The chiefly important thing was to wait quietly until the next morning and then find out Captain Castaigne’s condition. Eugenia meant to make as brave a fight for his life as possible. If he recovered there would be time enough to determine whether he should surrender or make an effort to escape and rejoin his command. Fortunately there were both provisions and medical supplies stored in the farmhouse. Judge Thornton had sent fresh orders of both from Paris quite recently.
So for the rest of the afternoon and evening Eugenia sat by her patient while Duke crouched on the floor near them both. No one disturbed them; the little house might have been in the center of a vast desert for any human interest it created. The day before Eugenia had closed its outside windows and doors, and since had opened only the one window necessary for light and air.
For the greater part of the night Captain Castaigne was delirious from a high fever. Eugenia knew that it would be almost impossible for him to escape blood poison, after the dirt had been ground into his wounds from the long dragging of his body on the earth.
Nevertheless, now and then the young officer slept the sleep of utter exhaustion, with Duke and Eugenia both slumbering beside him whenever this opportunity came.
Eugenia did not question the reason for her care. She had not liked the young Frenchman at their first meeting in Paris. Certainly their second accidental meeting in the woods had not increased her liking. Moreover, she had been entirely out of sympathy with him, with his mother and with their French ideas and environment on the afternoon of her one call.
Yet none of these things counted in the least with Eugenia. Captain Castaigne was a French soldier, one of the men whom she had come to Europe to nurse in case he needed her care. Therefore he should have the best it was in her power to offer.
Once, while in the act of giving him medicine to relieve his fever, the young man murmured his mother’s name and for the instant Eugenia was moved to sympathy. All the rest of the time her feeling was entirely impersonal. Captain Castaigne was merely a patient who must if possible be kept alive and later restored to health. If she had any feeling in the matter Eugenia was sorry that she had ever made the young man’s acquaintance before this night.
Nevertheless, at about six o’clock the following morning, after an entire hour of refreshing sleep, Eugenia opened her eyes to find her patient gazing steadfastly at her. For the time being his delirium had passed and she realized that he recognized her and longed to ask questions but was still too weak and ill to speak.
A half an hour afterwards, after a few sips of clam bouillon which chanced to be among the household stores, Captain Castaigne said a few words.
“What does this mean?” he asked in painstaking English, appreciating even in his present condition that Miss Peabody preferred the conversation to take place in her native tongue.