“Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed! Too late! Too late!” he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying expiration.
“Not too late!” The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if it had come down to him from heaven.
In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms of—a woman!
Out of the stifling chamber,—over the burning stairs,—close by the tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,—out into the open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,—carried as easily as if he had been a babe, in the strong arms of “The Wonder” of the gymnasium, the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.
Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again, unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,—those stern men—the old sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city counting-room—sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.
This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at the same moment.
As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that entered with every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed close to his ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every reviving pulse told him in language like a revelation from another world that a woman's arms were around him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace had brought him.
She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:—
“Do not move him a hair's breadth,” he said. “Wait until the litter comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy flask about him?”
One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather awkward, but did not come forward.