Just past midnight the dispatched courier arrived, bringing twain of the most-skilled physicians of Jerusalem.
Cornelius watched them with an interest beyond words. His heart sank down and down again, as he saw them in serious consultation. Unable to restrain himself, he seized the elder, and drawing him hastily aside, demanded an opinion. The grave old man only shook his head, saying: “We may save one.”
“One? One!
“Which? What?”
“Young man, be quiet; do not let thy emotions disturb the patient or the nurses. Prepare for the worst.”
The husband seized the wrinkled hand of the aged practitioner, and then flung it from him, crying: “It must not be! It shall not be!” Instantly he rushed toward the couch, but the two men of healing intercepted him. Then the elder one said: “We must be obeyed, or else we will give no commands! Shall we go or stay?”
What a revulsion came! It seemed to Cornelius as if these two men of skill were angels, and flinging his arms about them, he hoarsely whispered: “Save, save! Stay and save! All I have I give you, only save her!”
Quietly they led him to the adjoining apartment; then charged him, as he hoped for any good to his wife, not to re-enter her chamber until sent for. Reluctantly he consented, not daring to do otherwise and yet believing in his very soul that in this hour of peril the bestowment of love’s caresses on the invalid would be better than any skill of the stranger. He withdrew to the arch on the roof, where unmolested he could pray. But his meditations were full of miserable sights. He thought of the Egyptians in their feats of Osiris, leading to sacrifice the heifer draped in black; then of Rizpah defending her relatives; then of the monument in Bozrah, with the mother holding her dead Son. He thought, amid the latter meditations, of himself creeping about that monument, in the night, until he came to another, on which he deciphered the name, “Miriamne.” The imagination gave him a shock, and he gave way to it exhausted. An hour or so after he was awakened from a sort of stupor by the younger of the physicians, who, standing by his side, addressed him:
“Sir Priest, thou mayst come now; but as thy profession teaches, nerve thyself to confront any fate, good or ill.”
“How’s my wife?” exclaimed the stricken man, leaping from his couch and approaching the speaker, that he might devour with his eyes the thought of the one he questioned.