"You will be better now, Lovedy, here is the doctor," said Rachel,
though conscious that this was not the right thing, and then she
hastened out on the stairs to meet the gaunt old Scotsman and bring him
in. He made Mrs. Kelland raise the child, examined her mouth, felt her
feet and hands, which were fast becoming chill, and desired the warm
flannels still to be applied to them.
"Cannot her throat be operated on?" said Rachel, a tremor within her
heart. "I think we could both be depended on if you wanted us."
"She is too far gone, poor lassie," was the answer; "it would be mere
cruelty to torment her. You had better go and lie down, Miss Curtis; her
mother and I can do all she is like to need."
"Is she dying?"
"I doubt if she can last an hour longer. The disease is in an advanced
state, and she was in too reduced a state to have battled with it, even
had it been met earlier."
"As it should have been! Twice her destroyer!" sighed Rachel, with a
bursting heart, and again the kind doctor would have persuaded her to
leave the room, but she turned from him and came back to Lovedy, who had
been roused by what had been passing, and had been murmuring something
which had set her aunt off into sobs.
"She's saying she've been a bad girl to me, poor lamb, and I tell her
not to think of it! She knows it was for her good, if she had not been
set against her work."
Dr. Macvicar authoritatively hushed the woman, but Lovedy looked up with
flushed cheeks, and the blue eyes that had been so often noticed for
their beauty. The last flush of fever had come to finish the work.
"Don't fret," she said, "there's no one to beat me up there! Please, the
verse about the tears."
Dr. Macvicar and the child both looked towards Rachel, but her whole
memory seemed scared away, and it was the old Scotch army surgeon that
repeated-"'The Lord God shall wipe off tears from all eyes.' Ah! poor little one,
you are going from a world that has been full of woe to you."
"Oh, forgive me, forgive me, my poor child," said Rachel, kneeling by
her, the tears streaming down silently.
"Please, ma'am, don't cry," said the little girl feebly; "you were
very good to me. Please tell me of my Saviour," she added to Rachel.
It sounded like set phraseology, and she knew not how to begin; but Dr.
Macvicar's answer made the lightened look come back, and the child was
again heard to whisper--"Ah! I knew they scourged Him--for me."
This was the last they did hear, except the sobbing breaths, ever more
convulsive. Rachel had never before been present with death, and awe and
dismay seemed to paralyse her whole frame. Even the words of hope and
prayer for which the child's eyes craved from both her fellow-watchers
seemed to her a strange tongue, inefficient to reach the misery of this
untimely mortal agony, this work of neglect and cruelty--and she the
cause.