Armed with this, the two devoted women fought the Destroyer, praying
inaudibly, while they wrought, for the life of the child they had
reared to her sorrowful womanhood.
"HE'S asleep, and so is SHE!" whispered Phillis, once, pointing
alternately to the adjoining room where Herbert Dorrance awaited the
issue of this critical stage of his wife's illness, and to Mrs.
Aylett's chamber across the hall. "The Lord forgive 'em both! It
won't be they two that will shed many tears if so be she doesn't see
the light of another day--the murdered lamb! They tormented the life
out of her. I passed by her room last night before bed-time, and
heard her a-sobbin' and talkin' to herself, and walkin' up and down
the floor, and THEY a-bangin' away on the pyano down in the parlor!"
The faithful creature's prejudice wronged one of the hated pair.
Mrs. Aylett's slumbers upon her downy couch might be none the less
serene for her sister-in-law's danger, but Herbert's was the sleep
of exhaustion, not callousness. He had been up all the previous
night, and racked by the wildest anxiety throughout the intervening
day, and to compass this vigil was beyond his physical powers. Mabel
would not miss him, and he could do nothing for her--would only be
in the way, being totally unpractised in the art of nursing, he
reasoned; and there was no telling what new draught upon his
strength the morrow might bring. He would just lie down for an hour;
then he would be fresh for whatever service might be required of
him. With this prudent resolve, he threw himself along the bed in
the spare-room, and was oblivious of everything sublunary until
sunrise.
"If there should be any change, call me!" Mrs. Aylett had enjoined,
plaintively. "Winston will not hear of my sitting up, but I shall
not close my eyes all night, so do not hesitate to disturb me, if I
can be of any use whatever."
Which, it is idle to remark, was the last thing either of the nurses
thought of doing. If their darling were, in truth, dying, they were
the fittest persons to receive her latest sigh; for had they not
been present at her birth, and did not her mother go to glory from
their supporting arms?
There was a change, and not a favorable one, before daybreak. The
patient, from mutterings and restless starts, passed into violent
delirium, laughing, crying, and singing in a style so opposed to the
prescribed diagnosis of her case, as to lash the provincial doctor
to his wits' end, and extinguish in Aunt Rachel's sanguine heart the
faint hope to which she had clung until now. Herbert, awakened
finally by the turbulent sounds from the room he had been told must
be kept perfectly quiet, jumped up, and showed himself, with
disordered hair and blinking eyes, in the door of communication,
just as Mabel struggled to rise, and pleaded weepingly with those
who held her down that they would restore her child to her.