“My love!” cried her mother. “The idea of the thing. The—”
But expostulations were wasted breath; while they were being made, Orient was calmly getting on her travelling-gown, and, seeing herself powerless, the mother—with her heart palpitating in the ends of her fingers through awe and through alarm, and interweaving with the ejaculations that escaped her chattering teeth a thousand instructions to her quaking maid and sister—hastened to do likewise and be off with her.
Thus it happened that the telegram from Reymund’s brother crossed the travellers on their way; and they reached his brother’s house in the gray of the shivering morning.
It was just as Orient’s heart had told her. Reymund had been thrown from his horse on the previous morning, striking his head on a curbstone’s edge; he had been taken up senseless, and had lain since then in a stupor only broken by his twice calling her name in the afternoon. At a little after five o’clock he had risen on the pillow, and in a loud and terrible voice had called Orient again, and then had fallen back; and whether he were dead or alive there was no one able to say.
Orient threw off her hat and shawl and stole into the apartment where Reymund had been placed. The white face that fastened her eye was still as a mask of clay, and there was stamped upon it that look of unutterable melancholy into which she had seen the smile fade yesterday,—the linen where it lay was less white, a marble image had been less still. As Orient bent there her breath stirred the dark lock of hair on the brow, and the slight and airy motion of itself brought into forceful being all the awful immobility and silence of death.
“He does not breathe! His heart does not beat! Will he never open his eyes again?” she said. “O Reymund, Reymund, I love you!”
She bent nearer as she sighed the words, and her lips were sealed to his.
A quiver ran through all the frozen frame reposing there beside her, a pulse of warmth, perhaps, played in the hand hers clasped; the eyelids shook and lifted and unveiled the dark and woful eyes.
“You have seen my soul, Orient,” said Reymund. “Good by.”
The dark and woful eyes were veiled again. And this time Reymund’s soul was gone beyond recall.