Bob Beaty knelt supporting Lot’s shoulders and pressing his hand over the frothing wound in the man’s chest.
“My God,” he said, “what fools! We brought no surgeon.”
Jeffray, who was looking down at his cousin with mute regret, turned suddenly, and, picking up Lot’s gaudy waistcoat, doubled it into a pad and thrust it into Beaty’s hand.
“Hold it over the wound,” he said; “we must get him into the coach. Drive to Stott’s house at Rookhurst. Quick, Dick, take his shoulders.”
Between them they lifted Lot Hardacre, gray-faced and bloody, weak as a sick child, and carried him up the stairway along the terrace to the coach. A frightened and shaking serving-man opened the coach door. They lifted Lot in as gently as they could, and laid him along the seat with his head resting against Bob Beaty’s shoulder. The serving-man slammed the door and climbed up to the seat behind the coach. The postilion whipped up his horses, and the clumsy carriage swung away on its great springs, leaving Jeffray and Dick Wilson watching it side by side from the terrace.
XXXIX
The anger had melted out of Jeffray’s heart from the moment that he had helped to lift his cousin’s body and bear it with Beaty and Wilson to the coach. The reaction was but the recoiling of a sensitive nature from the violence that had brought a strong man in anguish to the ground. He stood watching the coach as it rolled along between the trees casting up a cloud of summer dust that drifted idly over the long grass.
Wilson, understanding something of the regret that had seized upon his friend’s mind, laid his hand upon Jeffray’s shoulder.
“It was no fault of yours, Richard,” he said, looking earnestly into Jeffray’s face.
The younger man hung his head and sighed.