The doctor smiled sadly.
“If he only remembers her!” he murmured. “No lesion; long overdoing followed by anemia, too strong emotion, and doubtless some fixed idea,” the young doctor rambled on as he looked at the portraits of Helia which Poufaille was taking down. “It’s a kind of intoxication of the nervous system—a railway brain, as it were; we’ll give him things to build him up, and rest and silence in the meantime.”
“Doc—doctor!” Poufaille stammered, livid with fear, “is the disease catching?”
“No fear!” the doctor answered, as he glanced at the hairy face of Poufaille, with its crimson health. “It only comes from exaggerated intellectual functions.”
“Oh, I’m better already!” said Poufaille, reassured.
Phil was delirious for a week.
His mind, sunk in abysses of sleep, made obscure efforts to come back to the light of day. Sometimes an ocean of forgetfulness rolled him in its waves. Sometimes great flashes of light illuminated his consciousness in its least details and gave to his dreams the hard relief of marble.
Oftenest he simply wandered, mingling Helia and Suzanne, seeing in his nightmare guitars, yellow on one side and blue on the other, like worlds lighted up at once by sun and moon—a whole skyful of guitars, amid which, motionless, the skull of the poet-painter-sculptor-musician thought constantly, never sleeping—until the thought burned like a red-hot iron, and then Phil put his hand to his own burning forehead and asked for something to drink.
But there was some one to anticipate his wish. A gentle hand raised his head on the pillow and an anxious face bent over him, seeking to read his eyes, now dulled, and now brilliant with the light of fever.
“Is it Helia?” Phil asked.