“It is something. Oh, if only to be kind to me, Mr. Dale, let me have your hand!”
We struggled, my other arm went around her, and I attempted to draw her back and sweep her around to my uninjured side. I was obstinate and angry, and she was persistent and tearful, and we wrestled like two foolish children. “Please, please,” she kept repeating, and I reiterated, “No.” It must have looked uncommonly like a love scene to a casual onlooker, and Haidee’s voice speaking through the dusk gave me an odd thrill.
“I have called and called you, Wanza,” she was saying. “Will you go to Mrs. Olds, please? I think she wants water from the spring, or the malted milk prepared, or—or something equally trivial.”
I released my prisoner and she sped away. I was left to peer through the darkness at Haidee and vainly conjure my mind for something to say. The drip, drip of the blood from my cut on to the maple leaves at my feet, gave me a disagreeable sensation. I felt weakened, and slow in every pulse. I thought of words, but had no will to voice them, and so I stood staring stupidly at the vision before me. She spoke with a strange little gasp in her voice at last.
“I think I have been mistaken in you, Mr. Dale.”
“You are making a mistake now,” I replied hoarsely. There was a peculiar singing in my ears, and a buzzing in my brain where small wheels seemed to be grinding round, so that my tone was not convincing, and as I spoke I leaned my shoulder against a tree from sheer weakness. In my own ears my words sounded shallow and ineffectual. I tried to speak again but succeeded in making only a clicking sound in my throat. I felt myself slipping weakly lower and lower, though I dug my feet into the turf and braced my knees heroically. Faster and faster the wheels went round. I felt that Haidee was moving toward the cabin away from me. I tried to call her name. But I was floundering in a quagmire of unreality; I groped in a dubious morass darkly, straining toward the light. My knees felt like pulp, they yielded completely and I slid ignominiously to the ground, rolled over, and lay inert, waves of darkness washing over me.
It was Joey who found me, whose tears on my face aroused me. His grief was wild. His lamentations echoed around me. He was moaning forth: “Mr. David, Mr. David,” in a frenzy, laying his face on mine, patting my cheeks, lifting my eyelids with trembling fingers. “Are you killed? Are you killed?” I heard him wail. “Oh dear, dear, my own Mr. David, please open your eyes and speak to Joey!”
A light from a lantern struck blindingly into my eyes as I unclosed them and I quickly lowered my lids. But my lad had seen the sign of life and I heard him call: “Wanza, Wanza, come quick! Mr. David is laying here all bloody and hurted.”
I struggled to a sitting posture as Wanza came forward at a run, swinging her lantern. A few minutes later I sat on a bench in the workshop while Wanza bathed and dressed my hand and gave me a sip of brandy from a bottle she found in the cupboard over one of the small windows. I was ashamed of my weakness and I apologized for it, explaining that I had never been able to endure the sight of blood with fortitude, and admitting that the tin had cut rather deep.
“Now you just crawl into bed and go to sleep and forget all about it,” she crooned, mothering me, with a gentle hand on my hair. She went to my bunk in the corner, shook up the pillows and straightened the blankets, and catching up the pail of water filled the basin on the wash-bench. “Wash your face and hands, you Joe,” she ordered. “Then come outside and I’ll hear you say your prayers.”