“My friend,” the doctor had said to him as early as the second day of her illness, “if you continue thus you will end by killing yourself.”
Holles had smiled as he replied: “If she lives, her life will have been cheaply purchased at the price. If she dies, it will not signify.”
The doctor, ignorant of her true identity, and persuaded ever that the twain were husband and wife, was touched by what he conceived to be an expression of exemplary conjugal devotion. That, however, did not turn him from his endeavours to reason Holles out of this obstinacy.
“But if she should survive and you should perish?” he asked him, whereupon Holles had amazed him by a sudden flash of anger.
“Plague me no more!”
After that Dr. Beamish had left him to follow his own inclinations, reflecting—in accordance with the popular belief, which the doctor fully shared—that after all the man carried in himself the most potent of all prophylactics in the fact that he was without fear of the infection.
But, although Holles neglected all the preventive measures which the doctor had so urgently prescribed for him, he nevertheless smoked a deal, sitting by the window of her chamber, which was kept open day and night to the suffocating heat of that terrible July. And the great fire constantly maintained by the doctor’s orders, this heat notwithstanding, did much to cleanse and purify the air. These things may have helped to keep him safe despite himself, procuring for him a measure of disinfection.
It was entirely as a result of that tireless vigilance of his and of the constant poulticings which he applied, that on the fourth day the swelling in the patient’s armpit, having been brought to a head, began to vent the deadly poison with which her veins were laden.
Beamish was as amazed as he was delighted.
“Sir, sir,” he commended the Colonel on the evening of that fourth day, “your pains are being rewarded. They have wrought a miracle already.”