"I can't see him hurt," said the woman, doggedly. "I love him so much. Poddle, I just can't! It hurts _me_."
The boy was now in bed. "Mother," he asked, lifting himself from the pillow, "when will I die?"
"I wish," said the boy, "it was to-morrow."
"There!" said the woman, in triumph, to the man. "He ain't afraid of death no more."
"I told you so, Millie!" the man exclaimed, at the same instant.
"But he ain't afraid to die," she persisted. "And that's all I want."
"You can't fool him always," the man warned.
Top floor rear of the Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life--the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,--straying upward from the fussy places below, were lost in the space between.
Within: a bed, a stove, a table--the gaunt framework of home. But the window overlooked the river; and the boy was now seven years old, unknowing, unquestioning, serenely obedient to the circumstances of his life: feeling no desire that wandered beyond the familiar presence of his mother--her voice and touch and brooding love.
It was a magic window--a window turned lengthwise, broad, low, small-paned, disclosing wonders without end: a scene of infinite changes. There was shipping below, restless craft upon the water; and beyond, dwarfed in the distance, was a confusion of streets, of flat, puffing roofs, stretching from the shining river to the far, misty hills, which lay beside the sea, invisible and mysterious.
But top floor rear was remote from the river and the roofs. From the window--and from the love in the room--the boy looked out upon an alien world, heard the distant murmur, monotonously proceeding, night and day: uncomprehending, but unperturbed....
In the evening the boy sat with his mother at the window. Together they watched the shadows gather--the hills and the city and the river dissolve: the whole broad world turn to points of light, twinkling, flashing, darting, in the black, voiceless gulf. Nor would she fail to watch the night come, whether in gentle weather or whipping rain: but there would sit, the boy in her arms, held close to her breast, her hand straying restlessly over his small body, intimately caressing it.