And from all this discourse—of which I now, at calm distance of time, recall every word—my human, loving heart bore away for the moment but this sentence, “Ye will need one another;” so that I cried out, “Life, life, life! Is there no hope for her life? Have you no hope as physician? I am a physician, too; I will see her. I will judge. I will not be banished from my post.”
“Judge, then, as physician, and let the responsibility rest with you. At this moment, all convulsion, all struggle, has ceased; the frame is at rest. Look on her, and perhaps only the physician’s eye could distinguish her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not trance, it is not the dooming coma from which there is no awaking. Shall I call it by the name received in our schools? Is it the catalepsy in which life is suspended, but consciousness acute? She is motionless, rigid; it is but with a strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still breathes, and the heart still beats. But I am convinced that though she can neither speak, nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively conscious of all that passes around her. She is like those who have seen the very coffin carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry out, ‘Do not bury me alive!’ Judge then for yourself, with this intense consciousness and this impotence to evince it, what might be the effect of your presence,—first an agony of despair, and then the complete extinction of life!”
“I have known but one such case,—a mother whose heart was wrapped up in a suffering infant. She had lain for two days and two nights, still, as if in her shroud. All save myself said, ‘Life is gone.’ I said, ‘Life still is there.’ They brought in the infant, to try what effect its presence would produce; then her lips moved, and the hands crossed upon her bosom trembled.”
“And the result?” exclaimed Faber, eagerly. “If the result of your experience sanction your presence, come; the sight of the babe rekindled life?”
“No; extinguished its last spark! I will not enter Lilian’s room. I will go away,—away from the house itself. That acute consciousness! I know it well! She may even hear me move in the room below, hear me speak at this moment. Go back to her, go back! But if hers be the state which I have known in another, which may be yet more familiar to persons of far ampler experience than mine, there is no immediate danger of death. The state will last through to-day, through to-night, perhaps for days to come. Is it so?”
“I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be no change in her state. I believe also that if she recover from it, calm and refreshed, as from a sleep, the danger of death will have passed away.”
“And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful?”
“Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right.”
I wrung my friend’s hand, and we parted.
Oh, to lose her now!—now that her love and her reason had both returned, each more vivid than before! Futile, indeed, might be Margrave’s boasted secret; but at least in that secret was hope. In recognized science I saw only despair.