“No, don’t write. Mamma has had a fresh cold, and neither my father nor Jenny could leave her. Let them have a little peace till it gets worse. There will be plenty of time, if it is to be a twenty-eight days business like the others. Poor mamma!” and he rolled his head away; then, after some minutes of tossing and shivering, he asked for a prayer out of the little book in his pocket. “I should know it, but my memory is muddled, I think.”
The book—a manual for sick-rooms—was one which Julius had given him new five weeks back. It showed wear already, having been used as often in that time as in six ordinary years of parish work. By the time the hard-pressed doctor came, it was plain that the fever was setting in severely, aggravated no doubt by the dreadful night at the ‘Three Pigeons,’ and the unrelaxed exertions ever since; for he was made to allow that he had come home in the chill morning air, cold, sickened, and exhausted; had not chosen to disturb anybody, and had found no refreshment but a raw apple—the last drop of wine having been bestowed on the sick; had lain down for a short sleep worse than waking, and had neither eaten nor slept since, but worked on by sheer strength of will and muscle. When Julius thought of the cherishing care that he had received himself, he shuddered, with a sort of self-reproach for his neglect; and the doctor, though good-humouredly telling Herbert not to think he knew anything about his own symptoms, did not conceal from Julius that enough harm had been done in these few days to give the fine Bowater constitution a hard struggle.
“Grown careless,” he said. “Regular throwing away of his life.”
Careless Herbert might have been, but Julius wondered whether this might not be losing of the life to find it.
Cranstoun or Cranky arrived, a charming old nurse, much gratified in the midst of her grief, and inclination to scold. She summarily sent off Mungo and Tartar by the conveyance that brought her, and would have sent Rollo away, but that Herbert protested against it, and no power short of an order from him would have taken the dog from his bedside.
And Mr. Bindon returned from Wil’sbro’ in unspeakable surprise. “The heroes of the occasion,” he said, “were Bowater and Mrs. Duncombe! Every sick person I visited, and there were fourteen in all stages, had something to say of one or other. Poor things, how their faces fell when they saw me instead of his bright, honest face! ‘Cheering the very heart of one!’ as a poor woman said; ‘That’s what I calls a true shepherd,’ said an old man. You don’t really mean he was rejected at the Ordination?’”
“Yes, and it will make him the still truer shepherd, if he is only spared!”
“The Sisters can’t say enough of him. They thought him very ill yesterday, and implored him to take care of himself; but he declared he could not leave these two funerals to you. But, after all, he is less amazing to me than Mrs. Duncombe. She has actually been living at the hospital with the Sisters. I should not have known her.”
“Great revolutions have happened in your absence. Much that has drawn out her sterling worth, poor woman.”
“I shall never speak harshly again, I hope. It seems to be a judgment on me that I should have been idling on the mountains, while those two were thus devoting themselves to my Master in His poor.”