The captain, who had been, as usual, absorbed in his manuscript, sitting with his back to the window, knew nothing of it until he was hastily called to carry up the senseless Theo. It was a considerable time before his efforts to restore the unconscious girl were successful; and it would not be easy to tell how the father, whom Theo Carnegy had allowed herself to think and pronounce indifferent to his children's welfare, suffered as he hung over the senseless form of his best-beloved child. Her peril stirred up all the love that, though undoubtedly existing, had been dormant. From that fateful hour, however, the old sea-captain was an altered man. His heart awoke to the fact that the chief place in it should be filled by his motherless children, instead of, as it had been, by a mere hobby.
All through the hours of the anxious night that followed he went from one bed to the other, tending the occupants with that gentleness, almost womanly, which a sailor possesses in no ordinary degree. For Queenie there were no apprehensions, save dread of a chill from the wetting she received; the child was tranquil, and appeared to have sustained no shock.
'We said "Our Father," me and Theo,' she whispered innocently to the captain, as he sat by her little bed holding her hands, 'and He sent Geoff and Binks directly to pick us out of the water; and then Theo went off to sleep in the boat, and my new shoes is spoilt most dreadful!'
With Theo it was otherwise. She had sustained a severe mental shock, as well as the bodily strain, in her fruitless efforts to pull the heavy boat through the water. And it had been a terrible spasm of terror to sink slowly, helplessly, in the yawning waves, trying all the time to hold up the precious little sister. When the doctor from Brattlesby arrived, he looked grave enough over his elder patient; and next day he was even more serious.
'She is in for brain fever!' he said briefly. He was a man of few words, leaving the burden of conversation, as a rule, to his patients. Hence, perhaps, it was that little Dr. Cobbe was the most popular being, man or doctor, for miles round Northbourne.
And with regard to Theo it was as he said. For many weeks Theo Carnegy lay battling for her life in the cruel clutches of the fever, unconscious that her most devoted and tenderest nurse was the father whom she had bitterly imagined thought more of his hobby than of his boys and girls. All Northbourne, as with one heart, sorrowed aloud for their favourite Miss Theedory; her grave condition was the sole theme of talk in the cottages round the bay.
'Happen she was too good to live!' croaked Jerry Blunt's mother, with an appropriate melancholy in her voice; and the gossips nodded approvingly at a sentiment which fitted in with their own views of life.
'Nothin' o' the sort!' struck in a dissentient voice, which belonged to Goody Dempster herself. 'There's none too good to live, seein' as life is a great gift that can only come from the Lord Himself. He gives, and He takes away, that's how we've got to look at things. And, please God, He will see fit to raise up Miss Theedory among us again, hale and sound. She's one as could be ill spared.'
'Amen!' assented more than one voice among the listeners, in ready response.
But there was one heart that felt heavier than all others—too heavy to hold a ray of hope—and that belonged to Alick Carnegy. When he returned home from his stolen holiday, and found what had happened during his absence, the remorse of the boy was uncontrollable. He could not but feel it to be true, what others did not scruple to tell him bluntly, for plain-speaking was a distinguishing feature of the fishing village, that had he and Ned Dempster been at home, they could have reached his sisters in far less time than Geoff, younger and weaker of muscle, and Binks, long past his heyday of strength and stiffened with rheumatism, had done.