“By no means,” answered Dominick. “It has a splendid climate. This gale is quite exceptional. Nevertheless, we cannot tell when the next may burst on us. Come, Otto, you and I will go down to the camp. Now, Dr Marsh, you must remain here. I can see, without being told, that you are quite unfit to help us. I know that it is hard to be condemned to inaction when all around are busy, but reflect how many patients you have solemnly warned that their recovery would depend on implicit obedience to the doctor’s orders! Divide yourself in two, now, and, as a doctor, give yourself strict orders to remain quiet.”
“H’m! Gladly would I divide myself,” was the doctor’s reply, “if while I left the patient half to act the invalid, I could take the impatient half down to the camp to aid you. But I submit. The days of my once boasted strength are gone. I feel more helpless than a mouse.”
There was something quite pitiful in the half-humorous look and the weary sigh with which the poor youth concluded his remarks, and Otto was so touched that he suddenly suggested the propriety of his staying behind and taking care of him.
“Why, you conceited creature,” cried Dominick, “of what use could you be? Besides, don’t you think that Pina is a sufficiently good nurse?”
Otto humbly admitted that she was.
Dr Marsh, glancing at her pretty face, on which at the moment there beamed an expression of deep sympathy, also admitted that she was; but, being a man of comparatively few words, he said nothing.
It was a busy day for Dominick and his brother. Not only had they to counsel and advise with the unfortunate emigrants as to the best position for the temporary encampment, with reference to wood and water, as well as to assist with their own hands in the erection of tents made of torn sails and huts and booths composed of broken planks and reeds, but they had to answer innumerable questions from the inquisitive as to their own history, from the anxious as to the probabilities of deliverance, from the practical as to the resources of the islands, and from the idiotic as to everything in general and nothing in particular. In addition to which they had to encourage the timid, to correct the mistaken, and to remonstrate with or resist the obstinate; also to romp a little with the children as they recovered their spirits, quiet the babies as they recovered their powers of lung, and do a little amateur doctoring for the sick in the absence of the medical man.
In all these varied occupations they were much aided by the widow Lynch, who, instead of proving to be, as they had expected, a troublesome termagant, turned out to be a soft-hearted, kindly, enthusiastic, sympathetic woman, with a highly uneducated, unbalanced mind, a powerfully constituted and masculine frame, and “a will of her own.” In this last particular she did not differ much from the rest of the human species, but she was afflicted with an unusually strong desire to assert it.
Very like Mrs Lynch in the matters of kindly soft-heartedness and sympathy was Mrs Welsh—a poor, gentle, delicate Englishwoman, the wife of a great hulking cross-grained fellow named Abel, who was a carpenter by trade and an idler by preference. Mrs Welsh was particularly good as a sick-nurse and a cook, in which capacities she made herself extremely useful.
About midday, Mrs Welsh having prepared a glorious though simple meal for her section of the emigrant band, and the other sections having been ministered to more or less successfully by their more or less capable cooks, Dominick and Otto went up to the golden cave to dinner, which they well knew the faithful Pauline would have ready waiting for them.