She understood that she was to moderate her anxiety. Her vagabond did not mean to let their former acquaintance be known to the village sleuth who might gossip it about the valley.
“Can the constable carry you in?”
“No, ma’am! nor hi wouldn’t try it!” came out of the night, with indignant emphasis and a cockney accent as thick as the darkness.
“No need, officer. It’s my shoulder that is hit. If I may come in....”
“Hi might as well tell yer that, w’erever you go, Hi goes with yer, as Ruth she says to Nay-homy in the Scriptur’; cos w’y? Cos you’re hunder arrest, that’s w’y.”
“Thank you for the explanation. I might have thought you were following me from sheer affection.”
“Oh, don’t jest!” Rosamond pleaded. “It may be dreadfully serious. I will run in ahead and find some linen to make bandages—and telephone for the doctor.” She ran up the road toward her gate, not heeding his protests against the doctor.
Dr. Wells’s office- and horse-boy, Peter, answered the telephone almost immediately. He slept in the office downstairs for that purpose. Dr. Wells was wont to say that while Peter never woke up, when the bell rang, he always got up and took the name fairly correctly, stumbled to his master’s door and repeated it, and then, after harnessing the horse, rolled back to bed without knowing that he had been up. When vagabond and constable entered Villa Rose, Peter was even then rapping on the doctor’s chamber door and saying the name of “Mearely.”
Rosamond scurried hither and thither producing soft linen and lotions, safety pins and needle and thread, cotton batting and smelling salts, until the end of the big table looked like a peep into a hospital. To all protests she answered:
“Don’t talk! Don’t talk! Save your strength.”