“I have had enough of this talking outside my window. I tell you I don’t know where I am. Send for Mrs. Mancredo. She’s a straight woman, but by George, how she will lie. Why, Miss Ethel, I didn’t know you. You are looking old and queer, somehow. I’m frightened somehow. This room and place—? Send for Robert. He’ll take me round to my hotel in his trap, as he did yesterday.”
“Take my arm for a moment, and we will walk up and down the balcony,” said Ethel. “Your foot feels as if it were asleep, does it not?”
“It feels as though it were waking up. Get out, man! Hold off there!” said he, bracing back against the wall ready to strike out at Fleetwood, his nurse, who approached too much in the character of an attendant to escape distrust.
“I am here, Captain Grove,” said Ethel. “You are my guest.”
“I am your guest, Miss Ethel? Well, that’s all right then. You hear that, you peeping idiot back there? I’m Miss Ethel’s guest; but I tell you others, the whole posse of you, to keep away from me, or I’ll knock you all down, like ninepins in an alley. They are for shutting me up somewhere. I have heard lots of talk about it, and if that dark fellow isn’t a doctor, what is he, with his soft-stepping ways?
“There, look at that. There are my roses, not wilted yet; and there is my Petrarch. There’s no drunk about me. I was here yesterday. I remember everything: only I forget some of it. Oh,—oh, Miss Ethel, what has happened?”
“Just this: you have been ill, but you are getting well now.”
“There now, you’re telling the truth. But when have I been ill, and where have I been ill?” said he, reassured, yet with the anger of a proud man fighting against the treachery of his faculties. “Look here. That’s—that’s Mrs. Mancredo that I hear crying somewhere. It breaks me all up to have that woman so unhappy. Come, Miss Ethel, if you believe in prayer, down on your knees, and tell them up there to keep paralysis off a fellow like me. I’m not half a bad lot, I tell you. No, indeed; I’m not half bad.”
At last Ethel brought him to see that if he would submit to patient thought he would soon bridge the mental hiatus that now afflicted him, since his mind had been abstracted from things about him. But that only made him anxious to have one good fight with the best fellow there, to prove that there was nothing the matter with him, and never had been.
“Well, then, take me,” said Daniel Daksha, coming up; his presence so full of blessed content that Reginald laid his hand in that man’s with a comforted sense that “old Heem,” as he was sometimes called, would see him through all right.