I hung about outside till the hospital attendant paid his belated visit, and then questioned him.
"A shot through the lung," he told me, "and a bout of fever on top of it. Lung healing, needs nursing. Do you know him?"
"He is from my country. If you'll tell me what to do I'll see to him."
"Then I'll leave him to you. We've got our hands full over there," and he gave me simple directions as to treatment, and told me to report to him each day.
And so my work was cut out for me, and for the time being all thought of escape was put aside.
It was as much as I could do to keep Le Marchant from talking, but I insisted and bullied him into the silence that was good for him, and had my reward in his healing lung and slowly returning strength.
To keep him quiet I sat much with him, and told him by degrees pretty nearly all that had happened to me. In the matter of Torode I could not at first make up my mind whether to disclose the whole or not, and so told him only how John Ozanne and the Swallow encountered Main Rouge, and came to grief, and how the privateer, having picked me up, had lodged me on board the Joséphine.
I thought he eyed me closely while I told of it, and then doubted if it was not my own lack of candour that prompted the thought.
His recovery was slow work at best, for the wound had brought on fever, and the fever had reduced him terribly, and when the later journeying renewed the wound trouble he had barely strength to hang on. But he was an Island man, and almost kin to me for the love I bore Carette, and I spared myself no whit in his service, thinking ever of her. And the care and attention I was able to give him, and perhaps the very fact of companionship, and the hopes I held out of escape together when he should be well enough, wrought mightily in him. So much so that the hospital man, when he looked in, now and again, to see how we were getting on, told me he would want my help elsewhere as soon as my present patient was on his feet again, as I was evidently built for tending sick men.
As soon as Le Merchant's lung healed sufficiently to let him speak without ill consequences, I got out of him particulars of the disaster that had befallen them.