Paul tried to nod, but succeeded only in closing his eyes in sign of assent.
‘I am a bid of a dogtor,’ said Darco; ‘led me veel your bulse. Goot—goot, ant your demberadure is normal. It is now begome your business to ead and trink.’ He waddled across the room, and came back with a tin of jelly and a spoon, and fed the invalid ‘That is enough,’ he said, after the fifth spoonful. ‘Liddle and often; that is the came to blay.’
Paul was too weak to wonder at anything, or he would have wondered at Darco’s presence; but Nature was too wise to let him waste his forces on any such unprofitable exercise as thinking, and sent him to sleep again. When he awoke he was ravenously hungry, and in a day or two he began to abuse the nurse who tended him for stinting his victuals. But the nurse was a good-humoured old campaigner.
‘Why, bless your heart, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said, when in an interval of contrition Paul apologised, ‘it do me good to hear you swear that hearty! Most gentlemen does it when they’re picking up a bit.’
There was in his mind barely a thought of Claudia; the one fever seemed to have burned the other out of him.
‘The heart,’ said the doctor—‘the heart’s the thing we’re always afraid of in rheumatic fever, and the heart’s as sound as a nut.’
Paul stretched feebly, and thought he had his jest wholly to himself; but the doctor undeceived him.
‘It wasn’t always so, my young friend.’
Paul blushed like fire.
‘Have I been babbling? he asked guiltily.