“You had better stay in bed to-day,” said Cole. “I will send you a draught to take.”
“But what is it that’s the matter with me?” asked Jacob.
“I don’t know,” said Cole.
“Is it ague? Or intermittent fever coming on? See how I am shaking.”
“N—o,” hesitated Cole, either in doubt, or else because he would not say too much. “I’ll look in again by-and-by.”
Towards midday Jacob thought he’d get up, and see what that would do for him. It seemed to do nothing, except make him worse; and he went to bed again. Cole looked in three times during the day, but did not say what he thought.
In the middle of the night a paroxysm of illness came on again, and a servant ran to knock up the doctor. Jacob was shaking the very bed, and seemed in awful fear.
And in the morning he appeared to know that he had not many hours to live. Knew it by intuition, for Cole had not told him. An express went flying to Worcester for Dr. Malden: but Cole knew—and told it later—that all the physicians in the county could not save him.
And the state of mind that Jacob Chandler went into with the knowledge, might have read many a careless man a lesson. It seemed to him that he had a whole peck of suddenly-recollected sins on his head, and misdeeds to be accounted for. He remembered Tom Chandler then.