"You are right—quite!"
"I feel sure I am. When he can talk he will tell you—if he remembers. I wonder how much they remember—except the relief and the blessed happiness of it? Lord Coombe, I believe as I believe I'm in this room, that when he knew he was going to face the awful risk of trying to escape, he knew he mustn't tell her. And he knew that in crawling through dangers and hiding in ditches he could never be sure of being able to lie down to sleep and concentrate on sending his soul to her. So he told her that he might not come for some time. Oh, lord! If he'd been caught and killed he could never— No! No!" obstinately, "even then he would have got back in some form—in some way. I've got to the point of believing as much as that. He was hers!"
"Yes. Yes. Yes," was all his slow answer. But there was deep thought in each detached word and when she went away he walked up and down the room with leisurely steps, looking down at the carpet.
As many hours of the day and night as those in authority would allow him Lord Coombe sat and watched by Donal's bed. He watched from well hidden anxiousness to see every subtle change recording itself on his being; he watched from throbbing affection and longing to see at once any tinge of growing natural colour, any unconscious movement perhaps a shade stronger than the last. It was his son who lay there, he told himself, it was the son he had remotely yearned for in his loneliness; if he had been his father watching his sunk lids with bated breath, he would have felt just these unmerciful pangs.
He also watched because in the boy's hours of fevered unconsciousness he could at times catch words—sometimes broken sentences, which threw ghastly light upon things past. Sometimes their significance was such as made him shudder. A condition the doctors most dreaded was one in which monstrous scenes seem lived again—scenes in which cruelties and maddening suffering and despairing death itself rose vividly from the depth of subconsciousness and cried aloud for vengeance. Sometimes Donal shuddered, tearing at his chest with both hands, more than once he lay sobbing until only skilled effort prevented his sobs from becoming choking danger.
"It may be years after he regains his strength," the chief physician said, "years before it will be safe to ask him for detail. On my own part I would never bring such horrors back to a man. You may have noticed how the men who have borne most, absolutely refuse to talk."
"It's an accursed fool who tries to make them," broke in one of the younger men. "There was a fellow who had been pinned up against a barn door and left to hang there—and a coarse, loud-mouthed lunatic asked him to describe how it felt. The chap couldn't stand it. Do you know what he did? He sprang at him and knocked him down. He apologized afterwards and said it was his nerves. But there's not a man who was there who will ever speak to that other brute again."
The man whose name was Jackson seemed to be a clinging memory to the skeleton when its mind wandered in the past Hades. He had been in some way very close to the boy. He had died somehow—cruelly. There had been blood—blood—and no one would help. Some devil had even laughed. When that scene came back the doctors and nurses held their breath and silently worked hard. Nothing seemed quite as heart-rending as what had happened to Jackson. But there were endless other things to shudder at.