“No, not that; I can’t part with that,” he groaned; and then he remembered his best suit of clothes, which had cost nearly a hundred dollars, and a great many hard words from his father. He could sell these in Cincinnati; he had just money enough to go there and back, and he would do it the next day, and make some excuse for taking a valise, and no one need be the wiser. That was the very best thing he could do, and comforted with this decision he crept shivering to bed just as the clock was striking the hour of eleven.
Breakfast waited a long time for him the next morning, and when she saw how impatient the judge was growing, Rosamond went to his door and knocked loudly upon it, but received no answer, except a faint sound like a moan of pain, which frightened her, and sent her at once to the judge, who went himself to his son’s room. Everard was not asleep, nor did he look as if he had ever slept, with his blood-shot, wide-open eyes rolling restlessly in his head, which moved from side to side as if in great distress. He did not know his father; he did not know anybody; and said that he was not sick, when the doctor came, and he would not be blistered and he wouldn’t be bled; he must get up and have his clothes,—his best ones,—and he made Rossie bring them to him and fold them up and put them in his satchel, which he kept upon his bed all during the two weeks when he lay raving with delirium and burning with fever induced by the cut on his head, and aggravated by the bleeding and blistering which he had without stint. Rossie was the nurse who staid constantly with him, and who alone could quiet him when he was determined to get up and sell his clothes. This was the burden of his talk.
“I must sell them and get the money,” he would say,—but, with a singular kind of cunning common to crazy people, he never said money before his father. It was only to Rosamond that he talked of that, and once, when she sat alone with him, he said:
“Don’t let the governor know, for your life.”
“No, I won’t; you can trust me,” she replied; then, while she bathed his throbbing head, she asked: “Why do you want the money, Mr. Everard? What will you do with it?”
“Send it to Joe,” he said. “Do you know Joe?”
Rossie didn’t know Joe, and she innocently asked:
“Who is he?”
“Who is he?” Everard repeated: “ha, ha! that’s a good joke. He,—Joe would enjoy that; he is a splendid fellow, I tell you.”
“And you owe him?” Rossie asked, her heart sinking like lead at his prompt reply.