The nun laid her arm on him. “Lean back now, dear, and it’ll be all right, I’m telling you.” And she gently but ineffectually tried to press him down.
The sick man turned his face on her, into the candlelight. He was long unshaved, but the two things that struck me most, after the crop of gray bristle, were the dry cavern of his mouth and the scalding intensity of his eyes. I was terrified lest those eyes should alight on me, and yet I gazed hard at him. His lips were flaked with yellow scales, and dry mucus was in strings at the corners of his mouth. His night-shirt gaped open, showing a very hairy black chest. He seemed a shrunken man, not a very tall man, but his shoulders were broad and his chin very square. To support his chin seemed the great effort of his jaws. It fell open on him, giving him a vacant foolish expression, with his teeth so black and irregular, and he tried his best to clamp his teeth tight. The working of his jaws, however, scarcely interfered with his whistling breath or his gasping words.
“They will be at the back door, I say. God!” a feeble scream and whimper. “Bring me my clothes. You’re hiding them on me. Oh, why are you hiding them on me? Can’t you give me my clothes?”
“You’re home now, dear. You’re home now,” the nurse assured him. “Isn’t that your own clock on the mantel? Lie down now and I’ll make you a comfortable drink and put you to sleep.”
“Boy, fetch me my coat.”
“Don’t mind him,” the nun turned to me, “but do you cover his feet.”
His feet had lost the gray blanket. They stared blankly up from the end of the bed. I covered them snugly, glad to have something to do.
“It’s all the whisky in him,” the nun whispered when at last he went limp and lay down. “It’s got to his brain. I thought he was over the pneumonia, but that whisky has him saturated. The poor thing! The poor thing!”
“Well, I must be going now,” the sick man ejaculated, and with one twist of his body he was out of bed.
“Oh, keep yourself covered, for the love of God!” The poor nun ran after him with the blanket as his old flannel night shirt fluttered up his legs.