American fiction -- 19th century; Dime novels; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction
Once, during a lucid interval, he looked into her face, and knew her.
“Christine,” he said, faintly, “where is Queenie? I came to find her.
Don’t let me die till I have seen her.”
“Queenie is here. I will send for her at once. Do not be afraid; I will
not let you die. Your case is not very bad,” Christine replied, speaking
thus emphatically and against her own convictions, because she saw how
frightened he was himself, and knew that this would only augment the
disease and lessen his chances for recovery.
“Keep very quiet, and I’ll soon have you well,” she said, and Phil did
whatever she bade him do, though his mind began to wander again, and he
talked constantly of Queenie, whom he had come to find.
At last, however, he fell away to sleep, and then it was that Christine
sent for Queenie, and establishing her in the room, went out into the
adjoining chamber and waited, knowing that sooner or later she would be
needed. All through the weary hours which preceded Queenie’s cry for
help she sat alone in the darkness, alternately shaking with cold and
burning with fever, while in her heart was a feeling amounting to
certainty that her work was done, that the deadly faintness stealing
over her at intervals, and making her so sick and weak, was a precursor
of the end. But she must live long enough to save Philip Rossiter, and
give him back to Queenie, who might think more kindly of her when she
was gone. So she fought back her symptoms bravely, and rubbed her cold,
damp face when it was the coldest, and then leaned far out of the open
window into the falling rain when it was the hottest.
And thus the time passed on until her quick ear caught the sound of
voices and footsteps in the sick-room, and she heard Queenie’s wild cry
for _her_ as if in that hour of peril she was the one person in all the
world of whom there was need. Queenie had turned to her at last as the
child turns to its mother in peril, and with swift feet Christine went
to the rescue, and almost before Pierre knew she was there, she had the
unconscious girl in her arms and was bearing her into the room, where
for hours she had waited so patiently. Fixing her in a safe and upright
position upon a cushion, she ran back to Phil, who, she knew, must be
her first and principal care.
When Queenie’s shriek echoed through the room so near to him, he had
roused from his sleep, and was moaning and talking to himself, without,
apparently, any real consciousness as to where he was. But Christine’s
soothing hands, and the medicine she administered quieted him, and
leaving him in Pierre’s care, she went back to Queenie, who was
recovering from her swoon.
“Tell me,” she gasped, when she was able to speak, “Was it a dream, or
was it Phil? Tell me, Christine, is it Phil, and will he die?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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