Lois used to tell him,
while she feebly tried to set his room in order, of all her plans,--of
how Sam Polston was to be married on New-Year's,--but most of all of the
Christmas coming out at the old schoolmaster's: how the old house had
been scrubbed from top to bottom, was fairly glowing with shining paint
and hot fires,--how Margaret and her mother worked, in terror lest the
old man should find out how poor and bare it was,--how he and Joel had
some secret enterprise on foot at the far end of the plantation out in
the swamp, and were gone nearly all day.
She ceased coming at last. One of the sisters went out to see her, and
told him she was too weak to walk, but meant to be better soon,--quite
well by the holidays. He wished the poor thing had told him what she
wanted of him,--wished it anxiously, with a dull presentiment of evil.
The days went by, cold and slow. He watched grimly the preparations
the hospital physician was silently making in his case, for fever,
inflammation.
"I must be strong enough to go out cured on Christmas eve," he said to
him one day, coolly.
The old doctor glanced up shrewdly. He was an old Alsatian, very
plain-spoken.
"You say so?" he mumbled. "Chut! Then you will go. There are
some--bull-dog men. They do what they please,--they never die unless
they choose, begar! We know them in our practice, Herr Holmes!"
Holmes laughed. Some acumen there, he thought, in medicine or mind: as
for himself, it was true enough; whatever success he had gained in life
had been by no flush of enthusiasm or hope; a dogged persistence of
"holding on," rather.
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