He nodded feebly once or twice. I disposed him to his safety, fetched a kettle, water, and the condiments, and in a little had brewed him a good stinging jorum.
“Now,” I said, “I am going to pull the sofa there to the fire, put you on it, and leave you to sleep.”
He smiled weakly as I lifted him in my arms, and whispered for the first time, very faintly: “Good, good—ver’ strong and good—grazia, signore!”
The medicine, I will admit, he took down lamblike, in three dutiful gulps. It had its effect on him almost instantly. He closed his eyes and sank back in a blissful stupor. Then I covered him warm with a rug; lit the candles; shut all in snug and dry, and set about making my preparations for a comfortable hot meal against the time when he should awake.
A strange glow was in my blood. I must have felt something, I think, of a mother’s feelings, when her conscious self first realises in the new life beside her the earnest of pains past and present reward—when she wakes from storm to see the rainbow glowing in her sky. Does that sound extravagant? I daresay; but remember the sort of social Crusoe I had been. This was my man Friday—the living salvage of my hands. I was jealous already of my proprietorship in him. He owed his life to me; and I felt a fierce joy in that debt, as in one that elevated me for the first time to the ranks of life’s creditors. All conventional disabilities vanished in that uplifting. What did a name matter to one who had saved a life? I had qualified for the great human brotherhood.
He slept very long and heavily, hardly stirring or seeming to breathe. When I had finished my preparations, I took a chair near him, and sat pondering his face. It was of a curious green-white, like the complexion of a plant starved in a cellar. The lines of emotion on it looked almost grotesquely exaggerated, as if he had been an actor, who had been made up to portray some tragic part, and who had forgotten to wash himself afterwards. The contrast between that anæmic skin and the grey furrows which channelled it was startling.
Who was he? and what could have brought him, a stranger and a foreigner, to wander to his destruction on these remote and wintry roads? I was greedy for his awakening to learn.
It came in the end quite suddenly. I had just made up the fire, and was returning to my post of observation, when I saw his eyes wide open and staring at me.
“Bully, old fellow!” I said. “Come sta, isn’t it? How do you find yourself?”
He threw off the rug with a quick movement, and, scrambling to his feet, precipitated himself on his knees before me, and caught and kissed my hands.