Then she raises a white, forlorn face, and falters:
“Is no one coming to him?”
And De Belcour, who feels himself moved to a great compassion for this slender bit of a girl, stricken down in the very beginning and flush of her life, bows his head in answer.
She forgets his presence then. Bending over her husband, she touches his closed lids and his cold cheeks very softly and caressingly, as if her little fingers loved to linger in their task. She puts her hand on his heart, which beats, but so faintly as if each throb were its last, and she keeps on murmuring tender words to the ears which do not hear them.
“Delaval, darling, speak to me, only one word—one little word, Delaval, that I may just hear your voice. Oh, God! won’t he speak to me again? shall I never hear him speak kind, dear words as he did to-day—before he went away to—die? Die! Oh! you won’t die, Delaval, darling, my own darling, you have not left me—left me—for ever!”
The last words go out from her in a wail loud enough, and piteous enough, to reach the sky.
Faint and dizzy with fear, she stretches out her trembling hands, like a blind woman, towards the form lying before her with the rigidity of death, but, before they reach it, she falls back and drops senseless on the floor.
* * * * *
Maybe her piteous cry has reached beyond the sky, for he has not left her “for ever.”
The shot of a vengeful woman, wounded in her terrible love, driven to the phrensy of a wild beast, has grazed the right lung, and for a long time he hovers between life and death, while his wife nurses him unwearyingly night and day with a devoted unselfish love that is not often to be found in the worldly daughters of Belgravia.