“Bring out your dead; bring out your dead.”
The words kept repeating themselves over and over in Queenie’s mind until her brain became confused; the present faded away into the far-off past, and she was one of those weary watchers in London, listening to the cry:
“Bring out your dead.”
And she was bringing hers—was carrying the young man whose long limbs dragged upon the floor, and whose head drooped upon her shoulder, while his dead face, not yet cold, touched hers with a caressing motion which brought with it a thought of poor Phil, lying beneath the Indian waters.
It was a horrid nightmare, and Queenie struggled with it a moment, and then awoke with a cry of Phil upon her lips—a cry so loud that the sleeper upon the bed started a little, and moaned, and said something indistinctly, and moved uneasily, then settled again into slumber, and all was quiet as ever.
But Queenie stood erect upon her feet, rigid as a piece of marble, and almost as white, while her eyes, which seemed to Pierre to shoot out gleams of fire, were turned wildly toward the form lying so motionless across the room, with the white, shapely hand still outside the counterpane, and the light brown wavy hair upon the pillow. He had spoken—had called a name, which the excited girl had recognized as her own. She could not be mistaken. In answer to her cry for Phil the fever patient had aroused a little and responded:
“Queenie.”
She was sure of it. He might not have meant her, it is true. There were other Queenies in the world, no doubt, but he had called her name—this man, who in her dream she was carrying to the death-cart, and who might perhaps, go there when the morning dawned.
There was a clock upon the mantel, and Queenie saw that it was half-past two. The early summer morning would soon break, and then she would see the face of this stranger who had called for Queenie, and whose head and hair were so like her lost Phil’s that, as she looked, with straining, eager eyes, and whirling brain, it seemed to her at last that it was Phil himself—Phil, drowned and dead, perhaps, but still Phil, come back to her in some incomprehensible manner, just to mock her a moment, and then to be snatched away again forever. But she would see him first distinctly, would know if it were a phantom or a reality lying there upon the bed within her reach, for she had advanced a few steps forward, and could have touched the head upon the pillow.
“Pierre,” she said, at last, when she could endure the suspense no longer—“Pierre,” and her voice sounded to herself like the echo of something a thousand miles away, “am I going mad, or is that—is that—” and she pointed to the tall form on the bed.