Clash of Arms: A Romance

by John Bloundelle-Burton

Then the darkness became intense and he knew no more.

[CHAPTER XXIV.]

THE WEIRD WOMAN

Andrew Vause raised himself on his left elbow--though his right arm and shoulder were so intolerably painful that it caused him agony to do so--and endeavoured to peer into the darkness in which he was enveloped. Endeavoured to discover, or imagine, where he was; also to remember what had happened.

Yet he could recollect nothing, had no more conception where he was, or why he was lying on his back suffering excruciating agony accompanied by a burning thirst, than he would have possessed had he been but that moment born.

All was chaos to him.

As, however, the lowest form of creature on which nature confers existence, even though owning no power of reasoning or memory, or the knowledge of why or how it so exists, yet seeks for the necessities that existence requires and for the wherewithal to supply its wants, so the man lying there sought for some assuagement of that intolerable thirst. Sought for it by endeavouring unconsciously to moisten his lips with his dry and parched tongue--then, failing in this attempt, relapsed into the lethargy, followed by the oblivion, which had previously been his.

Yet again, later on--though he knew it not himself, no more than he knew that many more hours had passed since first his eyes had opened--he awoke a second time, still dazed, still unconscious of who, or what, or where he was; knowing only as the unreasoning brute-beast knows that it is suffering, yet also knowing not why.

But now his agony was so intense--the agony of thirst! for the other pain, that of his right side, might be borne--that, like some wounded creature, he writhed and tossed about upon whatever object it might be on which he lay, and in his writhings and the tossings of his long arms his left hand struck something. Something that, even to his bemused mind, seemed to give promise of containing the wherewithal to quench his thirst. Whereon the long fingers twining round that object found that it held water. Then, still with no knowledge of what he did, with nothing beyond that instinct shared by the lowest of creatures to tell him that what he was doing would bring him relief, he drew the vessel nearer and drank. Drank and drank, long and copiously, until at last there was no drop left, then sank back once more, and once more lapsed into unconsciousness.

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