THE CRISIS
For five days, which to Randal Holles were as five years of mortal
anguish, she lay suspended between this world and the next. The
lightest straw of chance would suffice to tip against her the fearful
balance of the scales, the slightest lack of care and watchfulness
might result in the snapping of the slender thread by which life was
still tethered to her exhausted, fever-wasting frame.
The doctor had succeeded beyond all his hopes in his quest of a
nurse-keeper, and he brought her with him to the house in Knight
Ryder Street, on the morrow of Nancy’s taking ill--a lean, capable,
good-natured, henlike woman of forty. But for all her competency and
willingness, had this Mrs. Dallows been alone in charge of the patient,
it is long odds that Nancy would quickly have succumbed. For no hired
attendant could ever have ministered to her with the self-sacrificing,
remorseful devotion of the broken adventurer who loved her. No
hired attendant could have brought to the task the strength of will
and singleness of purpose that drove the weary, faltering flesh
relentlessly along the path of this self-imposed duty.
Not for a moment did Holles suffer himself to relax his vigilance, to
pause for a breathing in that grim fight with death. Of sleeping he
never so much as thought, whilst the snatches of food and drink that
constituted his meals, forced upon him by the nurse-keeper, were taken
there at Nancy’s bedside.
Mrs. Dallows remonstrated with him, urging him to take some rest in the
hours during which she was herself on duty. It was in vain. Equally
vain were the same remonstrances when more authoritatively urged
by Dr. Beamish. Holles left them unheeded as he did the physician’s
recommendations that he should take some of the ordinary precautions to
keep himself immune. The balsam of sulphur which the little doctor left
with him to be used as a disinfectant was never touched; the wormwood,
masterwort, and zedoary pressed upon him as prophylactics were equally
neglected.
“My friend,” the doctor had said to him as early as the second day of
her illness, “if you continue thus you will end by killing yourself.”
Holles had smiled as he replied: “If she lives, her life will have been
cheaply purchased at the price. If she dies, it will not signify.”
The doctor, ignorant of her true identity, and persuaded ever that the
twain were husband and wife, was touched by what he conceived to be an
expression of exemplary conjugal devotion. That, however, did not turn
him from his endeavours to reason Holles out of this obstinacy.
“But if she should survive and you should perish?” he asked him,
whereupon Holles had amazed him by a sudden flash of anger.
“Plague me no more!”
After that Dr. Beamish had left him to follow his own inclinations,
reflecting--in accordance with the popular belief, which the doctor
fully shared--that after all the man carried in himself the most potent
of all prophylactics in the fact that he was without fear of the
infection.
But, although Holles neglected all the preventive measures which the
doctor had so urgently prescribed for him, he nevertheless smoked a
deal, sitting by the window of her chamber, which was kept open day
and night to the suffocating heat of that terrible July. And the
great fire constantly maintained by the doctor’s orders, this heat
notwithstanding, did much to cleanse and purify the air. These things
may have helped to keep him safe despite himself, procuring for him a
measure of disinfection.
It was entirely as a result of that tireless vigilance of his and of
the constant poulticings which he applied, that on the fourth day the
swelling in the patient’s armpit, having been brought to a head, began
to vent the deadly poison with which her veins were laden.
Beamish was as amazed as he was delighted.
“Sir, sir,” he commended the Colonel on the evening of that fourth day,
“your pains are being rewarded. They have wrought a miracle already.”
“You mean that she will live?” cried Holles in fearful hope.
The doctor paused, moderating his satisfaction, afraid of his own
optimism.
“So much I cannot promise yet. But the worst is over. With proper care
and God’s help I trust that we may save her.”
“Never doubt that the care will be forthcoming. Tell me but what is to
do.”
The doctor told him, and the exhausted yet unyielding Holles listened
greedily to his instructions, flung off his deadly lassitude, and
applied himself diligently to the execution of all exactly as he was
bidden.
And meanwhile, as if incubated by that terrific heat, the plague was
spreading now through London at a rate that seemed to threaten the
City with the utter extermination which the preachers of doom had
presaged. It was from Beamish that Holles learnt of that sudden,
upward, devastating leap of the pestilential conflagration, of the
alarming bill of mortality, and of the fact that the number of victims
within the walls amounted in that week alone to nearly a thousand. And,
apart from what the doctor told him, there were abundant evidences
of the havoc even within the narrow survey possible to him from his
prison. From that first-floor window, at which he spent long hours
of day and night, he beheld Knight Ryder Street--that once busy
thoroughfare--become daily less and less frequented, whilst daily,
too, the hum of London’s activity, which might be likened to the very
heart-beat of that great city, growing feebler and ever feebler, bore
witness to its ebbing life.
There in Knight Ryder Street he could see the closed houses--and
there were already three of them within the radius of his view on the
opposite side of the street--each with its red cross and an armed
watchman day and night before its padlocked door.
Victuals and what else was needed from outside reached them through
the agency of their own watchman. Holles, who was still plentifully
supplied with funds from what Buckingham had furnished him for this
adventure, would lower the necessary money from the window in a basket.
By the same means the watchman would send up the purchases he made
on behalf of those within, absenting himself when necessary for the
purpose, but always leaving the door locked and taking the key with him.
On the comparative and ever ominously increasing stillness of the air
came intermittently, to increase the general melancholy, the tolling of
bells, ringing out the knell of the departed, and nightly, just after
dark and again before peep of day, there came now the clang of another
bell infinitely more hideous because of the hideous ideas with which
it had become associated, and the stillness of the street would be
disturbed by a creak and rumble of wheels, a slow clatter of hooves,
and a raucous voice uttering a dreadful summons:
“Bring out your dead!”
Peering down, as he ever did, he could make out the ghastly outline of
the dead-cart loom into view as it came slowly rumbling by, attracted
thither by those sealed houses, like some carrion-bird in expectation
of its prey. Invariably it paused before Holles’s own door, arrested
by the sight of the watchman and the red cross dimly revealed by the
light of his lantern; and that raucous voice would ring out again, more
direct in its summons, sounding now like a demand, revoltingly insolent
and cynical.
“Bring out your dead!”
Then, at a word from the watchman, the horrible vehicle would toil
slowly on, and Holles with a shudder would fling a glance over his
shoulder at the sufferer where she lay fevered and tossing, wondering
fearfully whether duty and pitiless necessity would compel him to
answer that summons when next it came, and surrender that lovely body
to join the abominable load in that hideous cart.
Thus, until the morning of the sixth day, when from daybreak until past
eight o’clock he waited in a sudden frenzy of impatience for the coming
of Beamish. When at last he arrived, Holles met him at the stair-head.
The Colonel’s face was ghastly, his eyes fevered, and he was trembling
with fearful excitement.
“She sleeps--quietly and peacefully,” he informed the doctor, in a
whisper, a finger to his lips.
Very softly they entered the chamber now and tiptoed to the bedside,
Holles in an agony of hope taking up his position at the foot between
the carved bedposts. A glance confirmed the news with which Holles
had met the physician. Not only was she in an easy, tranquil slumber,
such as she had not known since taking to this bed, but the fever had
entirely left her. This the doctor’s practised eye judged at once, even
before he moved to take her pulse.
At that touch of his hand upon her wrist, she stirred, sighed, and
opened her eyes, sanely and calmly awake at last. She looked up into
the wizened, kindly little spectacled face of the doctor, blankly at
first, then with a little frown of bewilderment. But he was speaking
at the moment, and the words he used helped her groping wits to piece
together the puzzle of her surroundings and condition.
“The danger is overpast,” he was saying. “She will recover now, thanks
be to God and to your own tireless care of her. It is yourself gives me
more concern than she does. Leave her now to the care of Mrs. Dallows,
and do you go rest yourself, or I tell you I will not answer for your
life.” He had been looking at Holles whilst he spoke. Now he turned to
consider her again, and found her conscious glance upon him. “See! She
is awake,” he cried.
“The danger is overpast?” Holles echoed, his voice thick and unnatural.
“You say the danger is overpast? I am awake, good doctor? I have not by
chance fallen asleep at my post and come to dream this thing?”
“You are awake, man, and I repeat the danger is at an end. Now go and
rest.”
Wondering to whom it was the doctor spoke, whose was that raucous,
weary voice that questioned him, she slowly turned her head, and beheld
a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghost of a man, whose pallid, sunken cheeks were
overgrown with a course stubble of unshaven beard, standing between the
bedposts, clutching at one of them as if for support. Meeting her gaze,
he recoiled a step and loosed his hold. Then he swung half-round, a
hand to his brow.
“Naught ails me, doctor,” he mumbled, and now she knew who he was and
remembered. “I would sooner....”
His voice abruptly ceased in mid-period; he reeled, steadied himself
for an instant, and then toppled slowly forward and crashed at full
length upon the floor. Instantly Mrs. Dallows, with a little outcry
of alarm, was on her knees beside him; she turned him over, raised
his head, by an effort, and pillowed it in her lap as Dr. Beamish
came hastening up. The same thought was in the mind of both nurse and
physician.
Nancy sought painfully--for she was very weak--to raise herself, that
she might see what was taking place there on the floor, beyond the foot
of the bed.
Swiftly the doctor tore open the breast of the Colonel’s doublet; but
not even so much was necessary. At once he perceived what had happened.
It was as if the assurance that she was out of danger, and so no longer
in need of his ministrations, had snapped the reins of will by which
Holles had held his lassitude in subjection. Instantly Nature had
claimed from him the dues which he had so long withheld.
“He is asleep,” said Dr. Beamish; and he almost chuckled. “That is all.
Help me to lift him to that couch, Mrs. Dallows. No need to carry him
farther or to do more for him at present. Never fear, you’ll not rouse
him--not until the clock has gone round once, at least.”
They laid him there, a pillow under his head, and Beamish returned to
his patient’s side. She had sunk back again, but her eyes, looking
enormous now in her wasted cheeks, were still upon the figure of Holles
where he lay inert as stone, just within the orbit of her vision.
“Sleep?” she questioned the doctor, wonderingly. “Is that sleep?”
Never had she--nor, indeed, have many--seen slumber fell a man as if he
had been shot.
“Nothing worse, ma’am. The Colonel has never so much as closed his eyes
for a whole week. Nature compassionately has closed them for him. No
need to afflict yourself on his behalf. Sleep is all he now requires.
So give yourself peace, and beware of making demands upon the little
strength that’s left you.”
She looked at him intently. “I have the plague, have I not?”
“Say rather that you had it, ma’am. You have it no longer. It has been
cast out of you. It has left you feeble; but that is all that ails you
at present. And you are a safe woman now. When you shall have recovered
your strength, you may go whither you will without further fear of the
infection. The plague will not touch you again. For the great mercy
thus vouchsafed you, you may render thanks to God, and, next to God, to
your husband.”
She frowned, perplexed.
“My husband?”
“Your husband, ma’am. And a husband in a thousand--nay, in ten
thousand. I have seen many a husband lately, and I speak with
knowledge--alas! The terror of the pestilence can blot out every other
feeling. I have seen it happen time and again. But Colonel Holles is
not of those. His is a devotion that makes a hero of him; and, because
he has been fearless, he has been spared. Fortune favours the brave,
ma’am.”
“But ... but he is not my husband.”
“Not your husband?” said the doctor, confounded. And he repeated,
“Not your husband!” Then, with an affectation of cynicism very alien
in reality to the genial, kindly little man, “Gadso!” he ejaculated,
“perhaps that explains it. But what is he, then, who has all but given
his life for you?”
She hesitated, at a loss how to define their relationship. At last:
“Once he was my friend,” she answered.
“Once?” The physician raised his bushy brows. “And when, pray, did he
cease to be your friend--this man who stayed with you in this infected
house when he might have fled; this man who has denied himself sleep
or rest of any kind in all these days, that he might be ever at hand
against your need of him; this man who has wrestled with death for
you, and rescued you at the risk of taking the pestilence a thousand
times for your sake?”
“Did he do all this?” she asked.
Dr. Beamish entertained her with the details of the heroism and
self-sacrifice that Holles had displayed.
When the tale was done, and she lay silent and very thoughtful, the
doctor permitted himself a slyly humorous smile.
“He may once have been your friend, as you say,” he concluded, smiling.
“But I cannot think that he was ever more your friend than now. God
send me such a friend in my own need!”
She made no response, but continued very still and thoughtful for a
while, staring up at the carved canopy of this great strange bed,
her face a blank mask in which the little doctor sought in vain for
a clue to the riddle of the relations of those two. Had he yielded
to his inquisitiveness, he would have questioned her. But, other
considerations apart, he was restrained by thought for her condition.
Nourishment and rest were to be prescribed, and it was not for him, by
probing questions, to prove himself perhaps a disturber of the latter.