He felt that he would be less than man if he did not help her. Priest and physician, she should have both,—poor soul, poor soul!
He tried to make her understand him—speaking loud as to the deaf, in little words as to a child. The priest, the physician—aye, she should have them—quickly—she might trust to him. But she looked at him, uncomprehending, with eyes ever wilder. A step farther on her awful journey; she seemed already a world away from her fellow-humans.
Then, as if his meek, aged countenance, all puckered in distress, were a spectacle of unspeakable horror, she flung out both arms to ward him from her; stared round the room like a hunted thing, and, ere he could call or arrest her, had darted through the half-open door of the inner room and flung it, clapping, into the lock between them.
“My lord’s own room!”
Chitterley stood a second helplessly; then came a groan from within; the sound of a heavy fall. The old man called upon Heaven and ran on his errand of mercy.
The wretched woman found herself in a darkened room, with heavy curtains closely drawn, illumined only by a dying night-lamp. She staggered toward a couch, fought for a moment vainly for breath. Then strength, and with it, mercifully, consciousness, gave way; she fell face downward, clutching the silken hangings.
It seemed as if it had become suddenly broad day in that room where Chitterley had kept his night’s vigil—that room, famed once in Whitehall for those gatherings of wit and beauty, convened for his Majesty’s pleasure. A shaft of sunshine, yellow through the sullen mists, struck the chair where Charles had been wont to sit; where but a few moments ago had agonised one whose gay winsomeness and bird-song he had so often commended.
The vapour of Sir George Garth’s sovereign remedy rose but in feeble wisp-like exhalations, ever fainter and wider apart—like to the breath of some dying thing. Occasionally a sigh, or a groan and a muffled word or two, came dully from the neighbouring room. But after a while these ceased; and the only sound to be heard was that of a blue fly, bloated and busy, circling about, emphasising the stillness, to settle ever and anon with a heavy buzz on the wine which Jeanne de Mantes had spilled from her last cup.