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Hour after hour her fairy form flitted around the sick-chamber; or sat mute and breathless by the feverish bed; she had neither fear for contagion nor bitterness for past oppression; everything vanished beneath the one hope of serving, the one gratification of feeling herself, in the wide waste of creation, not utterly without use, as she had been hitherto without friends. Miss St.
If these pleased me, it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and home and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.
Was I then in a sick-chamber? was that personification of beauty doomed? I looked round, and pronounced it incredible. I gazed upon the recumbent figure before me, so still, so living, and yet so death-like and moralised upon the utter deception of appearances. At length she awoke, apparently much reanimated. "My dear Ralph," said she, "why are you not in mourning?"
No woman's step crossed the floor of the sick-chamber, whose western dormer-windows overpeered the dingy architecture of old Charlie's block; Charlie and a skilled physician, the one all interest, the other all gentleness, hope, and patience these only entered by the door; but by the window came in a sweet-scented evergreen vine, transplanted from the caving bank of Belles Demoiselles.
All the twelve days the mother had pined for the child, and the child for the mother, but both knew that the prayer of these longings could not be granted. When the mother was told on the first day that her disease was typhoid, she was frightened, and asked if there was danger that Helen could have contracted it the day before, when she was in the sick-chamber on that confession visit.
The doctor was obliged to banish Chloe from the room, lest the noisy manifestation of her joy should injure her nursling, yet trembling upon the very verge of the grave; and as he did so, he cautioned her to refrain from yet communicating the glad tidings to any one, lest some sound of their rejoicing might reach the sick-chamber, and disturb the little sufferer.
"Then I will go to her," she answered, "that she may see a face of love when she passes," and pushing them all aside, she resolutely entered the sick-chamber, signing to Maestro Gentile to follow her; but the protest from the group of learned men was less than she had feared, since the Queen was now so ill that nothing could cure or harm.
Frahender had been relieved by the maid, but they were anxious to return to their posts, and when Francois began to fold his napkin, they pushed back their chairs and quickly returned to the sick-chamber. The patient was becoming delirious. The name of Esperance was continually recurrent in his confused talk.
While the end was yet approaching, Madame de Saint-Simon, seeing that there was no one to bear M. le Duc d'Orleans company, sent for me to stand by him in these sad moments. It appeared to me that my arrival pleased him, and that I was not altogether useless to him in relieving his grief. The rest of the day was passed in entering for a moment at a time into the sick-chamber.
When I recovered I found that my foe, whose sick-chamber was crowded with friends and comforters, had taken advantage of my illness to ruin my reputation. He, the swindler, accused me of his own crime: the equivocal character of my uncle confirmed the charge. Him, his own high-born pupil was enabled to unmask, and his disgrace was visited on me.
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