"What you want, boys," he remarked, with great earnestness, to the few faithful retainers whom the potent spell of gingerpop rendered insensible to other considerations,—"what you want is to take plenty of exercise in the open air, and smoke freely. Tobacco is a great—a—prophylactic."
Meetings of citizens were held, and all the usual sanitary means adopted and put in execution. An uninhabited farm-house, whose rightful owner was in some unknown part of the world, was chosen for hospital uses, and thither all victims of the disease were carried at once. From the beginning, Dr. Horton had been most prompt and active in suggesting prudential measures, and in seeing them carried out. By universal consent, he was invested with full powers. Dr. Starkey, the only other physician, on the ground of failing health, willingly submitted to the situation. The young physician's entire energies were aroused. He worked indefatigably, sparing neither strength nor pocket; for among the victims were several heads of families, whose sickness—and, in a few cases, whose death—left want and misery behind them.
One of the greatest obstacles encountered was the scarcity of nurses, most of those responding to the call becoming themselves victims in a few days. Two men only—veteran soldiers—were equal to the occasion, and acted in multifarious capacities—as drivers of the ambulance, housekeepers, cooks, nurses, undertakers, and grave-diggers.
On the evening when the certainty of the outbreak was established, Dr. Horton, after a day of excessive labor, went around to Mrs. Fairfield's. It was a dark, rainy evening, and the house seemed strangely cheerless and silent. A faint light shone from one upper window, and he fancied, as he reached the steps, that he saw a girlish figure leaning against the window-sash. The housemaid who admitted him, after a second ring, did so with a hesitating and constrained air, eyed him askance as she set her lamp upon the parlor table, and retreated hastily.
He was kept waiting, too, as it seemed to him, an unnecessarily long time. He was tired and a little unstrung. He was in that mood when the touch of a warm, tender hand is balm and cordial at once, and the delay fretted him. He could hear muffled footfalls over his head, and the murmur of voices, as he wandered about the room, taking up various small articles in a listless way, to throw them down impatiently again; pulling about the loose sheets of music on the piano, and wondering why so lovely a creature as Florence need to be so scrupulously exact about her toilet, with an impatient lover chafing and fretting not twenty paces away. But at last there was a sound of descending footsteps, a rustling of skirts, and the door opened to admit—Mrs. Fairfield. She, at all events, had not been spending the precious moments at her toilet-table. Something must have thrown her off her guard. She was negligent in her attire, and certain nameless signs of the blighting touch of Time were allowed to appear, it may be safely asserted for the first time, to the eyes of mortal man. She was also flustered in manner, and, after giving Dr. Horton the tips of her cold fingers, retreated to the remotest corner of the room, and sank into an easy-chair. He noticed as she swept by him that her person exhaled camphor like a furrier's shop.
"It's dreadful, isn't it?" she murmured, plaintively, holding a handkerchief saturated with that drug before her face. "Perfectly dreadful!"
Dr. Horton was at first puzzled, and then, as the meaning of her remark came to him, a good deal amused. He had not felt like laughing, all day; but now he was obliged to smile, in the palm of his hand, at the small, agitated countenance of his future mother-in-law, seen for the first time without "war-paint or feathers."
"It is certainly a misfortune," he said, reassuringly; "but it is not wise to become excited. The disease is confined at present to the lower part of the town, and, with the precautions which are to be taken, it will hardly spread beyond it."
Mrs. Fairfield shook her head incredulously.
"There's no telling," she murmured, sniffing at her handkerchief with a mournful air.