This artificial respiration ceasing, do I feel any faint flutter under my hand upon the chest?
No.
Over and over again No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless.
See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! The four rough fellows, seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world, nor Riderhood in the other, could draw tears from them; but a striving human soul between the two can do it easily.
He is struggling to come back. Now, he is almost here, now he is far away again. Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet—like us all, when we swoon—like us all, every day of our lives when we wake—he is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.
Bob Gliddery returns with Pleasant Riderhood, who was out when sought for, and hard to find. She has a shawl over her head, and her first action, when she takes it off weeping, and curtseys to Miss Abbey, is to wind her hair up.
‘Thank you, Miss Abbey, for having father here.’
‘I am bound to say, girl, I didn’t know who it was,’ returns Miss Abbey; ‘but I hope it would have been pretty much the same if I had known.’
Poor Pleasant, fortified with a sip of brandy, is ushered into the first-floor chamber. She could not express much sentiment about her father if she were called upon to pronounce his funeral oration, but she has a greater tenderness for him than he ever had for her, and crying bitterly when she sees him stretched unconscious, asks the doctor, with clasped hands: ‘Is there no hope, sir? O poor father! Is poor father dead?’
To which the doctor, on one knee beside the body, busy and watchful, only rejoins without looking round: ‘Now, my girl, unless you have the self-command to be perfectly quiet, I cannot allow you to remain in the room.’