"Oh, dear! I do so ache, and I'm thirsty," the second patient groaned desperately, showing no emotion--surprise, awe or shame--at sight of the doctor and employer whom he had so cruelly wronged by leaving him in the lurch for inadequate reasons originating in mere sentiment. He had been solitary for half an hour and could not bear it. He wanted, and wanted ravenously, something from everybody he saw. The world existed solely to succour him. And certainly he looked very ill, forlorn, and wistfully savage in the miserable bed in the miserable bedroom of the ex-charwoman. He looked quite as ill as Mr. Earlforward, and to Elsie even worse.
"It's malaria," said the doctor in a casual tone, after he had gone through the routine of examination. "Temperature, of course. He'll be better in a few days. I've no doubt he had it in France first, but he never told me. When they brought back troops to France from the East, malaria came with them. All the north of France is covered with mosquitoes, and they carry the disease. I'll send down some quinine. You must feed him on liquids--milk, barley-water, beef-tea, milk-and-soda. Hot water to drink, not cold. And you ought to sponge him down twice a day."
Elsie, listening intently to this mixture of advice and information, could not believe that Joe's case was not more serious than the doctor's manner implied. Well implanted in her lay the not groundless conviction that doctors were apt to be much more summary with the sick poor than with the sick rich. And she was revisited by her old sense of this doctor's harsh indifference. He had not even greeted his former servant, had regarded him simply as he would regard any ordinary number in a panel.
"You won't have a great deal to do downstairs. In fact, scarcely anything," the doctor added, who apparently saw nothing excessive in leaving two patients in charge of one unaided woman, she being also housekeeper, shopkeeper, and domestic servant.
"Of course you can send him to the hospital if you care to," said the doctor lightly. "I dare say they'd take him in." He was, in fact, not anxious to insist on Joe's removal, thinking that he had already sufficiently worried the hospital authorities about the dwellers in Riceyman Steps.