CHAPTER XXXI.
EYES UNSEALED.
Edmonson sat with a terrible fierceness in his face.
Harwin had never seen him before, but he had heard of him, and, through Katie, of his former attentions to Elizabeth, and he divined who had fired that shot meant for himself.
"Come up to me," called Edmonson, turning suddenly upon him. "I've no weapon now. My face can't turn you to stone, though I'd be a Medusa to do it. But no, I'll do better than that. Come here! come here!" he repeated excitedly.
Harwin went up to him in silence, reading as he went a lesson that wrote itself on his mind as if in letters of blood. The man before him was well-born, well-educated, and skilled in all the graces of society, accepted even in court circles; yet, as he lay there, he looked a slave, for the nobility of freedom had gone, and the mark of the brute nature was on his forehead, and in his hand that he stretched out with the longing in it to grasp his victim. The soldier on the bed next his, who had spent a good part of his thirty years of life in a fishing-smack, who knew nothing of books beyond what the common-school education had given him, and less of any life but his own venturesome calling, who beyond knowledge of the sea and its dangers had been taught only by the quickness of his own wit and the honor of his own heart,—this man, as he turned attentive eyes upon the approaching figure, Harwin involuntarily glanced at. In a flash of insight he saw in the uprightness of the sailor's face the beauty of such strength. Then he looked back at Edmonson, and there he saw his own heart in exaggeration, and he trembled.
As he went up to Edmonson, the latter raised himself from his elbow, and sitting upright leaned as near him as he could.
"Do you know me?" he asked.
The other nodded, "Mr. Edmonson."
"Yes. Do you know that I was to have married Mistress Royal?" Harwin assented again. "Who told you?"
"Mistress Archdale."
"Ah! yes, the little golden-haired one that thinks herself such a beauty."
"She is infinitely more than she can think herself," cried Harwin.
Edmonson turned upon him a look of malign triumph. "Ah!" he said. "You suffer, too." He was silent for an instant. "But then you think that you may yet win her," he said. "Who knows?" and he watched his listener closely, "Women are strange," he added. "She'd be flattered by your having been a scamp for her sake; she is not like the other one." He saw the light flash into Harwin's eyes and leave its bright mark along his cheek, and he smiled. "But you never shall," he said. "You might, but you never shall. Did you see what happened a minute ago?" he went on in stifled tones. "I shot her, and he carried her out,—not the yellow-haired one, oh, no, but,—Did you see his face?" he hissed with a look that made Harwin draw back at its fierceness. "But we shall be even; we will fight." He sat a moment watching Harwin, and then went on: "You will be interested in hearing that Mistress Archdale is engaged to Lord Bulchester, my friend. Your doings, too. But you shall pay for all," as Harwin stepped back in consternation. "Already, you see you've begun, but this is not the end."
"Calm yourself," said Harwin laying his hand nervously on the other's shoulder, "control yourself. This is very bad, if you're wounded."
"Control myself!" sneered Edmonson. "I never have done it in my life, and I'm not likely to do it now at the command of a coward and a sneak. Now will you fight with me?"
"Certainly. But I want to know why it is with you?"
Edmonson seemed about to shout his answer, then, recollecting where he was, said with a passion more dreadful for its suppression, "Why? Because but for you I should be in paradise now, and by reason of you I am in——." Suddenly his speech was arrested by what seemed to him in its vividness a vision rather than a remembrance. He was again one of the gay carousers at the London inn, he was scoffing at Bulchester, and drinking that frightful pledge to meet them all again in one hundred years. Had he kept his appointment already? He would have a long while to wait. The act had seemed to him nothing, the recollection of it now made him shudder. All at once, the scene stood out to him in a lurid light, and through this he seemed to see a horror in Elizabeth Royal's face. For one moment the whirl of anguish and remorse blinded him. The next, that Archdale pride, so grand in a worthy cause, so fatal when in the hands of caprice and passion, was driving him on again. But as he was about to speak, the surgeon's voice by his bed commanded him to stop, for his own sake and for others. "Not another word," it said. "One,—I must speak one," returned Edmonson. "Then I have done, I promise you. Stand back and count off one minute." He leaned close to Harwin as the doctor yielded. "I give you a chance of honorable duel," he said. "You'll take it, or there's no place on earth where my sword is too short to reach you. You've taught me how to stab in the back; I shall not forget it. But I give you your chance. You'll fight?"
"Yes."
"Weapons?"
"Swords."
Edmonson smiled derisively.
"You think my sword arm will not be strong enough?" he asked. "I shouldn't advise you to depend upon that. Time—when I am able. Place—we'll settle that afterward. We can't find seconds here—too much Puritanism; they would interfere. But we can arrange it; we're honorable men," he sneered. "I may depend upon you?"
"Yes."
"If not—beware! Now, surgeon, only one thing more," as Harwin left the tent. "How much have I hurt Mistress Royal?"
"Lovell has gone with them. When he returns you shall hear."
"You will certainly tell me?"
"Certainly."
"Then I have done with you to-night." And he threw himself back on his pillow, and lay silent and watchful until the other surgeon entered. Hours after, he fell into an uneasy sleep.
Elizabeth's injury was slight. When she recovered from the shock and the faintness, she declared that there was no wound at all—that the ball had merely grazed her, and the report of the pistol and her fatigue had done the rest.
"You always seem to be round sort of handy when we want anything," remarked Nancy to Archdale as she looked up from wiping the few drops of blood from Elizabeth's ear.
"Half an inch to the left," said Stephen hastily, as he stood watching her, "and—"
"Yes," she answered, "and then—." She looked up, seeing him indistinctly in the flaring light of the candle. But in her mind there was a fair woman standing beside him. But for Elizabeth's idle words this vision would have been a reality instead of a a hopeless dream. She felt the pain of this so keenly now that it seemed to her it would have been a good thing if the ball had swerved half an inch to the left. Then her father, who had been found on his way back, came in hastily, and as Elizabeth glanced at his face she knew that life ought to be dear to her.
"Elizabeth," he said, as Archdale left them, "have you not had enough of it yet? Come home now. You have already done a great work."
The girl raised herself slowly, for she still felt a touch of faintness.
"Yes, father, I will go home at once," she answered, "if you will tell me that it is the sort of thing that you have been trying all my life to teach me to do."
After Mr. Royal had left her, and Nancy was asleep, Elizabeth lay a long time thinking. She perceived now the whole truth about Edmonson. She was in a coil of struggle, and perhaps of crime. It seemed as if she herself must be guilty, as all the consequences of what she had supposed the jest of a summer evening rose before her.
Yet, for all this imagining, there was in her heart the comfort of innocence.
In the morning the shadow of danger seemed to shrink away in the sunlight, and Elizabeth went back to her duties with a spirit firm, if not untroubled. She saw nothing to give her fresh alarm. She found that Edmonson had excused his act to the spectators as a touch of delirium accompanying fever, and the next day he had fever beyond question, though not enough to be very dangerous.