So rigid and motionless was her countenance, that it appeared as if changed into stone; her eyes were fixed; and her hair which, before this last blow, had retained all its gloss and beauty, was turned to an ashen hue, giving a strange and unearthly appearance to her pallid features.
“Sister,” said Madam Brinley, who sat by her, “here’s your dear child, Judith—will you not look at her and speak to her?”
Judith, from a sudden impulse, threw herself on her knees before the bereaved mother, clasped both her hands in her own and bathed them with her tears, but endeavored in vain to speak. Sobs were heard from all present. Madam raised her head, and as she did so, her eyes falling upon Judith, immediately showed a sense of her presence; their fixed and glassy look was changed to one of intelligence, the muscles around her mouth then moved, and she appeared as if endeavoring to articulate. At length she spoke, but in a voice hollow and strange—“We’ve had sad tidings, my child!”
Her whole countenance now appeared working; the frozen fountain of her grief was at length softened, and burst forth in a torrent of tears and sobs and groans.
In the state of exhaustion succeeding this outbreak, she was prevailed upon to take some food which Judith brought her; after which she fell asleep and was carried to her bed, from which she did not rise for several weeks. She had suffered a severe paralytic shock, which affected her limbs and speech for many months, though she finally recovered. Judith, in the meanwhile, divided her time between this, her second mother, and her own family.
What were the sensations of Mr. Wendell on hearing the appalling tidings, that at the moment in which his senses had figured to him George Fayerweather face to face, and whose voice he still felt burnt as it were into his brain—at that very moment, thousands of miles distant, the spirit of his young friend was in the act of departing in a death so fearful! Had such an incident been related to Mr. Wendell, from a source however authentic, he would either have totally disbelieved it, or have considered it an instance of singular coincidence of an illusion, occasioned by bodily indisposition, occurring at the same moment with the death of another at a great distance. But the feeling which even now raised the hair on his head, which curdled his blood and blanched his cheek anew at the bare recollection of that meeting, as it recalled sensations which his mind was too intent upon its important subject to heed at the time, gave the lie to his reason whenever he attempted so to argue.
Mr. Wendell, however, never spoke upon the subject himself, and by the family it was avoided altogether; each one feeling it of too awful and sacred a nature to admit, not only of discussion, but even of allusion to it in conversation. But as might be supposed, so remarkable an occurrence occasioned no little sensation throughout the town and its neighborhood. It was noted down, with its date, in many a private memorandum as the extraordinary event of the year in which it happened, with remarks upon it, either devout or philosophical, or both, according to the different characters of the minds which severally dictated them.
When all danger for the life of Madam Fayerweather was over, and Judith ceased to have in her an immediate object of care and anxiety, her own health, no longer sustained by extraordinary stimulus to exertion, at length gave tokens of the injury it had itself received. She fell into a state of languor and debility, which threatened to end in consumption, had not her strength of mind, aided by a deep sense of religion, enabled her to exert all her energies to struggle against the foe and finally to subdue it—her own melancholy. Her religious duties, those which she owed to her parents and those to society, she had always faithfully discharged, and now finding them insufficient to engross her mind and prevent it from preying upon itself, she had recourse to the cultivation of her taste and the higher powers of her fine intellect. In this she was assisted by John, already an elegant scholar, and she became a highly accomplished woman, as well as the most beautiful in the province.
Time passed on, and in its course saw Mr. Wendell presiding on the bench as chief-justice, his place as head of the bar filled by John Fayerweather.