With the aid of a Russian surgeon, who spoke German well, I managed to dress the wounds and bandage the fractured arm, during which the patient never spoke once, nor, indeed, seemed to be at all concerned in what was going on.
“You can stay here, I hope,” said he to me, when all was finished. “At least, you 'll see me through the worst of it I can afford to pay, and pay well.”
“I 'll stay,” said I, imitating his own laconic way; and no more was said.
Now, though it was not my intention to pass myself off for a physician, or derive any, even the smallest advantage from the assumption of such a character, I saw that, remote as the poor sufferer was from his friends and country, and totally destitute of even companionship, it would have been cruel to desert him until he was sufficiently recovered to be left with servants.
From his calm composure, and the self-control he was able to exercise, I had formed a far too favorable opinion of his case. When I saw him first the inflammatory symptoms had not yet set in; so that at my next visit I found him in a high fever, raving wildly. In his wanderings he imagined himself ever directing some gigantic enterprise, with hundreds of men at his command, whose efforts he was cheering or chiding alternately. The indomitable will of a most resolute nature was displayed in all he said; and though his bodily sufferings must have been intense, he only alluded to them to show how little power they had to arrest his activity. His ever-recurring cry was, “It can be done, men! It can be done! See that we do it!”
I own that, even though stretched on a sick-bed and raving madly, this man's unquenchable energy impressed me greatly; and I often fancied to myself what must have been the resources of such a bold spirit in sad contrast to a nature pliant and yielding like mine. To the violence of the first access, there soon succeeded the far more dangerous state of low fever, through which I never left him. Care and incessant watching could alone save him, and I devoted myself to the last with the resolve to make this effort the first of a new and changed existence.
Day and night in the sick-room, I lost appetite and strength, while an unceasing care preyed upon me and deprived me even of rest. The very vacillations of the sick man's malady had affected my nerves, rendering me overanxious, so that just as he had passed the great crisis of the malady, I was stricken down with it myself.
My first day of convalescence, after seven weeks of fever, found me sitting at a little window that looked upon the sea, or rather the harbor of Sebastopol, where two frigates and some smaller vessels were at anchor. A group of lighters and such unpicturesque craft occupied another part of the scene, engaged, as it seemed, in operations for raising other vessels. It was in gazing for a long while at these, and guessing their occupation, that I learned to trace out the past, and why and how I had come to be sitting there. Every morning the German servant who tended me through my illness used to bring me the “Herr Baron's” compliments to know how I was, and now he came to say that as the “Herr Baron” was able to walk so far, he begged that he might be permitted to come and pay me a visit I was aware of the Russian custom of giving titles to all who served the Government in positions of high trust, and was therefore not astonished when the announcement of the “Herr Baron” was followed by the entrance of Harpar, who, sadly reduced, and leaning on a crutch, made his way slowly to where I sat. I attempted to rise to receive him, but he cried out, half sternly,—“Sit still! we are neither of us in good trim for ceremony.”
He motioned to the servants to leave us alone; then laying his wasted hand in mine, for we were each too weak to' grasp the other, he said,—
“I know all about it It was you saved my life, and risked your own to do it.”