Robert Kimberly Part 54

"But don't you want to see what it was?"

"Some one else will do that; come."

She clung to his arm as they pa.s.sed through an open door. "You don't seem just well, dearie," he said, taking her hand within his own. "Let us sit down."

He gave her a chair. She sank into it, supporting her head on her other hand. "I haven't been quite well for a day or two, Robert. I feel very strange."

Kimberly with his handkerchief wiped the dampness from her forehead.

Her distress increased and he realized that she was ill. "Alice, let me take you upstairs a moment. Perhaps you need a restorative."

The expression on her face alarmed him. They rose just as Dolly hastened past. "Oh, you are here!" she cried, seeing Kimberly. "Why, what is the matter with Alice?"

Alice herself answered. "A faintness, dear," she said with an effort.

"I think that awful crash startled me. What was it?"

Dolly leaned forward with a suppressed whisper. "Don't mention it!

Robert, the Dutch mirror in the dining-room has fallen. It smashed a whole tableful of gla.s.s. The servants are frightened to death."

"No one was hurt?" said Kimberly.

"Fortunately no one. I must find Imogene."

She hurried on. Alice asked Kimberly to take her back to the ballroom.

He urged her to go upstairs and lie down for a moment.

The music for the dance was still coming from within and against Kimberly's protest Alice insisted on going back. He gave way and led her out upon the floor. For a few measures, with a determined effort, she followed him. Then she glided mechanically on, supported only by Kimberly and leaning with increasing weakness upon his arm.

When he spoke to her, her answers were vague, her words almost incoherent. "Take me away, Robert," she whispered, "I am faint."

He led her quietly from the floor and a.s.sisted her up a flight of stairs to his mother's apartment. There he helped her to lie down on a couch.

Annie was hurriedly summoned. A second maid was sent in haste for Doctor Hamilton and Dolly.

Alice could no longer answer Kimberly's questions as he knelt. She lay still with her eyes closed. Her respiration was hardly perceptible and her hands had grown cold. It was only when Kimberly anxiously kissed her that a faint smile overspread her tired face. In another moment she was unconscious.

CHAPTER XL

When Hamilton hastily entered the room, Annie, frightened and helpless, knelt beside her mistress, chafing her hands. On the opposite side of the couch Kimberly, greatly disturbed, looked up with relief.

Taking a chair at her side, the doctor lifted Alice's arm, took her pulse and sat for some time in silence watching her faint and irregular respiration.

He turned after a moment to Kimberly to learn the slight details of the attack, and listening, retracted the lids of Alice's eyes and examined the pupils. Reflecting again in silence, he turned her head gently from side to side and afterward lifted her arms one after the other to let them fall back beside her on the couch.

Even these slight efforts to obtain some knowledge of Alice's condition seemed to Kimberly disquieting and filled him with apprehension. The doctor turned to Annie. "Has your mistress ever had an experience like this before, Annie?"

"No, doctor, never. She has never been in this way before."

Imogene came hurrying upstairs with Dolly to learn of Alice's condition.

They looked upon her unconsciousness with fear and asked whispered questions that intensified Kimberly's uneasiness.

"Do you think we could take her home, doctor?" asked Annie, timidly.

The doctor paused. "I don't think we will try it to-night, Annie. It is quite possible for her to remain here, isn't it?" he asked, looking at Dolly and Kimberly.

"Certainly," returned Dolly. "I will stay. Alice can have these rooms and I will take the blue rooms connecting."

"Then put your mistress to bed at once," said Hamilton to Annie.

"And telephone home, Annie," suggested Dolly, "for whatever you need. I will see the housekeeper right away about the linen."

Kimberly listened to the concise directions of the doctor for immediate measures of relief and followed him mechanically into the hall. Only one thought came out of the strange confusion--Alice was at least under his roof and in his mother's room.

When he returned with the doctor the lights were low and Alice lay with her head pillowed on her loosened hair. The maid and Dolly had hastened away to complete their arrangements for the emergency and for a few moments the two men were alone with their charge.

"Doctor, what do you make of this?" demanded Kimberly.

Hamilton, without taking his eyes from the sick woman, answered thoughtfully: "I can hardly tell until I get at something of the underlying cause. Bryson will be here in a moment. We will hear what he has to say."

Doctor Bryson appeared almost on the word. Hamilton made way for him at Alice's side and the two conferred in an undertone.

Bryson asked many questions of Hamilton and calling for a candle retracted Alice's eyelids to examine the pupils for reaction to the light. The two doctors lost not an unnecessary moment in deliberation.

Consulting rapidly together, powerful restoratives were at once prepared and administered through the circulation.

Reduced to external efforts to strengthen the vital functions the two medical men worked as nurses and left nothing undone to overcome the alarming situation. Then for an hour they watched together, closely, the character and frequency of Alice's pulse and breathing.

To Kimberly the conferences of the two men seemed unending. Sometimes they left the room and were gone a long time. He walked to a window to relieve his suspense. Through the open sash came the suppressed hum of motors as the cars, parked below the stables, moved up the hill to receive departing guests and made their way down the long, dark avenue to the highway.

On the eastern horizon a dull gray streak crossed a mirror that lay in the darkness below. Kimberly had to look twice to convince himself that the summer night was already waning.

Annie came into the room and, he was vaguely conscious, was aiding the doctors in a painstaking examination of their patient. Through delicacy Kimberly withdrew, as they persistently questioned the maid in the hope of obtaining the much-needed information concerning her mistress's previous condition; for what Annie could not supply of this they knew they must work without.

Plunged in the gloom of his apprehensions, he saw the doctors coming down the hall toward him and stopped them. "Speak before me," he said with an appeal that was a command. "You both know what I have at stake."

The three retired to the library and Kimberly listened attentively to every phase of the discussion between the two master clinicians as they laid their observations before him. The coma was undisguisedly a serious matter. It seemed to them already ingravescent and, taken in connection with the other symptoms, was even ominous. The two men, without a satisfactory history, and without a hope of obtaining one from the only available source--the suffering woman herself--discussed the case from every side, only to return unwillingly to the conclusion to which everything pointed--that a cerebral lesion underlay the attack.

Their words sent a chill to Kimberly's heart. But the lines of defence were mapped out with speed and precision; a third eminent man, an authority on the brain, was to be sent for at once. Nurses, equal almost in themselves to good pract.i.tioners, were to be called in, and finally Hamilton and Bryson arranged that either one or the other should be at the sick-bed every instant to catch a possible moment of consciousness.

Hamilton himself returned to his patient. Bryson at the telephone took up the matter of summoning aid from town, and when he had done threw himself down for a few hours' sleep. Kimberly followed Hamilton and returned to Alice's side. He saw as he bent over her how the expression of her face had changed. It was drawn with a profound suffering.

Kimberly sitting noiselessly down took her hand, waiting to be the first to greet her when she should open her eyes.

All Second Lake knew within a day or two of Alice's critical illness.

The third doctor had come in the morning and he remained for several days.

Hamilton questioned Annie repeatedly during the period of consultations.

"Try to think, Annie," he said once, "has your mistress never at any time complained of her head?"