At ten o’clock the old man still lay on the hospital bed—breathing, living, but apparently dead to all around him.
“What do you think of him, Mr. Paull?” asked the Sister, as Hugh went his last round—at least the round which was usually his last.
“Think of him?” repeated Hugh, absently. “Oh—well—Dr. Fairlight will be here in the morning. He will take the case. Tell the night nurse I shall be down in an hour.”
“You’re not going to sit up, Mr. Paull?”
“I think I shall.”
The Sister looked from patient to doctor, as Hugh went striding out of the ward, and back again to the livid, solemn face on the pillow.
“That young cabman’s case last week was a good deal worse than this,” she mused, “and he didn’t sit up. I suppose the old gentleman’s age makes him anxious.”
Hugh Paull, with his odd attractiveness, his scrupulous fidelity to his duties, and his learning, which was acknowledged by the great men who were appointed to the hospital, as well as by his fellow-workers, was the hero of the resident staff, both doctors and nurses; and it did not enter the good Sister’s head to dream that any other motive but that of devotion to duty led to this sacrifice of a night’s rest, and singular departure from ordinary hospital routine.
Yet when Hugh took up his position at the patient’s bedside with some books as the possible companions of his vigil, he smiled to himself with a cynical wonder.
“Why am I doing this?” he asked himself. Why, indeed? He could have been summoned if any change took place. He could have ordered an extra night nurse for Sir Roderick. Why should he go out of his way for a strange man? Because this old man’s brother and the housekeeper had behaved so coolly, and his sense of humanity was aroused? Because this human windfall in the accident ward was Sir Roderick Pym, of Pym, Clithero & Pym? No! for neither of these reasons. Hugh Paull was in the habit of self-interrogation. His dissatisfaction with ordinary life as ordinary people took it had made him desperately in earnest; and being desperately in earnest, had made—