CHAPTER XXVIII. ALEXANDER STRIKES A LIGHT. “A death-bed’s a detector of the heart.” So is a sick bed. A man may have passed through the greatest college in the world and carried off its highest honors; may have traveled over every foot of land and sea; may have learned all else that this earth has to teach him—_yet_ if he has never had a good, dangerous, rallying spell of illness, his education has been neglected. Alexander Lyon had been a strong, arrogant, despotic man, and not from any _in_ternal force of the spirit, but by the _ex_ternal support of great physical strength, sound health and large wealth. Of the reverses of these he had no experience in his own person, and not enough of sympathy with others to realize them to his own imagination. Poverty, sickness, death, were to him abstract ideas. He had no personal knowledge of them. True, he had lost both his parents by death; but they were very aged; and his father had died in an instant, like a man called away on a hasty journey; and his mother had followed, after a short illness; and their decease had left upon his mind the impression of absence rather than of death. Certainly, within a few hours before his duel he had been forced to think of his own possible death, but it was as of a sudden and violent catastrophe, which in his great excitement he was desperate enough to brave and meet. But he never imagined being wounded and mutilated, and laid helpless and languishing on a bed of weakness and pain. Yet here he was. On the third day after that upon which he had been wounded, an irritative fever set in, and from having been stupid and quiet he became delirious and violent. General Lyon had left him, as we have seen. And Francis Tredegar had also, soon after, gone to London on imperative business. And Alexander was now in the hands of the skilful surgeon whom the magnanimity of Prince Ernest had placed in attendance upon him. And the surgeon was assisted by the valet Simms and by the servants of the hotel. For eight terrible days the wounded man burned with fever and raved with frenzy. For eight days, within his broken and agonized frame, an almost equal struggle between the forces of life and death went on. But, by the aid of his strong constitution and of his skilful surgeon, life at length prevailed over death. It was about the dawn of the critical ninth day, that the fever finally left him. The surgeon, who, on that particular night, had watched by his bed, was the first to perceive the signs of reviving life, in the moisture of the sleeper’s hands and the moderated pulsations at his wrists. “The imminent danger is over now. He will live and recover,—unless he should have a relapse, which we must try to prevent,” said Doctor Dietz to Simms, the valet, who had shared his watch.