A sudden tingling sensation leaped through every nerve. He snatched at the phial and bent to its label—“Mandragora.”
With an inarticulate cry he sprang up, leaped to the nearest window and smashed it frantically with his fist. The splintering glass cut his hand, but he did not feel it. He caught a fragment as it fell, and in a second was holding it close over Teresa’s parted lips.
He waited a time that seemed a dragging eternity, then lifted it to the candle-light and looked with fearful earnestness. The faintest tarnish, light as gossamer film, clouded it.
The crystal clashed upon the floor. He seized and emptied one of the rose bowls and rushed out through the darkening flower-paths to the fountain in the garden. Goldfish flirted and glistened in panic as he filled the bowl with the icy water. He hurried back, dipped Teresa’s stirless hands into its coldness and dashed it over her face, drenching her white neck and the dull gold hair meshed on the velvet.
Three separate times he did this. Then, breathless, he seized her arms and began to move them as one resuscitates a half-drowned person, trying to rouse the lungs to action to throw off the lethal torpor of the belladonna-like opiate.
He worked for many minutes, the moisture running from his forehead, his breath coming in gasps. Laboring, he thought of the dire risk she had run, trusting all to his promise to return and to his divination. He remembered he had said a drachm. To make assurance doubly sure, might she have taken more?
He kept watching her features—the rigor seemed to be loosening, the marble rigidity softening its outlines. But heart and pulse were still. In despair he laid his warm lips close upon her cold ones and filled her lungs with a great expiration, again and again.
He lifted himself, trembling now with hope. The lungs, responding to that forced effort, had begun to renew their function. Her bosom rose and fell—slowly, but still it was life. He dried her face and chafed her hands between his own. She commenced to breathe more naturally and rhythmically; at length she sighed and stirred on the cushions.
A rush of tears blinded Gordon’s eyes—the first he had shed since the night in London when he had bent above the little empty snow-silent bed that had held Ada. He dashed them away, seeing that Teresa’s eyes were open.
Her hand, wavering, touched his wet cheek.