With an effort of the will
such as she could never before have even imagined, she controlled
the anguish of her own spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the
poor lad, which had again sought her lap, compelled herself to sing
him for lullaby a song of which in his childhood he had been very
fond, and with which, in all the importance of imagined motherhood,
she had often sung him to sleep. And the old influence was potent
yet. In a few minutes the fingers which clutched her hand relaxed,
and she knew by his breathing that he slept. She sat still as a
stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe enough to keep her
alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed moments of
self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding ocean
of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom. She
sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she
must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which
went through her in all directions held her body together like ties
and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now
she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body
clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it
to a pitiful kind of repose.
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