Fanny stood petrified with horror; while the servant girl rushed screaming out of the room. The doctor still kept his open hand on Skin-well's mouth, while the dying man Strove to set himself free by violent motions of the head and writhings of the body. A stifled call on the name of Fanny at length broke from his muffled lips.
"Go out! leave me!" fiercely cried Rowel to the horrified young woman; but she did not obey him.
"Fanny!" again escaped the lawyer's lips.
The sight, the voice, the desperate sense that came upon her all at once that Rowel was killing his patient, nerved her with more than woman's courage and ten times woman's ordinary strength. She rushed franticly to the opposite side of the bed from that on which the doctor stood, and violently seized his wrist.
"Away, woman!" he cried, suddenly turning all his efforts against her, in the endeavour to free his hands and strike her down. But she held him tightly. Curses upon her, whispered almost as from the inmost soul, but deadly and pregnant with hellish meaning, hissed through the doctor's teeth, which showed between his lips clenched like a workman's vice. Fanny prayed mentally for strength to hold him. As they struggled, the sick man beneath them spoke.
Rowel threw the whole weight of his body upon him to stop that tongue. He could not.
"It's a lie!--a lie!--a lie!" cried the doctor in rapid succession, to render the words inaudible.
Their struggle grew more desperate, and Fanny could not hold much longer: the unwonted muscles would not obey her will to gripe. They were overstrained, and growing useless. At the same time the doctor wrenched more furiously than ever. The dying man beneath him gurgled in the throat for breath, and tossed in muscular convulsions beneath the clothes. At last he got himself to the edge of the bed, and by a sudden and last violent effort, struck himself against the doctor so forcibly as to loosen him from the hands of Fanny, and throw him several paces from the bed. The lawyer threw himself upright, and with his dim half-dead eyes fixed on Fanny, and his finger turning to point at Rowel, he cried with his last breath, "In his madhouse!--his madhouse!" and sunk back to groan and die.