What was to be done? I stood still for a moment paralysed; then I sent up a hurried prayer for help, and simultaneously ‘cooeyed’ three or four times with all the force of a powerful pair of lungs, for Don at the wool-shed. Then I hurried after her, and met her coming through the door of my brother’s dressing-room with one of his razors in her hand. Her face was white and set as she seized my hand and hurried me into the smoking-room, which was near us, and turned the key in the lock. I knew what she wanted; and I set my teeth in an agony that no words could express, and which I can never think of now without a shudder.
‘Look!’ she said piteously, with a little sob in her throat; and I looked, and saw one of the fingers of her left hand tied round tightly with a piece of string below the first joint, and the end of it already livid and swollen and shewing the unmistakable punctures of the snake’s fangs. She laid her other hand on my arm, and looked up at me with a beseeching face that nearly unmanned me.
‘Help me!’ she whispered eagerly; ‘now—now; before the others come!’ And she held out the razor, open and shining. ‘It is no use to suck it—it only wastes time,’ as I seized her finger and put it in my mouth. ‘Don’t, don’t! I want to be on the safe side. I don’t want to die! O pray, pray help me!’—now sobbing passionately—’or else I must try to do it myself. I won’t cry out; I won’t mind it. I will turn my head away.’ She laid her finger on the edge of the table, and I took the razor from her, and with all the courage I could muster, excised the wounded part. She bore the cruel operation without a murmur.
An hour afterwards the commotion in the house was over, but the shadow of death was on it. Rachel was in her bed, white and faint and breathing heavily, twitching with weak fingers at the bedclothes, and staring with dull eyes into the sad faces around her. I knelt in my room close by with my head on my outspread arms, weeping like a child as if my heart would break, and listening to the creaking of the doctor’s boots and the whisking of skirts and whispering of awed voices on the other side of the thin wall. There was nothing else that I was privileged to do, now that I had done that dreadful thing which they told me might be the saving of her precious life.
As the twilight fell, the voices in the sick-room took a louder and more cheerful tone; and presently one of them called softly: ‘Jerry, I want you.’ Lizzie met me in the passage with a tremulous tear-stained smiling face. ‘The doctor says she will be all right now, and that she has to thank you for it,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t stay here any longer; go and have a cigar with Don.’
I seized her hand and kissed it, and looked at her with my wet eyes full of foolish emotion, too glad for speech; and the brightening intelligence of her countenance was curious to note. ‘I thought you didn’t care for each other,’ she said archly; ‘but,’ she added drily, ‘I suppose I was mistaken.’
‘Don’t suppose anything, Lizzie, there’s a good girl. But let me know when I may see her,’ I replied earnestly.
‘All right—I understand—I’ll let you know,’ she said, nodding her head vigorously with an air of mystery and importance; and then I went, not to have a cigar with Don, but to walk about the dark garden alleys, alone with my thoughts.
Our patient improved steadily all night, so much so that the family assembled at breakfast as usual. Then a great hunt was made for the snake (at Lizzie’s instigation, on the children’s behalf), which lasted a long while and was wholly unsuccessful. Then church-time came, and the buggy was ordered to take the servants and the little girls to church; and the hot day wore on. Towards evening, as I was loafing about the garden, Lizzie came running across the croquet lawn—where the balls and mallets were still lying about as we had left them, though it was Sunday—and told me that Rachel was up and dressed, and that she chanced to be alone in the drawing-room.
I stole in to her in the twilight with my heart beating fast; and for a few moments she did not notice me. She was standing by the open piano, small and white and weak, with a shawl wrapped round her, gazing at the silent key-board, with tears running down her face. No one could look less like Delaroche’s Marie Antoinette than she looked then.