It was a stroke of paralysis that had fallen upon the Indian veteran, and he was borne to his bed, which he never left alive.
Hour after hour did Maude hang over him, listening to his fevered breathing, and futile moanings, which no medical skill could repress or soothe; and the long day, and the terrible night—every minute seemed an age—passed on, and still the pallid girl watched there in the hopeless agony of looking for death and not for life.
That long night—one of the earliest of winter—was at last on its way towards morning.
All was still in the glen of the Esk save the murmur of the mountain stream and the rustle of the leaves in the shrubberies without, and there was a strange loneliness, a solemnity, in Hester's mind as she thought of Merlwood in its solitariness, with death and life, time and eternity, so nigh each other under its roof; and the ceaseless ticking of an antique clock in the hall fell like strokes of thunder on her brain, till she stopped it, lest the sound might disturb the invalid.
And in that time of supreme anxiety and sorrow the lonely girl thought of her only kinsman, Roland Lindsay—the friend of her childhood and early girlhood—the merry, handsome, dark-haired fellow, who taught her to ride and row and fish, and whom she loved still with a soft yet passionate affection, that was strong as in the old days, for all that had come and gone between them.
Would he ever return—return to her and be as he had been before—before Annot Drummond came?
Another and a fatal stroke came speedily and mercifully; the long-suspended sword had fallen at last, and the old soldier was summoned to his last home!
A few days after saw Hester prostrate in her own bed and in the hands of the doctors, her rich dark-brown hair shorn short from her throbbing temples, feverish and faint, with dim eyes and pallid lips that murmured unconsciously of past times, of the distant and the dead—of her parents, of camps and cantonments far away; of little brothers and sisters who were in heaven; of green meadows, of garden flowers and summer evenings, when she and Roland had rambled together; and then of Egypt and the war in the deserts by the Nile.
After a time, when the early days of February came, when the mellow-voiced merle and the speckle-breasted mavis were heard in the woods by the Esk; when the silver-edged gowans starred the grassy banks, and the newly-dug earth gave forth a refreshing odour, and everywhere there were pleasant and hopeful signs that the dreary reign of winter was nearly over, Hester became conscious of her surroundings, but at first only partially so.
'Maude,' said she, in a weak voice to a watcher, 'dear Maude—are you there?'