“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—
“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.
“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.
“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”
The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of his patient.
The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed, was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the two occasions we have mentioned.
As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures, but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation, he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.
The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings, he had been strongly interested.
She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have recognised it.
Her arms, which he now remembered to have been bare in all his late interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white, and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself this wandering of thought.