“Sergeant! Sergeant! He’s drowning me! But I’ve got him!” and
bubbled away into silence.
At that moment there was lightning; and the outlines of two figures
struggling in the water could be distinctly seen. These two persons
were Lena and Ben Trawl. They seemed to have each other in a mutual
death-grip. The girl’s hands were at the man’s throat. He dashed
her under and under the water. But her clutch did not relax by a
finger. He held her down. But Lena held on.
“After I’ve strangled you!” gasped Lena.
“---- you,” muttered the man. “Drown, then!”
Her head went under; her mouth filled; this time she could not
struggle up; her ears rang; her brain burst. But the little fingers
on the big throat clutched on. Then she felt herself caught from
above--air came, and breath with it--and Ben swore faintly.
“Undo your hands, Lena,” said the sergeant. “We’ve got him. You
don’t want to hang him before his time.”
Another flash of lightning revealed the sea and sky, the docks and
the officers, and Ben, purple and breathing hard, stretched upon
the wharf. Lena heard the snap of the handcuffs upon his wrists;
and then she heard and saw no more.
The sergeant touched the girl’s dripping and unconscious figure
with a respect never shown to Lena in Windover police circles
before.
“She might not come to, yet,” he said; “she’s nigh enough to a
drowned girl. Get a woman, can’t you, somebody?”
“The man’s all we can manage,” replied a brother officer. “Get him
to the station the back way--here! Give a hand there! Quick! We’ll
have lynch-law here in just about ten minutes, if you ain’t spry.
Hark! D’ye hear that?”
A muffled roar came down the throat of Angel Alley. It grew, and
approached. It was the cry of all Windover raging to avenge the
Christian hero whom it learned, too late, to honor.
* * * * *
“Anyhow, he’ll hang for it,” muttered Lena, when she came to
herself in her decent room. Johnny’s mother was moaning over her.
Lena pushed the old woman gently away, and commanded the retreating
officer,
“Say, won’t he? Out with it!”
“Well,” replied the officer in a comfortable tone, “a good deal
depends. Liquor men ain’t skerce in this county. He’d get twenty
witnesses to swear to an alibi as easy as he’d get one.”
“Let ’em swear,” said Lena. “I see him do it. I saw him heave the
stone.”
“That might alter the case, and again it mightn’t,” replied the
officer; “it would depend on the value of the testimony--previous
reputation, and so on.”
Lena groaned.
“But I caught him by the arm! I stood alongside of him. I was
watching for it. I thought I’d be able to stop him. I’m pretty
strong. I grabbed him--but he flung me off and stamped on me. I see
him heave the rock. See! There’s the mark, where he kicked me. Then
he ran, and I after him. I can swear to it before earth and heaven.
I see him fling that rock!”
“You see,” observed the officer, “it ain’t a case of manslaughter
just yet. The minister was breathing when they moved him.”
* * * * *
They carried him to his own rooms, for it was not thought possible
to move him further. He had not spoken nor stirred, but his pulse
indicated that a good reserve of life remained in him. The wound
was in the lung. The stone was a large and jagged one, with a cruel
edge. It had struck with malignant power, and by one of those
extraordinary aims which seem to be left for hate and chance to
achieve.
His wife had caught him as he fell. She had uttered one cry; after
that, her lips had opened only once, and only to say that she
assented to her father’s proposal for the removal of her husband
to Mrs. Granite’s house, and that she entreated them to find some
gentle method of transportation over the rough road. For Windover
was a town of many churches, but of no hospital.
Oddly, the only quite coherent thought she had was of a man she had
heard about, a carpenter, who fell from a staging on the other side
of the Cape. He was put into an express cart and driven home, a
seven-mile gallop, over the rudest road in the State, to his wife;
naturally, he was dead when he got there. Bayard had been called to
see the widow.
Captain Hap stepped up (on tiptoe, as if he had been in a
sick-room), and whispered to the surgeon who had been summoned to
Angel Alley.
“That will do,” said the surgeon; “it has never been tried, that
I know of, but it is worth trying--most modern ideas are--if
practicable.”
“The fishermen hev cleared the car, the company has cleared the
track, and the motor man is one of his people,” said Captain Hap;
“an’ there’s enough of us to carry him from here to heaven so--so
lovin’ly he’d never feel a jolt.”
The old captain made no effort to wipe the tears which rained down
his wrinkled cheeks. He and Job Slip, with Mr. Bond and Bob and
Tony, took hold of the stretcher; they looked about, to choose, out
of a hundred volunteers, the sixth strong hand.
The Reverend George Fenton, agitated and trembling, forced his way
through the parting crowd, and pleaded piteously to be allowed to
offer his assistance in carrying his wounded classmate.
“I have never lifted a hand to help him since I came to Windover,”
cried Fenton in the voice of a man who would rather that the whole
world heard what he said and knew how he felt. “Let me have this
chance before it is too late!... I’m not worthy to touch his bier,”
added Fenton brokenly.
They gave way to his pleading, and it was done as he asked. Thus
the wounded man was carried gently to the electric car--“the
people’s carriage.” The fishermen, as the captain said, had
captured it; they stood with bowed heads, as the stretcher passed
through them, like children, sobbing. Throngs of them followed
the slowly moving car, which carried Bayard tenderly to his own
door. It was said afterwards that scores of them watched all
night outside the cottage, peering for some sign of how it fared
with him; but they were so still that one might hardly tell their
figures from the shadows of the night.
The wind had continued to rise, but the thunder had passed on, and
the shower was almost over when Bayard’s bearers lifted him across
the threshold of Mrs. Granite’s door. At that moment one belated
flash ran over earth and sea and sky. It was a red flash, and a
mighty one. By its crimson light the fishermen saw his face for
that last instant; it lay turned over on the stretcher quietly,
towards his wife. The red color dyed her bridal white, and the
terrible composure of her attitude was revealed; her hand was
fast in his; she seemed to communicate, God knew how, with the
unconscious man.
The flash went out, and darkness fell again.
“Then God shut the door,” muttered an old and religious fisherman
who stood weeping by the fence, among the larkspurs.
* * * * *
The wind went down, and the tide went out. Bayard’s pulse and
breath fell with the sea, and the June dawn came. The tide came in,
and the wind arose, and it was evening. Then he moaned, and turned,
and it was made out that he tried to say, “Helen?--was Helen hurt?”
Then the soul came into his eyes, and they saw her.
* * * * *
He did not sink away that day, nor the next, and the evening and
the morning were the third day in the chamber where death and life
made duel for him.
He suffered, it is hard to think how much; but the fine courage in
his habit of living clung on. The injury was not, necessarily, a
fatal one. The great consulting surgeon called from Boston said.
“The patient may live.” He added: “But the vitality is low; it has
been sapped to the roots. And the lung is weak. There has been a
strain sometime; the organ has received a lesion.”
Then Job Slip, when he heard this, thought of the minister’s
cough, which dated from that battle with the surf off Ragged Rock.
And the value of his own cheap life, bought at a price so precious,
overwhelmed the man. He would have died a hundred deaths for the
pastor. Instead, he had to do the harder thing. It was asked of him
to live, and to remember.
In all those days (they were eight in number) Jane Granite’s small,
soft eyes took on a strange expression; it was not unlike that we
see in a dog who is admitted to the presence of a sick or injured
master. God was merciful to Jane. The pastor had come back. To live
or to die, he had come. It was hers again to work, to watch, to
run, to slave for him; she looked at the new wife without a pang
of envy; she came or went under Helen’s orders; she poured out her
heart in that last torrent of self-forgetful service, and thanked
God for the precious chance, and asked no more. She had the spaniel
suffering, but she had the spaniel happiness.
* * * * *
For seven days and nights he lay in his shabby rooms, a royal
sufferer. The Christ above his bed looked down with solemn
tenderness; in his moments of consciousness (but these were few) he
glanced at the picture.
Helen had not left his room, either day or night. Leaning upon one
arm on the edge of the narrow bed, she watched for the lifting of
an eyelid, for the motion of a hand, for the ebbing or the rising
of a breath. Sometimes he knew her, and seemed to try to say to her
how comforting it was to him to have her there, in the dreary old
rooms, where he had dreamed of her sumptuous presence; where they
meant to begin their life and love together.
But he could not talk. She found herself already anticipating the
habit of those whom the eternal silence bereaves, recalling every
precious phrase that his lips had uttered in those last days; she
repeated to herself the words which he had said to her on Sunday
morning,--
“Nothing _can_ harm us now, for you are mine, and I am yours, and
this is forever.”
As the seventh day broke he grew perceptibly stronger. Helen
yielded to her father’s entreaties, and for a moment absented
herself from the sick-room--for she was greatly overworn,--to drink
a breath of morning air. She sat down on the step in the front door
of the cottage. She noticed the larkspur in the garden, blue and
tall; bees were humming through it; the sound of the tide came up
loudly; Jane Granite came and offered her something, she could not
have said what; Helen tried to drink it, but pushed the cup away,
and went hurriedly upstairs again.
A cot had now been moved in for her beside Bayard’s narrow bed. She
sat down on the edge of it, between her father and her husband. The
Professor stirred to step softly out.
“Dear Professor!” said Bayard suddenly. He looked at the Christ on
the wall, and smiled. “We meant--the same thing--after all,” he
whispered.
Then he put his hand in his wife’s, and slept.
It came on to be the evening of the eighth day. He had grown
stronger all the day, but he suffered much.
“Folks are keepin’ of him back by their prayers,” said the
religious, old fisherman, who leaned every day upon the garden
fence. “He can’t pass.”
But Job Slip and Captain Hap, who sat upon the doorsteps, listening
from dawn to dark for any sign from Bayard’s room, said nothing at
all.
It came to be evening, and the tide had risen with the wind. The
sea called all night long. Helen sat alone with her husband.
He did not wander that night, but watched her face whenever he was
not asleep.
“Kiss me, Helen,” he sighed at midnight.
She stooped and kissed him, but her lips took the air from him, and
he struggled for it.
“You poor, poor girl!” he said.
The wind went down, and the tide went out. The dawn came with the
ebb. Bayard fell into a sleep so gentle that Helen’s heart leaped
with hope. She stole out into the study. Captain Hap was there;
his shoes were off; he stepped without noise. The sunrise made a
rose-light in the rooms.
“It is real sleep,” breathed Helen. “Don’t wake him, Captain.”
But when the old sailor-nurse would have taken her place for the
morning watch, she shook her head. She went back and lay down on
the cot beside her husband; he moved his hand, as if he groped for
hers, and she was sorry that he had missed it for a moment.
“It shall not happen again,” she thought.
Then exhaustion and vigil overcame her, for she had watched for
many nights; and thinking that she waked, she slept.
When she came to herself it was broad, bright day. Her hand had a
strange feeling; when she tried, she could not move it, for he held
it fast. There were people in the room,--her father, her mother,
Captain Hap. She stirred a little, leaning towards her husband’s
pillow.
“Dear, are you better this morning?”
But some one came up, and gently laid a hand upon her eyes.