"What do you mean?" demanded Adeline, sitting up on the sofa in her alarm. "Have I been saying anything in my sleep?"
"Not much--only a few words," said Mary Carr, stepping forward and speaking in a calm, soothing tone, a very contrast to Rose's excited one. "But we can see how it is about Mr. St. John, Adeline. He left in ill-feeling, and the inward grief is killing you by inches. If your mind were at rest, time might restore you to health; but, as it is, you are giving yourself no chance of life."
"There is no chance for me," she answered; "you know it. If I were happy as I once was, as I once thought I should be; if I were even married to Mr. St. John, there would be no chance of prolonged life for me; none."
Mary Carr did know it; but she strove to soothe her still.
"I might have expected all that has happened to me," smiled Adeline, trying to turn the subject to a jest, the first approach to voluntary smile or jest they had marked on her lips. "Do you remember your words, Rose, on that notable first of January, my ball-night--that some ill-fate was inevitably in store for me?"
"Rubbish!" said Rose. "I was an idiot, and a double idiot: and I don't remember it."
But Rose did remember it, all too vividly. She remembered how Adeline had laughed in ridicule, had spurned her words, then; in her summer-tide of pride and beauty. It was winter with her now!
There could be no further erroneous opinions on the point. Physically, she was dying of consumption, as a matter of course, and as the doctors said: but was she not just as much dying of a broken heart? The cruel pain was ever torturing her: though her lungs had been strong and healthy, it might have worked its work.
I hardly know how to continue this portion of the history, and feel a great temptation to make a leap at once to its close. Who cares to read of the daily life of a sick-chamber? There is so little variation in it: there was so little in hers. Adeline better or worse; the visits of the doctors, and their opinions; a change in her medicine, pills for mixture, or mixture for pills; and there you have about the whole history. Which medicine, by the way, was ordered by the English physician. A French one never gives any. He would not prescribe one dose, where the English would choke you with five hundred. It is true. Pills, powders, mixture; mixture, powders, pills: five hundred at the very least, where a Frenchman would give none. Warm baths and fasting in abundance they order, but no medicine. They are uncommonly free with the lancet, however; with leeches; with anything else that draws blood. The first year Eleanor Seymour (if you have not forgotten her) was at school at Madame de Nino's, an illness broke out amidst the pupils, and the school medical attendant was sent for. It was this very Dr. Dorré, now attending Adeline de Castella. Five or six of the younger girls seemed heavy and feverish, and there were signs of an eruption on the skin. Monsieur le docteur thought it would turn out to be measles or scarlatina, he could not yet pronounce which; and he ordered them to bed and to take a few quarts of eau sucrée: he then sent for the rest of the pupils one by one, and bled them all round.[1] "A simple measure of precaution," he said to Madame.