Corporal White drew his men aside, while the Count, concealing his own slight wounds, led and supported young Lorraine through a short passage, and into a bedroom, dark, and cool, and comfortable. Here he laid him to rest on a couch, and brought cold water, and sponged his face. And presently old Teresina came, and moaned, and invoked the Virgin a little, and then fell to and pulled all his clothes off, as if he were her daughter’s baby. And Hilary laughed at her way of working, and soothing him like some little pet; so that he almost enjoyed the pain of the clotted places coming off. For after all he had not received--like Brigadier Walker that hot evening--twenty-seven wounds of divers sorts; but only five, and two bad bruises, enough to divert the attention. If a man has only one place of his body to think about, and to be full of, he is scarcely better off than a gourmand, or a guest at a Lord Mayor’s dinner. But if he finds himself peppered all over, his attention is not over-concentrated, and he finds a new pleasure in backing one hole of his body against another. In the time of the plague this thing was so; and so it must be in the times of war. From the crown and climax of human misery, Lorraine (by the grace of the Lord) was spared. No doctor was allowed to come near him. That fatal step in the strongest man’s life (the step tempting up to the doctor’s bell), happily in his case was not trodden; for the British surgeons were doing their utmost at amputating dead men’s legs; while Senhor Gines de Passamonte (the only Spanish graduate of medicine in good circles) had been roasted at one of the bonfires, to enable him to speak English. This was a well-meant operation, and proved by no means a fatal measure; the jack, however, revolved so well, that he went on no medical rounds for three months. “Senhor, we can no doctor get,” said the anxious Count to Hilary, having made up his mind to plunge into English, of which he had tried some private practice. “Senhor, what is now to do? I can no more speak to please.” “You can speak to please most nobly; I wish that I could speak the grand Hispanic tongue at all, sir.” “Senhor, you shall. So brave a gentleman never will find bad to teach. The fine Angles way of speaking is to me very strong and good; in one year, two year, three year, sir. Alas! I behold you laughing.” “Count, it was but a twinge of pain. You possess a great knowledge of my native tongue. But I fear that after such a night as this you will care to cultivate it no more.”