Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.
Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary's shop, as a soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached the door of the surgeons' room. Then he shook his head.
"Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men."
"But you'll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden.
"You'd better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending over him. "You'll get well twice as quick and it's quieter, and the nausea will pass——"
"It's the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in with the men."
XVII.
All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan's pulse or watch the change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch and note. Trevelyan's great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.
Once Trevelyan's hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.
A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan's gray and sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar, as though he were ashamed.