That hand, light as a woman's, withstood me like a wall. I drew back and sought a chair in the library—a chair of Blossom's, it was—and sat glooming into the darkness in a wonder of fear.
What wits I possess have broad feet, and are not easily to be staggered. That night, however, they swayed and rocked like drunken men, under the pressure of some evil apprehension of I knew not what. I suppose now I feared death for Blossom, and that my thoughts lacked courage to look the surmise in the face.
An hour went by, and I still in the darkened room. I wanted no lights. It was as though I were a fugitive, and sought in the simple darkness a refuge and a place wherein to hide myself. Death was in the house, robbing me of all I loved; I knew that, and yet I felt no stab of agony, but instead a fashion of dumb numbness like a paralysis.
In a vague way, this lack of sharp sensation worked upon my amazement. I remember that, in explanation of it, I recalled one of Morton's tales about a traveler whom a lion seized as he sat at his campfire; and how, while the lion crunched him in his jaws and dragged him to a distance, he still had no feel of pain, but—as I had then—only a numbness and fog of nerves.
While this went running in my head, I heard the rattle of someone at the street door, and was aware, I don't know how, that another physician had come. A moment later my ear overtook whisperings in the hall just beyond my own door.
Moved of an instinct that might have prompted some threatened animal to spy out what danger overhung him, I went, cat-foot, to the door and listened. It was the two physicians in talk.
“The girl is dead,” I heard one say.
“What malady?” asked the other.
“And there's the marvel of it!” cries the first. “No malady at all, as I'm a doctor! She died of suffocation. The case is without a parallel. Indubitably, it was that birthmark—that mark as of a rope upon her neck. Like the grip of destiny itself, the mark has been growing and tightening about her throat since ever she lay in her cradle, until now she dies of it. A most remarkable case! It is precisely as though she were hanged—the congested eye, the discolored face, the swollen tongue, aye! and about her throat, the very mark of the rope!”
Blossom dead! my girl dead! Apple Cheek, Anne, Blossom, all gone, and I to be left alone! Alone! The word echoed in the hollows of my empty heart as in a cavern! There came a blur, and then a fearful whirling; that gorilla strength was as the strength of children; my slow knees began to cripple down! That was the last I can recall; I fell as if struck by a giant's mallet, and all was black.