“Yes, better so,—you—know—best—stand—by—me,—Hugh,” Mildred said, very slowly, as she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes in the weary way of a child going to sleep.
Hugh thought she was going to faint, her face was so pinched and gray, and he said, excitedly:
“Mildred, Mildred, rouse yourself. You must not faint here. I don’t know what to do with people who faint. You must go home at once. Your carriage is gone but I see a cab coming. I will call it for you.”
Darting to the door, he signaled the cab, to which he half led, half carried Mildred, who seemed very weak and was shaking with cold. Rallying a little, she said to him:
“Thank you, Hugh. I’d better go home. I am getting worse very fast and everything is black. Is it growing dark?”
This was alarming. He could not let her go alone, and springing in beside her, Hugh bade the cabman drive with all possible speed to the Park and then go for a physician.
CHAPTER XV.
THE DENOUEMENT.
Nothing could have happened better for Mildred and her cause than the long and dangerous illness which followed that visit to Hugh’s office. It was early September then, but the cold November rain was beating against the windows of her room when at last she was able to sit up and carry out her purpose. She had been very ill, first with the fever taken from her husband, and then with nervous prostration, harder to bear than the fever, for then she had known nothing of what was passing around her, or whose were the voices speaking so lovingly to her, or whose the hands ministering to her so tenderly, Bessie, who called her sister, and Alice, who was scarcely less anxious and attentive than Bessie herself. She did not even know the white-haired woman who sat by her day after day, with her blind eyes turned toward the tossing, moaning, babbling figure on the bed, whose talk was always of the past, when she was a girl and lived at home, and bathed her mother’s head and cooked the dinner and scolded Tom and Bessie and kissed and petted Charlie. Of Hugh she seldom spoke, and when she did it was in the old, teasing way, calling him a red-haired Scotchman and laughing at his big hands and feet. To all intents and purposes she was the Mildred whom we first saw shelling peas in the doorway, and the names of her husband and Gerard and Alice never passed her lips. Every morning and evening Hugh walked up the avenue, and ringing the bell asked, “How is Mrs. Thornton?” Then he would walk back again with an abstracted look upon his face, which to a close observer would have told of the fear tugging at his heart. The possibility that Mildred could ever be anything to him, if she lived, did not once enter his mind, but he did not want her to die, and the man who had seldom prayed before, now learned to pray earnestly for Mildred’s life, as many others were doing.
Hugh had done his work well, and told Mildred’s story, first to her mother, Bessie and Tom, then to Gerard and Alice, and then to everybody, giving it, however, a different coloring from what Mildred had done. She had softened her husband’s part in the matter and magnified her own, while he passed very lightly over hers, and dwelt at length upon the pride and arrogance of the man who, to keep her family aloof, wrung from her a promise, given unguardedly and repented of so bitterly. Thus the sympathy of the people was all with Mildred, who, as the lady of Thornton Park, had won their good opinion by her kindness and gentleness, and gracious, familiar manner. That she was Mrs. Giles Thornton did not harm her at all, for money and position are a mighty power, and the interest in, and sympathy for her were quite as great, if not greater, than would have been the case if it were plain Mildred Leach for whom each Sunday prayers were said in the churches and for whom inquiries were made each day until the glad news went through the town that the crisis was past and she would live. Hugh was alone in his office when the little boy who brought him the morning paper said, as he threw it in, “Mis’ Thornton’s better. She knows her marm, and the doctor says she’ll git well.” Then he passed on, leaving Hugh alone with the good news.
“Thank God,—thank God,” he said. “I couldn’t let Milly die,” and when a few minutes later one of his clerks came into the front office, he heard his chief in the next room whistling Annie Laurie, and said to himself, with a little nod, “I guess she’s better.”