LV

I could not tell what had happened, when I awoke one night on a bed surrounded by objects and persons that I could scarcely distinguish. A shaded lamp, whose light made the curtains of my bed the more opaque, diffused a faint gleam throughout the silent room. I tried in vain to sit up. I called, and felt my hands pressed. I called again, and the name I feebly pronounced brought a sob for an answer. Turning to the side from which it came, I recognized my mother. Her anxious and tearful eyes were fixed on my face. In the softest voice, she asked me many times if I was better.

“So it is true, then?” I said to her, when the confused remembrance of the last time I had seen her came to me.

Without replying, she laid her head on the pillow beside mine. After a few minutes of silence, I was cruel enough to say: “So they deceived me! What have I come for?”

“Haven’t I suffered, too?” she interrupted me, her tears falling on my neck.

But all her sorrow and tenderness could not bring any to my eyes.

It was evident they were trying to guard against any strong emotion, for, a little afterwards, my father came in silently, and pressed my hand while he wiped his eyes, about which I saw the dark circles of sleeplessness.

My mother, Eloisa, and Emma took turns that night in watching by my bed, after the doctor had gone away promising a slow but certain recovery. Uselessly they exerted every effort to induce me to go to sleep. When my mother at last fell asleep herself, worn out by fatigue, I guessed that I had been home more than twenty-four hours.

Emma knew the only thing I wanted to learn⁠—the history of her last days, and her last words. I felt that I had not courage to hear, yet I could not control my desire to know the sorrowful details; and I asked her often to tell me. She would only reply to me, in the tone of a mother putting her child to sleep in his cradle, “In the morning.”