He was within a yard of his own post when these mad exaltations of an excited fancy crossed his mind, and at that instant a musket shot took him in the neck and he fell with his burden into the trench before him.
CHAPTER XI
We swoop, as it were, to the skies, and we drop, as it were, to the very sea bed, and we are seasick to the souls of us, one and all; and of the five hundred men the staunch boat carries, there are a round four hundred and fifty wounded, and a round four hundred who will never see the skies with conscious eyes again. We are bound for Scutari, where an enlightened intelligence, awakened at last to some beginning of elementary necessity, has established a hospital; for Government, as usual in such matters, after five hundred years of more or less victorious prowling to and fro in the world and more of gathered experience than any other body of men ever had in the history of the world, has positively made up its mind to shelter broken bones and sick bodies from the mere inclemencies of the weather.
It would not have done so much had it not been for the intervention of a lady whose name deserves to be immortal so long as the British Empire paints itself red upon the map; but Florence Nightingale had enlisted the sympathy of English hearts more quickly than the Queen’s shilling had enlisted fighting men, and the Crimean hospitals were the centre of a thousand human interests. The authorities had somehow caught and impounded the good ship Cæsar at Odessa, and had despatched it to a desert bay with no landing place or chartered sounding, near Ouklacool Aides, and, having loaded it there with wounded, had ordered it across to the Black Sea and down the Dardanelles. The stout Ayrshire heart of the captain was sick and sore within him many a time on that grim voyage, for before it was half over he had spent his last round shot on board and his last bit of spare canvas in the sewing up and weighting of men who were fated to be buried in the deep.
Amongst those who escaped this dreary fate were Polson Jervase and the enemy he had rescued at so grave a risk of his own life, and they two, with about one half the original human cargo of the ship, reached Scutari, and were landed there, and carried into hospital. A rough sea voyage in January weather in the Black Sea affords no pleasant nurture for a wounded man, and the poor fellows who were carried or helped ashore were a pitiable crew indeed. Neither Polson nor his enemy was conscious at the hour of landing, or had been truly conscious throughout the whole of the long and trying voyage. They were lowered in their stretchers from the ship’s side to the caiques which were brought alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital. They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas. The rustic Turk had not yet mastered the art, even if he has mastered it to-day, of constructing a cartwheel in a circle. He makes it eight-sided, and builds his vehicles without springs, and the wounded went along the vile road with a compound jolt for every foot of ground they traversed. There are men yet living who remember that piercing scene, and the cries which were wrung from the hearts of the stoutest fighting men in the world along that via dolorosa. It happened that the rescued and the rescuer were laid side by side, each on a bed some twenty inches in width; and there they were tended many days before either of them awoke to a real knowledge of his surroundings. In their waking hours they babbled deliriously, the pair of them, letting out the secrets of their very souls, if anybody had been there to listen. Day by day, and night by night, Polson, as he remembered afterwards, heard the best loved voice in the world from time to time, and sometimes with it and sometimes alone the voice he hated most. The wind was blowing the rain against the windows of the grey-stone house on Beacon Hill, and Irene and his father were whispering secrets together in the parlour. Then De Blacquaire was chattering there and saying all manner of things which were not pertinent to the case in hand, and Irene was answering him. John Jervase was talking by turns to all three, and was sometimes absurdly sentimental, dropping tears on the listener’s upturned face. All this was so strange and confused, so much a dream of delirium, that when at last the sufferer awoke to reason, he attached no meaning to it.
It was the 1st of February, as he found out afterwards, and he had been crazy for five weeks. He stared feebly up at the ceiling and wondered as to his whereabouts. He tried to lift a hand, but he might have worn a gauntlet of lead, it felt so heavy; though, when at last he struggled into a changed posture, it looked as if it were made of egg-shell porcelain, it was so thin and worn.
‘I wonder,’ he said within himself—and this was his first conscious thought, ‘I wonder if I saved that sweep.’ And then at his side he heard De Blacquaire’s voice.
‘Thank you,’ it was saying. ‘You’re awfully sweet and kind, and I’m very much obliged to you. That is much easier.’
Polson was greatly interested, but in the very act of turning over to look at his enemy, and to find out whom he was addressing, he fell into a deep sleep. The next time he came back to consciousness it was dark, except for a sickly burning oil lamp on a sconce fixed against a wall at a little distance. He began to be aware of the fact that he was amazingly hungry, and the memory of what he imagined to have been his last meal came back to him. He laughed feebly, and he spoke.