“Righto.”
I heard a gurgle from Oxford’s lips and guessed that his heart must be rotating in his throat. His shoulder to my touch was quivering, and while we went to rejoin the rest he staggered as if in drink, although certainly sober. But his nerves aren’t the best, I shouldn’t wonder, for there must be regular occasions when he quaffs and quaffs again.
They were a chastened, vaguely murmurous company we discovered almost beneath the arch of the ancient gate-house with its ivy swarming up and up, now standing lone, its walls on either side all shorn away. Only a spurt or two of a match they had to see by, until I came with my torch and they made way for me. The light on the weather-beaten stone was like the circle of an old medallion or mellowed painting: two women, one pallid and lifeless, the other, seated on the grass, supporting the lovely, unconscious head on her knees.
I supposed instantly that this was the young English-woman, Millicent Mertoun, who lay wan—the most beautiful creature, I believe, I have ever seen. Fine breeding, fine spirit were in her stricken face. Cold loveliness, indeed, with the life gone out of it; eyes set widely apart, closed beneath straight black eyebrows which were now lifted apeak with the intensity of strain that showed in the fine lines across her forehead and the slight drawing-back of her short upper lip, disclosing her large, evenly graduated teeth. The lashes that rested upon her cheeks were remarkably long, deep black, and it was their fragile, almost imperceptible stirring alone that betokened a possible reawakening to life. Her chin was softly rounded, and in the disorder of her abundant black hair a delicate ear was exposed. The suspension of life had withdrawn the blood from the full-contoured lips, left the cheeks pallid, but while I gazed at the face and the aristocratic little neck, twined about so by the tumbling length of masses of black hair, I had a whisper of what beauty the face might have when expression was restored to it, and the eyes, of unguessable depth and sweetness, were open.
Of the other woman’s head I caught only the partly averted profile, while she bent over Miss Mertoun, with one hand clasping together at the throat the unconscious girl’s loose gown, apparently a garment of negligée. She, of course, must be the American girl, for it was at the sound of her voice that Sean Cosgrove had torn across the lawn. There was dignity, I thought, in her head with its straitly fastened golden-brown hair, and a lovely tenderness in the solicitude of her pose.
She was in the midst of speech, relating the adventure which had brought her and her companion to that plight. She did not look up or turn her head when the light from my hand broke over her, and all the while she spoke her watchful gaze was for the features of the girl whose senses were benumbed. American speech it was, yet the words came from her lips with a chiselled precision, the tone tending toward viola depth.
“—blinding, yes, not blinding alone, but maddening. I got her into looser clothing—she wouldn’t go to bed. She gave no sign of fainting, but the pain drove her into delirium more than once, and I almost sent for someone else to help me with her. Then the pain went down, and suddenly she went to sleep.”
Someone, I think Cosgrove, took a step nearer. “No, keep away, please. Don’t try to move her yet.”
“But, Paula, how did you ever come—?”
The American girl precluded the end of Alberta Pendleton’s question. “Of course I am coming to that. She went sound asleep, and I thought it better not to undress her; so I let her lie on the bed, and I curled up in the chair by the window. Millicent’s wretched evening had left me tired out, too, and I don’t remember anything more until when I woke up to find her awake again and wandering about. There was enough light from the globe by the mirror to see that she was terribly distressed, but it was not with pain this time. She was suffering from some—”