“No matter who it is; it is a man. Now, girls, have you courage, have you humanity? Then come one on each side of him and take hands beneath his back, while I lift his head and Dard his legs.”
“And handle him gently whatever you do,” said Dard. “I know what it is to be wounded.”
These four carried the lifeless burden very slowly and gently across the Pleasaunce to the house, then with more difficulty and caution up the stairs.
All the while the sisters’ hands griped one another tight beneath the lifeless burden, and spoke to one another. And Josephine’s arm upheld tenderly but not weakly the hero she had struck down. She avoided Rose’s eye, her mother’s, and even the doctor’s: one gasping sob escaped her as she walked with head half averted, and vacant, terror-stricken eyes, and her victim on her sustaining arm.
The doctor selected the tapestried chamber for him as being most airy. Then he ordered the women out, and with Dard’s help undressed the still insensible patient.
Josephine sat down on the stairs in gloomy silence, her eyes on the ground, like one waiting for her deathblow.
Rose, sick at heart, sat silent too at some distance. At last she said faintly, “Have we done well?”
“I don’t know,” said Josephine doggedly. Her eyes never left the ground.
“We could not let him die for want of care.”
“He will not thank us. Better for him to die than live. Better for me.”