“Poor fellow, how sick he looks! he must go to bed at once. We have no bed yet, but the one at the end there will soon be empty. While we are waiting, we will put him on a couch.”
This couch was placed close to the bed “that would soon be empty,” from whence were heard long sighs, dreary enough in themselves, but made a thousand times more melancholy by the utter indifference with which they were heard by the others in the room. The man was dying, but Jack was himself too ill to notice this. He hardly heard Bélisaire’s “au revoir” nor the rattling of dishes as the soup was distributed, nor a whispering at his side; he was not asleep, but exhausted by fatigue. Suddenly a woman’s voice, calm and clear, said, “Let us pray.”
He saw the dim outline of a woman kneeling near the altar, but in vain did he attempt to follow the words that fell rapidly from her lips. The concluding sentence reached him, however.
“Protect, O God, my friends and my enemies, all prisoners and travellers, the sick and the dying.”
Jack slept a feverish sleep, and his dreams were a confused mixture of prisoners rattling their chains, and of travellers wandering over endless roads. He was one of these travellers: he was on a highway, like that of Etiolles; Cécile and his mother were before him refusing to wait until he could reach them; this he was prevented from doing by a row of enormous machines, the pistons of which were moving with dizzy haste, and from whose chimneys were pouring out dark volumes of smoke. Jack determined to pass between them; he is seized by their iron arms, torn and mangled, and scalded with the hot steam; but he got through and took refuge in the Foret de Sénart, amid the freshness of which Jack became once more a child and was on his way to the forester’s; but there at the cross-road stood mother Salé; he turned to run, and ran for miles, with the old woman close behind him; he heard her nearer and nearer, he felt her hot breath on his shoulder; she seized him at last, and with all her weight crushed in his chest. Jack awoke with a start; he recognized the large room, the beds in a line, and heard the sighs and coughs. He dreamed no more, and yet he still felt the same weight across his body, something so cold and heavy that he called aloud in terror. The nurses ran, and lifted something, placed it in the next bed, and drew the curtains round it closely.
CHAPTER XXIV.
DEATH IN THE HOSPITAL.
“Come, wake up! Visitors are here.”
Jack opened his eyes, and the first thing that struck him was the curtains of the next bed,—they hung in such straight and motionless folds to the very ground.
“Well, my boy, you had a pretty bad time last night. The poor fellow in the next bed had convulsions and fell over on you. I suppose you were terribly frightened. Now raise yourself a little that we may see you. But you are very weak.”
The man who spoke was about forty years of age, wearing a velvet coat and a white apron. His beard was fair and his eyes bright. He feels the sick man’s pulse and asks him some questions.