A kind hand laid on his shoulder interrupted a reverie which had induced torpor.
“Mr. Clegg, you are ill—your cold requires attention. You had better seek repose: you are quite feverish.”
Repose! The man’s soul was on fire, as well as his body. Yet from his chamber a fortnight later emerged a grave business man, without an apparent thought beyond the warehouse.
And what of Laurence Aspinall, whom we left with closed eyes, wrapped in blankets, on a sofa? He had hung suspended in the water for an hour by the clock in the tower of St. Thomas’ ivy-clad church; and notwithstanding he had kept his limbs and the water in motion so long as he had power, the chill had extended upwards, and though life had been called back, sight and reason were in abeyance.
Shorn of his rich curls, for weeks he raved and struggled in the grasp of brain fever; and old Kitty, forgetting everything but her promise to his dead mother, watched and tended him night and day, albeit nurses from the Fever-Ward relieved each other in their well-paid care of him.
The frost was gone; vegetation, bound so long, had leapt upwards from its chains. Lilacs and May-buds greeted him with perfume through the open windows, and even the daffodil and narcissus sent up their incense from the brim of the garden-pond when he began to show signs of amendment.
“Better,” “Much better,” were the answers to inquirers (among whom may be cited Kit Townley, and Bob, their sometime groom); but the lilac and the hawthorn ripened and faded, and the daffodils gave place to the wallflower and carnation, and the rosebuds opened their ripe lips to June, yet the rich cotton merchant’s son saw nothing of the glow.
Over the blue eyes of Laurence the lids were closed, and not an oculist in the town had skill to open them. Dr. Hull, the consulting physician of the Eye Institution, and his surgical colleagues, Messrs. Wilson and Travers, had laid their heads together over a case peculiar in all its bearings, but the lids remained obstinately shut.
At length, when Hope had folded her drooping wings in despair, and Mr. Aspinall was borne down with grief for his sightless son, someone suggested that, as water had done the mischief, water in action might cure it.
“Can he swim?” asked rough Dr. Hull curtly of Kitty.