“Litus!” exclaimed she, with a suppressed, frightened voice.
And the child began,—
“I feel so strange, so weak—”
Her thoughts grew dim; and after a while she continued,—
“Oh, the sea is rolling—such a big sea!—and we are all sailing on it. Mamma! mamma!”
And a new attack came, dreadful, pitiless. The little girl’s body was drawn in convulsions, and her eyesight turned toward the back of her head. There was no chance of illusion this time; death was at hand, and visible in the pale light of the lamp, in the dark corner of the room, in the sound of the window-panes, stricken by the rain, and in the noise of the wind, full of terrified voices and cries.
Pan Stanislav sprang up and ran for the doctor. In a quarter of an hour both appeared before the closed doors of the room, uncertain whether the child was living yet, and they disappeared through it immediately,—first Pan Stanislav, then the doctor, who, from the moment that they had pulled him out of bed, kept repeating one phrase, “Is it fear or emotion?”
Some of the servants, with sleepy and anxious faces, were gathered at the door, listening; and in the whole house followed a silence, long continued, which weighed down like lead.
It was broken at last by Marynia, who was the first to come out of the closed chamber, her face as pale as linen, and she said hurriedly,—
“Water for the lady! the little lady is living no longer.”