Davidina accepted the duty which fate had laid on her, and nursed him with devoted detachment.
‘It’s wonderful how those two do love each other!’ remarked Mrs. Trimblerigg, after viewing a sick-bed scene where Jonathan was as one hanging between life and death in Davidina’s arms: ‘And yet to look at them sometimes you wouldn’t think it.’
That was on the first day of desperate symptoms, preliminary to the arrival of the doctor, when Davidina, for lack of higher guidance was nursing him with prescriptions of her own choosing. He had horrible pains; she pursued them with the old-fashioned remedies which, in remote country districts, still effect cures, and for which the undeserving doctor comes presently to receive the fee. Fore and aft, wherever a pain came catching his breath, she skinned him with untempered applications of hot raw mustard; and after five hours of it he still survived.
When the doctor came he could not but admire her handiwork. ‘Well, you have punished him!’ he said. He examined the patient and gave the illness its name—double pneumonia. Its importance was a satisfaction to Mr. Trimblerigg and Davidina alike; they took it as a worthy occupation;—he to be ill of it, she to have the nursing of it. For the next fortnight brother and sister enjoyed each other thoroughly, more than they had ever done in their lives before. They even became fond of each other. But character remained; the fondness was critical.
The day that the doctor pronounced him out of danger, Mr. Trimblerigg had already felt so much better, that he wanted to get up. Life having become attractive again, he was impatient to go out and meet it once more on his own terms. And when he had seen from the medical eye that all was to be well with him, he was as anxious to have word of it as though it were a compliment on his good looks. ‘What does he say of me?’ he asked when his sister returned from seeing the doctor to the door.
Davidina, having measured him judicially with her eye, settled that he was well enough for an indulgence that would be mutual.
‘He says you are out of danger,’ she answered; ‘so now you are in it again.’
‘In what?’
‘In your own way,’ she replied, elliptically. ‘It’s done you no harm being ill. To be safe from yourself for a fortnight never happened to you before. Mother calls it a God’s mercy you’re still alive. Perhaps it is: I don’t know.’
Mr. Trimblerigg lay trying to read her face and the meanings behind it. ‘Have I been a great trouble?’ he asked at last.