Then the unhappy Grace regarded him by the light of the candle. There
was something in his look which agonized her, in the rush of his
thoughts, accelerating their speed from minute to minute. He seemed to
be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet--erratic,
inapprehensible, untraceable.
Grace's distraction was almost as great as his. In a few moments she
firmly believed he was dying. Unable to withstand her impulse, she
knelt down beside him, kissed his hands and his face and his hair,
exclaiming, in a low voice, "How could I? How could I?"
Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now,
though she knew him so well. The purity of his nature, his freedom
from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had never been
fully understood by Grace till this strange self-sacrifice in lonely
juxtaposition to her own person was revealed. The perception of it
added something that was little short of reverence to the deep
affection for him of a woman who, herself, had more of Artemis than of
Aphrodite in her constitution.
All that a tender nurse could do, Grace did; and the power to express
her solicitude in action, unconscious though the sufferer was, brought
her mournful satisfaction. She bathed his hot head, wiped his
perspiring hands, moistened his lips, cooled his fiery eyelids, sponged
his heated skin, and administered whatever she could find in the house
that the imagination could conceive as likely to be in any way
alleviating. That she might have been the cause, or partially the
cause, of all this, interfused misery with her sorrow.
Six months before this date a scene, almost similar in its mechanical
parts, had been enacted at Hintock House. It was between a pair of
persons most intimately connected in their lives with these. Outwardly
like as it had been, it was yet infinite in spiritual difference,
though a woman's devotion had been common to both.
Grace rose from her attitude of affection, and, bracing her energies,
saw that something practical must immediately be done. Much as she
would have liked, in the emotion of the moment, to keep him entirely to
herself, medical assistance was necessary while there remained a
possibility of preserving him alive. Such assistance was fatal to her
own concealment; but even had the chance of benefiting him been less
than it was, she would have run the hazard for his sake. The question
was, where should she get a medical man, competent and near?
There was one such man, and only one, within accessible distance; a man
who, if it were possible to save Winterborne's life, had the brain most
likely to do it. If human pressure could bring him, that man ought to
be brought to the sick Giles's side. The attempt should be made.