He patted her on the sound shoulder with a large trembling hand, and bade her be quiet, very quiet, till the doctor came.
“No, mother.” His voice trembled very much, and he stooped and kissed her. “Never, never any more!”
She smiled at him, lying there contented, with her head on Susie’s breast--joyful, but not surprised by this news, for nothing could surprise her now--and then she motioned to him to come closer, and whispered, “Has he got away?”
The appearance of the doctor, notwithstanding his pause and exclamation of horror at the door, was an unspeakable relief. That cry conveyed no information to the patient within, who did not seem even to require an answer to her question. There was no question any longer of any fluttering of Lew’s heart. The slight shake of the doctor’s head, the look on his face, his rapid, low-spoken directions for the removal of the dead man, renewed the dreadful commotion of the night for a moment. And then he had Mrs Ogilvy removed on the mattress which his skilled hands helped to place her on, into her own parlour, where he examined her wound. She was still quite conscious, and told him over again her old phrases. “He did not mean it,”--and “Maybe it will not be so ill as you think,”--with a smile which wavered between consciousness and unconsciousness. Her troubled brain had got those words as it were by heart. She said them many times over during the course of the long and feverish night, during which she saw many visions, glimpses of her son bending over her, smoothing her pillow, touching her with ignorant tender hands, glimpses of Susie sitting beside her, coming and going. They were all dreams, she knew--but sometimes dreams are sweet. She was ill somehow--but oh, how immeasurably content!