Page:The Indian Orphan.pdf/3

58 her eyes; her lip was pale and parched, and when I hung on her neck, she told me she was sick and faint, and wept: she would lie for hours on the mat, and an old woman who came to see us sometimes, said she was dying. Dying!—I knew not what she meant, but I felt sad, very sad, and went and lay down by my mother; but the hand I took was burning, and the pressure was so slight I scarcely felt it.

It was a beautiful summer sunset,—not those soft gradual tints which melt on the evenings I have since seen in England; but the sunset of a southern clime, all passion, all flame—the sky was crimson; the Ganges was crimson too; its waves flashed through the green foliage that overshadowed it, like the gush of red meteors through the midnight clouds. My mother called me to her; I knelt by the mat, while she told me to look on the glorious sky, and said it was the last she should ever see; that like that sun she was passing to darkness and silence, but not like that sun to return. She said she looked for the arrival of a stranger; and if he came after her spirit had fled—"My child, you will remember your mother's last words—tell him I have loved him even unto death; my latest prayer was his name and thine." She leant back, and gasped fearfully, then lay quiet as if she slept, yet her eyes were open and fixed upon me. I remember yet, how I trembled before that cold and appalling look. It grew dark; I lay down close to her side and fell asleep. The morning sun was looking cheerfully forth when I awoke:—my mother lay so still, so motionless, that