Never, never until his last hour can Arthur forget that sight.
And poor Alice, writhing thus between life and death, talked to herself in a voice husky and faint, and said certain words that made Arthur's blood gather in a flood about his heart:
"Herman, you will not desert me!" she said, and then while the foam was on her lips, she babbled of her father and home—writhing all the while in every nerve and vein.
Arthur entered the room. Corkins turned and beheld him, and uttered a cry of fright. For at that moment Arthur's face was not a pleasant face for any man to look upon, much less Corkins. And the iron bar which Arthur held in his clenched hand, taken into connection with the look on his face, reminded Corkins of stories which he had read—stories which told of living men, bruised suddenly to death by such a hand and such an iron bar. Corkins, therefore, uttered a cry of fright, and in his terror shook his gold spectacles from his parrot nose.
"Down," said Arthur, in a low voice, "on your knees,"—he pointed to a nook of the room, between the foot of the bed and the wall. "Stay there with your face to the wall."
Corkins obeyed. Trembling to the corner, he sank on his knees, and turned his face away from the door and turned toward the wall, there was such a persuasive eloquence in Arthur's look.
Then Arthur, still clutching the iron bar, drew near the head of the bed, and gazed upon Alice.
Stretching forth her arms, and opening and closing her little hands; flinging back her head, her eyes fixed upon the same point of the ceiling, no matter how she writhed—babbling with foaming lips about her father and her home,—it was one of the saddest sights that ever man beheld.
Arthur could not stand it. He turned his face away, and there was a choking sensation in his throat, and a painful heaving of his chest. His eyeballs were hot and tearless.—He would have given his life to shed a single tear.
But that moment of intolerable anguish was interrupted by the sound of footsteps resounding from the lower part of the mansion. Madam Resimer was returning to the room of Alice.