The Carlow folks were deeply impressed with the two eminent surgeons, of
whom some of them had heard, and on Tuesday, the bulletins marking
considerable encouragement, most of them decided to temporarily risk the
editor of the "Herald" to such capable hands, and they returned quietly to
their homes; only a few were delayed in reaching Carlow by travelling to
the first station in the opposite direction before they succeeded in
planting themselves on the proper train.
Meanwhile, the object of their solicitude tossed and burned on his bed of
pain. He was delirious most of the time, and, in the intervals of half-
consciousness, found that his desire to live, very strong at first, had
disappeared; he did not care much about anything except rest--he wanted
peace. In his wanderings he was almost always back in his college days,
beholding them in an unhappy, distorted fashion. He would lie asprawl on
the sward with the others, listening to the Seniors singing on the steps,
and, all at once, the old, kindly faces would expand enormously and press
over him with hideous mouthings, and an ugly Senior in cap and gown would
stamp him and grind a spiked heel into his hand; then they would toss him
high into air that was all flames, and he would fall and fall through the
raging heat, seeing the cool earth far beneath him, but never able to get
down to it again. And then he was driven miles and miles by dusky figures,
through a rain of boiling water; and at other times the whole universe was
a vast, hot brass bell, and it gave off a huge, continuous roar and hum,
while he was a mere point of consciousness floating in the exact centre of
the heat and sound waves, and he listened, listened for years, to the
awful, brazen hum from which there could be no escape; at the same time it
seemed to him that he was only a Freshman on the slippery roof of the
tower, trying to steal the clapper of the chapel bell.
Finally he came to what he would have considered a lucid interval, had it
not appeared that Helen Sherwood was whispering to Tom Meredith at the
foot of his bed. This he knew to be a fictitious presentation of his
fever, for was she not by this time away and away for foreign lands? And,
also, Tom Meredith was a slim young thing, and not the middle-aged youth
with an undeniable stomach and a baldish head, who, by the grotesque
necromancy of his hallucinations, assumed a preposterous likeness to his
old friend. He waved his hand to the figures and they vanished like
figments of a dream; but all the same the vision had been realistic enough
for the lady to look exquisitely pretty. No one could help wishing to stay
in a world which contained as charming a picture as that.