Saxon kissed the little, red satin Spanish girdle passionately,
and wrapped it up in haste, with dewy eyes, abandoning the
mystery and godhead of mother and all the strange enigma of
living.
In bed, she projected against her closed eyelids the few rich
scenes of her mother that her child-memory retained. It was her
favorite way of wooing sleep. She had done it all her life--sunk
into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the
last on her fading consciousness. But this mother was not the
Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype. They had been
before Saxon's time. This that she saw nightly was an older
mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept,
always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering,
dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining
from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and whom
not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep.
Crept--always she crept, about the house, from weary bed to weary
chair and back again through long days and weeks of torment,
never complaining, though her unfailing smile was twisted with
pain, and the wise gray eyes, still wise and gray, were grown
unutterably larger and profoundly deep.
|