“Worcester?” asked the sick man eagerly.
That was it. Worcester.
“He hasn’t been here, has he? The gentleman hasn’t called to see me?”
The nurse shook his head, and Bayard turned his own away. He would not have believed that his heart would have leaped like that at such a little thing. He felt like a sick boy, sore and homesick with the infinite longing for the love of kin. It was something to know that he was not utterly forgotten. He asked for one of the Boston pears, and ate it with pathetic eagerness.
“There’s been letters,” said the captain; “but the doctor’s orders are agin your seeing ’em this week. There’s quite a pile. You see, its bein’ in the papers let folks know.”
“In the papers! What in the papers?”
“What do you s’pose?” asked the captain proudly. “A fellar don’t swim out in the undertow off Ragged Rock to save a d—— fool of a drunken fisherman every day.”
“I’ll be split and salted!” added the fisherman-nurse, “if we didn’t have to have a watchman here three nights when you was worst, to keep the reporters off ye. Thirteen Windover fellars volunteered for the job, and they wouldn’t none of ’em take a cent for it. They said they’d set up forty nights for you.”
“For me?” whispered the sick man. His eyes filled for the first time since the Clara Em went ashore on Ragged Rock. Something new and valuable seemed to have entered life as suddenly as the comfort of kin and the support of friends, and that bright, inspiriting atmosphere, which one calls the world, had gone from him. He had not expected that precious thing—the love of those for whom we sacrifice ourselves. He felt the first thrill of it with gratitude touching to think of, in so young and lovable a man, with life and all its brilliant and beautiful possibilities before him.