“And now, let’s finish our game,” said Duke.
The robust yet careless family affection, which would have done anything for the weakling among them, left him cheerful and comforted as soon as he was “better,” having no anxious thought.
And Mar was left to Letitia and her terse and unemotional questionings. It was Mrs. Parke’s habit to take all his ailments as a sort of reproach to herself.
“You might have known that it was not fit for you to go out in the blazing sun,” she said; “but you seem to take a pleasure in behaving as if no attention was ever paid to you.”
She went and got him a cushion with her own hands, and thrust it under his head with an irritable movement, and walked up and down the room, drawing down a blind over the window which gave Mar a glimpse of the sky and green trees he loved, and putting things in order which needed no arrangement.
“The doctor is a long time over his game,” she said to the old nurse, who still attended to the wants of the schoolroom. “I think he might have come before now.”
“Don’t let me keep you up here, Aunt Letitia,” said Mar. “There is not much the matter with me; it is a pity to trouble the doctor.”
“You will please not meddle with what I do, Mar,” she replied. “If you would only pay a little attention to what may be expected from yourself——”
The doctor came at last, and asked a great many questions and looked very grave. He ordered Mar to bed, not to lie on the sofa any longer, and gave a great many directions about quiet and fresh air and beef tea. He himself helped the boy to his room, and was so careful and so kind that there came to Mar’s mind a half elation, half melancholy, in the thought that he was going to be ill—that at last, after his years of delicate health, there was going to be something the matter with him which would prove all that Mrs. Parke had said, and of which he would possibly die. A great excitement, silent and suppressed, rose in his mind with this thought. It was alarming and strange, but it was not altogether unpleasing. There is a kind of pre-eminence, of superiority, in being very ill to a boy. It was like going into a battle. He felt solemnized, yet half amused. He was to be the hero of a sort of drama—he was to be in danger of his life. It pleased his imagination, which had so little food. And he tried to catch what the doctor was saying when he followed Mrs. Parke into the next room. But by that time he was getting drowsy, and his faculties dulled, and this he could not do.
In the next room the conference was grave enough. “He has never been ill before,” said the doctor. “I ever told you so from the first, Mrs. Parke, delicate but not ill, and nothing that he might not shake off with time. But he is ill now. If I am not mistaken he is in for an attack of typhoid, and I fear a bad one. I’ll go straight to the hospital at Claremont and send you a nurse—indeed, you had better have two nurses—care is everything. With great care and unremitting attention we may pull him through.”