He wanted very much to comfort her.
“There could have been no pain, no consciousness—”
“Oh yes, there was pain enough—as much as she could bear!” Teresa cried, the words wrung from her by the torture of an almost unbearable anguish. “If only she had died yesterday!”
The doctor looked at her, and realised that here was something he could not understand, and had better not question.
“You are overdone, Donna Teresa, and no wonder, after such a terrible shock,” he said quietly. “And there is also your grandmother to be considered. Will you go to her room, and take what I will send you? I will inform the others, and see to the necessary details. Indeed, you should not remain here.”
His mind ran professionally forward to all that had to be done: the police, the strangers who would have to come and see for themselves. For this was no quiet death-bed where the mourners might sit silent in the hush of sorrow. Already there was a clamour of weeping outside the door—Peppina’s the loudest—and Teresa’s strange words made him afraid for her brain, so that he pressed her again.
“Send in your own woman. She has got her wits about her. Afterwards, I give you my word, you shall come back.”
Teresa waved him aside with a quiet gesture full of strength.
“I shall not leave her,” she said, “and you need have no fears for me. There must be a great deal for you to do. Please see to it, and let Colonel Maxwell help you. Will you go to my grandmother first, and ask her to come to me in ten minutes? She and Nina—no one else.”
So she had ten minutes alone with her dead—ten minutes in which to stand and gaze at the fair young face, unmarred by the withering finger of illness, still round, still soft, still smiling, yet suddenly invested with that great dignity which Death alone can give to those he calls. Never before had Sylvia looked inscrutable, mysterious, far away, far above them all. Teresa touched her, kissed her, strained her in her arms. She was not yet cold; her young limbs were still supple. Teresa could have believed life was lingering but for that look—the look of something more than life, something into which life had suddenly sprung, something which came back across a gulf. In one little moment, Sylvia, ignorant Sylvia, had solved the great problem, and smiled at them from beyond an immeasurable vastness. Teresa stretched out her arms—speechless—and grasped air.