So is a sick bed. A man may have passed through the greatest college in the world and carried off its highest honors; may have traveled over every foot of land and sea; may have learned all else that this earth has to teach him—yet if he has never had a good, dangerous, rallying spell of illness, his education has been neglected.
Alexander Lyon had been a strong, arrogant, despotic man, and not from any internal force of the spirit, but by the external support of great physical strength, sound health and large wealth. Of the reverses of these he had no experience in his own person, and not enough of sympathy with others to realize them to his own imagination. Poverty, sickness, death, were to him abstract ideas. He had no personal knowledge of them.
True, he had lost both his parents by death; but they were very aged; and his father had died in an instant, like a man called away on a hasty journey; and his mother had followed, after a short illness; and their decease had left upon his mind the impression of absence rather than of death.
Certainly, within a few hours before his duel he had been forced to think of his own possible death, but it was as of a sudden and violent catastrophe, which in his great excitement he was desperate enough to brave and meet.
But he never imagined being wounded and mutilated, and laid helpless and languishing on a bed of weakness and pain.
Yet here he was.
On the third day after that upon which he had been wounded, an irritative fever set in, and from having been stupid and quiet he became delirious and violent.
General Lyon had left him, as we have seen.
And Francis Tredegar had also, soon after, gone to London on imperative business.
And Alexander was now in the hands of the skilful surgeon whom the magnanimity of Prince Ernest had placed in attendance upon him. And the surgeon was assisted by the valet Simms and by the servants of the hotel.