She re-entered the hut, flung off her bonnet and cloak, and approached the sufferer. He had begun anew those terrible mutterings, and his hands were cold. As soon as she saw him there returned to her that agony of mind which the stimulus of her journey had thrown off for a time.
Could he really be dying? She bathed him, kissed him, forgot all things but the fact that lying there before her was he who had loved her more than the mere lover would have loved; had martyred himself for her comfort, cared more for her self-respect than she had thought of caring. This mood continued till she heard quick, smart footsteps without; she knew whose footsteps they were.
Grace sat on the inside of the bed against the wall, holding Giles's hand, so that when her husband entered the patient lay between herself and him. He stood transfixed at first, noticing Grace only. Slowly he dropped his glance and discerned who the prostrate man was. Strangely enough, though Grace's distaste for her husband's company had amounted almost to dread, and culminated in actual flight, at this moment her last and least feeling was personal. Sensitive femininity was eclipsed by self-effacing purpose, and that it was a husband who stood there was forgotten.
The first look that possessed her face was relief; satisfaction at the presence of the physician obliterated thought of the man, which only returned in the form of a sub-consciousness that did not interfere with her words.
"Is he dying--is there any hope?" she cried.
"Grace!" said Fitzpiers, in an indescribable whisper--more than invocating, if not quite deprecatory.
He was arrested by the spectacle, not so much in its intrinsic character--though that was striking enough to a man who called himself the husband of the sufferer's friend and nurse--but in its character as the counterpart of one that had its hour many months before, in which he had figured as the patient, and the woman had been Felice Charmond.
"Is he in great danger--can you save him?" she cried again.
Fitzpiers aroused himself, came a little nearer, and examined Winterborne as he stood. His inspection was concluded in a mere glance. Before he spoke he looked at her contemplatively as to the effect of his coming words.
"He is dying," he said, with dry precision.
"What?" said she.
"Nothing can be done, by me or any other man. It will soon be all over. The extremities are dead already." His eyes still remained fixed on her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end his interest, professional and otherwise, in Winterborne forever.
"But it cannot be! He was well three days ago."
"Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has followed some previous illness--possibly typhoid--it may have been months ago, or recently."
"Ah--he was not well--you are right. He was ill--he was ill when I came."
There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during the intervals in silent tears.
Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away.
Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. "Have you lived here long?" said he.
Grace was wild with sorrow--with all that had befallen her--with the cruelties that had attacked her--with life--with Heaven. She answered at random. "Yes. By what right do you ask?"
"Don't think I claim any right," said Fitzpiers, sadly. "It is for you to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel, that I am a vagabond--a brute--not worthy to possess the smallest fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient interest in you to make that inquiry."
"He is everything to me!" said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and laying her hand reverently on the dead man's eyelids, where she kept it a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she were stroking a little bird.
He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.
"Grace--if I may call you so," he said, "I have been already humiliated almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me elsewhere--I have entered your father's house, and borne all that that cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me? You say you have been living here-- that he is everything to you. Am I to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?"
Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women--especially the latter. It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.
"Yes," she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.
Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she half repented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. It seemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had been abstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts at self-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determination was fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than she had expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across at Winterborne.
"Would it startle you to hear," he said, as if he hardly had breath to utter the words, "that she who was to me what he was to you is dead also?"
"Dead--SHE dead?" exclaimed Grace.
"Yes. Felice Charmond is where this young man is."