The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had no reality. [Endnote: 2.]
To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go; to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century, where the business was to rest,—to drag on dreamy days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.
“A very quiet and well-behaved patient,” said he to the palmer. “Unless I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon’s hand for a similar hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some time ago,—three or four years since, when he could have been little more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.”
“It was an Indian bullet,” said the patient, still fancying himself gone astray into the past, “shot at me in battle; ‘twas three hundred years hereafter.”
“Ah! he has served in the East Indies,” said the surgeon. “I thought this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.”
The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been involved in correcting the surgeon’s surmise; so he let it pass, and patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the surgeon’s ear.
“He has vitality enough for his needs,” said he, nodding to the palmer. “These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and within a day or two we shall see.”
He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient’s nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign guardian.