Jerry’s fair head drooped; he caught uncertainly at Blount’s arm.
'I have nothing to say,' he muttered faintly.
Blount, who, as senior captain, succeeded to Pryor’s command in case of that officer’s death or incapacity, turned from his young subordinate.
'Sergeant Jackson,' he said, in a voice that was not quite steady, 'take Lieutenant Breton to his quarters. You will be responsible for him until further instructions.' Then he knelt beside Pryor, over whom the surgeon was bending. 'Is there life in him?' he asked.
There was life in him—life that lingered after they had carried him to his bed and his wound had been dressed; a mere spark of life, which might flicker out at any moment, although, the major being a healthy man, in the prime of years, it might yet blaze up again into strength. Such was the surgeon’s unchanging report during the next two days to the post, where horror of the tragedy in its midst had silenced gossip, and where even conjecture held its breath.
There is thus much resemblance between a small garrison and a family, that the befalling of a calamity to one of their number softens all judgments; quarrels, criticisms, envyings, are the corrupted fruit of a too brilliant sunshine. Pryor had been unpopular, but only kindness was spoken of him now that it seemed probable that he lay dying. If there was a manifest desire, especially among the ladies, to foster a suspicion that his evident wretchedness had led him to attempt suicide, the desire merely expressed their hope that Jerry Breton’s innocence might be proved, in spite of the young fellow’s stunned passiveness and his strange flinging away of the pistol.
Proof either of guilt or of innocence depended vitally on Pryor’s recovery, as no inquiry had elicited any of the facts which preceded the catastrophe of that night. Shortly after ten o’clock the commanding officer had passed the sentry for a solitary stroll along the rampart, which was a daily habit with him; nobody else had been seen, and nothing unusual had been heard until the pistol-shot.
Depression, black as the shadow of death which over-hung them, possessed the little post which was wont to be so cheery. No one was surprised to hear that Rosita had been added to the number of the surgeon’s patients, nor did any one doubt the cause of the nervous collapse from which he declared her to be suffering, and which forced him to veto Mrs. Blount’s offer of a visit to her. Lawless, he said, had miraculously developed into the most perfect of nurses, and Rosita, with the tendency to delirium that belongs to volatile and undisciplined temperaments, was better off under his undisturbed attendance.
Closely confined to his quarters, Jerry Breton knew nothing of her illness, and each hour of her silence, after he believed that she must be aware of his position, buried deeper his hope that she would confess when she discovered that he had assumed the suspicion of her mad crime. With bitterness he reflected that the devotion of so fantastic a creature was no more to be trusted than her moral principles; and bound though he felt himself to shelter her, he yearned for the happiness and honor she alone could restore to him.
Whether Pryor lived or died, his own career must end in a darkness whose varying degrees seemed to Jerry scarcely worth remark. This story of treacherous vengeance would be told to his own people, and to the woman he loved. Oh, God! How his soul adored her purity, her pride, the girlish exaltation for which he had used to profess a tender ridicule! Had he been cruelly unjust to her, and to those others who were dear to him? Yet would he not have been unutterably base had he crawled to safety across the condemnation of Rosita, whose crime had resulted from misguided love for him?