"Now, take this medicine, Mr. Jerrolds, and repay me for this long story by going directly to sleep."
I took it, lay for a moment in a dreamy wonder, and drifted off. As she had said, the uphill journey had begun.
That afternoon I saw the doctor, a grizzled, kindly man, and it was he who told me what I had already somehow divined—that I owed my life to Harriet Buxton.
"I never saw such nursing," he said frankly; "the woman has a real genius. It was nip and tuck with you, Mr. Jerrolds, and she simply set her teeth and wouldn't give up! One can't wonder the American nurses get such prices—they're worth it. Now it's hold hard and cultivate your patience, and get back that two or three stone we lost during the siege, and then good-bye to me!"
But oh, how long it was! Day after day, and night after night, and day after day again I counted the pieces of furniture in the bare, dull room and read faces into the hideous wall-paper and stared into the empty window. The little night-light punctuated the dark; the feeble sunlight struggled through the rain. The few kindly friends who called upon me I could not see; their sympathetic commonplaces were unendurable to my weakened nerves. Had it not been for the return, now and then, of the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, weakness and irritation.
How Harriet Buxton bore with my whims and fads and downright rudeness, I cannot tell. When in a fit of contrition I asked her this, she smiled and said that men were generally irritable.
"But I should go mad if I were obliged to humour the caprices of such a bear as I!"
"But you are not a nurse!" she answered quietly.
After ten days of steady convalescence, when I was propped up a little upon my pillows and could feed myself very handily from an ever-increasingly varied menu, I asked suddenly if she had heard from Roger lately.
"Yes," she said promptly, "only yesterday. I was waiting till you asked. Before I give you the letter I must tell you that they are no longer in Paris: they have gone back to America."