"Be very careful!" whispered the nurse.

He knew he must be careful. Only the eyes were alive. The body was a collapsed thing. He seemed scarcely breathing, his voice was a thread.

"Robin!" Coombe caught as he bent close to him. "Robin!"

"She is well, dear boy!" How his voice shook! "I have taken care of her."

The light leaped up into the blue for a second. The next the lids dropped and the nurse sprang forward because he had slipped into a faint so much like death that it might well have rent hope from a looker-on.

For the next hour, and indeed for many following, there was unflagging work to be done. The Red Cross Nurse was a capable, swiftly moving woman, with her resources at her finger's ends, and her quick wits about her. Almost immediately two doctors from the staff, in charge of the rooms upstairs were on the spot and at work with her. By what lightning-flashed sentences she conveyed to them, without pausing for a second, the facts it was necessary for them to know, was incomprehensible to Coombe, who could only stand afar off and wait, watching the dead face. Its sunken temples, cheeks and eyes, and the sharply carven bone outline were heart gripping.

It seemed hours before one of the doctors as he bent over the couch whispered,

"The breathing is a little better--"

It was not possible that he should be moved, but the couch was broad and deeply upholstered and could be used temporarily as a bed. Every resource of medical science was within reach. Nurse Jones, who had been on her way home to take a rest, was so far ensnared by unusual interest that she wished to be allowed to remain on duty. There were other nurses who could be called on at any moment of either night or day. There were doctors of indisputable skill who were also fired by the mere histrionic features of the case. The handsome, fortunate young fellow who had been supposed torn to fragments had by some incomprehensible luck been aided to drag himself home--perhaps to die of pure exhaustion.

Was it really hours before Coombe saw the closed eyes weakly open? But the smile was gone and they seemed to be looking at something not in the room.

"They will come--in," the words dragged out scarcely to be heard.

"Jackson--said--said--they--would." The eyes dropped again and the breathing was a mere flutter.

Nurse Jones was in fact filled with much curiosity concerning and interest in the Marquis of Coombe. She was a clever and well trained person, but socially a simple creature, who in an inoffensive way "loved a lord." If her work had not absorbed her she could not have kept her eyes from this finely conventional and rather unbending-looking man who--keeping himself out of the way of all who were in charge of the seemingly almost dead boy--still would not leave the room, and watched him with a restrained pa.s.sion of such feeling as it was not natural to see in the eyes of men. Marquis or not he had gone through frightful things in his life and this boy meant something tremendous to him. If he couldn't be brought back--! Despite the work her swift eye darted sideways at the Marquis.

When at length another nurse took her place and she was going out of the room, he moved quickly towards her and spoke.

"May I ask if I may speak to you alone for a few minutes? I have no right to keep you from your rest. I a.s.sure you I won't."

"I'll come," she answered. What she saw in the man's face was that, because she had brought the boy, he actually clung to her. She had been clung to many times before, but never by a man who looked quite like this. There was _more_ than you could see.

He led her to a smaller room near by. He made her sit down, but he did not sit himself. It was plain that he did not mean to keep her from her bed--though he was in hard case if ever man was. His very determination not to impose on her caused her to make up her mind to tell him all she could, though it wasn't much.

"Captain Muir's mother believes that he is dead," he said. "It is plain that no excitement must approach him--even another person's emotion. He was her idol. She is in London. _Must_ I send for her--or would it be safe to wait?"

"There have been minutes to-day when if I'd known he had a mother I should have said she must be sent for," was her answer. "To-night I believe--yes, I _do_--that it would be better to wait and watch. Of course the doctors must really decide."

"Thank you. I will speak to them. But I confess I wanted to ask _you_."

How he did cling to her!

"Thank you," he said again. "I will not keep you."

He opened the door and waited for her to pa.s.s--as if she had been a marchioness herself, she thought. In spite of his desperate eyes he didn't forget a single thing. He so moved her that she actually turned back.

"You don't know anything yet-- Some one you're fond of coming back from the grave must make you half mad to know how it happened," she said. "I don't know much myself, but I'll tell you all I was able to find out. He was light headed when I found him trying to get on the boat. When I spoke to him he just caught my hand and begged me to stay with him. He wanted to get to you. He'd been wandering about, starved and hiding. If he'd been himself he could have got help earlier. But he'd been ill treated and had seen things that made him lose his balance. He couldn't tell a clear story. He was too weak to talk clearly. But I asked questions now and then and listened to every word he said when he rambled because of his fever. Jackson was a fellow prisoner who died of hemorrhage brought on by brutality. Often I couldn't understand him, but he kept bringing in the name of Jackson. One thing puzzled me very much.

He said several times 'Jackson taught me to dream of Robin. I should never have seen Robin if I hadn't known Jackson.' Now 'Robin' is a boy's name--but he said 'her' and 'she' two or three times as if it were a girl's."

"Robin is his wife," said Coombe. He really found the support of the door he still held open, useful for the moment.

An odd new interest sharpened in her eyes.

"Then he's been dreaming of her." She almost jerked it out--as if in sudden illumination almost relief. "He's been dreaming of her--! And it may have kept him alive." She paused as if she were asking questions of her own mind. "I wonder," dropped from her in slow speculation, "if she has been dreaming of _him_?"

"He was not dead--he was not an angel--he was Donal!" Robin had persisted from the first. He had not been dead. In some incredibly hideous German prison--in the midst of inhuman horrors and the blackness of what must have been despair--he had been alive, and had dreamed as she had.

Nurse Jones looked at him, waiting. Even if nurses had not been, presumably, under some such bond of honourable secrecy as constrained the medical profession, he knew she was to be trusted. Her very look told him.

"She did dream of him," he said. "She was slipping fast down the slope to death and he caught her back. He saved her life and her child's. She was going to have a child."

They were both quite silent for a few moments. The room was still. Then the woman drew her hand with a quick odd gesture across her forehead.

"Queer things happened in the last century, but queerer ones are going to happen in this--if people will let them. Doctors and nurses see and think a lot they can't talk about. They're always on the spot at what seems to be the beginning and the ending. These black times have opened up the ways. 'Queer things,' I said," with sudden forcefulness. "They're not queer. It's only laws we haven't known about. It's the writing on the scroll that we couldn't read. We're just learning the alphabet."

Then after a minute more of thought, "Those two--were they particularly fond of each other--more to each other than most young couples?"

"They loved each other the hour they first met--when they were little children. It was an unnatural shock to them both when they were parted.

They seemed to be born mated for life."

"That was the reason," she said quite relievedly. "I can understand that. It's as orderly as the stars." Then she added with a sudden, strong, quite normal conviction, and her tiredness seemed to drop from her, "He won't die--that beautiful boy," she said. "He can't. It's not meant. They're going on, those three. He's the most splendid human thing I ever handled--skeleton as he is. His very bones are magnificent as he lies there. And that smile of his that's deep in the blue his eyes are made of--it can only flicker up for a second now--but it can't go out.

He's safe, even this minute, though you mayn't believe it."

"I do believe it," Coombe said.

And he stood there believing it, when she went through the open door and left him.

CHAPTER XLI

It was long before the dropped eyelids could lift and hold themselves open for more than a few seconds and long before the eyes wore their old clear look. The depths of the collapse after prolonged tortures of strain and fear was such as demanded a fierce and unceasing fight of skill and unswerving determination on the part of both doctors and nurses. There were hours when what seemed to be strange, deathly drops into abysses of s.p.a.ce struck terror into most of those who stood by looking on. But Nurse Jones always believed and so did Coombe.

"You needn't send for his mother yet," she said without flinching. "You and I know something the others don't know, Lord Coombe. That child and her baby are holding him back though they don't know anything about it."

It revealed itself to him that her interest in things occult and apparently unexplained by material processes had during the last few years intensely absorbed her in private. Her feeling, though intense, was intelligent and her processes of argument were often convincing. He became willing to answer her questions because he felt sure of her. He lent her the books he had been reading and in her hard-earned hours of leisure she plunged deep into them.

"Perhaps I read sometimes when I ought to be sleeping, but it rests me--I tell you it _rests_ me. I'm finding out that there's strength outside of all this and you can draw on it. It's there waiting," she said. "Everybody will know about its being there--in course of time."

"But the time seems long," said Coombe.

Concerning the dream she had many interesting theories. She was at first disturbed and puzzled because it had stopped. She was anxious to find out whether it had come back again, but, like Lord Coombe, she realised that Robin's apparent calm must on no account be disturbed. If her health-giving serenity could be sustained for a certain length of time, the gates of Heaven would open to her. But at first Nurse Jones asked herself and Lord Coombe some troubled questions.

It came about at length that she appeared one night, in the room where their first private talk had taken place and she had presented herself on her way to bed, because she had something special to say.

"It came to me when I awakened this morning as if it had been told to me in the night. Things often seem to come that way. Do you remember, Lord Coombe, that she said they only talked about happy things?"

"Yes. She said it several times," Coombe answered.