I leant over him now with sal volatile to his temple, his forehead, the palms of his hands, but I had no courage to feel his pulse, to touch his lips.
Mr. Tudor came - he put his hand upon the heart, the noblest of hearts, and pronounced that all was over!
How I bore this is still marvellous to me! I had always believed such a sentence would at once have killed me. But his sight—the sight of his stillness, kept me from distraction! Sacred he appeared, and his stillness I thought should be mine, and be inviolable.
I suffered certainly a partial derangement, for I cannot to this moment recollect anything that now succeeded, with truth
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or consistency; my memory paints things that were necessarily real, joined to others that could not possibly have happened, yet so amalgamates the whole together as to render it impossible for me to separate truth from indefinable, unaccountable fiction.
Even to this instant I always see the room itself charged with a medley of silent and strange figures grouped against the wall just opposite to me, Mr. Tudor, methought, was come to drag me by force away; and in this persuasion, which was false, I remember supplicating him to grant me but one hour, telling him I had solemnly engaged myself to pass it in watching. . . .
But why go back to my grief? Even yet, at times, it seems as fresh as ever, and at all times weighs on me with a feeling that seems stagnating the springs of life. But for Alexander ,our Alexander!—I think I could hardly have survived. His tender sympathy, with his claims to my love, and the solemn injunctions given me to preserve for him, and devote to him, my remnant of life—these, through the Divine mercy, sustained me.
May that mercy, with its best blessings, daily increase his resemblance to his noble father.
March 20, 1820. (288) M. d'Arblay, who was, it appears, still lame (boiteux) from the kick which he had received from a horse.-ED,