“There is a young man behind the screen there who is very low,” he said. “He had an internal haemorrhage towards morning, and has lost his pluck. He has a wife and three children. We have been doing our best for him with hot-water bottles and stimulants, but he has not the courage to help us. You have an extraordinary effect on them all, Lord Mount Dunstan. When they are depressed, they always ask when you are coming in, and this man— Patton, his name is— has asked for you several times. Upon my word, I believe you might set him going again.”
Mount Dunstan walked to the bed, and, going behind the screen, stood looking down at the young fellow lying breathing pantingly. His eyes were closed as he laboured, and his pinched white nostrils drew themselves in and puffed out at each breath. A nurse on the other side of the cot had just surrounded him with fresh hot-water bottles.
Suddenly the sunken eyelids flew open, and the eyes met Mount Dunstan’s in imploring anxiousness.
“Here I am, Patton,” Mount Dunstan said. “You need not speak.”
But he must speak. Here was the strength his sinking soul had longed for.
“Cruel bad—goin’ fast—m’ lord,” he panted.
Mount Dunstan made a sign to the nurse, who gave him a chair. He sat down close to the bed, and took the bloodless hand in his own.
“No,” he said, “you are not going. You’ll stay here. I will see to that.”
The poor fellow smiled wanly. Vague yearnings had led him sometimes, in the past, to wander into chapels or stop and listen to street preachers, and orthodox platitudes came back to him.
“God’s—will,” he trailed out.
“It’s nothing of the sort. It’s God’s will that you pull yourself together. A man with a wife and three children has no right to slip out.”
A yearning look flickered in the lad’s eyes—he was scarcely more than a lad, having married at seventeen, and had a child each year.
“She’s—a good—girl.”
“Keep that in your mind while you fight this out,” said Mount Dunstan. “Say it over to yourself each time you feel yourself letting go. Hold on to it. I am going to fight it out with you. I shall sit here and take care of you all day —all night, if necessary. The doctor and the nurse will tell me what to do. Your hand is warmer already. Shut your eyes.”
He did not leave the bedside until the middle of the night.
By that time the worst was over. He had acted throughout the hours under the direction of nurse and doctor. No one but himself had touched the patient. When Patton’s eyes were open, they rested on him with a weird growing belief. He begged his lordship to hold his hand, and was uneasy when he laid it down.
“Keeps—me—up,” he whispered.
“He pours something into them—vigour—magnetic power —life. He’s like a charged battery,” Dr. Thwaite said to his co-workers. “He sat down by Patton just in time. It sets one to thinking.”
Having saved Patton, he must save others. When a man or woman sank, or had increased fever, they believed that he alone could give them help. In delirium patients cried out for him. He found himself doing hard work, but he did not flinch from it. The adoration for him became a sort of passion. Haggard faces lighted up into life at the sound of his footstep, and heavy heads turned longingly on their pillows as he passed by. In the winter days to come there would be many an hour’s talk in East End courts and alleys of the queer time when a score or more of them had lain in the great room with the dancing and floating goddesses looking down at them from the high, painted ceiling, and the swell, who was a lord, walking about among them, working for them as the nurses did, and sitting by some of them through awful hours, sometimes holding burning or slackening and chilling hands with a grip whose steadiness seemed to hold them back from the brink of the abyss they were slipping into. The mere ignorantly childish desire to do his prowess credit and to play him fair saved more than one man and woman from going out with the tide.
“It is the first time in my life that I have fairly counted among men. It’s the first time I have known human affection, other than yours, Penzance. They want me, these people; they are better for the sight of me. It is a new experience, and it is good for a man’s soul,” he said.
CHAPTER XLIII
HIS CHANCE
Betty walked much alone upon the marshes with Roland at her side. At intervals she heard from Mr. Penzance, but his notes were necessarily brief, and at other times she could only rely upon report for news of what was occurring at Mount Dunstan. Lord Mount Dunstan’s almost military supervision of and command over his villagers had certainly saved them from the horrors of an uncontrollable epidemic; his decision and energy had filled the alarmed Guardians with respect and this respect had begun to be shared by many other persons. A man as prompt in action, and as faithful to such responsibilities as many men might have found plausible reasons enough for shirking, inevitably assumed a certain dignity of aspect, when all was said and done. Lord Dunholm was most clear in his expressions of opinion concerning him. Lady Alanby of Dole made a practice of speaking of him in public frequently, always with admiring approval, and in that final manner of hers, to whose authority her neighbours had so long submitted. It began to be accepted as a fact that he was a new development of his race—as her ladyship had put it, “A new order of Mount Dunstan.”
The story of his power over the stricken people, and of their passionate affection and admiration for him, was one likely to spread far, and be immensely popular. The drama of certain incidents appealed greatly to the rustic mind, and by cottage firesides he was represented with rapturous awe, as raising men, women, and children from the dead, by the mere miracle of touch. Mrs. Welden and old Doby revelled in thrilling, almost Biblical, versions of current anecdotes, when Betty paid her visits to them.
“It’s like the Scripture, wot he done for that young man as the last breath had gone out of him, an’ him lyin’ stiffening fast. `Young man, arise,’ he says. `The Lord Almighty calls. You’ve got a young wife an’ three children to take care of. Take up your bed an’ walk.’ Not as he wanted him to carry his bed anywheres, but it was a manner of speaking. An’ up the young man got. An’ a sensible way,” said old Mrs. Welden frankly, “for the Lord to look at it— for I must say, miss, if I was struck down for it, though I s’pose it’s only my sinful ignorance—that there’s times when the Lord seems to think no more of sweepin’ away a steady eighteen-shillin’ a week, and p’raps seven in family, an’ one at the breast, an’ another on the way—than if it was nothin’. But likely enough, eighteen shillin’ a week an’ confinements does seem paltry to the Maker of ‘eaven an’ earth.”
