"We must move your friend upstairs," he said. "If you will help, Mr.
Trustcott, I will call my servant."
(III)
It was about half-past nine that night that the doctor, having rung the bell in the spare bedroom, met his man at the threshold.
"I"ll sleep in this room to-night," he said; "you can go to bed. Bring in a mattress, will you?"
The man looked at his master"s face. (He looked queer-like, reported Thomas later to his wife.)
"Hope the young man"s doing well, sir?"
A spasm went over the doctor"s face.
"Most extraordinary young man in the world," he said.... Then he broke off. "Bring the mattress at once, Thomas. Then you can go to bed."
He went back and closed the door.
Thomas had seldom seen his master so perturbed over a human being before. He wondered what on earth was the matter. During the few minutes that he was in the room he looked at the patient curiously, and he noticed that the doctor was continually looking at him too. Thomas described to me Frank"s appearance. He was very much flushed, he said, with very bright eyes, and he was talking incessantly. And it was evidently this delirious talking that had upset the doctor. I tried to get out of Doctor Whitty what it was that Frank had actually said, but the doctor shut up his face tight and would say nothing. Thomas was more communicative, though far from adequate.
It was about religion, he said, that Frank was talking--about religion.... And that was really about all that he could say of that incident.
Thomas awoke about one o"clock that night, and, still with the uneasiness that he had had earlier in the evening, climbed out of bed without disturbing his wife, put on his slippers and great-coat and made his way down the attic stairs. The October moon was up, and, shining through the staircase window, showed him the door of the spare bedroom with a line of light beneath it. From beyond that door came the steady murmur of a voice....
Now Thomas"s nerves were strong: he was a little lean kind of man, very wiry and active, nearly fifty years old, and he had lived with his master, and the mice and the snakes, and disagreeable objects in bottles, for more than sixteen years. He had been a male nurse in an asylum before that. Yet there was something--he told me later--that gripped him suddenly as he was half-way down the stairs and held him in a kind of agony which he could in no way describe. It was connected with the room behind that lighted door. It was not that he feared for his master, nor for Frank. It was something else altogether. (What a pity it is that our system of education teaches neither self-a.n.a.lysis nor the art of narration!)
He stood there--he told me--he should think for the better part of ten minutes, unable to move either way, listening, always listening, to the voice that rose and sank and lapsed now and then into silences that were worse than all, and telling himself vigorously that he was not at all frightened.
It was a creak somewhere in the old house that disturbed him and snapped the thin, rigid little thread that seemed to paralyze his soul; and still in a sort of terror, though no longer in the same stiff agony, he made his way down the three or four further steps of the flight, laid hold of the handle, turned it and peered in.
Frank was lying quiet so far as he could see. A night-light burned by the bottles and syringes on the table at the foot of the bed, and, although shaded from the young man"s face, still diffused enough light to shoes the servant the figure lying there, and his master, seated beyond the bed, very close to it, still in his day-clothes--still, even, in his velvet cap--his chin propped in his hand, staring down at his patient, utterly absorbed and attentive.
There was nothing particularly alarming in all that, and yet there was that in the room which once more seized the man at his heart and held him there, rigid again, terrified, and, above all, inexpressibly awed.
(At least, that is how I should interpret his description.) He said that it wasn"t like the spare bedroom at all, as he ordinarily knew it (and, indeed, it was a mean sort of room when I saw it, without a fireplace, though of tolerable size). It was like another room altogether, said Thomas.
He tried to listen to what Frank was saying, and I imagine he heard it all quite intelligently; yet, once more, all he could say afterwards was that it was about religion ... about religion....
So he stood, till he suddenly perceived that the doctor was looking at him with a frown and contorted features of eloquence. He understood that he was to go. He closed the door noiselessly; and, after another pause, sped upstairs without a sound in his red cloth slippers.
(IV)
When Frank awoke to normal consciousness again, he lay still, wondering what it was all about. He saw a table at the foot of his bed and noticed on it a small leather case, two green bottles stoppered with india-rubber, and a small covered bowl looking as if it contained beef-tea. He extended his explorations still further, and discovered an Hanoverian wardrobe against the left wall, a glare of light (which he presently discerned to be a window), a dingy wall-paper, and finally a door. As he reached this point the door opened and an old man with a velvet skull-cap, spectacles, and a kind, furrowed face, came in and stood over him.
"Well?" said the old man.
"I am a bit stiff," said Frank.
"Are you hungry?"
"I don"t think so."
"Well, you"re doing very well, if that"s any satisfaction to you,"
observed the doctor, frowning on him doubtfully.
Frank said nothing.
The doctor sat down on a chair by the bed that Frank suddenly noticed for the first time.
"Well," said the doctor, "I suppose you want to know the facts. Here they are. My name is Whitty; I"m a doctor; you"re in my house. This is Wednesday afternoon; your friends brought you here yesterday morning.
I"ve given them some work in the garden. You were ill yesterday, but you"re all right now."
"What was the matter?"
"We won"t bother about names," said the doctor with a kind sharpness.
"You had a blister; it broke and became a sore; then you wore one of those nasty cheap socks and it poisoned it. That"s all."
"That"s in those bottles?" asked Frank languidly. (He felt amazingly weak and stupid.)
"Well, it"s an anti-toxin," said the doctor. "That doesn"t tell you much, does it?"
"No," said Frank.... "By the way, who"s going to pay you, doctor? I can"t."
The doctor"s face rumpled up into wrinkles. (Frank wished he wouldn"t sit with his back to the window.)
"Don"t you bother about that, my boy. You"re a case--that"s what you are."
Frank attempted a smile out of politeness.
"Now, how about some more beef-tea, and then going to sleep again?"
Frank a.s.sented.
It was not until the Thursday morning that things began to run really clear again in Frank"s mind. He felt for his rosary under his pillow and it wasn"t there. Then he thumped on the floor with a short stick which had been placed by him, remembering that in some previous existence he had been told to do this.
A small, lean man appeared at the door, it seemed, with the quickness of thought.
"My rosary, please," said Frank. "It"s a string of beads. I expect it"s in my trouser-pocket."
The man looked at him with extraordinary earnestness and vanished.
Then the doctor appeared holding the rosary.
"Is this what you want?" he asked.