The old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion that I had imposed on myself) had opened again.
I struggled against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the inn what to do.
It was useless.
I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me.
The death-in-life that had got her had got me.
Lost to the world about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our deathly trance.
Where were our spirits at that moment?
Were they together and conscious of each other?
United by a spiritual bond, undiscovered and unsuspected by us in the flesh, did we two, who had met as strangers on the fatal bridge, know each other again in the trance?
You who have loved and lost—you whose one consolation it has been to believe in other worlds than this—can you turn from my questions in contempt?
Can you honestly say that they have never been your questions too?
CHAPTER VIII. THE KINDRED SPIRITS
THE morning sunlight shining in at a badly curtained window; a clumsy wooden bed, with big twisted posts that reached to the ceiling; on one side of the bed, my mother's welcome face; on the other side, an elderly gentleman unremembered by me at that moment—such were the objects that presented themselves to my view, when I first consciously returned to the world that we live in.
"Look, doctor, look!
He has come to his senses at last."
"Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this."
My mother was rejoicing over me on one side of the bed; and the unknown gentleman, addressed as "doctor," was offering me a spoonful of whisky-and-water on the other.
He called it the "elixir of life"; and he bid me remark (speaking in a strong Scotch accent) that he tasted it himself to show he was in earnest.
The stimulant did its good work.
My head felt less giddy, my mind became clearer.
I could speak collectedly to my mother; I could vaguely recall the more marked events of the previous evening.
A minute or two more, and the image of the person in whom those events had all centered became a living image in my memory.
I tried to raise myself in the bed; I asked, impatiently,
"Where is she?"
The doctor produced another spoonful of the elixir of life, and gravely repeated his first address to me.
"Open your mouth, sir, and take a sup of this."
I persisted in repeating my question:
"Where is she?"
The doctor persisted in repeating his formula:
"Take a sup of this."
I was too weak to contest the matter; I obeyed.
My medical attendant nodded across the bed to my mother, and said,
"Now, he'll do."
My mother had some compassion on me. She relieved my anxiety in these plain words:
"The lady has quite recovered, George, thanks to the doctor here."
I looked at my professional colleague with a new interest.
He was the legitimate fountainhead of the information that I was dying to have poured into my mind.
"How did you revive her?" I asked.
"Where is she now?"
The doctor held up his hand, warning me to stop.
"We shall do well, sir, if we proceed systematically," he began, in a very positive manner.
"You will understand, that every time you open your mouth, it will be to take a sup of this, and not to speak.
I shall tell you, in due course, and the good lady, your mother, will tell you, all that you have any need to know.
As I happen to have been first on what you may call the scene of action, it stands in the fit order of things that I should speak first.
You will just permit me to mix a little more of the elixir of life, and then, as the poet says, my plain unvarnished tale I shall deliver."
So he spoke, pronouncing in his strong Scotch accent the most carefully selected English I had ever heard.
A hard-headed, square-shouldered, pertinaciously self-willed man—it was plainly useless to contend with him.
I turned to my mother's gentle face for encouragement; and I let my doctor have his own way.
"My name," he proceeded, "is MacGlue.
I had the honor of presenting my respects at your house yonder when you first came to live in this neighborhood.