“You would like to have it, doctor?” he said.

“Ay,” I answered, and that only.  I could not venture upon another word.

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-THIRD.

THE EBB OF LIFE.

There was nothing now for me to do but to devote myself wholly to my mother.

I made the malady under which she was slowly sinking my special study.  There remained a spark of hope yet in my heart that I might by diligent, intense, unflagging search, discover some remedy yet untried, or perhaps unthought of.  I succeeded only in alleviating her sufferings.  I pored over every work which treated of the same class of diseases.  At last in an old, almost-forgotten book, I came upon a simple medicament, which, united with appliances made available by modern science, gave her sensible relief, and without doubt tended to prolong her shortening days.  The agonizing thought haunted me that, had I come upon this discovery at an earlier stage of her illness, her life might have been spared for many years.

But it was too late now.  She suffered less, and her spirits grew calm and even.  We even ventured, at her own wish, to spend a week together in Sark, she and I—­a week never to be forgotten, full of exquisite pain and exquisite enjoyment to us both.  We revisited almost every place where we had been many years before, while I was but a child and she was still young and strong.  Tardif rowed us out in his boat under the cliffs.  Then we came home again, and she sank rapidly, as if the flame of life had been burning too quickly in the breath of those innocent pleasures.

Now she began to be troubled again with the dread of leaving me alone and comfortless.  There is no passage in Christ’s farewell to His disciples which, touches me so much as those words, “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come unto you.”  My mother could not promise to come back to me, and her dying vision looked sorrowfully into the future for me.  Sometimes she put her fear into words—­faltering and foreboding words; but it was always in her eyes, as they followed me wherever I went with a mute, pathetic anxiety.  No assurances of mine, no assumed cheerfulness and fortitude could remove it.  I even tried to laugh at it, but my laugh only brought the tears into her eyes.  Neither reason nor ridicule could root it out—­a root of bitterness indeed.

“Martin,” she said, in her failing, plaintive voice, one evening when Julia and I were both sitting with her, for we met now without any regard to etiquette—­“Martin, Julia and I have been talking about your future life while you were away.”

Julia’s face flushed a little.  She was seated on a footstool by my mother’s sofa, and looked softer and gentler than I had ever seen her look.  She had been nursing my mother with a single-hearted, self-forgetful devotion that had often touched me, and had knit us to one another by the common bond of an absorbing interest.  Certainly I had never leaned upon or loved Julia as I was doing now.