There was a hush over the house amid the old trees. The servants moved softly through the corridors, paused to whisper to one another, then hurried out of sight as David Verne appeared in his wheel chair, slowly propelled toward the sick room by Hamoud.
She seemed hardly to breathe as she lay in the gloom through which drifted the white uniforms of the nurses, amid a dim glamour from all the charming objects that had been meant to please her senses. Her hair was spread out on the pillow to frame her colorless face, which had now attained indeed the look of the "angelic messenger." But the angelic messenger, the bearer of life to him, seemed to David on the point of returning to the source of life.
He sat at the bedside, sometimes unable to extend his hand to touch her hand, as though his strength were wholly a reflection of her strength, so that with the latter's waning the former must flicker out.
"What is it?" he thought, lost in misery and wonder.
The physicians and the nurse looked at him askance, their secret pent in behind their lips.
He felt round him the pressure of this secret. The air was full of thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these shadows which he felt might be less agonizing than that flash of light.
There was no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria, emotional collapse.
Ah, yes; but from what cause?
Even Hamoud, he was sure, knew something that he did not know. The Arab, while apparently as solicitous as ever, was changed. He had taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of vengeance—with something sensual in its look of cruelty.
Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the deepest mass of shadows. One could make out only the pale blotch that was his white skullcap, and the long pale streak that was the uncovered portion of his white under robe. The eyes, the expression of the face, were lost in blackness.