"Thank you for coming--yet you ought not to be here," hoarsely murmured the sick man. Elizabeth kissed his hand and brow in answer--and, despite of all her endeavours, the tears fell from her eyes on his sunken cheek; again he smiled. "It is not so bad," he said; "do not weep, I am willing to die! I do not suffer very much, though I am weary of life."
The surgeon was now admitted. He examined the wound, which was of a musket bullet in his side. He dressed it, and administered some potion, from which the patient received instant relief; and then joined the anxious girl, who had retired to another room.
"He is in a very dangerous state," the surgeon remarked, in reply to her anxious looks. "Nothing certain can be pronounced yet. But our first care must be to remove him from this pestiferous place--the fever and wound combined must destroy him. Change of air may produce an amelioration in the former."
With all the energy which was her prominent characteristic, Elizabeth caused a litter to be prepared, horses hired, and everything arranged so that their journey might be commenced at daybreak. Every one went early to rest, to enjoy some repose before the morrow's journey, except Elizabeth; she spent the livelong night watching beside Falkner, marking each change, tortured by the groans that escaped him in his sleep, or the suppressed complaints that fell from his lips--by the restlessness and fever that rendered each moment full of fate. The glimmering and dreary light of the lamp increased even the squalid and bare appearance of the wretched chamber in which he lay; Elizabeth gazed for a moment from the casement to see how moved the stars--and there, without, nature asserted herself--and it was the lovely land of Greece that met her eyes; the southern night reigned in all its beauty--the stars hung refulgent lamps in the transparent ether: the fire-flies darted and wheeled among the olive groves, or rested in the myrtle hedges, flashing intermittingly, and filling for an instant a small space around them with fairy brightness; each form of tree, of rocky fragment, and broken upland, lay in calm and beautiful repose; she turned to the low couch on which lay all her hope--her idolized father; the streaked brow--the nerveless hand--half-open eye, and hard breathing betokened a frightful stage of weakness and suffering.