The blow on his temple had glanced, so that half the power, which in the case of Halberd had crushed in the skull instantly, had been lost, nevertheless it had served to render him wholly unconscious. Therefore, two hours later, when brave little Mrs. Phipps got him laid in a clean, sweet couch, he looked like death, and his heart-beat was feeble and faintly fluttering between mere life and the Great Stillness.
CHAPTER XII.
ADAM’S NURSE.
When the intelligence of the almost unparalleled crime spread with terror and awe in its wake through Boston, in the morning, Garde heard it like a knell—a fatality almost to have been expected, when she and Adam had been at last so happy. She did not faint. Not even a moan escaped her lips. She turned white and remained white.
“Grandther,” she said to the old man who owed his restoration to health and almost complete soundness of mind to her ministrations, “I am betrothed to this friend of our new Governor’s. I shall go to attend him.”
She left her grandfather staring at her in wonder, and with only her shawl on her head, she went to the “fair brick house” which William Phipps had built for his wife at the corner of Salem and Charter streets in the town.
“I am betrothed to Adam Rust,” she repeated, simply. “I have come to attend him.”
As if poor Garde had not already, in six years of waiting and hoping and vain regrets, sufficiently suffered for a moment’s lack of faith in her lover, the anguish now came upon her in a flood tide. Adam no sooner recovered a heart-beat strong enough to give promise of renewed steadiness, than he lapsed from his unconscious condition into one of delirium.
Had Garde been wholly in ignorance of his past and his life of many tragedies, she would have been doomed to learn of all of it now. He lived it all over, a hundred times, and told of it, brokenly, excitedly, at times with sallies of witty sentences, but for the most part in the sighs with which his life had filled his heart to overflowing, but to which he had never before given utterance.
She knew now what the boy had suffered when King Philip, the Sachem of the Wampanoags, was slain, with the people of his nation. She felt the pangs he had felt when, on first returning to Boston, he had believed himself supplanted in Garde’s affections by his friend Henry Wainsworth. She heard him croon to the little Narragansett child, as he limped again through the forest. And then she sounded the depths of a man’s despair when the whole world and the woman he loves drive him forth, abased.