There he tested the edges of the crisp parchment of the bank-notes, and apparently satisfied, hurriedly thrust them down into his own capacious hip-pocket.
Then he crept to the broken door and listened for a minute or two. He opened it cautiously, at last, tip-toed slowly over to the stair-balustrade, and finally turned back and closed the door.
As the latch of the shattered lock fell rattling on the floor a sigh quavered through the room. It was a woman’s sigh, wavering and weak and freighted with weariness, but one of returning consciousness. For, a minute later, a voice was asking, plaintively and emptily, “Where am I?”
CHAPTER XXVII
Often, in looking back on those terrible, phantasmal days that followed, Frances Candler wondered how she had lived through them.
Certain disjointed pictures of the first night and day remained vividly in her memory; unimportant and inconsequential episodes haunted her mind, as graphic and yet as vaguely unrelated as the midday recollection of a night of broken sleep and dream.
One of these memories was the doctor’s hurried question as to whether or not she could stand the sight of a little blood. A second memory was Durkin’s childlike cry of anguish, as she held the bared arm over the sheet of white oilcloth, pungent-odored with its disinfectant. Still another memory was that of the rattle of the little blackened bullet on the floor as it dropped from the jaws of the surgical forceps. A more vague and yet a more pleasing memory was the thought that had come to her, when the wound had been washed and dressed and hidden away under its white bandages, and Durkin himself had been made comfortable on the narrow couch, that the worst was then over, that the damage had been repaired, and that a week or two of quiet and careful nursing would make everything right again.
In this, however, she was sadly mistaken. She had even thought of shyly slipping away and leaving him to sleep through the night alone, until, standing over his bed, she beheld the figure that had always seemed so well-knit and self-reliant and tireless, shaking and trembling in the clutch of an approaching chill. It seemed to tear her very heartstrings, as she gave him brandy, and even flung her own coat and skirt over him, to see him lying there so impotent, so childishly afraid of solitude, so miserably craven, before this unknown enemy of bodily weakness.
As the night advanced the fever that followed on Durkin’s chill increased, his thirst became unappeasable, and from the second leather couch in the back room, where she had flung herself down in utter weariness of nerve and limb, she could hear him mumbling. Toward morning she awakened suddenly, from an hour of sound sleep, and found Durkin out of bed, fighting at his bedroom mantelpiece, protesting, babblingly, that he had seen a blood-red mouse run under the grate and that at all hazard it must be got out.
She led him back to bed, and during the five days that his fever burned through him she never once gave herself up to the luxury of actual sleep. Often, during the day and night, she would fling herself down on her couch, in a condition of half-torpor, but at the least word or sound from him she was astir again.