He was none too soon. Elizabeth, swaying beside the couch of the dying soldier, fell as Archdale reached her. He lifted her, and carried her to her own tent. She was too faint to resist, or appeal. Nancy, whom the shot had summoned, followed, holding back her grief and terror because help and silence were what her mistress needed. Archdale had stayed but a moment in the tent. But he had seen everything, Harwin unhurt rushing toward his assailant, the surgeon wrenching the pistol from the disabled hand that had missed its aim, and Edmonson's face wild with horror at the lodgment that his ball had found. He had seen all, and he comprehended all.
CHAPTER XXXI.
EYES UNSEALED.
Edmonson sat with a terrible fierceness in his face.
Harwin had never seen him before, but he had heard of him, and, through Katie, of his former attentions to Elizabeth, and he divined who had fired that shot meant for himself.
"Come up to me," called Edmonson, turning suddenly upon him. "I've no weapon now. My face can't turn you to stone, though I'd be a Medusa to do it. But no, I'll do better than that. Come here! come here!" he repeated excitedly.
Harwin went up to him in silence, reading as he went a lesson that wrote itself on his mind as if in letters of blood. The man before him was well-born, well-educated, and skilled in all the graces of society, accepted even in court circles; yet, as he lay there, he looked a slave, for the nobility of freedom had gone, and the mark of the brute nature was on his forehead, and in his hand that he stretched out with the longing in it to grasp his victim. The soldier on the bed next his, who had spent a good part of his thirty years of life in a fishing-smack, who knew nothing of books beyond what the common-school education had given him, and less of any life but his own venturesome calling, who beyond knowledge of the sea and its dangers had been taught only by the quickness of his own wit and the honor of his own heart,—this man, as he turned attentive eyes upon the approaching figure, Harwin involuntarily glanced at. In a flash of insight he saw in the uprightness of the sailor's face the beauty of such strength. Then he looked back at Edmonson, and there he saw his own heart in exaggeration, and he trembled.
As he went up to Edmonson, the latter raised himself from his elbow, and sitting upright leaned as near him as he could.
"Do you know me?" he asked.
The other nodded, "Mr. Edmonson."