The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel Part 18

"You are hiding the truth from me," said Lynde, with a pang. "She is dead!"

"No, but she is very low. The disease is approaching a crisis; a change must take place by to-morrow. Frankly, I dread that change. I am hiding nothing from you."

"Is there no hope? You do not mean that!"

"I am afraid I do. Perhaps it is because she is so dear to me that I always antic.i.p.ate the worst when she is concerned. The other physician is more sanguine; but then he does not love Ruth as I do."

"You might have saved her!"

"Everything has been done that could be done. He is a person of remarkable skill, this Paris physician. I could have advised no change in his treatment of the case if I had been on the spot at first. That is a great deal for one physician to say of another. You had better go and get some rest," added Dr. Pendegrast in a changed voice, struck by the young man's ghastly look. "Your two night-journeys have used you up."

Lynde went mechanically to his room and threw himself upon the bed without undressing. He had no inclination to sleep, but his fatigue, bodily and mental, overcame him unawares as he lay listening to the wind which swept through the mountain-gorges, and rose and fell monotonously with a sound like the rote of the sea. It was a vision of the sea that filled his unrestful slumber: Ruth was dead, she had died in his arms, and he was standing woe-begone, like a ghost, on the deck of a homeward bound ship, with the gray, illimitable waste of waters stretching around him.

It appeared to Lynde to be in the middle of the night, though it was in fact on the edge of daybreak, that he was awakened by some one knocking softly at his door. He lighted a match, and by its momentary flicker saw Mr. Denham standing on the threshold.

"Ruth wishes to see you," he said indistinctly and with an indecisive air. "As nearly as we can gather, that is what she wants. Come quickly!"

Without waiting for a reply Mr. Denham turned and pa.s.sed through the hall. Lynde followed in silence. He was less surprised than agitated by the summons; it was of a piece with the dream from which he had been roused.

There were candles burning on the mantel-piece of the chamber, and the dawn was whitening the window-panes. In that weird, blended light the face of the sick girl shone like a fading star. Lynde was conscious of no other presence, though Mrs. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast with a third person were standing near the chimney-place. Ruth raised her eyes and smiled upon Lynde as he came in; then her lids closed and did not open again, but the smile stayed in a dim way on her features, and a flush almost too faint to be perceived crept into her cheeks. Lynde stooped by the bed and took one of Ruth's hands. She turned her head slightly on the pillow, and after a moment her lips moved as if she were making an effort to speak. Lynde remained immobile, fearing to draw breath lest a word should escape his ear. But she did not speak. As he stood there listening in the breathless stillness, the flame of the candles burned fainter and fainter in the increasing daylight; a bird twittered somewhere aloft; then the sunshine streamed through the windows, and outside all the heights were touched with sudden gold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: But she did not speak]

Dr. Pendegrast approached Lynde and rested one finger on his arm. "You had better go now," the doctor whispered hastily. "I will come to you by and by."

Lynde was sitting on the side of the bed in his own room in the broad daylight. He had been sitting motionless in one posture for an hour--perhaps two hours, he could not tell how long--when Dr.

Pendegrast opened the door without pausing to knock. Lynde felt the cold creeping about his heart.

"Doctor," he said desperately, "don't tell me!"

"Mr. Lynde," said Dr. Pendegrast, walking up to the bedside and speaking very slowly, as if he were doubtful of his own words and found it difficult to articulate them, "a change has taken place, but it is a change for the better. I believe that Ruth will live."

"She will live!"

"We thought she was sinking; she thought so herself, the poor child.

You were worth a thousand doctors to her, that's my belief. Mrs. Denham was afraid to tell her you had gone to Paris to fetch us, thinking it would excite her. Ruth imagined that her aunt had offended you, and thought you had gone not to return."

"Ah!"

"That troubled her, in the state she was in--troubled her mightily. She has been able to take a few spoonfuls of nourishment," the doctor went on irrelevantly; "her pulse is improved; if she has no drawback she will get well."

Lynde looked around him bewilderedly for a moment; then he covered his face with his hands. "I thought she was dying!" he said under his breath.

That day and the next the girl's life hung by a thread; then the peril pa.s.sed, and her recovery became merely a question of careful nursing.

The days which immediately followed this certainty were the happiest Lynde had ever experienced. Perhaps it was because his chamber was directly over Ruth's that he sat there in the window-seat, reading from morning until night. It was as near to her as he was permitted to approach. He saw little of Mr. Denham and still less of Mrs. Denham during that week; but the doctor spent an hour or two every evening with Lynde, and did not find it tiresome to talk of nothing but his patient. The details of her convalescence were listened to with an interest that would have won Dr. Pendegrast if he had not already been very well disposed towards the young fellow, several of whose New York friends, as it transpired, were old acquaintances of the doctor's--Dr.

Dillon and his family, and the Delaneys. The conversation between Lynde and Dr. Pendegrast at the Hotel Meurice had been hurried and disjointed, and in that respect unsatisfactory; but the minute history of Ruth's previous case, which the doctor related to Lynde in the course of those long summer nights, set his mind completely at rest.

"I could never have given her up, anyway," said Lynde to himself. "I have loved her for three years, though I didn't know it. That was my wife's slipper after all," he added, thinking of the time when it used to seem to be sitting up for him at night, on his writing-table at Rivermouth, and how often it threw a gloom over him with its tragic suggestion. "My wife's slipper!" He repeated the phrase softly to himself. There was nothing tragic in it now.

By and by the hours began to drag with him. The invalid could not get well fast enough to keep pace with his impatience. The day she was able for the first time to sit up a while, in an armchair wheeled by the bedside, was a fete day to the four Americans in the Couronne hotel. If Lynde did not exhaust his entire inheritance in cut flowers on this occasion, it was because Dr. Pendegrast objected to them in any profusion in a sick-chamber.

"When am I to see her?" asked Lynde that evening, as the doctor dropped into the room to make his usual report.

"Let me think. To-day is Tuesday--perhaps we shall let you see her by Friday or Sat.u.r.day."

"Good heavens! why don't you put it off thirty or forty years?"

"I haven't the time," returned Dr. Pendegrast, laughing. "Seriously, she will not be strong enough until then to bear the least excitement.

I am not going to run any risks with Ruth, I can tell you. You are very impatient, of course. I will give you a soothing draught."

"What is it?"

"A piece of information."

"I'll take it!"

"And a piece of advice."

"I'll take that, too; you can't frighten me."

"It is a betrayal of confidence on my part," said the doctor slowly, and with an air of reconsidering his offer.

"No matter."

"Well, then, Ruth's asking for you, the other night, rather amazed Denham when he came to think it over quietly, and Mrs. Denham judged it best to inform him of the conversation which took place between you and her the morning you set out for Paris. Denham was still more amazed.

She had attempted to cure him of one astonishment by giving him another. Similia similibus curantur did not work that time. Then the two came to me for consultation, and I told them I thought Ruth's case required a doctor of divinity rather than a doctor of medicine."

"Did you say that!"

"Certainly I did. I strongly advised an operation, and designated the English church here as a proper place in which to have it performed.

Moreover, as a change of air would be beneficial as soon as might be afterwards, I suggested for the invalid a short trip to Geneva--with not too much company. My dear fellow, you need not thank me; I am looking exclusively to Ruth's happiness--yours can come in incidentally, if it wants to. Mrs. Denham is YOUR ally."

"Is she, indeed? I thought differently. And Ruth"--

"Ruth," interposed the doctor, with a twinkle in his eyes, "Ruth is the good little girl in the primer who doesn't speak until she's spoken to."

"By Jove, she doesn't speak even then! I have tried her twice: once she evaded me, and once she refused to listen."

"The results of her false education," said the doctor sententiously.

Lynde laughed.

"To what view of the question does Mr. Denham incline?" he asked.

"Denham is not as unreasonable as he used to be; but he is somewhat stunned by the unexpectedness of the thing."

"That's the information; and now for the advice, Doctor."

"I advise you to speak with Denham the first chance you get. You will have an opportunity this evening. I took the liberty of asking him to come up here and smoke a cigar with us as soon as he finishes his coffee."