His attendant was alarmed, but sought to calm him. “Think not,” he said, “that you are to be taken hence in your present fever, and to be plunged into water” (the sick man shuddered, and moaned); “in clinical baptism,[239] a few drops suffice, not more than is in this pitcher.” And he showed him the water in a small vessel. At the sight of it, the patient writhed and foamed at the mouth, and was shaken by a violent convulsion. The sounds that proceeded from him, resembled a howl from a wild beast, more than any utterance of human lips.
The pilgrim saw at once that hydrophobia, with all its horrible symptoms, had come upon the patient, from the bite of the enraged animal. It was with difficulty that he and the servant could hold him down at times. Occasionally he broke out into frightful paroxysms of blasphemous violence against God and man. And then, when this subsided, he would go on moaning thus;
“Water they want to give me! water! water! none for me! It is fire! fire! that I have, and that is my portion. I am already on fire, within, without! Look how it comes creeping up, all round me, it advances every moment nearer and nearer!” And he beat off the fancied flame with his hands on either side of his bed, and he blew at it round his head. Then turning towards his sorrowful attendants, he would say, “why don’t you put it out? you see it is already burning me.”
Thus passed the dreary day, and thus came the dismal night, when the fever increased, and with it the delirium, and the violent accesses of fury, though the body was sinking. At length he raised himself up in bed, and looking with half-glazed eyes straight before him, he exclaimed in a voice choked with bitter rage:
“Away, Pancratius, begone! Thou hast glared on me long enough. Keep back thy panther! Hold it fast; it is going to fly at my throat. It comes! Oh!” And with a convulsive grasp, as if pulling the beast from off his throat, he plucked away the bandage from his wound. A gush of blood poured over him, and he fell back, a hideous corpse, upon the bed.
The Sacrifice of Abraham, from a picture in the Catacombs.
His friend saw how unrepenting persecutors died.
CHAPTER III.
AND LAST.
