“You’ll have a night with him, I fancy. Keep the temperature of the room up to sixty, and see he doesn’t throw off his clothes. How old is he—eighteen?—a great overgrown boy, six feet one or two, surely. It goes hard with these long fellows. Give me your short, thick-set young ruffian for pulling through a bout like this. Have you found out where he lives?”
“No, I can’t discover his address anywhere.”
“Look in his Sunday hat. I always kept mine there when I was a boy, and never knew a boy who didn’t.”
Branscombe, however, was an exception.
“Well,” said the doctor, “it’s a pity. A mother’s the proper person to be with him a time like this. She’ll never— What’s this?”
It was an envelope slipped behind the bookcase, containing a bill from Splicer, the London cricket-bat-maker, dated a year ago. At the foot the tradesman had written, “Hon. sir, sorry we could not get bat in time to send home, so forward to you direct to Grandcourt School, by rail.”
“There we are,” said the doctor, putting the document in his pocket. “This ought to bring mamma in twenty-four hours. The telegraph office is shut now, but we’ll wake Mr Splicer up early, and have mamma under weigh by midday. Good-night, Railsford—keep the pot boiling, my good fellow—I’ll look round early.”
He was gone, and Railsford with sinking heart set himself to the task before him. He long remembered that night. It seemed at first as if the doctor’s gloomy predictions were to be falsified, for Branscombe continued long in a half-slumber, and even appeared to be more tranquil than he had been during the afternoon.
Railsford sat near the fire and watched him; and for two hours the stillness of the room was only broken by the lively ticking of the little clock on the mantelpiece, and the laboured breathing of the sufferer.
He was nearly asleep when a cry from the bed suddenly roused him.