Bidding Holles a good-night and a stout courage, the physician and the examiner departed together. The watchman, who remained to hinder any unauthorized person from passing in or out, then closed the door. Holles heard the key being turned on the outside, and knew himself a prisoner in that infected house for weeks to come, unless death should chance to set him free meanwhile.
Quickly now, urged by the thought of his task, utterly disregarding the dull aching of his bruised head, he mounted the stairs again. A memory flashed through his mind of those three gallants whom her cries had attracted to her rescue, and who would have delivered her from his clutches, but that he had scared them away with the lie—as he supposed it then—that she was infected with the plague. Had their rescue succeeded, in what case would she be now? Would there be one at hand to fight such a fight as that for which he was braced and ready; to give his life at need, freely and without a pang, that he might save her own? Out of the anguish of his soul, out of the depths into which he was plunged, he thanked God for this fight that lay before him, for this disposition which made good come out of evil.
He found her in a state of lethargy which, whilst leaving her a full consciousness of all that had occurred and was occurring about her, yet robbed her of all power of speech or movement. Lying there, her head supported by the pillows, which it had been the doctor’s last service to adjust, her wide, fevered eyes followed every movement of the Colonel’s as, stripped now of his doublet, he went briskly about the business of preparation. Anon under the pain which his ministrations caused her, she sank into unconsciousness, and thence into a raving delirium which for days thereafter was to alternate with periods of lethargic, exhausted slumber.
CHAPTER XXII THE CRISIS
For five days, which to Randal Holles were as five years of mortal anguish, she lay suspended between this world and the next. The lightest straw of chance would suffice to tip against her the fearful balance of the scales, the slightest lack of care and watchfulness might result in the snapping of the slender thread by which life was still tethered to her exhausted, fever-wasting frame.
The doctor had succeeded beyond all his hopes in his quest of a nurse-keeper, and he brought her with him to the house in Knight Ryder Street, on the morrow of Nancy’s taking ill—a lean, capable, good-natured, henlike woman of forty. But for all her competency and willingness, had this Mrs. Dallows been alone in charge of the patient, it is long odds that Nancy would quickly have succumbed. For no hired attendant could ever have ministered to her with the self-sacrificing, remorseful devotion of the broken adventurer who loved her. No hired attendant could have brought to the task the strength of will and singleness of purpose that drove the weary, faltering flesh relentlessly along the path of this self-imposed duty.
Not for a moment did Holles suffer himself to relax his vigilance, to pause for a breathing in that grim fight with death. Of sleeping he never so much as thought, whilst the snatches of food and drink that constituted his meals, forced upon him by the nurse-keeper, were taken there at Nancy’s bedside.
Mrs. Dallows remonstrated with him, urging him to take some rest in the hours during which she was herself on duty. It was in vain. Equally vain were the same remonstrances when more authoritatively urged by Dr. Beamish. Holles left them unheeded as he did the physician’s recommendations that he should take some of the ordinary precautions to keep himself immune. The balsam of sulphur which the little doctor left with him to be used as a disinfectant was never touched; the wormwood, masterwort, and zedoary pressed upon him as prophylactics were equally neglected.