Then only did the two old ladies understand that they had looked on whilst a tragedy had been enacted. “Help!” they cried, and “Help!” in their high, thin voices, timidly at first, but gathering volume as they went on, until the Wilderness rang with their shrieks. Lights shone in all the windows opposite, chains rattled, bars were unshot, doors opened, and out rushed friends to the rescue. Harold, with a stick; the Admiral, with his sword, his grey head and bare feet protruding from either end of a long brown ulster; finally, Doctor Walker, with a poker, all ran to the help of the Westmacotts. Their door had been already opened, and they crowded tumultuously into the front room.
Charles Westmacott, white to his lips, was kneeling an the floor, supporting his aunt's head upon his knee. She lay outstretched, dressed in her ordinary clothes, the extinguished taper still grasped in her hand, no mark or wound upon her—pale, placid, and senseless.
“Thank God you are come, Doctor,” said Charles, looking up. “Do tell me how she is, and what I should do.”
Doctor Walker kneeled beside her, and passed his left hand over her head, while he grasped her pulse with the right.
“She has had a terrible blow,” said he. “It must have been with some blunt weapon. Here is the place behind the ear. But she is a woman of extraordinary physical powers. Her pulse is full and slow. There is no stertor. It is my belief that she is merely stunned, and that she is in no danger at all.”
“Thank God for that!”
“We must get her to bed. We shall carry her upstairs, and then I shall send my girls in to her. But who has done this?”
“Some robber,” said Charles. “You see that the window is open. She must have heard him and come down, for she was always perfectly fearless. I wish to goodness she had called me.”
“But she was dressed.”
“Sometimes she sits up very late.”