She spoke the last words hurriedly, for the jailer entered at that moment to inform Ormiston that the prison was about to be shut up for the night, and that it was his duty to see that all strangers left it.
"But not Nellie—not my child?" said Mrs. Netterville, with an appealing look, first to the jailer and then to Ormiston. "Surely you will leave Nellie with me?"
"They must!" cried Nellie passionately, "for by force alone can they drag me from you."
"Sir," said the dying woman, addressing herself this time to Ormiston alone, "add this one favor, I beseech you, to all the others you have done me, and let my child close my dying eyes?"
"I cannot refuse you, madam," he replied, much moved. "But is your daughter equal to the effort? Would it not be better to have the jailer's wife as well?"
"No—no!" cried Nellie, answering before her mother, who looked half inclined to assent to this proposition, could reply. "I am equal, and more than equal. I would not have a stranger with us to-night for the world."
"Come for her, then, at the first dawn of day," said Mrs. Netterville, with a glance, the meaning of which they understood too well. She gave her hand in turn to each of the young men, and then signed to them to withdraw. Ormiston did so at once; but Roger turned first to Nellie, and taking her passive hand, lifted it silently to his lips. Not to save his life or hers could he have done more than that in the solemn presence of her dying mother.
He then followed Ormiston. The priest lingered a moment longer to speak a word of cheer to his poor penitent; but the jailer calling him impatiently, he also disappeared, and the cell-door was closed behind him.
Chapter XVI.
The rattling of the key in the lock as the jailer shut them up for the night came like a death-knell on poor Nellie's ear. So long as Ormiston and Roger had been there beside her, she had, quite unconsciously to herself, entertained a sort of hope that something (she knew not what) might yet be devised for the solace of her mother; and now that they were gone indeed, she felt as people feel when the physician takes his leave of his dying patient, thus tacitly confessing that all hope is over. The lamp, which, in obedience to a word from Ormiston, the jailer had brought in trimmed and lighted for the night, revealed the cell to her in all its bleak reality, and as she glanced from the straw pallet, which at Netterville they would have hesitated to place beneath a beggar, to the pitcher of cold water, which was the only refreshment provided for the dying woman, Nellie felt anew such a sense of her mother's misery and of her own inability to procure her comfort, that, unable to utter a single syllable, she sat for a few moments by her side weeping hopelessly and helplessly as a child. Mrs. Netterville heard her sobbing, and, after waiting a few minutes in hopes the paroxysm would subside, said gently: