Alfred followed eagerly to the door of the room, and stood there some seconds in breathless anxiety. It opened—the soi-disant doctor was coming out, but drew back, as it were, to make way for our hero; who, from his evident and pitiable agitation, and his eager inquiries, he seemed to take for granted, was some one of the lady's near relations arrived at last, and of course entitled to enter the apartment of the invalid. Laying apparently asleep on a sofa visible from the door, Alfred could now discern Caroline: yet, though at the time in no state of mind for reflection, he so far felt himself unauthorized in his intrusion as to give an air of hesitation to his manner.
"You can come in, sir," said the doctor, "there is no danger, I am sorry to say," he added with pompous solemnity, "of waking the patient."
On hearing these alarming words, Alfred rushed to the side of the couch in so wild a manner, that the doctor, quite aghast, followed, and laying his hand on his arm, said, "You mistake me, sir: there is no reason to expect immediate dissolution; my meaning was, that you need not be apprehensive of interrupting the slumbers of the patient; her state being unhappily, not natural sleep, but a species of trance, becoming, I feel it, notwithstanding, my painful duty to say from its prolonged duration and the daily diminution of bodily strength, every hour more and more hopeless. From, in fact, the first moment of her sudden seizure up to the present time, she has not shed one tear, spoken one word; nor, as we have reason to believe, though in this constant state of apparent unconsciousness, ever actually slept; for, at any startling or unusual sound, her eyes have been observed to open, though but for a second."
While the doctor, who was fond of hearing himself talk, had been thus holding forth, Alfred had stood gazing on the pale unconscious sufferer, in an agony of grief and compassion.
Pity is itself a gentle, an endearing sentiment; but when claimed by a being we already love, who shall paint the going forth of the whole soul, in the blended sympathy! If there is an earthly feeling pure from self, worthy of heaven, it is this! Had Alfred encountered Caroline in health, amid scenes of pleasure and of gaiety, himself free from the disgrace and ruin which now attached to him; nay, with a knowledge that her seeming want of truth had been but obedience to the tyrannical commands of a parent; that her heart was still his; that, in short, every obstacle to their union was removed by the death of poor Willoughby;—how soon, in such a case, he might have been able to have separated thoughts of her and of happiness from the heart-rending remembrance of his brother; at what distant period of time he could, in short, have sought a paradise on the very shore where that brother had become a wreck, it is impossible to say. But when instead of all this, her idea was presented to his mind under circumstances so new, so terrible, so far removed from selfish joy, which, when mingled with thoughts of Willoughby, would have seemed almost a sacrilege; then it was that an overwhelming interest in her fate took possession of his whole soul unresisted, consisting of fears, not of hopes; and that soul full of misery, was almost paralysed by the memory and presence of sorrow. He continued to gaze, till a sense of the most appalling dread, despite the assurance of the doctor that there was no immediate danger, crept over his heart, so much did the perfect stillness of the lovely features resemble that of death. His terror momentarily increased—he bent—he knelt—he listened in breathless anguish, till the throbbing of his own pulses might have been heard, but he could catch no sound of respiration. He looked up with a sort of despairing yet questioning expression in the doctor's face.
"I by no means," said the authority so appealed to, "apprehend, as I have already stated, any immediate danger. This species of trance has continued without intermission, ever since the first rash communication of the fatal intelligence." Then, fond of hearing himself talk, and possibly believing that he spoke to a near relative, acquainted of course with all the circumstances, he continued to exhibit his powers of oratory thus:
"The shock was, I fear, altogether too much for any sensitive mind; what with the abrupt mode of communication, and the manner of the gentleman's death, so terrible—murdered they say, by his own twin brother!"
"No, sir!" exclaimed Alfred, starting up with sudden fierceness, and grasping the doctor's arm, "he was not murdered by his brother; and that," he added, with an altered tone and manner, clasping his hands, and raising his eyes to heaven, "when her spirit awakes in the realms of the blessed it will know."
The conversation up to this point had been conducted in the mysterious whispers of a sick room, but Alfred's voice, from excess of excitement, in the last sentence unconsciously assumed its natural key. As he concluded his apostrophy to Heaven, his eyes, which had been uplifted in the fervour of devotional feeling fell again on Caroline. Her's were wide open, and fixed on him, with an almost wild expression of terror and bewilderment!
In a moment more, the crimson rash had, for a second, crossed her brow; the piercing cry escaped her lips, and she had fallen again into that totally inanimate state, which had characterised her first seizure, and distinguished it from the sleep-like trance in which she had subsequently lain.