“Worse?”
“With the fever so high he must be worse. It saps the life of a man. Poor fellow! I suppose no one can come?”
“No one. I gather you have little hope?” Silence answered the question. All the hours seemed to have been leading up to this moment, yet Wareham was unprepared for its shock. He turned white. Dr Scott went on to soften his unpronounced doom.
“I may be mistaken. One is never absolutely without hope in these cases, where youth is on our side, and I think Sivertsen is more sanguine than I am.”
Wareham went slowly up the stairs, heaviness in his heart. The turmoil about Anne which had filled his mind was suddenly swept into nothingness. Until this moment, it appeared to him he had never realised what hung over them, and all tender recollection of past years surged up like an overwhelming wave. Opening the door, he heard the babble of words rushing incessantly, not loud, but unintermitting. Hugh had grown so accustomed to his presence, that there was no longer a dread of added excitement, and he was admitted at all hours. Sometimes he sat by his bedside, openly in view; sometimes, when the fever ran high, placed himself behind the bed, an unseen watcher. He dropped there now, on a sign from the nurse.
Eyeing the floor, remembrances flitted across it. Hugh the school-boy, as he first recollected him, a fair curly-headed young giant, blue-eyed and open-faced, fighting an older and bigger fellow with indomitable pluck, and at another time taking a punishment which should not have been his. Once on the track, a dozen such memories of acts which had first drawn the two together, upstarted. Times down at Sir Michael’s, where Wareham, a lonely boy, was always welcome. Older life, when Wareham’s intellect had taken him to the front, and Hugh’s idleness hobbled him. Then the days he did not care to think about even now rose up; no words could have made them clearer; he recollected his misery and the young man’s patience, and the recollection thrilled him, striking, as it did, across the mutter of delirium. In natural sequence followed Hugh’s own trouble, which Wareham looked at now through cloudy remorse, impatient with himself that at first sight of the syren he did not fly, that he had been so dull in reading signs, that he had not waited, repressing the hateful letter. Imagination conjured up reproof in Hugh’s hollow eyes; at times, when he caught them fastened on his face, mute reproach, a hundred times more pathetic than words. His ear was constantly on the alert to catch something bearing on it in delirious sentences, he had an insane notion that then he might have quieted him with assurances. Every now and then something struck on his heart with a sound like a knell.
He spent the greater part of the night in the sick-room. Anne’s request that he would himself bring her news of the patient, he ignored. The morning showed a change, but one enemy retired only to make room for another, for which indeed it had been working, and doctors and nurses gathered all their resources to meet deadly weakness. That morning came a request for which Wareham was prepared. Could he see Anne? The doctor had to decide, and gave unwilling permission, fencing it about with limitations of time. In answer to Wareham’s questioning eyes, he said—
“We have not the right to refuse.”
What passed, his friend never learned. He absented himself, and took care not to go up till all fear of meeting with Anne was over. He knew only that the interview had not lasted more than a few minutes, and that the nurse was cross, admitting no right to human nature in a patient. Love, of all disturbing forces, should be shut out of a sick-room. Not venturing to snub the doctor, she snubbed Wareham, while nursing her charge devotedly. But in the course of the day, Hugh looked at him and said “To-morrow,” and he understood that something was to be said to himself. It relieved him, for he had the longing of a woman for a word out of the silence of darkness which he foresaw.
“He wants to speak to you alone,” Dr Scott said the next morning. “The interview won’t be so disturbing, I imagine, as that of yesterday?”