There, at the tavern, we found him in a stupor. Neglected, without the barest necessities, he had had no medical attendance of any kind. In a room high up under the roof he was lying across a broken bedstead, on a worn-out husk mattress, with nothing to shade him from the fierce, blazing sun or the crawling flies that kept up a loud, incessant buzz. And he had been sick eight days. On the floor old Mounse had crammed himself into the one shady corner.
Old Mounse was a besotted beggar round town who had arrived at the state where the rims of his eyelids appeared to be turned inside out and resembled raw beefsteak. The landlady, who was somewhat more compassionate than her worser half, fearing that Boydell might die on her hands, had sent up old Mounse, an hour ago, with a little gruel which he had swallowed himself, and was then peacefully snoring in the corner.
We sent immediately for a physician, and employed ourselves in having Boydell removed to another apartment, where, at least, he might escape being broiled to death by the sun, or devoured by flies. When the doctor arrived, we had him fixed in quite comfortable quarters. Boydell’s disease, as we feared, was a severe form of the typhoid fever. From the lifeless stupor, he suddenly broke into the wild ravings of delirium, so that our combined strength could hardly avail to keep him upon the bed.
We reinstated old Mounse on his watch, only with strict orders that the granulated eyelids were to be kept wide open. Old Mounse was one of those rare persons with the delirium tremens, who had hovered on the verge of dissolution for thirty years, and still lived along. Palsied and feeble, and crippled and unshaven, and dirty and whiny, he just managed to keep himself on this side of the grave. The adjective “old,” which had become a prefix to his name, could not have been better applied, for his clothes, too, were ready at any moment to keep him company and return to their original element. Old Mounse’s one merit was, he had become so aged that he could just do what he was told and nothing more. The case had assumed altogether a new aspect to him, now that Boydell seemed to have friends.
Every day the doctor reported the condition of his patient, which grew more and more unfavorable, until one morning he came and told us he thought Boydell had not over twenty-four hours to live. We went immediately to the tavern with him. Boydell, for the first time since his illness, was perfectly conscious. Here, in the silence of this barren room, unhallowed by the presence of sorrowing ones, the wild, reckless life was drawing to a close. It seemed as if the specter hands of death were already stretched out to snap the last binding thread. The face on the pillow, haggard and ghastly with its hollow cheeks, very little resembled the one over which that weary, indefinable expression, the shadow, the forerunner of the fever, had crept but three weeks ago. Boydell recognized me, and motioned to a chair beside the bed. He made two or three efforts before he spoke.
“I am going to die—”
We could only answer by silence. It was something terrible to see this strong man, now weaker than an infant, lie calmly on the brink of eternity; even old Mounse dropped his beefy lids, and drew back with a subdued sniffle of awe. We asked if there was any thing that he wished done. After a little he turned his head that his voice might the better reach us.
“I have relatives—it will not matter to them that I am gone; they hold themselves up in the world; it will only be a disgrace wiped out; but—I would like them to know, and when I am dead, why—I wish you would please write to—to my brother. I have not heard from him for nearly fifteen years.”
He closed his eyes, and seemed to dream, but presently roused himself, and looked anxiously about the room.
“There was something else—oh, yes. Tell him that—I am gone. He is rector of St. Paul’s Church, S——, Lower Canada.” He paused and then said slowly, as though repeating his words for the first time, “It is no matter—but tell him I am—dead.”