CHAPTER XVIII
THE RENUNCIATION
The early morning sun was streaming in through the window of the sick man’s room when Tresler at last awoke to consciousness. And, curiously enough, more than half an hour passed before Diane became aware of the change in her patient.
And yet she was wide awake too. Sleep had never been further from her eyes, and her mind never more alert. But for the first time since Tresler had been brought in wounded, his condition was no longer first in her thoughts. Something occupied her at the moment of his waking to the exclusion of all else.
The man lay like a log. His eyes were staring up at the ceiling; he made no movement, and though perfect consciousness had come to him there was no interest with it, no inquiry. He accepted his position like an infant waking from its healthy night-long slumber. Truth to tell, his weakness held him prisoner, sapping all natural inclination from mind and body. All his awakening brought him was a hazy, indifferent recollection of a bad dream; that, and a background of the events at Willow Bluff.
If the man were suffering from a bad dream, the girl’s expression suggested the terrible reality of her thought. There was something worse than horror in her eyes, in the puckering of her brows, in the nervous compression of her lips. There was a blending of terror and bewilderment in the brown depths that contemplated the wall before her, and every now and then her pretty figure moved with a palpable shudder. Her thoughts were reviewing feverishly scenes similar to those in her patient’s dream, only with her they were terrible realities which she had witnessed only a few hours before in that very room. At that moment she would have given her life to have been able to call them dreams. Her lover’s life had been attempted by the inhuman process of reopening his wound.
Should she ever forget the dreadful scene? Never! Not once, but time and again her brain pictured each detail with a distinctness that was in the nature of physical pain. From the moment she awoke, which had been unaccountable to her, to find herself still propped against the foot-rail of her bed, to the finish of the dastardly scene in the sick-room was a living nightmare. She remembered the start with which she had opened her eyes. As far as she knew she had heard nothing; nothing had disturbed her. And yet she found herself sitting bolt upright, awake, listening, intent. Then her rush to the lamp. Her guilty feelings. The unconscious stealth of her tiptoeing to the landing outside. Her horror at the discovery that her obstruction to the staircase had been removed, and the chairs, as though to mock the puerility of her scheming, set in orderly fashion, side by side against the wall to make way for the midnight intruder. The closed door of the sick-room, which yielded to her touch and revealed the apparition of her father bending over her lover, and, with no uncertainty of movement, removing the bandage from the wounded neck. The terror of it all remained. So long as she lived she could never forget one single detail of it.
Even now, though hours had passed since these things had happened, the nervousness with which she had finally approached the task of readjusting the bandage still possessed her. And even the thankfulness with which she discovered that the intended injury had been frustrated was inadequate to bring her more than a passing satisfaction. She shuddered, and nervously turned to her patient.
Then it was that she became aware of his return to life.
“Jack! Oh, thank God!” she murmured softly.