Perhaps, if there were no foul and stinking wards, jails, and clinks, this kind of fever would be banished altogether, and be no more seen. So, if we could discover the origin and cause of all diseases, we might once more restore man to his primitive condition, which I take to have been one free from any kind of disease or infirmity, designed at first by his Creator so to live for ever, and, after the Fall, enabled (when medicine shall be so far advanced) to die of old age after such prolongation of life and strength as yet we cannot even understand.
'Cousin,' I said, 'I am sorry to find thee lying in this condition.'
'Ay,' he replied, in a voice weak and low, not like his old blustering tones. 'Curse me and upbraid me, if thou wilt. How art thou come hither? Is it the ghost of Humphrey? Art thou dead like my grandfather? Are we on the Plantations of Barbadoes?'
'Indeed, I am no ghost, Benjamin. As for curses, I have none; and as for reproaches, I leave them to thy conscience.'
'Humphrey, I am sore afflicted. I am now so low that I cannot even sit upright in my bed. But thou art a doctor—thou wilt bring me back to health. I am already better only for seeing thee here.'
I declare that as yet I had no thought, no thought at all, of what I was to do. I was but a physician in presence of a sick man, and therefore bound to help him if I could.
I asked him first certain questions, as physicians use, concerning his disorder and its symptoms. I learned that, after attending at the Court, he was attacked by fits of shivering and of great heat, being hot and cold alternately, and that in order to expel the fever he had sat drinking the whole evening—a most dangerous thing to do. Next, that in the morning he had been unable to rise from his bed, and, being thirsty, had drunk more wine—a thing enough of itself to kill a man in such a fever. Then he lost his head, and could tell me no more what had happened until he saw me standing by his bedside. In short, he had been in delirium, and was now in a lucid interval, out of which he would presently fall a-wandering again, and, perhaps, raving, and so another lucid interval, after which he would die, unless something could be done for him.
I liked not his appearance nor the account which he gave me, nor did I like his pulse, nor the strange look in his eyes—death doth often show his coming by such a prophetic terror of the eyes.
'Humphrey,' he said pitifully. 'It was no fault of mine that thou wast sent to the Plantations.'
'That I know full well, Cousin,' I answered him. 'Be easy on that score.'