The Lazy Tour of Two Idle ApprenticesDickens, Charles
General
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Dickens, Charles
Apprentices -- Fiction; Cumbria (England) -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Walking -- England -- Cumbria -- Fiction
He stood looking at it unable to stir, unable to call out; feeling
nothing, knowing nothing, every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost
in the one seeing faculty. How long that first panic held him he never
could tell afterwards. It might have been only for a moment; it might
have been for many minutes together. How he got to the bed—whether he
ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly—how he wrought
himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered,
and never will remember to his dying day. It is enough that he did go to
the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.
The man had moved. One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was
turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open. Changed as to
position, and as to one of the features, the face was, otherwise,
fearfully and wonderfully unaltered. The dead paleness and the dead
quiet were on it still.
One glance showed Arthur this—one glance, before he flew breathlessly to
the door, and alarmed the house.
The man whom the landlord called ‘Ben,’ was the first to appear on the
stairs. In three words, Arthur told him what had happened, and sent him
for the nearest doctor.
I, who tell you this story, was then staying with a medical friend of
mine, in practice at Doncaster, taking care of his patients for him,
during his absence in London; and I, for the time being, was the nearest
doctor. They had sent for me from the Inn, when the stranger was taken
ill in the afternoon; but I was not at home, and medical assistance was
sought for elsewhere. When the man from The Two Robins rang the
night-bell, I was just thinking of going to bed. Naturally enough, I did
not believe a word of his story about ‘a dead man who had come to life
again.’ However, I put on my hat, armed myself with one or two bottles
of restorative medicine, and ran to the Inn, expecting to find nothing
more remarkable, when I got there, than a patient in a fit.
My surprise at finding that the man had spoken the literal truth was
almost, if not quite, equalled by my astonishment at finding myself face
to face with Arthur Holliday as soon as I entered the bedroom. It was no
time then for giving or seeking explanations. We just shook hands
amazedly; and then I ordered everybody but Arthur out of the room, and
hurried to the man on the bed.
The kitchen fire had not been long out. There was plenty of hot water in
the boiler, and plenty of flannel to be had. With these, with my
medicines, and with such help as Arthur could render under my direction,
I dragged the man, literally, out of the jaws of death. In less than an
hour from the time when I had been called in, he was alive and talking in
the bed on which he had been laid out to wait for the Coroner’s inquest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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