"Still I fear we are too late in the season for much camping," he
said, "I must see Arthur about it."
He waited till ten, eleven, half-past eleven. No Arthur, not even
the old woman about. He wondered very much. He approached the house,
and finding nobody coming at his knock, opened the door and went in.
Something wrong. He knew that at once. The air was stifling,
horrible, with an unknown quantity in it, it seemed to him. He threw
open the front room door. _Veuve_ Peter Ross was in her bed, ill,
and of small-pox. He could tell her that, for certain. He rushed
up-stairs and found Clarges on his bed, raving, delirious.
What was it he heard?
"Bovey's all right! Bovey's all right?" This was all, repeated over
and over.
The Hon. Bovyne was neither a fool nor a coward. He tore off his
coat and looked at his arm, then he dragged his cousin out of the
room, down the stairs and out of the fatal house. Propping him up
against a sturdy pine and covering him with all available warm
clothing, he sped like wind to the nearest house. But neither the
swift, keen self-reproaches of Bovey, nor the skill of the best
physician to be found in the town, nor the pure, fresh pine-scented
air, nor the yearning perchance of a dead yet present mother could
prevail. The young life went out in delirium and in agony, but
"thank God," thought Bovey, "in complete unconsciousness."
When he set about removing his tent and other camping apparatus some
time later, he was suddenly struck with the appearance of the tree
against which poor Clarges had been propped. He looked again and
again. "I must be dreaming," said the Hon. Bovyne. "That tree--oh!
its impossible--nevertheless, that tree has its counterpart in the
one opposite it, and both have extraordinary branches! They bend
upward, making a kind of--of--what was it Arthur saw in those
imaginary trees of his only--_yesterday_--my God--it is true--a kind
of lyre shape! There it is, and the more I look at it the clearer it
grows, and to think he has _died_ there--!! And beneath there he is
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