"In this complaint so it will often be. Is Sister Cecilia upstairs?"
"Yes, reverend father."
"Father Edwyn here?"
"Yes, reverend father."
He withdrew his head, closed the door, and walked upstairs. He tapped gently at the door of the front bedroom.
A French nun, in a habit precisely similar to that of the lady downstairs, stood noiselessly at the door. She was comparatively young, wore no spectacles, and had a kind and rather sad countenance. He whispered a word to her, heard her answer softly, and then he entered the room with a soundless step—it was thickly carpeted, and furnished luxuriously—and stood at the side of a huge four-post bed, with stately curtains of silk, within which a miserable shrunken old woman, with a face brown as clay, sunk and flaccid, and staring feebly with wide glassy eyes, with her back coiled into a curve, and laden with shawls, was set up, among pillows, breathing, or rather gasping, with difficulty.
Here she was, bent, we may say, in the grip of two murderers, heart complaint and cancer. The irresistible chemistry of death had set in; the return of "earth to earth" was going on. Who could have recognised, in this breathing effigy of death, poor Lady Lorrimer? But disease now and then makes short work of such transformations.
The good nurse here, like the other downstairs, had her little picture against the wall, and had been curtseying and crossing herself before it, in honest prayer for the dying old lady, to whom Monsieur Droqville whispered something, and then leaned his ear close to her lips. He felt her pulse, and said, "Madame has some time still to meditate and pray."
Again his ear was to her lips. "Doubt it not, madame. Every consolation."
She whispered something more; it lasted longer, and was more earnest this time. Her head was nodding on her shoulders, and her eyes were turned up to his dark energetic face, imploringly.