The Land of Cockayne: A Novel

by Matilde Serao

'What is she speaking about?' he asked Margherita when she, stupefied and frightened, came out of the room.

'She wants her mother,' the other muttered, crying silently, for it seemed to her a forerunner of death.

And the typhoid went on, finishing its first week, not yielding to the ice or the quinine, keeping always between a hundred and four and a hundred and five degrees, as if the mercury in the thermometer had stuck at that doleful figure, a funereal cylinder that nothing was of any use now to bring down.

'How much is it?' the old father made inquiry with anxious eyes from Margherita, who was looking at the thermometer held against the sick girl's burning skin.

'A hundred and four degrees,' she muttered under her breath with infinite despair.

Implacable figure! To bring down the fire that burned away Bianca Maria's blood and nerves, seeing that quinine taken by the mouth in large doses had no proper effect, quinine was now injected with a tiny, pretty silver syringe into the patient's arm. Not having the strength to open her eyes, she raised herself with difficulty, propped up on pillows, and held up in Margherita's arms, and her head shook, the black hair stuck to her temples, and dripped moisture from the chill of the ice-bag. They had to hold up her head, too, for it went from side to side. Then, baring the poor arms all dotted by the silver needle, a new burning, painful puncture was added to the others. She started, but only slightly, as if no pain was worse than that sleep. Sometimes she opened her eyes, and set them on Margherita's face, and they were so sad in their expression of weariness, so muddy in colour, dry, and indifferent now to all earthly sights, that a glance from them wrung the heart. It looked as if they had emptied out the fountain of tears. When her father and Margherita saw these doleful eyes in front of them, they gave a start.

'My child! my child!' the old man said to her, holding her hands.

Then she, disturbed and tired, lowered her eyelids at once, and sank anew into that stupefied state in which the only two signs of vitality were her laboured breathing and the high temperature. Very seldom did the quinine injections succeed in bringing down the high fever; there was a slight discouraging variation, nothing more.

Only on the morning of the tenth day she seemed, all of a sudden, in a better state. It was sleep instead of torpor, and in the comforting sleep a cold sweat ran over her forehead, which Margherita wiped off carefully. The poor old woman followed tremblingly every minute of that sleep, as if she guessed intuitively Bianca Maria's life was to depend on it; and while she said her prayers over mentally, her whole attention was fixed on the loved face sharpened by illness, that seemed to be getting back renewed brightness. Whilst the sound sleep lasted, Margherita's vigilant ear heard a noise in the flat. She got up on tiptoe and went out. It was the Marquis di Formosa coming in again, and he questioned her with his eyes anxiously.