The Nymph and the Lamp (37 page)

“Sara, don't be a little fool,” Skane said, and began to run.

“Stay where you are!” the girl screamed. The pony reared.

The shot made a shocking sound in the hollow and it was followed by a shocking silence. Isabel felt a violent blow as if an invisible fist had struck her side. It staggered her for a moment but she recovered and turned her eyes slowly from Skane to the girl, and to the old seal-rifle falling from Sara's hands and slithering down the slope. She heard her own voice demanding in an amazed tone, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“My God!” Skane said, and came towards her. Sara was sitting crouched on the pony with her hands spread over her face. Isabel looked down then, and saw a patter of red drops falling like dye from the edge of her scarlet jacket and splashing on her right boot and the sand. A wave of giddiness passed through her but she remained fully conscious, and she was saying in a bewildered voice, “I must sit down,” when Skane caught her falling to the turf.

She lay very still while Skane wrenched open her clothes. The bullet had entered the right side near the lowermost rib and passed through her waist at a steep angle, emerging just above the flank. He tore her chemise in ragged strips, and as he tried to stop the gush of blood with hasty wads and bandages he called over his shoulder, “Were those soft-nosed bullets you were using?”

“I don't know.”

“Did they have a bright metal jacket and a dark bit at the end?”

“Yes.”

“Christ!”

Sara slid from the pony's back and came slowly down to the pool. She stopped some distance away from the prone form on the grass. The storm had gone from her face and there was now a naive and frightened curiosity.

“Is she dead?”

“No, but she's badly hurt. Go and bring our ponies here. You know where they are.”

“I didn't do it,” she whimpered, like a child whose ball has broken a window. “It was your fault, jumpin' at the pony's head. The gun went off.”

“You had your finger on the trigger, didn't you? Go and get the ponies.”

Isabel was still conscious when Skane lifted her into the saddle. She uttered a gasp of agony, and Skane gritted his teeth. He adjusted the pads and bandages.

“Come here and steady her while I get on my pony.” Sara came reluctantly and held Isabel in a very gingerly way. Her mouth was drawn down in a child's grimace and the tears streamed. She watched Skane's grim face and cried out a babble of questions and entreaties that he did not trouble to answer.

“She ain't a-goin' to die, is she? 'Twasn't my fault. I didn't mean to hurt her, I just meant to call her names. You love her, don't you? What you goin' to tell Carney? You goin' to say I done it? Please, Greg, don't say it was me, I didn't want to do her no real harm an' Pa will take his belt an' whip me terrible. Greg! Oh Greg, I loved you so an' I couldn't bear to see you with her. I know I ain't good enough for you but she ain't neither. Is she hurt real bad?”

Skane rode in close to Isabel's pony and put his arm across her shoulders.

“Now give me those reins.”

Sara put them in his left hand, looking up in his face. “What shall I say?” she cried.

“Nothing!”

“Can't I do something to help you?”

“Yes,” he said savagely: “get out of my sight!”

He rode off slowly, heading across the island towards the lagoon and picking the way along the ravines where the going was easiest. It was awkward to keep the ponies together and hold Isabel as well. Several times he had to stop and adjust the bandages, and each time he was appalled by the amount of blood that soaked them and dripped down her leg and the pony's flank. Isabel sat dazed and wordless, clinging gallantly to her senses, knowing how difficult it would be for Skane to get her anywhere if she fainted. Fortunately she was riding the staid Lide-Jarge, but even so the pony was made uneasy by the dead-alive burden in the saddle which sat and swayed but did not grip with its knees. Skane had a continual dread that some further alarm, however slight, a sudden stir of wind in the marram, a ball of sea foam blown across the path, a pair of wild duck squattering away from one of the ponds, would cause the nervous beast to toss Isabel off and bolt.

There was good footing on the shore of the lagoon. The hard strand wound like a narrow road between the water and the dunes. The sun was far down towards the sea in the west and now that the sands no longer burned the mirage had dissolved.

Every object along the shore was very sharp and clear. When the wireless station came in sight Isabel's head began to loll.

“Just a bit more, darling,” Skane begged. “Only a little way now.”

When they turned off the lagoon shore and came up the easy undulating slope towards the station Carney and Sargent were outside, rolling a drum of gasoline to the intake pipe of the engine room. They did not notice the approach of the ponies for some time. Then Sargent exclaimed, Carney began to run first. He came in swift strides over the sand, shouting “My God, what's happened, Skane?” The sunset gave a coppery glint to his beard and hair. Skane did not reply at once but as they drew together he said in a flat voice, “She's been shot.” In a profound silence they drew the ponies to the door and carried Isabel to the bedroom.

Carney turned to Sargent. “Get back to your watch,” he said. “Phone McBain and tell him what's happened. Then crack off a message to the Department office at Halifax. Say my wife's been seriously injured and the
Elgin
must come at once. Mark it ‘D' for urgent, and sign my name. Then see if you can raise the
Elgin.
She's up the coast somewhere.”

Isabel swam in a dark sea, rising and falling with the waves. There were moments when she was acutely conscious of the careful hands of the two men as they cut her clothes away, and of the concerned murmur of their voices. She did not feel pain so much as exhaustion and a vast dull protest in her flesh that seemed to have no point of origin. Once she heard very plainly the click of the tin cover of the first-aid kit. Once, in reply to Carney, she heard Skane saying, “Some fool with a rifle I suppose, potting at ducks among the ponds.” And again, “No, she didn't seem to know what had happened for a minute. She didn't cry out. She looked at me in a startled sort of way and then I saw the blood.”

These interludes were brief. Most of the time she floated in darkness with the sound of a great surf in her ears. She did not hear the faint crunch of McBain's buggy wheels and she did not see Mrs. McBain come storming in, with a coat thrown over her apron and a moth-eaten Lily Langtry hat perched coquet tishly on her gray head, crying, “Guns! Guns! Guns! Last year it was Jim Corrie with his arm blown half off, and the year before it was that Shelman child, playing with a loaded twenty-two. When are you going to learn, you dangerous idiots! Where's this poor girl?”

She took charge at once, drove Carney and Skane out of the apartment, shook up the fire in the stove, filled the kettle, and moved into the bedroom with her old carpetbag. For years she had been Marina's oracle in medical matters, a role that she sustained with homely remedies learned in her girlhood in a Nova Scotia fishing village, in the years when she went to sea with McBain and in her years on Marina and with a good deal of plain common sense.

For many hours Isabel lay unconscious, sometimes tossing in delirium, sometimes as still as if dead. There were fantastic dreams. Processions of hideous faces came and went on a bright red screen of whirling molecules. Weird hags that might have stepped out of Grimms' fairy tales sidled up to her, speaking softly, slyly, and suddenly struck her in the face. She was on the beach, fastened, unable to move, with the great ice pack thrusting towards her, the floes heaving, thundering, falling upon her. She was in the
Lord Elgin's
cabin again, feeling that sickening rise and fall of the ship, or being carried to the bathroom to retch. But chiefly she was back in the buried house at Old Two. The scene was repeated again and again, with the actors changing roles. Sometimes when she cried out in that horrible darkness it was Skane's voice she heard. Sometimes it was Matthew's, and when she screamed “Why don't you strike another match?” he answered, just as Skane had done, “I'm sorry, I haven't any more.” But sometimes there was another match. She could hear the scrape of it in the dark, and when it flared she saw the face of Skane, dark and smiling in reassurance, or the face of Matthew, very calm and stern. Once or twice the voice that cried was not her own, and she found the match in her fingers and struck it; and then the face was Matthew's, with a frightened and lost expression in his eyes.

On the second day she swam back to full consciousness, and Mrs. McBain fetched Matthew. “My dear,” she said, “here's your husband. You mustn't try to talk to him. I don't know how far down the lung goes but the bullet may have touched it, though you seem to breathe all right. You talk to her, Matthew, while I put the dinner on.” Isabel turned her eyes. There was pain now, intense pain, as if a red-hot iron had been thrust into her side and was being twisted without cease or mercy in the wound. She lay drenched in perspiration. She saw Matthew coming slowly to the bedside. He ignored the chair and dropped upon his knees.

“My dear, my dear, if you only knew how I wish to God it had been me.”

Her eyes filled but she managed to twist her lips in a smile.

He turned his gaze to the wall and said with an assumed briskness, “You're going to be all right. We're going to take you off to hospital at Halifax. The Department's sent a message ordering O'Dell here at once. We're trying to get him now—so is Halifax. He's pottering about in some of those little harbors towards Canso, setting out buoys that were taken up for the winter, and of course there's no telegraph ashore and his wireless is blanked inside the hills and islands. We'll raise him the moment he sticks his masts outside. Thank God the weather's fair and the glass keeps high.”

Mrs. McBain looked in the doorway and saw Isabel close her eyes, “That'll be enough,” she said at once. “Don't talk any more. You can sit there with her if you like. You'll have to go out by and by when I change the dressings.”

Isabel could hear the coughing of the engine exhaust, and presently the transmitter screamed. She knew Skane's hand at once. He was calling the
Lord
Elgin
and she sensed in the long repeated signals the urgency of her lover. She could see his anxious face. And in the long silence that followed she could see him bent towards the tuner panel with his lean fingers on the dials, straining to hear the hoarse burr that was for all of them the voice of The Boat. There seemed to be no answer and she drifted into sleep. When she awoke again Matthew was gone, and Mrs. McBain was saying, “Ah! Now, lamb, before I touch those bandages do try to eat a little soup.”

CHAPTER 26

The hours passed. Much of the time now she lay awake and feverish. The pain remained but she had grown familiar with it, and with the patience of women who are born to endure she lay quiet under the torture. She saw the next day's sunrise enter the window and brighten a strip of wall above the bed, and she watched it slowly move and fill the room. Mrs. McBain came in and went at once to draw the blind, but Isabel protested.

“Don't pull it down, Mrs. McBain, please, I love the sunshine. There hasn't been much in my life.” Mrs. McBain looked at her curiously.

“You mustn't speak if it hurts, lamb. You haven't been happy on Marina, have you?”

“Yes and no.”

“Well, it's not much of a life for a young woman like you that's been used to towns and such.”

“It isn't that. But I don't want to talk about it. Where does Matthew sleep?”

Mrs. McBain pointed to the wall, “On the other side, in the cook's old room, so I could bang on the partition if you took a bad turn. Your voice sounds quite strong. You don't feel any bubbling inside or anything like that?”

“No.”

“You look bad though, lamb. I suppose it's the shock and of course you lost an awful lot of blood. We're all praying for a calm sea, so McBain can get you off the beach all right, and then you'll have a good run to Halifax. Carney's going off with you, I suppose?”

“Oh no, he mustn't do that.”

“I don't see why not.”

“After this one there won't be another boat till August. He can't leave Skane and Sargent here to keep watch-and-watch all that time. Besides, he's so worried about the station, the engine and all that. The equipment is so old. He must stay. I won't hear of him leaving.”

“You mustn't get excited, lamb. Well, I suppose you've got plenty of friends and relatives ashore.”

“I shall be quite all right.”

“Um. Well, I must go and get the men's dinner on. Your husband had the long watch last night and he turned in at eight this morning. He'll be up now, I expect. That man never sleeps more than four hours a day, it seems to me. After dinner I'll brush your hair and fix you up nice and he can talk to you. Would you like to see Skane and Sargent for a minute? They've been terrible anxious over you.”

“That would be nice.”