“To be the benefactor of mankind,” he thought he heard a voice reply.
He looked round, but there was nothing there; and a passage now shutting out the little parlour from his view, he went on, directing his eyes before him at the way he went.
“It is only since last night,” he muttered gloomily, “that I have remained shut up, and yet all things are strange to me. I am strange to myself. I am here, as in a dream. What interest have I in this place, or in any place that I can bring to my remembrance? My mind is going blind!”
There was a door before him, and he knocked at it. Being invited, by a voice within, to enter, he complied.
“Is that my kind nurse?” said the voice. “But I need not ask her. There is no one else to come here.”
It spoke cheerfully, though in a languid tone, and attracted his attention to a young man lying on a couch, drawn before the chimney-piece, with the back towards the door. A meagre scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped down fast.
“They chink when they shoot out here,” said the student, smiling, “so, according to the gossips, they are not coffins, but purses. I shall be well and rich yet, some day, if it please God, and shall live perhaps to love a daughter Milly, in remembrance of the kindest nature and the gentlest heart in the world.”
He put up his hand as if expecting her to take it, but, being weakened, he lay still, with his face resting on his other hand, and did not turn round.
The Chemist glanced about the room; – at the student’s books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it; – at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall; – at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home; – at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder.
The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head.
“Mr. Redlaw!” he exclaimed, and started up.
Redlaw put out his arm.
“Don’t come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!”
He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground.
“I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him.”
“I have been ill, sir,” returned the student, not merely with a modest hesitation, but with a kind of awe of him, “but am greatly better. An attack of fever – of the brain, I believe – has weakened me, but I am much better. I cannot say I have been solitary, in my illness, or I should forget the ministering hand that has been near me.”
“You are speaking of the keeper’s wife,” said Redlaw.
“Yes.” The student bent his head, as if he rendered her some silent homage.