As dusk was closing in, Nadine sat in the window of her big black-painted bedroom, where so many well-attended sessions had been held. Hugh had been in the surgeon's hands since they carried him in, and all that could be done had been done. Afterwards Nadine had seen the surgeon, and learned from him all there was to fear and the little there was to hope for. It was possible that Hugh might not live till the morning, but simply pass away from the shock of his injuries. On the other hand his splendid constitution might pull him through that. But given that he lived through the immediate danger, it was doubtful if he could ever lead an active life again. The boy he had saved was practically unhurt, and was fast asleep.
Nadine sat there very quiet both in mind and body. She did not want to rave or rebel, she merely let her mind sit, as it were, in front of these things, and contemplate them, like a picture, until they became familiar. She felt they were not familiar yet; though she knew them to be true, they were somehow unreal and incredible. She did not yet grasp them: it seemed to her that her mind was stunned and was incapable of apprehending them. So she had to keep her attention fixed on them, until they became real. Yet she found it difficult to control her mind: it kept wandering off into concentric circles round the center of the only significant thing in the world.
Out on the sea the sun had set, and there were cloud-bars of fading crimson on the horizon level across a field of saffron yellow. This yellow toned off into pale watery green, and high up in the middle of that was one little cloud like an island that still blazed in the sunlight of the upper air. Somehow that aroused a train of half-forgotten reminiscences. There had been a patch of sunlight once like an island, on the gray of the sea ... it was connected with a picture ... yes, it was a sketch which Esther had made for Hugh, and she had put in the island reluctantly, saying it looked unreal in nature and would be worse in art. But Hugh had wanted it there, and, as Esther worked, she herself had walked with him along the beach from which he had been carried up to-day, and she had told him that he lived in unrealities, and pictured to himself that some day he and she would live on some golden sunlit island together. She remembered it all now.
Her mind came back to the center again, and started off anew on that splendid deed of the morning. She had quite lost her head when she called out, "No, Hughie, not you!" It must have been Hugh to do it, no one else could have done it. The idea of Berts or Seymour wrestling with and overcoming that mountainous and maddened sea was unthinkable. Only Hugh could have done it, and the deed was as much part of him as his brown eyes or his white strong teeth. And if at the end the sea had flung him down and broken him, that was after he had laughed at the peril and snatched its prey out of its very jaws! Even as things were now with him, Nadine could not regret what he had done, and if time had run back, and she saw him again plunging into that riot and turmoil, she felt that she would not now cry out to him like that. She would have called Godspeed to him instead.
Once again her mind rippled away from its center. She had called out to Seymour or Berts to go. At the time it had been quite instinctive, but she saw now what had prompted her instinct. She meant—though then she did not know she meant it—that she could spare any one but Hugh. That was what it came to, and she wondered if Hugh had understood that. Seymour without doubt must have done so: he was so clever. Probably he would tell her he understood, and ask her if it was not that which was implied. But all such consideration seemed to her to matter very little. There was only one thing that mattered, and that was not whether Hugh lived or died even, but simply the fact of Hugh.
Her mother had telegraphed that she was coming at once; and Nadine remembering that she had not told the servants got up and rang the bell. But before it was answered there came an interruption for which she had been waiting. One of the two nurses whom the surgeon from Chester had brought with him knocked at the door. She had been tidying up, and removing all traces of what had been done.
"The room is neat again now," she said, "and you may come and just look at him."
"Is he conscious or in pain?" asked Nadine.
"No; but he may regain consciousness at any time, but I don't think he will have any pain."