“Oh, you wicked man! Is this the way to treat a respectable girl? You call yourself a gentleman! I would not give a farthing for a wagon-load of such gentlemen!” and the while she whacked him unmercifully.
Roger was so dazed and staggered by this sharp and unexpected assault that for a minute he made no resistance. Then, suddenly springing up, his forehead came in hard contact with Bess’s broom. Without a groan, he sank backward, blood gushing from his temple.
Immediately, Bess Lukens proved herself a true woman, and having only given Roger his just deserts, fell to weeping over him and reproaching herself, meanwhile tearing up her apron to make a bandage for his bleeding head.
Roger lay, half stunned by the violence of the blow, until his head was bandaged, and then he was so white and still that Bess was frightened half to death, and cried,—
“I will go for help! Sure, I have near killed him!”
“No—don’t go,” said Roger, in a quiet voice, seizing her. “There was much blood, but little hurt. Help me, rather, away from this public place.”
With the aid of Bess’s strong arm, he got up, and managed to walk as far as Lukens’s quarters, where he sank on a bench, near the open window. The air from without was cool and sweet, the room was quiet, and the blow from Bess’s broom, which had knocked the memory of all things from Roger for a moment, seemed to mark his waking into another and a better mind. Bess sat near him, fanning him anxiously, and the tears welling up into her brown eyes. In truth, Roger’s air of dejection, his bandaged head, and the sudden sadness of his manner, might have softened any woman.
“Bess,” said he after a long silence—the first time he had called her by her name—“I thank thee for that blow. I think you have beat the devil out of me with your broom, for I feel now to be myself; a thing I have not been before since I entered these walls.”
“I knew you were not yourself, Master Roger,” replied Bess, tearfully. “I knew it was just rage and misery and the like that had you by the throat and would not let you go.”
“Pity you thought not of that when you belabored me,” replied Roger, with the ghost of a smile.