A fraction of an hour passed, a second, and a third. The cry now had
changed singularly; it had lost its penetrating volume, it had sunk into
the rasping moan of one dreaming in a fever. Suddenly that ceased, the
silence was complete, and Mistrial, a trifle puzzled, moved out into the
hall. There he caught again the murmur of her voice. This time she was
talking very rapidly, in a continuous flow of words. From where he stood
Mistrial could not hear what she was saying, and he groped on tip-toe
down the hall. As he reached the door of the room in which she was, the
sweet and heavy odor of chloroform came out and met him there; but still
the flow of words continued uninterruptedly, one after the other, with
the incoherence of a nightmare monologuing in a corpse. Then, without
transition, in the very middle of a word, a cry of the supremest agony
rang out, drowning another, which was but a vague complaint.
"It's a boy," the nurse exclaimed.
And Justine through a rift of consciousness caught and detained the
speech. "So much the better," she moaned; "he will never give birth."
V.
"We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry
nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the
name of the Lord."
To this, Mistrial, garbed in black, responded discreetly, "Amen."
He was standing opposite the bier. At his side was Justine. Before him
Dr. Gonfallon, rector of the Church of Gethsemane,--of which the
deceased had been warden,--was conducting the funeral rites. To the left
was Thorold. Throughout the length and breadth of the drawing-room other
people stood--a sprinkling of remote connections, former constituents,
members of the bar and of the church, a few politicians; these, together
with a handful of the helpless to whom the dead statesman had been
trustee, counsellor too, and guide, had assembled there in honor of his
memory. At the door, sharpening a pencil, was a representative of the
Associated Press.
For the past few days obituaries of the Hon. Paul Dunellen varied from
six inches to a column in length. One journal alone had been
circumspect. No mention of the deceased had appeared in its issues. But
in politics that journal had differed with him--a fact which accounted
sufficiently for its silence. In the others, however, through
biographies more or less exact, fitting tributes had been paid. The
_World_ gave his picture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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