“Is there any hope of recovery?” she asked, feeling herself get dry-lipped at the horror of this condemnation.
“None at all!” the cheerful doctor asserted.
And just then from the bed came the poor, brainless voice.
“I tell you, Loris—jump.... Don’t be afraid—you wanted this, you know.... I’d always hoped it might one day be said of me that I’d lived clean. I wasn’t straitlaced as if I’d swallowed the Statue of Liberty up to her manly bosom. But it’s too late now—there’s no time.... Jump, Laurence—jump! I can tuck you under my arm.... Are you still afraid?... Don’t you believe in a free United States—”
The hearers listened in silence. This blague and bagout so essentially Parisian were his, doubtless, by some curious trick of ancestry, but it was rather gruesome just then.
“Won’t they laugh at home...!” The sickening drone went on. “I! caught in a double cross like this ... good for crabs and evil tongues.... Great Scott! isn’t that a treat!” He laughed a ghastly ringing laugh that suddenly choked in his throat, and gave a grimace of pain that brought the doctors back to his side.
“I thought he could not feel—anything?” Tatiana murmured, profoundly shocked. “If one must see him suffer too—”
“Reassure yourself, Madame la Duchesse. He does not really feel—as yet, and this wandering of the mind is quite natural. It is when he comes to himself that your kindly task will be—er—difficult.” It was Docteur Tant-Mieux who spoke, rubbing the tips of his long surgical fingers together, as if washing his hands of all doubt on the subject.
“Is there,” Salvières said, coming forward, “any danger in moving him to more comfortable quarters?”
The two confrères glanced swiftly at each other. “Do you,” inquired the optimist, “see any risk, Docteur de Partenay, in the patient’s being carried to the château, as Monsieur le Duc so thoughtfully suggests?”