“I feel so, too. But I manage to pull myself together. If I drop, it will be because I am a dead one—like Orizaba.”
“Keep up your courage. Go to your mother, and when you have finished with her, follow me to the rose-garden where we left your sister. I remember that she said she had taken her coffee, and that after she had filled her lungs with the breath of the roses, she should sit under the arbor and read, so I have no doubt that I will find her there.”
And so while the servants, directed by the two doctors, were conveying all that was left of Ramon Orizaba to the rooms he had occupied in life, Reginald Danton sought the apartment of his mother, and Nick Carter went out of the house through the side door and started along the gravel walk toward the arbor where Mercedes had told him she would sit and read.
He crossed the lawn and passed among the wealth of roses toward the very spot where he had been presented to her; and there, where she had stood during the two or three moments they had conversed together, the ground was littered with the roses she had carried in her arms and upon her person; and from that spot toward the arbor, fifty feet away, there was a trail of roses and rose leaves in such proficiency as almost to suggest that she had played the game of hare-and-hounds with them, in order to lead her pursuer to her retreat.
He followed quickly, for there was something about that confused littering of the flowers along the pathway which suggested haste and excitement. He could almost imagine that she had flung them there in her excitement as she turned to fly from some real or fancied peril. The roses along the walk seemed to speak to him and to bid him hasten to her side, and he lost no time in making his way to the arbor.
At the entrance he halted abruptly.
Inside that rose-embowered place, screened effectually from view from the outside, Mercedes had fallen, and she was stretched at full length upon the ground; her face, now waxen in hue, was turned toward the canopy of roses over her, and her whole attitude told him that she had fainted the instant she crossed the threshold and knew that she had escaped from the view of others.
“Poor child,” murmured Nick, bending over her, and he began to chafe her hands and to wait patiently until nature should come to his assistance and revive her, for it was not at all to his purposes that he should call for assistance or seek restoratives, and thus betray a weakness which she had sought so strenuously to hide.
While he bent above her, and stroking her hands, looked down upon her exquisitely beautiful face, vaguely wondering that creation could have wrought so perfectly upon one human being, a shadow fell across them both, and, raising his eyes, he saw that Danton had followed him into the garden.
“What has happened to Mercedes?” he demanded, instantly falling upon his knees beside his sister.