‘That is not French,’ he said. ‘Who or what can he be, I wonder?’
‘It is the Breton patois,’ said the Vicomte; ‘I understand it, for old Suzette my foster-mother—my housekeeper now—came from the mountains, and I learned the language ere I could speak my own. He is talking now like any peasant child about cows, and pigs, and other animals; and, look, he shrinks from something as if he expected a blow. But we must do something; we cannot let him lie here.—Go, Jacques, and call Suzette; she is a good nurse, and she will know what to do.’
Mr Maxwell had already lifted the little waif in his arms, however.
‘With your leave, Arnauld,’ he said, ‘I will carry him up to my room. It is big enough for me and half-a-dozen sick children if necessary. It is not the first time by any means that I have tried my hand at nursing, and it will make me feel that I am not quite a cumberer of the ground. Perhaps you will allow old Suzette to come to my help with some fresh tepid water. If we had him out of the sun, and some of this dust washed away, perhaps the little lad may revive. I confess I shall be deeply interested to hear his story.’
But all that the kind clergyman, aided by old Suzette, who came in in her quaint peasant costume, eager to lend her aid, could do, could not bring back sense to poor little Pierre’s wandering brain. They hoped that it would do so, for after they had undressed him, and sponged him tenderly all over with vinegar and water, and laid him in Mr Maxwell’s own bed, which they drew to the open window, so that he should have as much of the air as it was possible to get on that sultry afternoon, he fell into a heavy sleep; but when he awoke he seemed more feverish than ever, and tossed from side to side, throwing off the spotless coverings which Suzette would fain have kept tucked neatly round him, and talked brokenly in English of how he was an English boy, and must get up and go home.’
CHAPTER XXI.
THE OPINION OF DR JULES.
‘TIENS!’ said old Monsieur Croite, the family doctor and trusted friend of the Choisigny family, who had been hastily summoned from Dinard, and who stood looking down at his little patient, with Mr Maxwell and the Vicomte at his elbow. ‘At the first there has been a chill, a most severe one, and that has brought on a slight attack of rheumatic fever. Not bad, that is to say, but still it is there. And on the top of that, as it were, there are signs of irritability of the brain. That may arise from one thing, or it may arise from another. The lad may have been ill-treated, or he may have been frightened, which after all is but another form of ill-treatment, or he may be of weak intellect. That I cannot say for certain, but I suspect much. See!’ And laying his hand on Pierre’s little closely cropped head, he parted the hair just above the right ear, and showed an ugly scar which looked as if it were only newly healed.