"I will see to it--I will see to it," replied Richard de Ashby, "and send her to you presently. I cannot visit you again to-night, for I must away to the castle, but to-morrow I will come to you."
Thus saying, he quitted the wretched room, and closed the door after him. The wounded man heard the key turn in the lock, and murmured to himself--"The scoundrel! to leave me here a whole night and day without help or 'tendance; but if I get better, I'll pay him for his care--I'll break his neck, or bring him to the gallows. I surely shall live--I have been wounded often before, and have always recovered,--but I never felt anything like this, and my heart seems to fail me. I saw worms and serpents round me last night, and the face of the girl I threw into the Thames up by the thicket,--it kept looking at me, blue and draggled as when she rose the last time. I heard the scream too!--Oh yes, I shall live--'tis nothing of a wound! I have seen men with great gashes--twice as large. Ha! there is some one coming!" and he started and listened as the lock was turned, and the door opened.
The step was that of a woman, and the moment after, Kate Greenly approached his bed-side. Her fair face was pale, her lips had lost their rosy red, her cheek had no longer the soft, round fulness of high health; and though her eye was as lustrous and as bright as ever, yet the light thereof was of a feverish, unsteady, restless kind. There was a sort of abstracted look, too, in them. It seemed as if some all-engrossing subject in her own heart called her thoughts continually back from external things, whenever she gave her mind to them for a moment.
Walking straight to the bed, and still holding the lamp in her hand, she gazed full and gravely upon Dighton's face; but the brain was evidently busy with other matters than that on which her eyes rested; and it was not till the wounded man exclaimed, impatiently--"Well, what do you stare at?" that she roused herself from her fit of abstraction.
"He has sent me," she said, "to tend some wounds you have received, but I can do you little good. The priest of our parish indeed gave me some small skill in surgery; but methinks 'tis more a physician for the soul than for the body that you want."
"That is no affair of thine," replied the man, sharply--"look to my wound, girl, and see if thou hast got any cooling thing that will take the fire out, for I burn, I burn!"
"Thou shalt burn worse hereafter," said Kate, sitting down by his bed-side; "but show me the hurt, though methinks 'tis of little avail."
"There," cried the man, tearing down the clothes, and exposing his brawny chest, "'tis nothing--a scratch--one may cover it with a finger; and yet how red it is around, and it burns inwardly, back to my very shoulder."
Kate stooped her head down, and held the lamp to the spot where the sword of the old Earl of Ashby had entered, and examined it attentively for a full minute. As the man had said, it was but a small and insignificant looking injury to overthrow the strength of that robust form, and lay those muscular limbs in prostrate misery upon a couch of sickness, as feeble as those of an infant. You might indeed have covered the actual spot with the point of a finger; but round about it for more than a hand's breadth on either side, was a space of a deep red colour, approaching to a bluish cast as it came near the wound. It was swollen; too, though not much, and one or two small white spots appeared in the midst of that fiery circle.
When she had finished her examination, she raised her eyes to the man's face, and gazed on it again, with a look of grave and solemn thought.