CHAPTER XII.
Clifford was so entirely taken by surprise that he hardly realized, in the first moment, that he was hurt. The next, he dashed open the door at one blow, and finding Jem outside coolly wiping his knife on the ivy which grew on this side of the house, he seized the fisherman by the throat with one hand, snatched his knife from him and flung it away with the other, and then hurled the man from him with such violence that the latter fell, and, striking his head upon the stone-ledge of a window, lay motionless on the ground.
Then, suddenly overcome by a feeling of dizziness, the first result of his wound, Clifford staggered back against the broken door, and into Nell’s arms.
“Oh, it is my fault—my fault! I ought not to have asked you to come!” moaned she, not attempting now to hide her affectionate concern from the people who, startled by the noise of the affray, now pressed into the room.
George Claris was among the first to enter, and he frowned angrily on seeing Clifford, of whose arrival he had not yet heard.
“So it’s you, is it, Mr. King!” he exclaimed surlily, on recognizing the man whom he looked upon as the origin of all his trouble. “And what have you been up to now, eh?”
“Oh, uncle, uncle, can’t you see that he’s hurt, badly hurt?” implored Nell. “Send for a doctor—oh, some one pray go for a doctor, or he will bleed to death!”
But George Claris hardly concealed the fact that that event would give him satisfaction rather than annoyance; he did not dare to interfere, however, when Nell gave orders to one of the men who had crowded in, to go to Stroan for a doctor.
“Who did it?” somebody, not the landlord, presently asked.
Clifford was by this time hardly conscious. He had been laid upon the sofa, while Nell herself, keeping enough presence of mind to be of use and to see what the danger was, held her own fingers to the wound to check the flow of blood.
She heard the question and answered it.
“It was Jem Stickels. He struck him through the glass.”
This reply led to further investigations, and Jem was quickly discovered and brought into the room where his victim lay. Unconscious though he was, having been stunned severely, Jem, of course, got no pity from Nell. And when some of the men suggested carrying him to the cottage where he lodged, which was within a stone’s throw of the inn, Nell made no suggestion that he should remain where he was, being unaffectedly glad to have him taken out of her sight.
Buxom Meg exchanged many a nod and wink and grin with the customers from the bar, inspired by the utter absorption Nell showed in her lover and his danger.
“All my fault—my fault!” the girl kept murmuring, as she hung over Clifford, watching his face, which had grown pale, with straining eyes, and listening anxiously to the breathing, which told her that he was alive.
Then Meg became abruptly conscious that there was something in this simple grief, this maidenly affection, too sacred for the gaze of the rough, though sympathetic, group. And she bundled them all, with large, wide-sweeping gestures as of a gigantic hen, back into the bar. And Nell and her lover and her uncle were left together.
George Claris, though he, too, was somewhat touched, was uneasy and suspicious.
“What was he doing down here?” he began, inquisitorially, when they were left alone. “And what was he up to that made Jem Stickels knife him? No good, I’ll be bound,” grumbled he.
Nell, without raising her eyes from her lover’s face, answered, mechanically, with white lips:
“He loves me, uncle. He has asked me, weeks ago, to be his wife, but I hadn’t even promised; no, not a word; but when he came to-day—”
“Ah, what made him come to-day?”
Nell hesitated, and then confessed, in a low voice:
“I sent for him.”
George Claris mumbled his dissatisfaction.
“And what made Jem Stickels knife him? Come, now, I should have thought you were above having anything to do with a chap like him. But I’ve seen him loafing about more’n usual lately.”
“It was not my fault, of course,” said Nell, simply. “And of course he had no right to—to—”
“To be jealous? So I should ha’ thought. Still, he was jealous, eh?”
“I suppose so.”
There was a short silence; then George Claris spoke again:
“Well, lass, it’s no use talking to women, ’cause they’ve got their own way o’ doing things, whatever you say to ’em. But you’ve brew’d yourself a peck o’ trouble between them two chaps, and neither me nor anybody but yourself can help you out of it. An’ mind, I won’t say I’ll have this chap turned out of the house, though I’ve a good mind to. But if the doctor says he’s to be laid up here, I’ll not have you hangin’ ’round. You’ll just go away sharp to my sister in London. Do you hear? I’ll have him properly nursed, that I’ll promise; but it’ll not be by you. Do you hear?”
Nell assented meekly. As long as Clifford was not made to suffer, she felt that there was nothing for it but to submit.
Uncle and niece exchanged no more words until the arrival of the doctor, when George Claris told his niece to put on her hat and to go to Miss Bostal’s, where she was to remain until he sent her luggage to her there, when she was to start without delay for London.
Now, there was no place to which Nell would not rather have gone than to Shingle End. For was not sentimental Miss Theodora the very cause of the outrage which had put Clifford’s life in danger? If it had not been for Miss Bostal’s well-meaning but ill-judged encouragement, Jem Stickels would never have dared to think he could have a chance with a girl who was so far removed from him in every way as Nell. Now, with natural feminine obstinacy, Miss Bostal would be sure to take Jem’s part against Clifford, especially when it reached her ears that the latter had come down by Nell’s own request. So that it was with slow, unwilling feet that Nell made her way to the colonel’s house.
Everything turned out as she expected, with this exception, that Miss Bostal was so much more concerned about Jem than about Clifford that she insisted on marching off that very moment to inquire as to Jem’s condition, and insisted on dragging the unwilling girl with her on the expedition.
At first Nell absolutely refused to go. But she had to give way, being touched by the self-reproach of the prim little elderly lady, who blamed herself as much for Jem’s misfortune as Nell blamed herself for Clifford’s.
“It was all my fault. I feel that I have brought it upon the poor fellow myself,” was the burden of Miss Bostal’s lament, just as it had previously been of Nell’s.
She even shed tears at the thought of facing the young man upon whom she had brought more than one misfortune. For she persisted in regarding his assault upon Clifford as another grievance of Jem’s rather than of the hated rival’s.
Nell said little as they went along. She was on the one hand deeply anxious about her lover; while on the other she hardly knew whether to laugh at Miss Bostal’s extravagances or to cry sympathetically over her grief.
The little cottage where Jem lodged was soon reached. Miss Bostal’s knock was answered, unexpectedly enough, by Jem in person. There seemed to be little the matter with him, except for a cut on his lower lip, the result of the blow with which Clifford had felled him. If his bodily state was sound, however, this was all that could be said for him. A more forbidding expression of sullen ferocity than that which his face wore as he recognized his visitors it would be impossible to imagine.
“Oh, so it’s you, is it?” was his surly greeting, as with a scowl he made a movement to shut the door in the lady’s face.
But his patroness was ready with the soft answer that turned away wrath. Pressing forward quickly, and keeping Nell’s hand in hers with a tight grip, she edged her way into the cottage, and, regardless of the fact that the man and woman with whom Jem lodged were present, addressed the young boor in the gentlest of voices:
“Oh, dear! oh, dear! don’t send us away like that! We are so very sorry for what has happened to you. We want to know if we can do anything—”
Nell was frowning, and trying to get away, indignant at the lowly tone her companion was taking. And it was upon Nell that Jem’s eyes were fixed as he interrupted the other lady.
“No!” roared he. “You can’t do nothin’—as yet. But,” and he raised his voice, and lifted his fist against an imaginery foe, as he stared harder at Nell than ever, “I’m blest if you won’t find more’n enough to do to answer the questions as’ll be put to you folks—some of you—to-morrow morning!”
Nell suddenly ceased struggling, and fixed her eyes upon Jem’s swollen and excited face, in which the veins were rising like knotted cords.
“What do you mean, my dear young man?” piped Miss Bostal, in the gentlest accents, her mild efforts to calm the excited monster appearing every moment more futile and inadequate.
“Oh, you know very well what I mean, or, leastways, Miss Claris does!” pursued Jem, in the same key, and with a swaggering confidence, which caused little Miss Bostal to recoil a few steps, as if before a physical attack. “And if you don’t, why you’ll know soon enough. I’m just a-goin’,” proceeded Jem, with sullen emphasis, “to have my pipe and my ’alf pint,” and he took his beloved clay out of his pocket as he spoke, “and then I’m just a-goin’ to walk over to The Bell, at Stroan, to ask if a certain gen’leman from Lon’on is in.”
And, without more ceremony, Jem turned his back on the ladies, and marching out of the room by the opposite end, through the back door, left them no alternative but to retire.
Nell was utterly disgusted, not only by the part she had been made to play in this unpleasant scene, but by her companion’s humble demeanor and Jem’s own rudeness. As for his threat of speaking to the detective, she seemed to be past caring whether he carried it into effect or not. She said nothing as they walked back to Shingle End; and Miss Bostal, perhaps conscious that she had humbled herself before this young ruffian a little more than was meet, was silent also.
When they reached the house, the elder lady gave a little sigh, and fell back upon her usual solace in times of anxiety.
“I think we shall both feel better,” she chirped, as she carefully opened the front door with her latch-key, “when we’ve had a cup of tea.”
It was about a couple of hours after the termination of the scene between Jem Stickels and the two ladies, and the clock of the tower of St. Martin’s at Stroan had just chimed a quarter past eight, when a small boy burst into the bar-parlor of the Bell Inn, and startled the company by the scared expression of his face. He had been running fast, and it was some moments before he could articulate. In the meantime the questions put to him were so many that the confusion of tongues delayed the lad’s announcement still further.
It was Hemming, the London detective, who finally drew the boy out of the curious group, and made them wait for him to speak.
With another scared look, the lad at last panted out:
“There’s a man lyin’ out there on the road—the Courtstairs road, a little way past the big house. An’ I see him layin’—an’ I speaks to ’im—an’ he didn’t answer, an’ he didn’t move. An’—an’—an’ so I run right away, an’ come here to tell you.”
It seemed pretty evident that the boy had not said all he knew, or guessed. There was a rush for the door by the occupants of the bar-parlor, and in a few moments there was a stream of people trickling out in the darkness along the little quay by the little river, past the barges waiting to be unloaded, past the ancient stone gateway of Stroan’s prosperous days. Over the brand-new bridge they went, in twos and threes, and out upon the flat road over the marshes, taking as their rightful leader the detective Hemming, who, being afraid that the frightened boy might give him the slip, held his arm as if in kindly comradeship. The night was dark, and one of Hemming’s nearest followers held a lantern, which threw a ray of dancing light to right and left upon the white road, the ditch on either side, the wide stretch of marsh to the left, and the dull line of the sea far away on the right.
Just past the “big house,” a lonely mansion standing in flat, wind-swept grounds between Stroan and the sea, they came upon the man, lying, as the boy had described, by the side of the road, with his head hanging over on the grassy bank that sloped into the ditch.
“There—there he is!” whispered the boy, hoarsely.
Hemming beckoned to the man behind to bring up the lantern. Kneeling down beside the man on the ground, he lifted his head and threw the light upon his face.
“It’s Stickels! It’s Jem Stickels!” exclaimed more than one voice, recognizing the heavy, sullen face of the fisherman, who was well known in the neighborhood.
“Here! Give him some of this; it’s brandy,” said one man, handing a flask to Hemming.
But the detective shook his head.
“He’s had his last drink, poor chap!” said he. “He’s dead!”