Chapter 11 - Page 2

all duly ranged in the twilight of
their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly.
St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as
for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He
sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes;
sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched
mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered
how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those
bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome
byways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save
his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre,
diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.

The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she
knew not why. Alan couldn't rouse her to enthusiasm over his
beloved Buonfigli. Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetly
parted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, own
sisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admired
at Florence, moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might to like
them, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way.

At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain of
constant headache. He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and
restless. Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while,
those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to her
wishes in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, so that
Herminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor. Perugia
boasted no English one. The Italian felt his pulse, and listened
to his symptoms. "The signore came here from Florence?" he asked.

"From Florence," Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking.

The doctor protruded his lower lip. "This is typhoid fever," he
said after a pause. "A very bad type. It has been assuming such a
form this winter at Florence."

He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before in his bedroom at
the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water from
the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis.
For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded in
silence in his poisoned arteries. At the end of that time, they
swarmed and declared themselves. He was ill with an aggravated
form of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked through
unsanitated Europe.

Herminia's alarm was painful. Alan grew rapidly worse. In two
days he was so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph at
once to Dr. Merrick, in London: "Alan's life in danger. Serious
attack of Florentine typhoid. Italian doctor despairs of his life.
May not last till