These autumnal fevers,which carry off a large number of our young people every year,are treacherous and deceptive diseases.Not only are they liable,as has been mentioned,to various accidental complications which may prove suddenly fatal,but too often,after convalescence seems to be established,relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had appeared to be in its previous course.
One morning Dr.Butts found Maurice worse instead of better,as he had hoped and expected to find him.Weak as he was,there was every reason to fear the issue of this return of his threatening symptoms.
There was not much to do besides keeping up the little strength which still remained.It was all needed.
Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking what we call his "rest"?More than a thousand times an hour,between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week,he has to lift the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined,to save himself from asphyxia.Rest!There is no rest until the last long sigh tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task,to rest from which is death,is at last finished.We are all galley-slaves,pulling at the levers of respiration,--which,rising and falling like so many oars,drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another.No!
Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and twenty oars,at which we must tug day and night all our life long The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this relapse.It presently occurred to him that there might be some local source of infection which had brought on the complaint,and was still keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm.He determined to remove Maurice to his own house,where he could be sure of pure air,and where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during this critical period of his disease.It was a risk to take,but he could be carried on a litter by careful men,and remain wholly passive during the removal.Maurice signified his assent,as he could hardly help doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a command.He thought it a matter of life and death,and was gently urgent for his patient's immediate change of residence.The doctor insisted on having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own house,so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights,and not worry himself about what might happen to objects which he valued,if they were left behind him.
All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made,and everything was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable physician.Paolo was at the doctor's,superintending the arrangement of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master.
The nurse in attendance,a trustworthy man enough in the main,finding his patient in a tranquil sleep,left his bedside for a little fresh air.While he was at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity,and he followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake.It was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting.A Newfoundland dog had been showing off his accomplishments,and some of the idlers were betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as possible.He watched the dog a few minutes,when his attention was drawn to a light wherry,pulled by one young lady and steered by another.It was making for the shore,which it would soon reach.
The attendant remembered all at once,that he had left his charge,and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient.Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have said,--perhaps a quarter of an hour,perhaps longer;the time appeared short to him,wearied with long sitting and watching.
It had seemed,when he stole away from Maurice's bedside,that he was not in the least needed.The patient was lying perfectly quiet,and to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone.It was such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man,to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint,half-whispered words,that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.
Unfortunately,Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the absence of the nurse.He very soon fell into a dream,which began quietly enough,but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious,distressing,terrifying.His earlier and later experiences came up before him,fragmentary,incoherent,chaotic even,but vivid as reality.He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long,narrow galleries,or rather worm-holes,in which human beings pass a large part of their lives,like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building.How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling!The scene changed,and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort,his foot on the floor of a shallow niche,his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant,an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break.How thin the air seemed,how desperately hard to breathe!He was thinking of Mont Blanc,it may be,and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents.No,it was not Mont Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits;it was Hecla that he was climbing The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him;he was choking with its dense fumes;he heard the flames roaring around him,he felt the hot lava beneath his feet,he uttered a faint cry,and awoke.
