"Half sick," he said.
XIII.
The long days crept slowly by at the Station and through the infected district. as horses driven by Death, mercilessly, tired by their task, and yet urged on continually to break through the breastwork of care and precaution raised by Mackenzie and Trevelyan, so that the course of their charioteer might sweep onward to the outlying districts and turn the scourge, local as yet, into a devastating epidemic.
"Anything to keep the barracks clear of it," Trevelyan had thought and said, and Mackenzie, grown silent with the effort of the fight, nodded without speaking, forcing away from him the remembrance of the epidemic he himself had been through, and the stories once told him by his father, who had helped beat back the scourge on the Ganges in '63.
Each hour was freighted with unspeakable horrors, and Trevelyan learned to know the course of the disease almost as well as Mackenzie himself. He knew the first symptoms; he knew with an instinct that rarely failed, just the cases that were liable to pull through, and those that were liable not to; he could foretell the signs of the collapse, when the face would become cold and gray, the finger tips and lips and nose livid; the eyes deeply sunk and bloodshot with the dark rings beneath; the breath without any sensible warmth when caught on the hand; the scarcely audible beating of the heart;—the apathy that was itself a death.
The haunting shadow of his crime was driven back and back by the absorbing matter of the hour, and even Cary's face—moon-kissed—seemed indistinct and far away, as he went about his tasks. It seemed developed on a plate, hidden in the dark room—the innermost recesses of his soul—to be produced and worshipped now and then when courage weakened and the heart languished and grew sick.
He would recall it, at night sometimes, when he had flung himself down for a few hours of rest, and he would press his fingers over his eyes as though to hide from sight the memories of the day's horrors and the day's deaths, and the face would come to him then, and his soul would look upon it as on some dream of heaven.
And then the memory of her face would fade, and he would let it slip away from him, as though knowing it had no place here—midst the cholera scourge, and he would fall off to sleep and sleep exhaustedly.
The days held but one purpose, but one thought—his service to the men, and he sometimes wondered how even the service of the hour had a power to hold him, stronger than the memory of her face.
In those days, when each morning saw another man added to the inmates of the hospital, it was all reality—grim, terrible and as strong as the death he fought; and he and Death kept on the fight, and even when Death won, his triumph seemed petty and incomplete because of this man's courage, which he could neither break nor bend.