“He is dead of the plague,” they replied, “and the other also that came with him, who fled before the sickness, fell dead of it on the roadside, going to the sea.”
“Why should I go?” he replied, and he turned threateningly to his weapon, as if in menace of their presence.
“You have no one to leave behind,” they answered eagerly, “and you are old.”
“Liars,” he rejoined, “let the little city save itself!” and he wheeled and went into his house, and they saw that they had erred in not remembering his daughter, whose presence they had once prized. They saw that they had angered him beyond soothing; and they went back in grief, for two of them had lost dear relatives by the fell sickness. When they told what had happened, the people said: “We will send the women; he will listen to them—he had a daughter.”
That afternoon, when all the hills lay still and dead, and nowhere did bird or breeze stir, the women came, and they found him seated with his back turned to the town. He was looking into the deep woods, into the hot shadows of the trees.
“We have come to bring you to the little city,” they said to him; “the sick grow in numbers every hour.”
“It is safe in the hills,” he answered, not looking at them. “Why do the people stay in the valley?”
“Every man has a friend, or a wife, or a child, ill or dying, and every woman has a husband, or a child, or a friend, or a brother. Cowards have fled, and many of them have fallen by the way.”
“Last summer I lay sick here many weeks and none came near me—why should I go to the little city?” he demanded austerely. “Four times I saved it, and of all that I saved none came to give me water to drink, or food to eat, and I lay burning with fever, and thirsty and hungry—God of heaven, how thirsty!”
“We did not know,” they answered humbly; “you came to us so seldom, we had forgotten; we were fools.”