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It is sometimes but a short and easy way up to the gates of death, but a long and weary journey back to life. It was a long and weary journey to me.
I was like to a man who travels in the dead of night over rough ways, and now and again slumbers uneasily with troubled dreams, and now looks out upon a glimmer of light in some house or village, and now on nothing but the pitchy darkness; and yet he is always travelling on and on till he is weary with madness of fatigue. And then, as the dawn breaks upon the wanderer, and he sees a strange land around him, so the dawn of what seemed a new existence began to break for me, and I looked upon life anew with wondering eyes.
At first I looked as the traveller may, with eyes so tired and drowsy as scarce to care to notice. But in yet a little while I warmed and quickened to the sun of returning health. I began to be something more than a mere tortured mass of humanity; each breath was no longer misery to draw; the mind was able to re-assert authority over the flesh. That dark, watchful figure that seemed to have been sitting at the foot of my bed for centuries, that was János! Poor old fellow! I could not yet speak to him, but I could smile. My next thought was amaze that I should be in a strange room; it had a very teasing tapestry; its figures had worried me long before I could notice them. In a little while I began to understand that I was not in my own chambers, and to feel such irritation at the liberty which had been taken with me that I should have demanded instant explanation had my strength been equal to the task.
But I come of too vigorous stock, the blood that runs in my veins is too sweet—because I have not, like so many young fools of my day, poisoned it with endless potations and dissoluteness—for me, when once on the broad high road to recovery (to continue my travelling simile), to dally over the ground.
Moreover I was too well nursed. János, it seems, after the first couple of visits, in each of which I was wisely bled of the diminished store the Chevalier’s sword had left in my veins—János had had a great quarrel with the surgeon, vowing he would not see his master’s murder completed before his eyes and never a chance of hanging the murderer.
It had ended in the old soldier taking the law into his own hands, dismissing the man of medicine, and treating me after his own lights. He had had a fairly good apprenticeship, having attended my uncle through all his campaigns. As far as I am concerned I am convinced that in this, as well as in another matter which I am about to relate, he saved my life.
The other matter has reference to the very change of quarters which had excited my ire, the true explanation of which, however, I did not receive until I was strong enough to entertain visitors. János would give me little or no satisfaction.
“I thought in myself it would be more wholesome for your honour than your other house,” was the utmost I could extract. Indeed, he strenuously discouraged all conversation. But the day when this stern guardian first consented to admit Carew and Beddoes to my presence,—and that was not till I could sit up in bed and converse freely,—all that I had been curious about was made clear to me.