Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/541

 534 of thunder made him start up and hasten to bring Helen away before the storm should burst. Her head was resting on the grave, and the sound of Keefe’s quick steps did not rouse her. He stood for a minute reluctant to disturb her, for he thought she was praying, but another peal of thunder, and the rapidly darkening sky dispelled his scruples.

“Miss Lennox, there’s a heavy thunder-squall coming on,” he said; “if we don’t make haste we’ll not get home before it breaks.”

She did not answer. Terrified at her strange silence and movelessness he bent over her, and becoming bolder as he grew more alarmed, he gently raised her head. Then he saw that he might have called her long and loudly without being heard or heeded. Her eyes were wide open, but swollen and meaningless; her lips parted like those of one gasping for breath; she had fallen into a sort of stupor, and was as unconscious of Keefe’s voice and touch as if she had been already dead.

Raising her in his arms Keefe carried her home; the thunder came nearer and nearer, and the lightning darted across his path, but he neither heard the one nor saw the other. His feelings as he held her close to his heart were such as a parent might feel overwhelmed with the dread of losing her only and idolised child, or a miser who had found the pearl of countless price and sees it about to be torn from his grasp: he had saved her life, and in saving her had found a new life himself, and now she was not only to him the first and only woman he had ever loved, but something on which his very existence depended. Every moment of delay seemed a chance of her recovery lost, and fear and love giving treble strength to his vigorous frame, he was scarcely conscious of her weight as he flew along. At last, and just as the rain began to fall in torrents, he reached the house, and bursting into her room laid her on the bed; then rushing to Mrs. Wendell, who, calm and unexcitable as she generally was, had screamed with terror on seeing Helen apparently dead in his arms, he dragged her to the bed, exclaiming, “Look at her—is she dying?”

Mrs. Wendell took Helen’s burning hand in hers, and looked at the poor girl’s flushed face and swollen eyeballs, while Keefe watched her with an intense anxiety that quivered in every limb.

“It’s a brain fever she’s got, I guess,” said Mrs. Wendell; “but you needn’t be so scared, dear; she’s young and healthy, and with God’s help shell get over it. Mercy on me, I thought she had been struck by the lightning.”

Fatigue, grief, loss of rest and food, and the violent efforts she had made to struggle against the weakness she could not overcome, had been too much for Helen to bear; and for some days it seemed impossible that she could recover. Mrs. Wendell nursed her with the most judicious care, and though filled with compassion at seeing one so fair and young thrown on the mercy of strangers, at a time when sympathy and affection were so much needed, (and under any circumstances her promise to Mr. Lennox would have been religiously kept,) her solitude was rendered more anxious by her conviction that Keefe’s happiness hung on the slender thread which bound Helen to life.

Very sad it was to hear her wild delirious ravings,—more melancholy still to listen to her plaintive moans. The whole scene of her shipwreck was acted over again by her excited fancy; the red lightning, the crashing thunder, the furious blasts, the foaming waves, were all present to her senses; and again she saw young Bennett struggling with the waves, while her spirit, like a bird straining at the string which bound it, vainly strove to break its bonds and fly to his aid.

“There, there:—I see him now!” she cried, springing up wildly; “he is sinking; he’s going down. Is there no pity in heaven! Now I have caught him;” and she would grasp the bedclothes frantically; “help me to hold him, or he will be gone! Are you men, are you friends that you can see him perishing before your eyes, and not try to save him? Oh! now he is gone!”

And her shrill cry of agony would ring through the room.

“Look at them lying at the bottom of the lake!” she would exclaim at another time; “see the dead men holding them down with their skeleton fingers; see the white foam choking up their breath! Oh, they are all dead, dead, dead! and why won’t you let me die too? Why are you holding me in this burning fire? Let me down into the cool water; look at it sparkling and shining; see its bright clear waves rippling upon the white sand; listen to them murmuring and sighing among the stones; they are calling me now—hearken!” and in a voice which, though shrill and strained, was full of the saddest pathos, she sang:

Come, mariner, down to the deep with me,

And hide thee under the wave,

And quiet and soft thy rest shall be,

In a cell of the mermaid’s cave!”

Then her wild frenzy wandered to her father’s grave, and she would call to Keefe, with the most pathetic cries, to take him out of the earth, declaring that she knew he was alive, and that she heard his voice entreating her to release him from the horrors of his living tomb; and then she would dig with her hands at what she believed to be his grave, and implore Keefe to help her, in an agony of frantic grief that might have touched the hardest heart. At other times she was gentle, and her thoughts wandered back to the happy days of her childhood, to birds, and streams, and flowers, and green trees and grass; and she talked as she had talked to her father in the innocent, playful words of infancy, sing baby-songs, or repeat the prayers she had been accustomed to say at his knee every night, and ask for his parting kiss, as if time had gone back, and she was again but four years old.

On the night her fever was at the worst, Keefe was watching outside her chamber-window, (it was open to admit the air,) and every word and moan she uttered reached his ears. It was hard for him to listen to her wild ravings and cries of terror and