"Who was it then, whose deathful face now lay on her arm?" She had seen, by her cousin's countenance, on the first view of the sufferer, that he knew him; and she now contemplated the silent agonies of a more than common grief!—Her hand instinctively moved to the heart of the stranger. "Lorenzo," said she, in a low voice; as if alike afraid to wake the dead, or to disturb the living; "feel! surely there is a pulse!"
Lorenzo obeyed her; but not so gently as her tender touch; and pressing likewise heavily on the body, as he leaned over to examine, the sufferer started in Cornelia's arms, and murmured a few inarticulate sounds. Louis heard them, as a voice from the dead; and springing forward, was again at his side.
"He is wounded, but he lives, Cornelia!" cried he, "we must search his wounds, and he may yet be saved!"
"Who is he?" asked Cornelia, in a tone that echoed the deep interest of his own.
"He is my friend," answered Louis. But he checked himself from saying more, for his heart smote him with the true response: "my bitterest enemy!"
Heavy groans succeeded the few halfuttered sounds from the lips of Wharton; for it was he that Louis recognized in this lone abode of ruffianly murder; and finding that as he and Lorenzo attempted to raise him, the symptoms of pain were always most acute when he appeared to press on the left shoulder; Louis concluded that on that spot was the principal injury. Though the sufferer was evidently sensible to bodily anguish, his other faculties were too confused to shew any perception of what was now passing around him.
On examining farther, which his anxious attendants did with the tenderest care, they found his shoulder dislocated, and a frightful wound in his breast, made by some jagged instrument. The blood was staunched over it by the cold of the night. Louis had no sooner removed the stiffened linen, and a broad blue ribbon, part of which had been stabbed into the wound, than the blood began to flow afresh. Cornelia shuddered as the pure crimson trickled over the hand of her cousin. He shuddered also, but it was from a different reflection. She gave him a cambrick handkerchief from her neck, to well up what she feared might be the last effort of life. The heart's surgery was then in the hands of Louis; and by the time he had bound up the wound, and composed the shoulder, so as to produce the least possible pain until he could reach proper assistance, a servant came in from without, to say the carriage was brought into a tolerable state for proceeding.
On Lorenzo going out to examine, he saw the information was correct; and returning, told his master the extreme violence of the storm having subsided, one of the out-riders had found his way back with tidings of a secure track. Another had been yet more successful, having brought a herdsman, whose cottage he had lit upon; and arousing him, by a promise of reward, had engaged him to guide the carriage over the waste into the direct northern road.
On inquiry of this man, Louis found they were now in the midst of Wansbeck Moor, a terrible wilderness of bituminous slime, exhausted coal-pits, and pasture land, so marshy, that it was rather poison than aliment to the cattle which were so miserably provided, as to be turned on it to graze. But as it possessed a few causeways of firmer texture, which the wretched herdsmen had raised for their own convenience, such tracks were sometimes temptations to less practised travellers to use as cross roads; and often, as might be expected, led them astray, or into no very insignificant nightly perils. This had been the temptation and the issue to the postilions of de Montemar's travelling equipage.
When all was prepared in the coach, the wounded Duke was carried into it between Louis and Lorenzo. None knew who he was, but the bleeding heart of him who had once been his friend. At the unavoidable changes of position, his sufferings became so grievous, that every sound went to the soul of Cornelia; who now felt both for the invalid and her cousin, whose interest in his recovery, she saw, not in words, but in the pale cheek and searching eye with which he composed every thing that could yield him ease.