With convulsive motion that hand kept grasping the throat as if to tear away something that oppressed it—as if the horrible rope still encircled it.
Then Rainford's chest began to swell and work with the violence of returning respiration—as if a mighty current of air were rushing back to the lungs.
"He breathes! he breathes!" cried Ellingham and Jacob Smith, as it were in one voice.
"He will be saved," said the physician calmly, as he again applied the poles of the battery;—"provided congestion of the brain does not take place—for that is to be dreaded!"
But the nobleman and the poor lad heard not this alternative of sinister and dubious import: they had no ears for anything save those blessed words—"He will be saved!"
And they were literally wild with joy.
Lascelles, without desisting from his occupation of applying the electric fluid, and apparently without noticing the excitement—the delirium of happiness and hope which had seized upon his two companions, began leisurely to explain how it was necessary to adopt means to equalise the reviving circulation; and though he called for hartshorn, he was not heard. At length he stamped his foot violently on the floor, exclaiming, "Will neither of you give me the hartshorn? Do you wish him to die through your neglect?"
The Earl instantly checked the exuberance of his joyous emotions, and hastened to obey all the instructions which the physician gave him.
The hartshorn was applied to Rainford's nostrils; and in a few moments his lips began to quiver:—then, on a sudden, as Lascelles let fall upon him a stronger current of the electric fluid, a terrific cry burst from the object of all this intensely concentrated interest!
But never was cry of human agony more welcome to mortal ears than now; for it told those who heard it that life was in him who gave vent to it!