"He is going fast," whispered the Doctor, "his mind is killing him. Where are his relatives?"
His relatives! Sad, sad word! His wife had been dead many years, and her relatives were at a distance; perchance in a foreign land. His nearest relative was a corpse, up-stairs, with a pistol wound through his heart.
Evelyn Somers, Sen., was one of the richest men in New York, and yet there was not a single relative to stand by his dying-bed. The death-sweat on his fevered brow, the whiteness of death on his quivering lips, the fire of the grave in his expanding eyes, Evelyn Somers, the merchant prince, had neither wife nor child nor relative to stand by him in his last hour. The poor boy who wept by the bed-side was, perchance, his only friend.
"Cornelius Berman, the artist, (who died, I believe, some years ago,) was his only relative in New York: his only son out of view." This was the answer of Colonel Tarleton, to the question of the Doctor.
And the dying man, still sitting bolt upright, one hand on his knee, and the other grasping the golden coin, still babbled in his delirium in the hollow tone of death. He talked of everything. He bought and sold, received rent and distressed tenants, paid notes and protested them, made imaginary sums by the sale of stocks, and achieved imaginary triumphs by the purchase of profitable tracts of land,—it was a frightful scene.
The Doctor shuddered, and as he looked at his watch, muttered a word of prayer.
The Colonel turned his face away, but was forced by an involuntary impulse, to turn again and gaze upon that livid countenance.
The boy Gulian—in the shadows of the room—sunk on his knees and uttered a prayer, broken by sobs.
At length the dying man seemed to recover a portion of his consciousness. Turning his gaze from the golden coin which he still clutched in his fingers, he said in a voice which, in some measure, resembled his every-day tone,—
"Send for a minister, a minister, quick! I am very weak."