A Changed Heart Part 77

Dr. Leach was giving directions in a low tone to Miss Rose, and Val, at his desire, lifted the slight form of the sufferer in his strong arms, carried her into the inner room, and laid her on the bed.

"I will call in again before night," said the doctor. "Remember my directions, Miss Rose. Come, Blake; you're going, I suppose?"

"Yes; in a moment. I want to see Wyndham."

Paul Wyndham was walking up and down the hall as they came out, his pale face expressive of but one thing--intensest anxiety. Dr. Leach, with a stiff bow, pa.s.sed on and went out, but Val halted.

"Well?" Mr. Wyndham asked, eagerly.

"No hope," said Val; "no earthly power can save her. It's typhoid--the most malignant kind. She will die, thank G.o.d!"

Paul Wyndham leaned against the wall and covered his face, with a bitter groan.

"As to you," pursued Val, sternly, "you must leave this house at once, and enter it no more. Do not forget that we are acting criminally in screening you from the law, and that we can enforce our commands. Go at once, and do not come here again until all is over!"

He left the house as he spoke, and joined the doctor, who had gained the highroad. Some people pa.s.sing stared to see them coming from Rosebush Cottage, and surmised Mr. Wyndham's mad mother must be worse than ever.

"How long can she last, doctor?" Val asked, before they parted.

"Not over two weeks, I fancy, at the most. This fever will carry her off at once."

Late in the evening Dr. Leach returned, and found Nathalie worse. Mr.

Wyndham had left the cottage, after taking one last look at the wife he loved so pa.s.sionately. The agony in his face had gone to Mrs. Marsh's heart, and she cried now, as she spoke of it to the doctor.

"Yes, I dare say," the old man returned, shortly, "he's very sorry, no doubt, but he's a villain for all that; and, only for poor Natty's sake, I'd have him arrested for bigamy this minute!"

Miss Rose did not go home that night; she would never leave Nathalie now. She sent a note to Mrs. Wheatly by the doctor, explaining that it was a case of typhoid, and that she feared to bring the infection into the family. All further explanation she left to the doctor, only desiring that her clothes might be sent to her. Mrs. Marsh dispatched a similar message to Betsy Ann, and before night everybody knew that Mr.

Wyndham's mother was very bad, that Dr. Leach and Val Blake had been there, and that Mrs. Marsh and Miss Rose were staying to take care of her.

And what did Speckport say to all this? Oh, Speckport had a great deal to say, and surmise, and inquire. How was it, Speckport wanted to know, in the first place, that Mrs. Marsh and Miss Rose should be especially selected as the sick woman's nurses? To which Dr. Leach replied that Miss Rose, being such a capital hand at the business, and so fond of it into the bargain, he thought that there was no one in the town so fitted for the task; and Mrs. Marsh, having nothing else to do, could play propriety and read novels there as well as in Cottage Street. What was Mr. Wyndham's mother like, was she a violent lunatic, and was her present disease infectious? Speckport further inquired. To which Dr.

Leach said, Mrs. Wyndham was the wreck of a very handsome woman, that she was not violent, only imbecile, and that her fever was highly infectious, and made it extremely dangerous for any one but the physician and nurses to enter the house; on which account Mr. Wyndham would absent himself from Redmon, and Mrs. Olive from Rosebush Cottage, until all was over. After which ominous phrase the doctor would hurry away, and Speckport was satisfied.

Mr. Blake, to be consistent, took up his quarters elsewhere, and visited the cottage every day to inquire. Paul Wyndham, who was stopping at the Farmer's Hotel, very near the cottage, came two or three times a day to ask, but no one invited him to enter, and a sense of honor forbade his intruding. The answer to all inquiries was continually the same, "No better." No, Nathalie was no better--never would be better in this world! She lay tossing on her feverish bed, raving wildly, consumed with burning heat, never resting night or day. All the scenes of her life were acted over again in that burning chasm. Now she babbled of her schoolgirl-days, her mathematics and her music, or berrying and nutting frolics with Charley. Now she was with Captain Cavendish, loving and trusting and happy; and now she was shrieking out again that she saw the murdered woman, and covering her eyes to shut out the ghastly sight. Now the days of her misery had come; now she was at sea with Captain Locksley, and in the New York lodging-house; now on the stage, making rambling, incoherent speeches, and singing stage-songs. Now she was with Paul Wyndham, his wife; now she was in the cathedral listening to the stern preacher. And here she would shriek out, and toss her arms wildly, and ask them to take her to Redmon, that she must tell her all--she must! she must! And Miss Rose and her mother would have to hold her down by force to prevent her from rising from the bed in her excitement, and soothe her with promises that she should go there--only to wait a little while. And the poor sufferer would fall back exhausted, and perhaps go back to the old days when she played with Charley, a child.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

DIES IRae, DIES ILLA.

The November day broke bleak and gloomy. The dismal dawn was laden with thick, sodden fog, and wretched, drizzling rain. The wind, full of the wail of coming winter, was cold and raw; and the sky, seen dimly through the fog-bank, was of sullen lead, the earth black and dreary; and the sea and the fog so mixed that you could hardly tell where one began and the other ended.

In the Farmers' Hotel, a rambling wooden building, standing by itself on a quiet country road, all was still as the grave at this early hour of the miserable November morning. Even in the kitchen and halls there was as yet no step, and the servants slept the sleep of the just in their own dormitories. Perhaps of all in the house the man who stood at his chamber window, blurred and smeared with clammy wet, and stared hopelessly out through the full blank of fog and mist, was the only one astir in the house.

In the murky dawn of this bad November morning, Paul Wyndham, with hollow creases under his eyes, and deep plowshares of silent suffering about his mouth and forehead, stood looking out of the stained window, at the flat waste of desolation without. It was hardly two poor weeks, but it seemed a lifetime; and a horrible numbness was coming over him and blunting all sense of pain. Would it always go on like this--this dull, dead blank in life--would it last forever? All things were beginning to look unreal, and lose their significance, nothing seemed palpable or as it used to be. He was conscious that the crisis had come; that in the long, black, sluggish watches of that wet November night a battle had been fought between life and death, in the cottage whose lighted window he could see from his own; but only conscious in a dull, numb sort of way, to which the sharpness of the torture had given force.

The pale, cold dawn crept s.h.i.+ning in while he stood there blankly staring out at the hopeless dreariness, and he roused himself from his torpor by a great effort at last. A loud-voiced clock somewhere in the silent house struck six as he put on his overcoat and hat and went down stairs.

Paul Wyndham waded on through the sea of mud, in the cold morning rain, not meeting a soul, until he stood before Rosebush Cottage. The red light in the window burned still; but had that other light, that light of a beloved life, gone out in the night? It had been the crisis of the fever--that low, miserable, burning, delirious fever, in which for so many weary days and endless nights, the poor, unconscious sufferer had tossed. Ah! that dreary time of probation--when the faithful watchers had seen her sink day by day; when they had to force her clenched teeth apart to admit teaspoonfuls of beef-tea; when they had listened with aching hearts to her meaningless babble, or the songs the weak voice sang. But that sad time of waiting had dragged itself out, and the night came which must end all suspense. Does hope ever entirely leave the human heart, until the blank face actually grows rigid and the death-rattle sounds? Those sad and silent watchers in that darkened room hoped against hope through the slow lingering hours of that night. They were all there--Dr. Leach, Val, Mrs. Marsh, Miss Rose, and Midge, all mutely watching the pale shadow of Nathalie lying so still and white on the bed. You might have thought her dead had you entered, and looked at her lying with closed eyes, and no perceptible respiration. But she was only sleeping, and a faint breath still came from the colorless lips--sleeping a sleep from which the doctor, at least, knew she could only awake to die. He had a strong hope she might awake free from fever, and that reason might return before the last hour. He sat by the bedside, holding her wrist in his fingers, never taking his eyes off her face. Mrs. Marsh had fallen asleep quietly in her chair, and Mr. Blake was dozing; so when, as the pale morning broke, and the blue eyes opened to life once more, there was only the doctor and Miss Rose to bend over her.

"Nathalie, darling!" the governess said, with trembling lips, "don't you know me?"

The blue eyes turned upon the sweet face with the clear light of restored reason, and a faint smile dawned on the wasted face.

"Miss Rose," she said, in a voice so faint that it sounded scarcely above a whisper. "You here?"

"I am here, too, Natty," said the physician. "Don't you know the old doctor?"

Yes, she knew him--she knew them all when they came crowding around her, and looked up at them with faint wonder in her fever-dimmed blue eyes.

"I have been ill, haven't I?" she said, feebly, glancing at her poor, transparent, wasted hands. "Have I been ill long?"

"Not very long, Natty dear," her mother answered, kissing her, "only two weeks, and you will be better soon now, won't she, doctor?"

But Dr. Leach did not reply. How could he deceive that dying girl? She looked into his grave, sad face, and a solemn shadow fell on her own, a shadow of the dark truth.

"Oh, doctor!" she cried out, "am I dying?"

He bent over her, and stroked away tenderly the full dark hair off her forehead.

"My poor child! my dear child! G.o.d knows I would save you if I could; but the power of life and death lies in higher hands. Has this world been such a pleasant place to you that you should wish to stay in it?

Think of that better world, my poor little girl, that lies beyond the grave. It would be cruel in me to deceive you now."

She drew the hand he held out of his suddenly, and turned her face away from them. Mrs. Marsh broke out into strong sobbing, but the doctor sternly hushed her. But the dulled, dying ear caught the sound, and she turned to them again.

"How long have I to live?" she asked.

He could not tell an untruth with those earnest eyes fixed on his face, and his voice was husky as he replied:

"Not long! not long, my poor girl! But long enough to prepare for the world to which you are going."

"Will I die to-day?"

Her mother's sobs broke out again; but Nathalie looked only at the doctor.

"Yes, dear child, you will last to-day, I think; but try and be calm, and not disturb yourself at the shortness of the time."

Her hands dropped in a kind of collapse of despair.

"So soon, so soon!" she said, "and so much to do--so much to atone for!"

"Shall we send for a clergyman?" the doctor asked.

"Shall I fetch you Father Lennard?" inquired Val, stooping over her.

Her face brightened a little. The gray old priest had baptized her, an infant, had confirmed her a young girl, rind she had loved and reverenced him more than any one else on earth.