He panted out these words in a series of hoarse cries; and all he while, as far as his hands would allow, he went through the movements of one having a desperate struggle with a great dog—fending off its efforts to get at his throat. Again clapping his hand to his arm with a moan of pain, and ending by striking at the animal which had attacked him blow after blow, to sink back looking hideously ghastly and perfectly exhausted by his efforts.
“Poor fellow!” said the lawyer, as the sick man lay with his eyes half closed. “How unlucky for the dog to spring at him. Seems to have completely shattered his brain.”
“Yes,” said the doctor gravely, as he held his patient’s wrist.
“Terrible work, sir,” continued the lawyer, looking at George Harrington, but the young man made no reply. He was staring thoughtfully at the wretched man, apparently waiting the moment when he must lean over the head of the sofa, and hold him down; but all the while following up a clue which his active imagination painted before him in vivid colours.
For, as he stood there, the wanderings of the delirious man’s brain evoked a chain of ideas, and he saw farther than his two companions, who attributed the violence of the paroxysms to the shock caused by the dog’s attack.
“The trouble must be farther back than that,” he thought. “The dog had dashed at him as if for some former cause,” and the incoherent panting words which he heard better than his companions at the feet could, he read as by the key suggested to his mind. Once started upon this track, all came very easily.
“There must have been some old encounter when the dog had attacked him. His words suggested it all, even to the effect of the encounter. He had been bitten and—then—to be sure, there was that broken walking-stick!—he had retaliated with a blow of such savage violence that he believed he had killed the dog; and, of course, it was perfectly clear—the next time they met, and the poor brute had sufficiently recovered, it had dashed at him.”
Saul Harrington’s breath came in a low, stertorous way, as Mrs Hampton just then re-entered the room, and crept to her husband’s side on tip-toe to whisper:
“Gertrude has gone herself. I’ll go back and wait till she returns.”
George Harrington felt a pang of disappointment as he asked himself why he had not gone, but the reason came to remind him, for as Mrs Hampton stole back to the door, Saul uttered a savage cry, and they had hard work to keep him down, as he threw his head from side to side, gnashing his teeth, snapping, and making a hideous, worrying sound, such as might come from a dog. For some moments no coherent words left his lips—nothing but these terrible, low, hoarse cries, and the doctor whispered from where he stood to George Harrington: