“Something must have happened to make him very happy,” thought Orient. “I never saw such a smile!”
Perhaps it was this smile that so transfigured him; a plain man commonly, the sunshine now seemed to bring out rich, dark tints on the countenance, the eyes overflowed with light, and whether it were grace of posture, overlying sunshine, or beaming smile, features and face and figure expressed a subtle harmony, and the man was beautiful,--beautiful as a strong angel pictured in some instant of stooping flight.
“He does not mean to speak till I do,” thought Orient again.
But as she drew near, the smile changed to a look of utter melancholy, as a shining cloud melts into rain,--a melancholy gaze that pierced her through and through. She put out her hand, nevertheless, to take his extended grasp.
In the same instant, with a loud and terrible voice, crying, “Orient!”--a voice as if it were the voice of death, the tomb, and all corruption,--the thing had vanished; the place was empty!
That cry rang through the house, that loud and terrible voice. Maid and mother rushed into the room; and they found no one there but Orient, fallen unconscious to the floor.
It did not take long to revive the child. “Something has happened to Reymund,” she said, upon lifting her head. “We must go to him at once!”
“My love!” cried her mother. “The idea of the thing. The--”
But expostulations were wasted breath; while they were being made, Orient was calmly getting on her travelling-gown, and, seeing herself powerless, the mother--with her heart palpitating in the ends of her fingers through awe and through alarm, and interweaving with the ejaculations that escaped her chattering teeth a thousand instructions to her quaking maid and sister--hastened to do likewise and be off with her.
Thus it happened that the telegram from Reymund’s brother crossed the travellers on their way; and they reached his brother’s house in the gray of the shivering morning.
It was just as Orient’s heart had told her. Reymund had been thrown from his horse on the previous morning, striking his head on a curbstone’s edge; he had been taken up senseless, and had lain since then in a stupor only broken by his twice calling her name in the afternoon. At a little after five o’clock he had risen on the pillow, and in a loud and terrible voice had called Orient again, and then had fallen back; and whether he were dead or alive there was no one able to say.