'We are going to take her to the house. Nothing can be done here.'
'We are poor nuns,' the Sister murmured. 'How will you carry her?'
'In the carriage,' he said shortly. Then, going up to Margherita, he went on in a low, forcible voice: 'I am coming with my coachman just now. She can't stay here; I can't do anything for her here. We will carry her out to the carriage and go home.'
'In this state?' she asked undecidedly.
'Do you want her to die here?' he interrupted brusquely.
'Please forgive me, sir.'
He had already gone out, without his hat and overcoat, across the passage and icy court. After a minute he came back with the coachman, who had evidently got his orders.
The doctor gently raised the fainting girl's body from under the arms, resting her head on his breast, while the coachman raised her feet. She was almost rigid and very heavy. The coachman had a frightened look; perhaps he thought he was carrying out a dead woman, all in black, through that bare parlour, deserted corridor, and chilly court; and although the sight of physical suffering was not new to him, being in a successful doctor's service, the idea of carrying a young woman's cold body, a corpse perhaps, gave him such a shudder he turned away his head. Old Margherita, coming behind, looked yellower, more like wrinkled parchment than ever, in the bright court. The procession of the anxious doctor, the frightened man, the rigid figure in black, and the old servant sadly bent by a strange new anguish, moved silently across the silent, tomb-like cloister, like a funeral. Gently, with the care needed not to waken a sleeping baby, the two men placed the poor lifeless creature in the carriage, her head against the cushions and her feet on the opposite seat. She had not given a sign of life whilst she was being carried; the two lines deepened between Dr. Amati's eyebrows, lines showing a strong will and deep thought, but which gave him an absent-minded look. Margherita still gently tried to rearrange the girl's loosened tresses that had fallen down, but she did not manage it, her lean hands trembled so; she, too, had got into the broad landau; she gathered up her mistress's hair caressingly, and the doctor heard her mutter, 'My darling! my darling!'
He had lowered the blue blinds against indiscreet eyes; the carriage went at a foot-pace; and in that bluish, misty shade the slow pace kept up the idea of a funeral still more. However, the carriage stopped at one point; after a little the coachman opened the door, and handed in to the doctor a hermetically sealed phial, which he held to the unconscious girl's nose. A sharp smell of ether at once spread through the carriage, which was still going very slowly. Bianca Maria never moved; after a little there was one sign of feeling: her closed eyelids got red, big tears burst out between the lashes and ran down her cheeks. The doctor did not take his eyes off her for a minute, keeping her hand in his. She went on weeping, still unconscious, without giving another sign of life: as if she still felt sorrow through her unconsciousness, as if through her loss of memory one bitter recollection still remained—only one. She did not recover consciousness.
When they got to the Rossi Palace courtyard, hardly was the door opened when a murmuring noise broke out, gradually growing stronger, impossible to restrain. Beside the carriage door the porter's wife called out and screamed as if the girl was dead. All the windows looking into the courtyard, all the landing-place doors, had opened to see the poor, fainting, pale creature in black, with hair hanging down, taken out of the carriage. The doctor vainly tried to insist on silence, but the cry of surprise and compassion grew louder, rising in the heavy air.