“His lordship is very ill, I fear, sir?” said Angela interrogatively.
“I left him at eleven o’clock this morning with but scanty hope of finding him alive after sundown. The woman I left to nurse him was his house-steward’s wife, and far above the common kind of plague-nurse. I did not think she would turn traitor.”
“Her husband has proved a false steward. The house has been robbed of plate and valuables, as I believe, from signs I saw below stairs; and I suppose husband and wife went off together.”
“Alack! madam, this pestilence has brought into play some of the worst attributes of human nature. The tokens and loathly boils which break out upon the flesh of the plague-stricken are less revolting to humanity than the cruelty of those who minister to the sick, and whose only desire is to profit by the miseries that surround them; wretches so vile that they have been known wilfully to convey the seeds of death from house to house, in order to infect the sound, and so enlarge their area of gains. It was an artful device of those plunderers to paint the red cross on the door, and thus scare away any visitor who might have discovered their depredations. But you, madam, a being so young and fragile, have you no fear of the contagion?”
“Nay, sir, I know that I am in God’s hand. Yonder poor gentleman is not the first plague-patient I have nursed. There was a nun came from Holland to our convent at Louvain last year, and had scarce been one night in the house before tokens of the pestilence were discovered upon her. I helped the infirmarian to nurse her, and with God’s help we brought her round. My aunt, the reverend mother, bade me give her the best wine there was in the house—strong Spanish wine that a rich merchant had given to the convent for the use of the sick—and it was as though that good wine drove the poison from her blood. She recovered by the grace of God after only a few days’ careful nursing. Finding his lordship stricken with such great weakness, I ventured to give him a draught of the best sack I could find in his cellar.”
“Dear lady, thou art a miracle of good sense and compassionate bounty. I doubt thou hast saved thy sister from widow’s weeds,” said Dr. Hodgkin, seated by the bed, with his fingers on the patient’s wrist, and his massive gold watch in the other hand. “This sound sleep promises well, and the pulse beats somewhat slower and steadier than it did this morning. Then the case seemed hopeless, and I feared to give wine—though a free use of generous wine is my particular treatment—lest it should fly to his brain, and disturb his intellectuals at a time when he should need all his senses for the final disposition of his affairs. Great estates sometimes hang upon the breath of a dying man.”
“Oh, sir, but your patient! To save his life, that would sure be your first and chiefest thought?”
“Ay, ay, my pretty miss; but I had other measures. Apollo twangs not ever on the same bowstring. Did my sudorific work well, think you?”
“He was bathed in perspiration when first I found him; but the sweat-drops seemed cold and deadly, as if life itself were being dissolved out of him.”
“Ay, there are cases in which that copious sweat is the forerunner of dissolution; but in others it augurs cure. The pent-up poison which is corrupting the patient’s blood finds a sudden vent, its virulence is diluted, and if the end prove fatal, it is that the patient lacks power to rally after the ravages of the disease, rather than that the poison kills. Was it instantly after that profuse sweat you gave him the wine, I wonder?”