'Sylvie, Sylvie!' said he,--and all their conversation had to be
carried on in low tones and whispers, for fear of the listening ears
above,--'don't,--don't, thou'rt rending my heart. Oh, Sylvie,
hearken. There's not a thing I'll not do; there's not a penny I've
got,--th' last drop of blood that's in me,--I'll give up my life for
his.' 'Life,' said she, putting down her hands, and looking at him as if
her looks could pierce his soul; 'who talks o' touching his life?
Thou're going crazy, Philip, I think;' but she did not think so,
although she would fain have believed it. In her keen agony she read
his thoughts as though they were an open page; she sate there,
upright and stony, the conviction creeping over her face like the
grey shadow of death. No more tears, no more trembling, almost no
more breathing. He could not bear to see her, and yet she held his
eyes, and he feared to make the effort necessary to move or to turn
away, lest the shunning motion should carry conviction to her heart.
Alas! conviction of the probable danger to her father's life was
already there: it was that that was calming her down, tightening her
muscles, bracing her nerves. In that hour she lost all her early
youth.
'Then he may be hung,' said she, low and solemnly, after a long
pause. Philip turned away his face, and did not utter a word. Again
deep silence, broken only by some homely sound in the kitchen.
'Mother must not know on it,' said Sylvia, in the same tone in which
she had spoken before.
'It's t' worst as can happen to him,' said Philip. 'More likely
he'll be transported: maybe he'll be brought in innocent after all.' 'No,' said Sylvia, heavily, as one without hope--as if she were
reading some dreadful doom in the tablets of the awful future.
'They'll hang him. Oh, feyther! feyther!' she choked out, almost
stuffing her apron into her mouth to deaden the sound, and catching
at Philip's hand, and wringing it with convulsive force, till the
pain that he loved was nearly more than he could bear. No words of
his could touch such agony; but irrepressibly, and as he would have
done it to a wounded child, he bent over her, and kissed her with a
tender, trembling kiss. She did not repulse it, probably she did not
even perceive it.
At that moment Phoebe came in with the gruel. Philip saw her, and
knew, in an instant, what the old woman's conclusion must needs be;
but Sylvia had to be shaken by the now standing Philip, before she
could be brought back to the least consciousness of the present
time. She lifted up her white face to understand his words, then she
rose up like one who slowly comes to the use of her limbs.