Now sprang the rose in the east. Dorotheus’s voice had sunk away. She found when she went to him that he was lying in a stupor. In the year she had spent in the convent village, before she came forth into the desert, she had seen and helped with illness enough. There came memories, too, of sickness in the great Alexandrian household, together with old tellings of Anna the nurse. She thought it not unlikely that she looked at a dying man. “Lord, Lord, Thy will?”
Dorotheus lay a long while, very ill, as ill as a man can be. After the first night and day he lay in the cave. Dorothea, a strong woman, had dragged and lifted him there. He lay where the light from the entrance fell upon him, in a wave of sunlight, or of moonlight or starlight. Sometimes, at night, he lay in firelight from a heap of twigs and dried palm fronds. That was when she thought that he would die in some moment between the coming and the going of the stars. She had found no fire in his cave, but flints from which, long and patiently striking them together, she obtained a spark with which to set alight shredded palm fibre. Embers once secured, she nursed them, fencing with stones and feeding at need, and so kept by her fire.
Food—always there were dates enough, and she brought the ripened grapes with other small fruits from the garden. In her own garden grew lentils, and she had in her cave a measure of grain. In the scant moments when he slept she hastened down to the palms and across to her own demesne, whence she brought back with her, in her woven baskets, all of use that she could carry. Even I followed her, and at last Welcome, though he kept a distance between him and Arla. Her cave and garden came and dwelled in Dorotheus’s cave and garden. She found two stones that would answer for millstones, and she ground the grain between them, and with water and salt made thin cakes and baked them before her fire. The sick man took from her fingers the crumbled food that should give him strength to fight the long fever. She pressed the grapes and strained the juice into a water cup and gave it to him when the fever sank and she thought his heart would stop. Days passed, days and days.
When he burned with fever she brought the water jar, cool-filled from the desert spring and bathed him as she would bathe a child. She nursed him as she would nurse a child, finding nothing too low for her to do. She nursed him as she would have nursed her own child, wanting only his recovery. Perhaps he was like a child to her. Perhaps here was human interest where for so long in the desert the soul had been strained toward upper realms. Perhaps the bow, unbending, rested, with fondness for its rest.
For Dorotheus, unconscious, unresisting, asceticism was sent to the winds. He was lapped in care. His frame was cooled or warmed at need. Food and water were put between his lips. His bed was made of soft, clean sand; he was watched beside by day and by night. The cavern was deep and shadowy, with outlets more than one. The moving air refreshed it, even when the desert withered beneath the sun.
The hermit, lying there ill, became her consuming interest. She slept only when she must. She toiled for him, watched him. By now her will would have resisted another’s coming to take her work—anchorite or pilgrim or monk from the monastery, or any desert wanderer. But it was the heated season, and unhealthful for wandering, and no one came.
Desiring to keep her strength, she put from herself any rigour of privation, fasting, discipline, prescribed prayers. “There will be time for all that,” she said, “for, O High God, I am yet far from Thee!” So she nursed Dorotheus in the cave by the little oasis. And after a long time the fever broke.
It was night when she felt that his brow and hands were moist, that he lay relaxed and at rest, breathing naturally. He slept, and she went without the cave and faced a crescent moon. “Jackal, Jackal—Even I—Welcome! He will live! He will live! O moon and palm trees! He will live!”
Dorotheus slept, and when he waked he was conscious, but like a little child for weakness. As though he were that, Dorothea nursed him still. Several days passed; he strengthened, mind and will began their return. She kneeled beside him with fruit and a thin barley cake. He put her hand away. “Eat!” she said. “Eat!”
“I have been ill. Who are you?”