"Friends," said the captain, in a low, restrained voice, every trace of his grief and excitement gone, "I've got to ask ye to git considerable way back and keep still. We got Doctor John here and Miss Jane, and there ain't nothin' ye kin do. When there is I'll call ye. Polhemus, you and Green see this order is obeyed."
Again he hesitated, then raising his eyes over the group nearest the door, he beckoned to Lucy, pushed her in ahead of him, caught the swinging doors in his hands, and shut them tight. This done, he again dropped on his knees beside the doctor and the now breathing man.
CHAPTER XXII
THE CLAW OF THE SEA-PUSS
With the closing of the doors the murmur of the crowd, the dull glare of the gray sky, and the thrash of the wind were shut out. The only light in the House of Refuge now came from the two small windows, one above the form of the suffering man and the other behind the dead body of Archie. Jane's head was close to the boy's chest, her sobs coming from between her hands, held before her face. The shock of Archie's death had robbed her of all her strength. Lucy knelt beside her, her shoulder resting against a pile of cordage. Every now and then she would steal a furtive glance around the room—at the boat, at the rafters overhead, at the stove with its pile of kindling—and a slight shudder would pass through her. She had forgotten nothing of the past, nor of the room in which she crouched. Every scar and stain stood out as clear and naked as those on some long-buried wreck dug from shifting sands by a change of tide.
A few feet away the doctor was stripping the wet clothes from the rescued man and piling the dry coats over him to warm him back to life. His emergency bag, handed in by Polhemus through the crack of the closed doors, had been opened, a bottle selected, and some spoonfuls of brandy forced down the sufferer's throat. He saw that the sea-water had not harmed him; it was the cordwood and wreckage that had crushed the breath out of him. In confirmation he pointed to a thin streak of blood oozing from one ear. The captain nodded, and continued chafing the man's hands—working with the skill of a surfman over the water-soaked body. Once he remarked in a half-whisper—so low that Jane could not hear him:
"I ain't sure yet, doctor. I thought it was Bart when I grabbed him fust; but he looks kind o' different from what I expected to see him. If it's him he'll know me when he comes to. I ain't changed so much maybe. I'll rub his feet now," and he kept on with his work of resuscitation.
Lucy's straining ears had caught the captain's words of doubt, but they gave her no hope. She had recognized at the first glance the man of all others in the world she feared most. His small ears, the way the hair grew on the temples, the bend of the neck and slope from the chin to the throat. No—she had no misgivings. These features had been part of her life—had been constantly before her since the hour Jane had told her of Bart's expected return. Her time had come; nothing could save her. He would regain consciousness, just as the captain had said, and would open those awful hollow eyes and would look at her, and then that dreadful mouth, with its thin, ashen lips, would speak to her, and she could deny nothing. Trusting to her luck—something which had never failed her—she had continued in her determination to keep everything from Max. Now it would all come as a shock to him, and when he asked her if it was true she could only bow her head.
She dared not look at Archie—she could not. All her injustice to him and to Jane; her abandonment of him when a baby; her neglect of him since, her selfish life of pleasure; her triumph over Max—all came into review, one picture after another, like the unrolling of a chart. Even while her hand was on Jane's shoulder, and while comforting words fell from her lips, her mind and eyes were fixed on the face of the man whom the doctor was slowly bringing back to life.