CHAPTER XIII.
FOUND.
Colonel John Decies, I.M.S. (retired), visiting the Kot Ghazi Station Hospital, whereof his friend and pupil, Captain Digby-Soames, was Commandant, scanned the temperature chart of the unknown, the desperately injured “case,” retrieved by his beloved flying-machine, who, judging by his utterances in delirium, appeared to be even worse damaged in spirit than he was in body.
“Very high again last night,” he observed to Miss Norah O’Neill of the Queen Alexandra Military Nursing Sisterhood.
“Yes, and very violent,” replied Miss O’Neill. “I had to call two orderlies and they could hardly hold him. He appeared to think he was fighting a huge snake or fleeing from one. He also repeatedly screamed: ‘It is under my foot! It is moving, moving, moving out.’”
“Got it, by God!” cried the Colonel, suddenly smiting his forehead with violence. “Of course! Fool! Fool that I am! Merciful God in Heaven—it’s her boy—and I have saved him! Her boy! And I’ve been cudgelling my failing addled brains for months, wondering where I had seen his face before. He’s my godson, Sister, and I haven’t set eyes on him for the last—nearly twenty years!”
Miss Norah O’Neill had never before seen an excited doctor in a hospital ward, but she now beheld one nearly beside himself with excitement, joy, surprise, and incredulity. (It is sad to have to relate that she also heard one murmuring over and over again to himself, “Well, I am damned”.)
At last Colonel John Decies announced that the world was a tiny, small place and a very rum one, that it was just like The Hawk to be the means of saving her boy of all people, and then took the patient’s hand in his, and sat studying his face, in wondering, pondering silence.
To Miss Norah O’Neill this seemed extraordinarily powerful affection for a mere godson, and one lost to sight for twenty years at that. Yet Colonel Decies was a bachelor and, no, the patient certainly resembled him in no way whatsoever. The tiny new-born germ of a romance died at once in Miss O’Neill’s romantic heart—and yet, had she but known, here was a romance such as her soul loved above all things—the son of the adored dead mistress discovered in extremis, and saved, by the devout platonic lover, the life-long lover, and revealed to him by the utterance of the pre-natally learnt words of the dead woman herself!
Yes—how many times through those awful days had Decies heard that heart-rending cry! How cruelly the words had tortured him! And here, they were repeated twenty years on—for the identification of the son by the friend!
That afternoon Colonel Decies dispatched a cablegram addressed to a Miss Gavestone, Monksmead, Southshire, England, and containing the words, “Have found him, Kot Ghazi, bad accident, doing well, Decies,” and by the next mail Lucille, with Aunt Yvette and a maid, left Port Said, having travelled overland to Brindisi and taken passage to Egypt by the Osiris to overtake the liner that had left Tilbury several days before the cable reached Monksmead. And in Lucille’s largest trunk was an article the like of which is rarely to be found in the baggage of a young lady—nothing more nor less than an ancient rapier of Italian pattern!…