He bends forward and takes her in his arms. With all her dying strength she lifts herself to his embrace. It is a last expiring effort—her weak clasp relaxes, there is one faint gasp. Her head falls heavily upon his breast—there is a despairing cry from the women, cold and lifeless, Charley Stuart lays his bride of a moment back among the pillows—whether dead or in a dead swoon no one there can tell.
CHAPTER XI.
THE NIGHT.
At first they thought her dead—but it was not death. She awoke from that long, death-like swoon as morning broke—so near unto death that it seemed the turning of a hair might weigh down the scale. And so for days after it was—for weary miserable days and nights. The great reaction after the great excitement had come, all consciousness left her, she lay white and still, scarcely moving, scarcely breathing. The one beloved voice fell as powerless on her dulled ears now as all others, the dim, almost lifeless eyes, that opened at rare intervals, were blank to the whole world. She lay in a species of stupor, or coma, from which it was something more than doubtful if she ever would awake. The few spoonfuls of beef-tea and brandy and water she took they forced between her clenched teeth, and in that darkened room of the great hotel, strangely, solemnly quiet, Life and Death fought their sharp battle over her unconscious head.
And for those who loved her, her father, her friends, and one other, nearer and dearer than father or friend, how went those darkest days for them? They could hardly have told—all their after life they looked back, with a sick shudder, to that week.
For Charley Stuart he never wanted to look back—never to the last day of his life will he be able to recall, to realize the agony of those six days—days that changed his whole nature—his whole life.
They watched with her unceasingly—death might come at any moment. There were times when they bent above her, holding their own breath, sure that the faint thread had already snapped—times when they held a mirror to her lips to be sure she breathed at all. For her new-made husband, he never left her except when nature succumbed to the exhaustion of ceaseless vigil, and they forced him away. He forgot to eat or sleep, he sat tearless and still as stone by the bedside, almost as bloodless, almost as wan and hollow-eyed as the dying bride herself. The doctors stood gloomily silent, their skill falling powerless here.
"She needed only the excitement of this most preposterous marriage to finish her," one of them growled; "I said so at the time—I say so now. She had one chance for life—perfect quiet—and that destroyed it."
On the fourth day, a letter from England, in a woman's hand, and deeply bordered with black, arrived. Edith, in the first days of her illness, had told Trix to open all her letters. She would have passed the power over to her brother now, but he waved it away impatiently. What did it matter whom it was from—what it contained—what did anything matter now?
His haggard eyes went silently back to the marble face lying among its pillows, so awfully still.