And so, for a time, his thoughts were far away even from Rose and the present scene. Far from the images that were full of the warlike and perilous present, he was revelling in the past, and talked fluently, confidently, and smilingly with the absent, the lost, and the dead. Often he said—
"Lift my head, dearest mother; place your kind arm round my neck and kiss me once again."
And Rose obeyed him, and he seemed to smile upward into her face; and yet he knew her not, or saw another there.
Then he talked deliriously of his father's rights, of his mother's wrongs, and of his cousin, Audley Trevelyan, till his voice sank into whispers and anon ceased.
This was what Shakspeare describes as the
"Vanity of sickness! fierce extremes,
In their continuance, will not feel themselves.
Death having preyed upon the outward parts,
Leaves them invisible; and his siege is now
Against the mind, which he pricks and wounds
With many legions of strange fantasies,
Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,
Confound themselves."
He fell asleep; and, without prolonging our description further, suffice it that poor Denzil never woke again, but passed peacefully away...
Rose sat for a time in a stupor, like one in a dream. Summoned by her first wild cry, the Khanum was by her side now.
Denzil, so long her care, her soul, her all, lay there, it would seem, as usual—lay there as she had seen him for many days; yet why was it that his presence, and that rigid angularity and stillness of outline, so appalled her now?
As the crisis so evidently had drawn near, strongly and wildly in the girl's heart came the crave for medical, for religious, for any Christian aid or advice; but there none could be had, any more than if she had stood by the savage shores of the Albert Nyanza; and now the dread crisis was past!