I spoke to him again. 'Is there anything more I can do for you, Matthew?'
'You can go away,' he said, articulate at last. 'You can go away and leave me. The sight of you makes me mad.' I have since thought that this might be a sign of repentance.
'I will go away directly. Is there anything more I can do for you?'
'I want,' he said, lifting his head and looking round, 'I want to have my turn. The last time I lost. If you will find the man who won my coat and will send him here, I shall be warm directly, and I can have another turn. I've lost a good deal, somehow. The luck's been against me, always against me.'
He lay back and shivered again, though now he was wrapped up in the blanket with a warm coat on over his old rags. He should have been quite warm. I felt his forehead; it was hot and dry.
'Matthew,' I said, 'I think you are in some kind of fever. Shall I bring a doctor for you?' There are generally about a thousand people in this barrack, men, women, and children, yet they have not so much as an apothecary in the place. Outside, there is the wise woman who knows the herbs and professes to cure all the diseases that flesh is heir to with a bundle of camomile, feverfew, or vervain. She commonly lives in a court. In Fleet Street there is the apothecary who has a shop full of drugs. He despises the wise woman, yet is not so much wiser than she is, except in his own conceit. There is the tooth-drawer; and there is the bone-setter; but for physicians there are none.
His face, now that the pains of cold and hunger were appeased, looked gray, and what the old women call drawn. It is a bad sign had I known it, but I did not. I thought he was suffering from cold and hunger first, and from some kind of fever brought on by privation.
'You think,' he murmured—his voice was sunk almost to a whisper—'to bring a man—a murderer—to make an end—that is your revenge. But you shall not. I will send to the Warden for protection. Go away. Leave me alone. I can do you no more harm. I will have no doctor sent by you, to poison me.'
'Do you know, Matthew, that Probus received such terrible injuries in pillory that he will remain blind for the rest of his life?'
'Blind?' he sat up eagerly repeating. 'Blind for the rest of his life. Ha! Then he will not be able to find me. Will, he wanted to get you hung—so as to be out of the way. He was going to try next to get me hung. Then all the money would be his. Blind, is he? Then he can't find me. Will, the man is a devil; now a blind devil; a devil in the dark.' The thought seemed to revive and to comfort him.