The jarl wakes. The jarl looks up.
Over him is bending a huge male figure, dressed in a long-sleeved waistcoat and lofty nightcap. Pained though he is, Claude cannot help thinking he is the ugliest man he ever saw. He is a giant in stature. He kneels beside young Alwyn, and there is a kindness visible in his little grey eyes, as he strokes Claude’s face, just as if he had been a colt. Byarnie, for such is this giant’s name, soon finds out how matters stand, and gently he lifts Claude in his arms and places him on his shoulder, and then marches off.
Preposterous and humorous thoughts will often pass through the mind, even when the body is in agony; and now, Claude could not help recalling the story of Jack the Giant-killer, and fancied himself Jack being carried away on the shoulders of Blunderbore. But not to a castle with a lawn littered with skulls and bones was Claude borne.
He had probably fainted with pain, and when he again became sensible he was no longer on Byarnie’s back, but in a comfortable warm bed in an antique but well-furnished room, and being attended to by a couple of old dames, both dressed alike, in gowns of dark rustling silk, and elevated steeple-like skull-caps of white net. And both, too, were alike wrinkled and ugly. They had almost finished dressing his leg.
“Thou must not speak, dear; thou must lie still and sleep.”
Good enough English, but spoken in a strange monotone—no rising or falling of the voice.
In a few minutes the work was done, and poor Claude found infinite relief. Then they brought him coffee and milk, and made him drink, and a little dram of schnapps which he also had to swallow. They evidently thought him a child, and stroked his face as Byarnie had done. One left the room, and the other took her seat beside the bed, and, still gently passing her hand downwards over Claude’s face, began to “croon” over that beautiful English lullaby—
“Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,
Holy angels guard thy bed;
Countless blessings without number,
Gently falling on thy head.”
The voice was quavering, but the music was sweet. How soft the pillows felt—they were eider-down. How light the quilt—that also was of the same. Under such circumstances it is little wonder that Claude soon forgot everything and fell into a deep and childlike slumber.
The scenes, it seemed to Claude, were continually shifting. He did not feel that he had slept, only that he had just closed his eyes and opened them again, when lo! the crones were gone, the sunlight was no longer shimmering in through the crimson and yellow flowers in the little window as he had last seen it. The room was lighted by a lofty lamp that stood on an ancient high-backed oaken piano, throwing a flood of light over all the apartment. A great grey cat was singing herself to sleep on the piano stool, a fire was burning on the low hearth—a fire of peat and wood, that looked very cheerful—and above the window, in a tiny wicker cage, hung a tiny and miserable-looking snow-flea.