CHAPTER XLIII.
When Nora and the doctor reached the door of Orange Grove, they found Edward Hawthorn waiting to receive them, and the servants already busy trying to remove as far as possible the signs of the wreck so lately effected by the wild rioters. Several neighbouring planters, who had come down from the hills above, stood in armed groups around the gate; and a few mounted black constables, hastily summoned to the spot by the fire, were helping to extinguish the smouldering ashes. Only Delgado’s dead body lay untouched upon the sofa, stiff and motionless, for not one of the negroes dare venture to set hands upon it; and in the room within, Marian sat still, looking anxiously at Harry Noel’s pallid face and livid eyelids, and his bloodstained shirt, that yet heaved faintly and almost imperceptibly upon his broad bosom at each long slow-drawn inspiration.
‘He is living?’ Nora asked, in a hushed voice of painful inquiry; and Marian answered under her breath, looking up at the bluff doctor: ‘Yes; he’s living still. He’s breathing quite regularly, though very feebly.’
As for Macfarlane, he went to work at once with the cool business-like precision and rapidity of his practised profession, opening the bloodstained shirt in front, and putting his hand in through the silk vest to feel the heart that still beat faintly and evenly. ‘He’s lost a great deal of blood, no doubt, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he said cheerily; ‘but he’s a strong man, and he’ll pull through yet; ye needn’t be too anxious—thanks to whoever put this handkerchief around his arm. It’s a good enough tourniquet to use on an emergency.—Was it you, Miss Dupuy, or Mrs Hawthorn?’
A round spot of vivid colour flashed for a moment into Nora’s white cheek as she answered quietly: ‘It was me, Dr Macfarlane!’ and then died out again as fast as it had come, when Macfarlane’s eyes were once more removed from her burning face.
‘Ye’re a brave lass, and no mistake,’ the doctor went on, removing the tourniquet, and stanching the fresh flow rapidly with a proper bandage, produced with mechanical routine from his coat pocket. ‘Well, well, don’t be afraid about him any longer. It’s a big cut, and a deep cut, and it’s just gone and severed a good big artery—an ugly business; but ye’ve taken it in time; and your bandage has been most judiciously applied; so ye may rest assured that, with a little nursing, the young man will soon be all right again, and sound as ever. A cutlass is a nasty weapon to get a wound from, because those nigger fellows don’t sharpen them up to a clean edge, as they ought to do rightly, but just hack and mutilate a man in the most outrageous and unbusiness-like manner, instead of killing him outright like good Christians, with a neat, sharp, workman-like incision. But we’ll pull him through—we’ll pull him through yet, I don’t doubt it. And if he lives, ye may have the pleasure of knowing, young lady, that it was the tourniquet ye made so cleverly that just saved him at the right moment.’
As Macfarlane finished dressing and tending Harry’s wound, and Harry’s eyes began to open again, slowly and glassily, for he was very faint with loss of blood, Nora, now that the excitement of that awful evening was fairly over, seemed at last to realise within herself her great loss with a sudden revulsion. Turning away passionately from Harry’s bedside, she rushed into the next room, where the women-servants were already gathered around their master’s body, keening and wailing as is their wont, with strange hymns and incoherent songs, wherein stray scraps of Hebrew psalms and Christian anthems were mingled incongruously with weird surviving reminiscences of African fetichism, and mystic symbols of aboriginal obeah. Fully awake now to the blow that had fallen so suddenly upon her, Nora flung herself in fierce despair by her father’s side, and kissed the speechless lips two or three times over with wild remorse in her fresh agony of distress and isolation. ‘Father, father!’ she cried aloud, in the self-same long-drawn wail as the negresses around her, ‘they’ve killed you, they’ve killed you! my darling—my darling!’
‘Dem kill you—dem kill you!’ echoed Rose and Nita and the other women in their wailing sing-song. ‘But de Lard ob hebben himself avenge you. De grabe yawnin’ wide this ebenin’ for Louis Delgado. De Lard smite him—de Lard smite him!’
‘Get away, all you auld crones!’ the doctor said, coming in upon them suddenly with his hearty Scotch voice, that seemed to break in too harshly on the weird solemnity of the ghastly scene. ‘Let me see how it was they killed your master. He’s dead, you say—stone-dead, is he? Let me see—let me see, then.—Here you, there—lift up his head, will you, and put it down decently on the pillow!’
Nita did as she was told, mechanically, with a reproachful glance from her big white-fringed eyes at the too matter-of-fact and common-sense Scotchman, and then sat down again, squatting upon the floor, moaning and crooning piteously to herself, as decorum demanded of her under such circumstances.
The doctor looked closely at the clotted blood that hung in ugly tangles on the poor old man’s gray locks, and whistled a little in a dubious undertone to himself, when he saw the great gash that ran right across Mr Dupuy’s left shoulder. ‘An awkward cut,’ he said slowly—‘a very severe and awkward cut, I don’t deny it. But I don’t precisely see, myself, why it need have positively killed him. The loss of blood needn’t have been so very excessive. He’s hacked about terribly, poor old gentleman, with their ugly cutlasses, though hardly enough to have done for a Dupuy, in my opinion. They’re very tough subjects indeed to kill, all the Dupuys are.’
As he spoke, he leant down cautiously over the body, and listened for a minute or two attentively with his ear at the heart and lips. Then he held his finger lightly with close scrutiny before the motionless nostrils, and shook his head once or twice in a very solemn and ominous fashion. ‘It’s a most singular fact,’ he said with slow deliberation, looking over at Edward, ‘and one full of important psychological implications, that the members of every nationality I have ever had to deal with in the whole course of my professional experience—except only the Scottish people—have a most illogical and ridiculous habit of jumping at conclusions without sufficient data to go upon. The man’s not dead at all, I tell you—not a bit of it. He’s breathing still, breathing visibly.’
Nora leapt up at the word with another sudden access of wild energy. ‘Breathing!’ she cried—‘breathing, doctor! Then he’ll live still. He’ll get better again, will he, my darling?’
‘Now ye’re jumping at conclusions a second time most unwarrantably,’ Macfarlane answered, with true Scotch caution. ‘I will not say positively he’ll get better again, for that’s a question that rests entirely in the hands of the Almighty. But I do say the man’s breathing—not a doubt of it.’
The discovery inspired them all at once with fresh hope for Mr Dupuy’s safety. In a few minutes they had taken off his outer clothing and dressed his wounds; while Nora sat rocking herself to and fro excitedly in the American chair, her hands folded tight with interlacing fingers upon her lap, and her lips trembling with convulsive jerks, as she moaned in a low monotone to herself, between suspense and hope, after all the successive manifold terrors of that endless evening.
By-and-by the doctor turned to her kindly and gently. ‘He’ll do,’ he said, in his most fatherly manner. ‘Go to bed, lass, go to bed, I tell ye. Why, ye’re bruised and beaten yourself too, pretty awkwardly! Ye’ll need rest. Go to bed; an’ he’ll be better, we’ll hope and trust, to-morrow morning.’
‘I won’t go to bed,’ Nora said firmly, ‘as long as I don’t know whether he will live or not, Dr Macfarlane.’
‘Why, my lass, that’ll be a very long watch for ye, then, indeed, I promise you, for he’ll not be well again for many a long day yet, I’m thinking. But he’ll do, I don’t doubt, with care and nursing. Go to bed, now, for there’ll be plenty to guard you. Mr Hawthorn and I will stop here to-night; and there’s neighbours enough coming up every minute to hold the place against all the niggers in the whole of Trinidad. The country’s roused now; the constabulary’s alive; and the governor’ll be sending up the military shortly to take care of us while you’re sleeping. Go to bed at once, there’s a guid lassie.’
Marian took her quietly by the arm and led her away, once more half fainting. ‘You’ll stop with me, dear?’ Nora whispered; and Marian answered with a kiss: ‘Yes, my darling; I’ll stop with you as long as you want me.’
‘Wait a minute,’ the good doctor called out after them. ‘Ye’ll need something to make you sleep after all this excitement, I take it, ladies. There’s nothing in the world so much recommended by the faculty under these conditions as a good stiff glass of old Highland whisky with some lime-juice and a lump of sugar in it.—Ye’ll have some whisky in the house, no doubt, won’t you, Uncle Ezekiel?’
In a minute or two, Uncle ’Zekiel had brought the whisky and the glasses and the fruit for the lime-juice, and Macfarlane had duly concocted what he considered as a proper dose for the young ladies. Edward noticed, too, that besides the whisky, the juice, and the sugar, he poured furtively into each glass a few drops from a small phial that he took out unperceived by all the others from his waistcoat pocket. And as soon as the two girls had gone off together, the doctor whispered to him confidentially, with all the air of a most profound conspirator: ‘The poor creatures wanted a little sedative to still their nerves, I consider, after all this unusual and upsetting excitement, so I’ve just taken the liberty to give them each a drop or two of morphia in their whisky, that’ll make them both sleep as sound as a child till to-morrow morning.’
But all that night, the negroes watched and prayed loudly in their own huts with strange devotions, and the white men and the constables watched—with more oaths than prayers, after the white man’s fashion—armed to the teeth around the open gate of Mr Dupuy’s front garden.