THE very name of Arthur Wardlaw startled Helen, and made her realize how completely her thoughts had been occupied with another.
But add to that the strange and bitter epigram! Or was it a mere fortuitous concourse of words?
She was startled, amazed, confounded, puzzled. And, ere she could recover her composure, Hazel was back to his problem again; but no longer with the same energy.
He said in a faint and sleepy voice: "'He maketh the winds His messengers, and flames of fire His ministers.' Ah! if I could do that!
Well, why not? I can do anything she bids me--_Graeculus esuriens coelum jusseris ibit."_
And soon after this doughty declaration he dozed off, and forgot all his trouble for a while.
The sun rose, and still he slept, and Helen watched him with undisguised tenderness in her face; undisguised now that he could not see it. Ere long she had companions in her care. Ponto came out of his den, and sniffed about the boat; and then began to scratch it, and whimper for his friend. Tommy swam out of the sea, came to the boat, discovered, Heaven knows how, that his friend was there, and, in the way of noises, did everything but speak. The sea-birds followed and fluttered here and there in an erratic way, with now and then a peck at each other. All animated nature seemed to be uneasy at this eclipse of their Hazel.
At last Tommy raised himself quite perpendicular, in a vain endeavor to look into the boat, and invented a whine in the minor key, which tells on dogs: it set Ponto off in a moment; he sat upon his tail, and delivered a long and most deplorable howl.
"Everything loves him," thought Helen. With Ponto's music Hazel awoke and found her watching him, with tears in her eyes; he said softly: "Miss Rolleston! There is nothing the matter, I hope. Why am I not up getting things for your breakfast?"
"Dear friend," said she, "why you are not doing things for me and forgetting yourself is because you have been very ill. And I am your nurse. Now tell me what I shall get you. Is there nothing you could fancy?"
No; he had no appetite; she was not to trouble about him. And then he tried to get up; but that gave him such a pain in his loins he was fain to lie down again. So then he felt that he had got rheumatic fever. He told her so; but, seeing her sweet anxious face, begged her not to be alarmed--he knew what to take for it. Would she be kind enough to go to his arsenal and fetch some specimens of bark she would find there, and also the keg of rum?
She flew at the word, and soon made him an infusion of the barks in boiling water; to which the rum was added.
His sweet nurse administered this from time to time. The barks used were of the cassia tree, and a wild citron tree. Cinchona did not exist in this island, unfortunately. Perhaps there was no soil for it at a sufficient elevation above the sea.
Nevertheless with these inferior barks they held the fever in check. But the pain was obstinate, and cost Helen many a sigh; for, if she came softly, she could often hear him moan; and, the moment he heard her foot, he set to and whistled, for a blind; with what success may be imagined.
She would have bought those pains, or a portion of them; ay, and paid a heavy price for them.
But pain, like everything, intermits, and in those blessed intervals his mind was more active than ever, and ran a great deal upon what he called the Problem.
But she, who had set it him, gave him little encouragement now to puzzle over it.
The following may serve as a specimen of their conversation on that head.
"The air of this island," said he, "gives one a sort of vague sense of mental power. It leads to no result in my case. Still, it is an agreeable sensation to have it floating across my mind that some day I shall solve the Great Problem. Ah! if I was only an inventor!"
"And so you are."
"No, no," said Hazel, disclaiming as earnestly as some people claim; "I do things that look like acts of invention, but they are acts of memory.
I could show you plates and engravings of all the things I have seemed to invent. A man who studies books instead of skimming them can cut a dash in a desert island, until the fatal word goes forth--invent; and then you find him out."
"I am sure I wish I had never said the fatal word. You will never get well if you puzzle your brain over impossibilities."
"Impossibilities! But is not that begging the question? The measure of impossibilities is lost in the present age. I propose a test. Let us go back a century, and suppose that three problems were laid before the men of that day, and they were asked to decide which is the most impossible:
1st, to diffuse intelligence from a fixed island over a hundred leagues of water; 2d, to make the sun take in thirty seconds likenesses more exact than any portrait-painter ever took--likenesses that can be sold for a shilling at fifty per cent profit; 3d, for New York and London to exchange words by wire so much faster than the earth can turn, that London shall tell New York at ten on Monday morning what was the price of consols at two o'clock Monday afternoon."
"That is a story," said Helen, with a look of angelic reproach.
