Something startled her; a faint noise near the door. She lifted her head, and there stood her father, looking wildly upon her—upon him.
Before she could move or speak, the old man swayed, uttered one faint moan, and fell across the threshold.
CHAPTER LIII.
DEATH.
WHILE Ruth had thought her father resting from his dangerous exertions, that poor man had been aroused into keen wakefulness which brought back all his old powers of thought. His brain had been cleared from the dull mists of fever, and the haze that had gathered over his memory was swept away by the physical effort he had made. He began to see things clearly that had seemed fantastic and dreamlike till then. The events of that night, when he received his wound, came out before him in pictures. The great cedar of Lebanon, the face he had seen for a moment gleaming through the darkness, everything came to his memory with the vividness of thoughts that burn like fire in an enfeebled brain, driving out sleep and everything but themselves.
Slowly and surely dreams melted away into nothingness. For, in the state of nervous excitement which sometimes comes with returning powers, after long mental wanderings, all his ideas were supremely vivid.
One by one he arranged past events in his mind. From the time that he met young Storms in the park on his way home that fatal night, and received the first cruel idea of his daughter's shame, for which he cast the young man to the earth in his rage, as we wrestle with a mad dog, which leaves its poison in our veins. He traced events down to the moment when a flash of fire seemed to pass through him under the cedars, and he awoke, helpless, in the little chamber whose walls enclosed him now. Then he remembered the letter he had written to young Hurst; hours before, he could not have given its import, or have repeated a word of it. But now, it came before him like the rest, a visible substance. He saw the very handwriting, uneven and irregular, such as he had left in copy-books years before, and it rose up clearly in judgment against him now. Reading these great, uncouth letters in his mind, he groaned aloud.
That which, in his fever, he had resolved to keep secret forever, he had written out in a wild effort to spare anxiety to another, suffering like himself. What if that letter should fall into the hands of an enemy? It conveyed a charge. It hinted at something that might bring terrible suspicions on the young man who had been dear to him almost as his own child. The evil he had tried to prevent had been drawn ominously near by his own hand.
The old man lay there, wounding himself with the most bitter reproaches. Into what mad folly had the fever thrown him!