"He's been going on like that all night," whispered the nurse; then she added gently, "He seems to have a wonderful love for you, sir." She was another nurse, just called in, still ignorant of such gossip as circulated in the servants' quarters. Constrained to listen to hideous raving, to heartrending revelations, this delirium of love touched her to the core. She knew that the famous preacher's wife lay dead in the next room, and being a tender-hearted woman, strove to comfort him.
"I hear so much that is so shocking," she whispered. "Only the other day I was nursing a gentleman who cursed his brother, who—died cursing him! And after that, this—— It must be a comfort to you...."
For a fortnight the fever raged. During long hours each day the brothers were together, united by the mocking fiend of delirium. And during those hours Mark lived again his youth. Nothing seemed to be forgotten. But delirium achieved more than reproduction—revelation. Mark, like all healthy boys, had concealed his love for his brother. Of the nature and extent of that love the elder had formed no conception—till now, when its steady stream poured down in flood.
After the first shock of seeing his brother's senseless body, Archibald told himself (and had said as much to David Ross) that it would be well if Mark departed in peace out of a world wherein he had suffered cruelly. But David Ross shook his head.
"He will not die," he said, with conviction, albeit the two doctors in attendance held the contrary opinion.
And then, gradually, Archibald came to regard his brother's ravings as the shadows of an inestimable substance. Computing his gains, he discovered with poignant consternation, that his losses far outweighed them. His name was in men's mouths; he held power, wealth, health in the hollow of his hand. But was there one fellow-creature who truly loved him? Day after day, Mark's innumerable friends came to the door: Pynsent, confessing that he was unable to work from anxiety; Jim Corrance, haggard with sleeplessness; Greatorex, who seemed to spend his time on the doormat; Albert and Mary Batley. And besides these, humbler friends: waifs and strays, reclaimed drunkards, factory girls, who had read in the papers that the man who had been kind to them lay dying.
Always Archibald had obtained what he desired; but it never occurred to him that he desired mean things, or rather that the things so desired were mean in comparison with other things which he had ignored. None the less, the habit of seeking strenuously what he coveted remained. He realised, inexorably, that he coveted his brother's love. And if Mark died, that love once given so freely, then changed into hate, and at last given back in awful mockery, would perish with him.
It is possible, of course, that David Ross cleared his vision. He told David the little which David did not know. In a moment of profound humiliation he professed himself willing to resign his see. David indicated other penance, not alien to Christian sense. In and around Parham, he pointed out, a transgressor might bow the neck beneath the yoke of a labour harder than any to be found even in convict establishments. That Archibald should question his fitness for the task assigned him convinced David of the magnitude of the change within him.
Upon the day, however, when the doctors agreed that the crisis of the disease was approaching, Archibald's misery reached its culminating point. Returning life meant sanity. Mark would awake from a sleep which had lasted forty-eight hours to the realisation of the past, or he would sink into the coma and collapse which precede dissolution.
After some discussion it was agreed that Mark's eyes, when they opened, should rest on a face dear and familiar to him, yet dissociated from the events which had succeeded Betty's marriage. Mrs. Corrance had come to town; she had helped to nurse Mark; she was staying in the house and could be summoned at any moment. Accordingly, when at length Mark Samphire returned from his wanderings, the first person he saw was his old friend, as she sat sewing at the foot of his bed. She smiled serenely, waiting for him to speak. None the less, he kept silence so long that her hand began to tremble. She was sure that he was conscious and that he must be thinking of Betty.