|Mr. Audouin,' Hiram cried, bursting into his friend's rooms in a fever
of despair, three days later, 'I've come to tell you I'm going back to
America!'
'Back to America, Hiram!' Audouin cried in dismay, for he guessed the
cause instinctively at once. 'Why, what on earth do you want to do that
for?'
Hiram flung himself back in moody dejection on the ottoman in the
corner. 'Why,' he said, 'do you know who has been to see me? Mr.
Truman.'
'Well, Hiram?' Audouin murmured, trembling.
'Well, he tells me I've made a complete mistake of it. I'm not a
painter, I can't be a painter, and I never could possibly make a
painter. Oh, Mr. Audouin, Mr. Audouin, I knew it myself long ago, but
till this very week I've hoped against hope, and never ventured fully
to realise it. But I know now he tells the truth. I can't paint, I
tell you, I can't paint--no, not that much!' And he snapped his fingers
bitterly in his utter humiliation.
Audouin drew a chair over softly to his friend's side, and laid his hand
with womanly tenderness upon the listless arm. 'Hiram,' he said in a
tone of deep self-reproach, 'it's all my fault; my fault, and mine only.
I am to blame for all this. I wanted to help and direct and encourage
you; and in the end, I've only succeeded in making both of us supremely
miserable!'
'Oh, no,' Hiram cried, taking Audouin's hand warmly in his own, 'not
your fault, dear Mr. Audouin, not your fault, nor mine, but nature's.
You thought there was more in me than there actually was--that was
kindly and friendly and well-meant of you. You fancied you had found an
artistic genius, an oasis in the sandy desert of Geauga County, and you
wanted to develop and assist him. It was generous and noble of you;
if you were misled, it was your own sympathetic, appreciative,
disinterested nature that misled you. You were too enthusiastic. You
always thought better of me than I have ever thought of myself; but if
that's a fault, it's a fault on the nobler side, surely. No, no, nobody
is to blame for this but myself, my own feeble self, that cannot rise,
whatever I may do, to the difficult heights you would have me fly to.'
Audouin looked at him long and silently. In his own heart, he had begun
to feel that Hiram's heroic figure-painting had turned out a distinct
failure For that figure-painting he, Lotlirop Audouin, was alone
responsible. But, even in spite of the great name of Truman urged
against him, he could hardly believe that Hiram would not yet succeed in
landscape. 'Did Truman see the Tyrolese sketches?' he asked anxiously at
last.
'Yes, he did, Mr. Audouin.'
'And what did he say about them?'
'Simply that he thought I ought never to have come away from America.'
Audouin drew a long breath. 'This is very serious, Hiram,' he said
slowly. 'I apprehend certainly that this is very serious. Truman's
opinion is worth a great deal; but, after all, it isn't everything. I've
led you wrong so long and so often, my poor boy, that I'm almost afraid
to advise you any farther; and yet, do you know, I can't help somehow
believing that you will really do great things yet in landscape.'
'Never, never,' Hiram answered firmly.
'I shall never do anything better than the edge of the lake at
Chattawauga!'
'But you _have_ done great things, Hiram,' Audouin cried, warming up
with generous enthusiasm, just in proportion as his protégés spirits
sank lower and lower. 'My dear fellow, you _have_ done great things
already. I'll stake my reputation upon it, Hiram, that the lake shore at
Chattawauga's a piece of painting that'll even yet live and be famous.'
Hiram shook his head gloomily. 'No, no,' he said; 'I mean to take Mr.
Truman's advice, and go back to hoe corn and plant potatoes in Muddy
Creek Valley. That's just about what I'm fit for.'
'But, Hiram,' his friend said, coming closer and closer to him, 'you
mustn't dream of doing that. In justice to me you really mustn't. I've
misled you and wasted your time, I know, by inducing you to go in
for this wretched figure-painting. It doesn't suit you and your
idiosyncrasy: that I see now quite clearly. All my life long it's been a
favourite doctrine of mine, my boy, that the only true way of salvation
lies in perfect fidelity to one's own inner promptings. And how have I
carried out that gospel of mine in your case? Why, by absurdly inducing
you to neglect the line you naturally excel in, and to take up with a
line that you don't personally care a pin for. Now, dear Hiram, my dear,
good fellow, don't go and punish me for this by returning in a huff'
to Geauga County. Have pity upon me, and spare me this misery, this
degradation. I've suffered much already, though you never knew it, about
this false direction I've tried to give your genius (for you _have_
genius, I'm sure you have ): I've lain awake night after night and
reproached myself for it bitterly: don't go now and put me to shame
by making my mistake destroy your whole future career and chances as a
painter. It need cost you nothing to remain. I misled you by getting you
to paint those historical subjects. I see they were a mistake now, and I
will buy the whole of them from you at your own valuation. That will be
only just, for it was for me really that you originally painted them.
Do, do please reconsider this hasty decision.' Hiram rocked himself
to and fro piteously upon the ottoman, but only answered, 'Impossible,
impossible. You are too kind, too generous.'
Audouin looked once more at his dejected dispirited face, and then,
pausing a minute or two, said quietly and solemnly, 'And how about Gwen,
Hiram?'
Hiram started up in surprise and discomfiture, and asked hastily, 'Why,
what on earth do you know about Gwen--about Miss Russell, I mean--Mr.
Audouin?'
'I can't tell you how I've surprised your secret, Hiram,' Audouin said,
his voice trembling a little as he spoke: 'perhaps some day I may tell
you, and perhaps never. But I've found it all out, and I ask you, my
boy, for Gwen's sake--for Miss Russell's sake--to wait awhile before
returning so rashly to America. Hiram, you owe it as a duty to her not
to run away from her, and fame and fortune, at the first failure.'
Hiram flung himself down upon the ottoman again in a frenzy of
despondency. 'That's just why I think I must go at once, Mr. Audouin,'
he cried, in his agony. 'I only know two alternatives. One is America;
the other is the Tiber.'
'Hiram, Hiram!' his friend said soothingly. 'Yes, yes, Mr. Audouin, I
know all that, I know what you want to say to me. But I can't drag down
Gwen--born and brought up as she has been--I can't drag her down with me
to a struggling painter's pot-boiling squalidness. I can't do it, and
I won't do it, and I oughtn't to do it; and the kindest thing for her
sake, and for all our sakes, would be for me to get out of it all at
once and altogether.'
'Then you _will_ go, Hiram?'
'Yes, I _will_ go, Mr. Audouin, by the very next Trieste steamer.'
He rose slowly from the ottoman, shook his friend's hand in silence, and
went away without another word. Audouin saw by his manner that he really
meant it, and he sat down wondering what good he could do to countervail
this great unintentional evil he had done to Hiram.
'Lothrop Audouin,' he said to himself harshly, 'a pretty mess you have
made now of your own life and of Hiram Winthrop's! Is this your perfect
fidelity to the inner promptings--this your obedience to the unspoken
voice of the divine human consciousness? You poor, purblind, affected,
silly, weak, useless creature, I hate you, I hate you. Go, now, see what
you can do to render happy these two better lives that you have done
your best to ruin for ever.'
If any other man had used such words of Lothrop Audouin, he would have
shown himself a bitter, foolish, short-sighted cynic. But as Lothrop
Audouin said it himself, of course he had a full right to his own
opinion.
Yet some men, not wholly bad men either, might have rejoiced at the
thought that they would thus get rid of a successful rival. They would
have said to themselves, 'When Hiram is gone, Gwen will soon forget him,
and then I may have a chance at least of finally winning her favour.' In
this belief, they would have urged Hiram, in a halfhearted way only,
not to return to America; and if afterwards he persisted in his foolish
intention, they might have said to themselves, 'I did my best to keep
him, and now I wash my hands forever of it.' All's fair, says the
proverb, in love and war; and many men still seem to think so. But
Audouin was made of different mould; and having once frankly wooed
and lost Gwen, he had no single shadow of a thought now left in his
chivalrous mind save how to redress this great wrong he conceived he had
done them, and how to make Gwen and Hiram finally happy.
He sat there long, musing and wondering, beating out a plan of action
for himself in his own brain, till at last he saw some gleam of hope
clear before him. Then he rose, took down his hat quickly from the peg,
and hurried round to Colin Churchill's studio. He found Colin working
away busily at the moist clay of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
'Churchill,' he said seriously, 'you must put away your work for an
hour. I want to speak to you about something very important.'
Colin laid down his graver reluctantly, and turned to look at his
unexpected visitor.
'Why, great heavens, Mr. Audouin,' he said, 'what can be the matter with
you? You really look as white as that marble.'
'Matter enough, Churchill. Who do you think has been to see Winthrop?
Why, John Truman.'
'Oh, I know,' Colin answered cheerfully. 'I sent him myself. And what
did he say then?'
'He said that Winthrop ought to go back to America, and that he would
never, never, never make a decent painter.'
Colin whistled to himself quickly, and then said, 'The dickens he did!
How remarkable! But did Winthrop show him the landscapes?' 'Yes, and
from what he says, Truman seems to have thought worse of them than even
he thought of the figure pieces.'
'Impossible!' Colin cried incredulously. 'I don't believe it; I can't
believe it. Truman knows a landscape when he sees it. There must be some
mistake somewhere.'
'I'm afraid not,' Audouin answered sadly. 'I've begun to despair about
poor Winthrop myself, a great deal of late, and to reproach myself
terribly for the share I've had in putting his genius on the wrong
metals. The thing we've got to do now is to face the actuality, and
manage the best we can for him under the circumstances. Churchill, do
you know, Hiram threatens to go back to America by the next steamer, and
take to farming for a livelihood.'
Colin whistled low again. 'He mustn't be allowed to do it,' he said
quickly. 'He must be kept in Rome at all hazards. If we have to lock him
up in jail or put him into a lunatic asylum, we must keep him here for
the present, whatever comes of it. I'm sure as I am of anything, Mr.
Audouin, that Hiram Winthrop has a splendid future still before him.'
'Well, Churchill,' Audouin said calmly, 'I want you to help me in a
little scheme I've decided upon. I'm going to make my will, and I want
you to be trustee under it.'
'Make your will, Mr. Audouin! Why, what on earth has that to do with
Hiram Winthrop? I hope you'll live for many years yet, to see him paint
whole square yards of splendid pictures.'
Audouin smiled a little sadly. 'It's well to be prepared against all
contingencies,' he said with a forced gaiety of tone: 'and I want to
provide against one which seems to me by no means improbable. There's no
knowing when any man may die. Don't the preachers tell us that our life
hangs always by a thread, and that the sword of Damocles is suspended
forever above us?'
Colin looked at him keenly and searchingly. Audouin met his gaze with
frank open eyes, and did not quail for a moment before his evident
curiosity. 'Well, Churchill,' he went on more gravely, 'I'm going to
make my will, and I'll tell you how I'm going to make it. I propose to
leave all my property in trust to you, as a charity in perpetuity. I
intend that you shall appoint some one young American artist as Audouin
Art Scholar at Home, and pay to him the interest on that property, so
long as he considers that he stands in need of it. As soon as he, by the
exercise of his profession, is earning such an income that he feels he
can safely do without it, then I leave it to him and you to choose some
other American Art student for the scholarship, to be enjoyed in like
manner. On that second student voluntarily vacating the scholarship,
you, he, and the first student shall similarly choose a third incumbent;
and so on for ever. What do you think of the plan, Churchill, will it
hold water?'
'But why shouldn't you leave it outright to Winthrop?' Colin asked, a
little puzzled by this apparently roundabout proceeding. 'Wouldn't it
be simpler and more satisfactory to give it to him direct, instead of in
such a complicated fashion?'
'Who said a word about Winthrop being the first scholar?' Audouin
answered with grave irony. 'You evidently misunderstand the spirit of
the bequest. I want to advance American art, not to make a present to
Hiram Winthrop. Besides,' and here Audouin lowered his voice a little
more confidentially, 'if I left it to Hiram outright, I feel pretty
confident he wouldn't accept it; he'd refuse the bequest as a personal
matter. I know him, Churchill, better than you do; I know his proud
sensitive nature, and the way he would shrink from accepting a fortune
as a present even from a dead man--even from me, his most intimate
friend and spiritual father. But if it's left in this way, he can hardly
refuse; it will be only for a few years, till he gets his name up; it'll
leave him free meanwhile to live and marry (if he wants to), and it'll
be burdened with a condition, too--that he should go on studying and
practising art, and that he should assist at the end of his own tenure
in electing another scholar. That, I hope, would reconcile him (if the
scholarship were offered to him) to the necessity of accepting and using
it for a few years only. However, I don't wish, Churchill, to suggest
any person whatsoever to you as the first student; I desire to leave
your hands perfectly free and untied in that matter.'
'I see; I understand,' Cohn answered, smiling gently to himself. 'I will
offer it, should the occasion ever arise, to the most promising young
American student that I can anywhere discover.'
'Quite right, Churchill; exactly what I wish you to do. Then you'll
accept the trust, and carry it out for me, will you?
'On one condition only, Mr. Audouin,' Colin said firmly, looking into
his blanched face and straining eyeballs. 'On one condition only. Let me
be quite frank with you--no suicide.'
Audouin started a little. 'Why, that's a fair enough proviso,' he
answered slowly after a moment. 'Yes, I promise that. No suicide. We
shall trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.'
'In that case,' Colin continued, reassured, 'I hope we may expect that
the trusteeship will be a sinecure for many a long year to come. But
I fail to see how all this will benefit poor Winthrop in the immediate
future, if he means to sail for New York by the next steamer.'
'The two questions ought to be kept entirely distinct,' Audouin went
on sharply, with perfect gravity. 'I fail myself to perceive how any
possible connection can exist between them. Still, we will trust to the
chapter of accidents. There's no knowing what a day may bring forth. We
must try at least to keep Wintlirop here in Rome for another fortnight.
That's not so very long to stay, and yet a great deal may be done in a
fortnight. I'll go and look out at once for an American lawyer to draft
my will for me. Meanwhile, will you just sign this joint note from both
of us to Winthrop?'
He sat down hurriedly at Cohn's desk, and scribbled off a short note to
poor Hiram.
'Dear Winthrop,--Will you as a personal favour to us both kindly delay
your departure from Rome for another fortnight, by which time we hope we
may be able to make different arrangements for you?
'Lothrop Audouin.'
He passed the note to Colin, and the pen with it. Colin read the
doubtfully worded note over twice in a hesitating manner, and then,
after some mental deliberation, added below in his clear masculine
hand--'Colin Churchill.'
'Remember, Mr. Audouin,' he said as a parting warning. 'It's a bargain
between us. No suicide.'
'Oh, all right,' Audouin answered lightly with the door in his hand. 'We
trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.'
CHAPTER XLIV. THE CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.
|Next day, after seeing the American lawyer (caught by good luck at the
Hôtel de Russie), and duly executing then and there his will in favour
of Colin Churchill as trustee, Audouin sauntered down gloomily to the
San Paolo station, and took the train by himself to a miserable little
stopping place in the midst of the dreary desolate Campagna. It was a
baking day, even in the narrow shaded streets of Rome itself; but out
on the shadeless scorched-up Agro Romano the sun was pouring down with
tropical fierceness upon the flat levels, one vast stretch of silent
slopes, with lonely hollows interspersed at intervals, where even the
sheep and cattle seemed to pant and stagger under the breathless heat of
the Italian noontide. Audouin got out at the wayside road, gave up his
ticket to the dirty military-looking official, passed the osteria and
the half dozen feverish yellow-washed houses that clustered round the
obtrusive modern railway, and turned away from the direction of the
mouldering village on the projecting buttress of rock towards the
mysterious, melancholy, treeless desert on the other side. It was just
the place for Audouin to walk alone on such a day, with his whole heart
sick and weary of a generous attempt ill frustrated by the unaccountable
caprice of fate. He had tried to do his best for Hiram Winthrop, and he
had only succeeded in making himself and his friend supremely unhappy.
Audouin had never cared much for life, and he cared less for it that
day than ever before. 'After all,' he said to himself, 'what use is
existence to me? I had one mistress, nature: I have almost tired of her:
she palled upon me, and I wanted another. That other would not take my
homage; and nature, it seems, in a fit of jealousy, has revenged her
slighted pretensions upon me, in most unfeminine fashion, by making
herself less beautiful in my eyes than formerly. How dull and gloomy it
all looks to-day! What a difficult world to live in, what an easy world
to leave; if we had but the trick to do it!'
He walked along quickly, away from the hills and the village perched on
an outlying spur of the distant Apennines, on to the summit of a rolling
undulation in that great grassy sea of wave-like hillocks. Not a
sound stirred the stagnant air. Away in front, towards the dim distant
Mediterranean, the flat prairies of Ostia steamed visibly in the
flickering sunlight; a low region of reeds and cane-brake, with feathery
herbage unruffled by any passing breath of wind, and barely relieved
from utter monotony by the wide dry umbrella-shaped bosses of the
basking stone-pines of Castel Fusano. The malaria seemed to hang over it
like a terrible pall, blinking before the eye over the heated reach
of sweltering pasture lands. Yonder lay Alsium--Palo they call it
nowadays--a Dutch oven of pestilence, breeding miasma in its thousand
foul nooks for the inoculation of all the country round. In truth a
sickly, sickening spot; but here, Audouin whispered to himself half
apologetically, with self-evident hypocrisy, here on the higher
moorlands of the Campagna, among the shepherds and the sheep, beside the
shaggy briar and hillocks, a man may walk and not hurt himself surely.
Colin Churchill had said, 'No suicide;' and that was a bargain between
them; yet suicide was one thing, and a quiet afternoon stroll through
the heart of the country was really another.
He had bought a flask of 'sincere wine' at the osteria, and had brought
some biscuits with him in his pocket from Rome. He meant to lunch out
here on the Campagna, and only return late to the hotel for dinner. When
a man feels broken and dispirited, what more natural than that he should
wish to escape by himself for a lonely tramp in the fields and meadows,
where none will interrupt his flow of spleen and the run of his solitary
meditations?
It would be quite untrue to say that Lothrop Audouin had come into
the Campagna by himself that day on purpose to catch the Roman fever.
Nothing could be more unjust or unkind to him. Wayward natures like
his do not expect to have their actions so harshly judged by the
unsympathetic tribunal of common-sense. They seldom do anything on
purpose. Audouin was only tempting nature. He was trusting to the
chapter of accidents. A man has a right to walk over the ground (if
unenclosed and unappropriated) whenever he chooses; there can be nothing
wrong in taking a little turn by oneself even among the desolate surging
undulations of the great plain that rolls illimitably between Rome and
Civita Vecchia. He was exercising his undoubted rights as an American
citizen; he could go where he chose over those long unfenced slopes,
where you may walk in a straight line for miles ahead, with nothing to
hinder you save the sun and the fever. And the fever! Well, yes; he did
perhaps have some slight passing qualms of conscience on that head, when
he thought of his promise to Colin Churchill; but then of course that
was straining language--interpreting it in non-natural senses. A man
isn't bound to make a mollycoddle of himself simply because he has
promised a friend that he won't commit suicide.
He sat down in the eye of the sun on a bit of broken rock--or at least
it looked like rock, though it was really a fragment from the concrete
foundations of some ancient villa--with his legs dangling over the deep
brown bank of pozzolano earth, and his hat slouched deeply above his
eyes to protect him from the penetrating sunlight. Dead generations lay
beneath his feet; the air was heavy with the dust of unnumbered myriads.
Lothrop Audouin took out his flask and drank his wine and ate his
biscuits. An old contadino came up suspiciously to watch the stranger;
Audouin offered him the remainder of the wine, and the man drank it off
at a gulp and thanked his excellency with Italian profuseness.
Would his excellency buy a coin, the contadino went on slowly, with the
insinuating Roman begging whine. Audouin looked at the thing carelessly,
and turned it round once or twice in his fingers. It was a denarius of
Trajan, apparently; he could read the inscription, Avg. Ger. Dac. p.m.
Tri. pot. Cos. vii., and so forth. It might be worth half a lire or so.
He gave the man two lire for it. Suicide indeed! Who talks of
suicide? Mayn't a bit of a virtuoso come out on to the Campagna, quite
legitimately, to collect antiquities?
The fancy pleased him, and he talked awhile with the contadino about the
things he had found in the galleries that honeycomb for miles the whole
Campagna. Yes, the man had once found a beautiful scarabæus, a
scarabæus that might have belonged to Cæsar or St. Peter. He had found
a lachrymatory, too, a relic of an ancient Christian; and many bones
of holy martyrs. How did he know they were holy martyrs? The most
illustrious was joking. When one finds bones in a catacomb, one knows
they must have been preserved by miraculous interference.
Much ague on the Campagna? No, no, signor; an air most salubrious, most
vital, most innocent. In the Ptfntine Swamps? oh there, by Bacchus,
excellency, it is far different. _There_, the people die of fever
by hundreds; it is a most desolate country; encumbered with dead and
rotting vegetation, it procreates miasma, and is left to stagnate idly
in the sun. The bottoms are all soft slime and ooze, where buffaloes
wallow and wild boars hide. Nothing there save a solitary pot-house, and
a few quaking, quavering, ague-smitten contadini--a bad place to live
in, the Pontine Marshes, excellency. But here on the Agro Romano,
high and dry, thanks to the Madonna and all holy saints, why, body of
Bacchus, there is no malaria.
Or if any, very little. Towards nightfall, perhaps; yes, just a trifle
towards nightfall; but what of that? One wraps one's sheepskin close
around one; one takes care to be home early; one offers a candle now
and then to the blessed Madonna; and the malaria is nothing. Except for
foreigners. Ah, yes, foreigners ought always to be very sure not to stop
out beyond nightfall.
Audouin let the man run on as long as he chose, and when the contadino
was tired of conversation, he lay back upon the dry yellow grass, and
thought bitterly to himself about life and fate, and Gwen and Hiram.
What a miserable, foolish, impossible sort of world we all lived in
after all! He had more money himself than he needed; he didn't want
the nasty stuff--filthy lucre--filthy indeed in these days; dirty
bank-notes, Italian or American, the first perhaps a trifle the dirtier
and racrgeder of the two. He didn't want it, and Hiram for need of it
was going to the wall; and yet he couldn't give it to Hiram, and Hiram
wouldn't take it if he were to give it to him. Absurd conventionality!
There was Gwen, too; Gwen; how happy he could make them both, if only
they would let him; and yet, and yet, the thing was impossible. If only
Hiram had those few wretched thousand dollars, scraps and scrips, shares
and houses--Audouin didn't know exactly what they were or what was the
worth of them; a lawyer in Boston managed the rubbish--if only Hiram had
them, he could take to landscape, marry Gwen, and undo the evil that he,
Lothrop Audouin, had unwittingly and unwillingly wrought in his foolish
self-confidence, and live happily ever after. In fairy tales and novels
and daydreams everybody always did live happy ever after--it's a way
they have, somehow or other. The whole course of individual human
history for the great Anglo-American race, in fancy anyhow, seems always
to end with a wedding as its natural finale and grand consummation. Yet
here he was, boxed up alone with all that useless money, and the only
way he could possibly do any good with it was by ceasing to exist
altogether. No suicide! oh, no, certainly not. Still, if quite
accidentally he happened to get the Roman fever, nobody would be one
penny the worse for it, while Gwen and Hiram would doubtless be a good
deal the better.
The afternoon wore away slowly, and evening came on at last across the
great shifting desolate panorama. The dirty greens and yellows began
to flush into gold and crimson; the misty haze from the Pontine Marshes
began to creep with deadly stealth across the Agro Romano; the grey veil
began to descend upon the softening Alban hills in the murky distance;
the purples on the hillside hollows began to darken into gloomy shadows.
A little breeze had sprung up meanwhile, and rain was dropping slowly
from invisible light drifting clouds upon the parched Campagna. The
malaria is never so dangerous as after a slight rain, that just damps
the dusty surface without really penetrating it; for then the germs that
lie thick among the mouldering vegetation are quickened into spasmodic
life, and the whole Campagna steams and simmers with invisible eddies
of vaporous effluvia. But Audouin sat there still, moodily pretending
to himself that his headache would be all the better for a few cooling
drops upon his feverish forehead. Even the old contadino was on his way
back to his wretched hut, and as he passed he begged his excellency
to get back to the railway with the most rapid expedition. 'Fa cattivo
tempo,' he cried with a warning gesture. But his excellency only
strolled slowly towards the yellow-washed station, dawdling by the way
to watch the shadows as they grew deeper and blacker and ever longer on
the distant indentations of the circling amphitheatre of hills.
The sunset glow faded away into ashen greyness. The air struck cold and
chill across the treeless levels. The wind swept harder and damper over
the malarious lowland. Then the Campagna was swallowed up in dark,
and Lothrop Audouin found his way alone, wet and steaming, to the tiny
roadside station. The train from Civita Vecchia was not due for half an
hour yet; he stood on the platform under the light wooden covering,
and waited for it to come in with a certain profound internal sense of
despairing resignation. His limbs were very cold, and his forehead was
absolutely burning. Yes, yes, thank heaven for that! the chapter of
accidents had not forsaken him. He felt sure he had caught the Roman
fever.
When the English doctor came to see him at the hotel that evening, about
eleven, the work of diagnosis was short and easy. 'Country fever in its
worst and most dangerous form,' he said simply; 'in fact what we at Rome
are accustomed to call the _perniciosa_.'