CHAPTER XXII.

HOUNDED TO HIS FATE.

The words rang out in bitter reproach and pleading:

“Save my darling’s life!”

Half-dazed by the suddenness of it all, Laurie gazed at his relative in consternation, and, seizing his hand, she dragged him passively in her wake, a silent victim, from the room.

As she went she was weeping wildly, and adjuring him:

“Only promise her what she asks, Laurie, even if you break the vow afterward! I know you are the soul of honor, but I will forgive you a little deceit if you will but humor her now, and induce her to take the antidote that is to save her life!”

She was clever and cunning, this woman; she had never known Laurie, or any other Willoughby, to break a promise once given. They clung close to the motto: “Noblesse oblige.”

She knew if she could entrap him into another promise of marriage, he would not break it any more than the stars would fall from the blue heavens.

And there was really no honorable retreat for him now.

He could not let Lelia die for want of his love. Every one would brand him as a monster if he refused to save her life.

Like one in a nightmare dream he followed her to Lelia’s room, and there in the cold, gray light of dawn, attended by the physician and a maid servant, Lelia lay gasping with pain on her white couch, just as she had been attired last evening. Evidently she had not been in bed all night.

Doctor White, with a glass of medicine in his hand, was arguing, entreating, ably seconded by the maid, but all to no avail.

The beautiful patient pushed them angrily away, moaning through her clenched teeth:

“Let me die in peace! It is all I crave!”

“Lelia, Lelia, my love, I beseech you take the antidote before it is too late! See, I have brought Laurie!” cried her mother eagerly.

A delicate convulsion shook the girl’s body from head to foot, her pale face writhed with pain, her delicate blue eyes stared blankly into space.

Mrs. Ritchie and the maid both screamed aloud in fear, and the physician muttered an unintelligible word of keen anxiety.

“She is dying, my child is dying, and you have killed her, cruel heart!” cried the agonized mother, turning on Laurie in fierce reproach that shook his nerves, strained already to the highest tension.

“What can I do?” he muttered hoarsely, all his outraged manhood shrinking from the sacrifice she demanded, even while Lelia’s pitiful plight excited his pity and sympathy.

“Do! Do!” cried the frenzied mother wildly. “Give her the antidote before it is too late! Hasten, hasten, she is fast going from us to death!”

It certainly looked like it the way Lelia was convulsed with spasm after spasm of keen agony, forcing groans of pain from her pallid lips till it looked as if each succeeding moment must be her last.

The old doctor silently held out the glass to Laurie with two significant words:

“Have mercy!”

“Have mercy!” sobbed the anguished mother.

“Have mercy!” echoed the maid imploringly.

And a sterner voice from the open door chimed in:

“Great Heaven, can my son hesitate over his plain honor and duty in such a terrible hour?”

They were all hounding him to his fate, even his venerable, revered father, and there was no appeal save to Heaven, that seemed to look on in relentless silence.

With a feeling like a criminal receiving sentence of death, he grasped blindly for the glass, and Doctor White put it carefully in his hand.

“Lose not a moment!” he earnestly adjured.

“Lelia,” he uttered, in a hoarse, strangled voice, with his hand on her arm.

She quivered with pain, and her big, blue eyes flared wide open on his face. They were filled with a terrible despair.

“Drink,” he said, placing the glass to her lips, but she clenched her teeth, moaning through them:

“I wish to die!”

“No, no, you must drink and live--live for me!” he added in a strange, far-off voice, unlike his own, like one accepting his death warrant. And, indeed, he felt he would as willingly die as put on Lelia’s fetters of love again.

Her clenched teeth parted, her eyes gleamed with joy, she cried like one coming back from the dead:

“Laurie, do you mean it? Do you love me again? Will you renew your promise? Shall I wear your ring again?”

“Yes, yes,” he muttered desperately, thinking in agony of the little hand now cold in death that wore his ring.

It was useless to tell Lelia anything about that. He could buy her another one just as costly, that would be enough.

She smiled faintly, joyfully, and eagerly swallowed the antidote he held to her lips with a shaking hand.