A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 50

But it was days before Stephen Gard took any interest in the matter, past or present, or in anything whatsoever.

The Doctor's pad undoubtedly saved his life, but no amount of padding could avert entirely the fiendish malignity of those merciless iron flails.

He lay unconscious for eight-and-forty hours; and the Doctor--though he never breathed a word of it, and prophesied complete recovery with the utmost cheerfulness and apparent sincerity--had his own grim fears as to what the effect of the whole hideous event might be on one who had already suffered such undue strain of mind and body.

Fortunately, his fears proved groundless. On the third day, Gard quietly opened his eyes on Nance, who had barely left his bedside since the Senechal went down to La Closerie himself and brought her back with him to Plaisance.

"I've been asleep," he said drowsily. "Anything wrong, Nance dear?" and he tried to sit up, but found his head heavy with cold water bandages, and a pain about his neck and left shoulder, and his left arm in splints, and all the rest of him one great aching bruise.

"Why--" he murmured, in vast surprise.

"You're to lie quite still," said Nance dictatorially, with lifted finger. "And you're not to talk or think till the Doctor comes."

"Give me a kiss, then!"--good prima facie evidence, this, that his brain had suffered no permanent injury.

"Well, he didn't say anything about that," and she bent over him and kissed him with a br.i.m.m.i.n.g flood of grat.i.tude in her blue eyes, and he lay quiet for a time.

"Is it dead?" he asked suddenly, with a reminiscent shudder which set all his bruises aching.

"The white horse? Yes, Dieu merci, it's dead! But you're not to talk or think."

"Give me another kiss, then!"--from which it was apparent that he knew very well what kind of medicine was best adapted to his ailments.

The Doctor came down to see him the very first thing every morning, and now he came quietly in, just as Nance had been administering her latest dose.

"Ah--ha, nurse! What are you doing to my patient!"

"I'm only keeping him quiet, sir, as you told me to," said Nance, with a rosy face.

"It's the doctor you ought to pay, not the patient. Well, my boy, how are we this morning? Head aching yet?"

"It does feel a bit queer. Tell me all about last night, Doctor!"

"Ah--ha, yes--last night! Well, you caught the murderer with a vengeance, my boy--or he caught you,"--and then, seeing the puzzlement in the tired eyes, he briefly explained the whole matter.

"And do you mean it was that awful beast killed the others?"

"Without a doubt--and would have killed you in exactly the same way, and exactly the same place, but for my pads and the Senechal's bullets.

Queer thing--they found the brute lying all in a heap in Coupee Bay on the very spot where Tom Hamon and Peter Mauger were found."

"Ay-y-y-y-y!" breathed Gard, with a long sigh of relief and a shiver. "I shall never forget him."

"Oh yes, you will--in time. Think of little Nance here. She's a sight better worth thinking of. And now, Miss Nancy, how much good news can you stand all at once, if you try your very hardest?" he asked, with a sparkle in his eyes that somehow seemed to set hers sparkling too.

"Oh made, Doctor!" and the little hands clasped up on her breast, as was her way when greatly moved. "Not----?"

She dared not hope for so much--the wish of her heart--just an inch or so behind the desire for Gard's recovery.

"The cutter this morning brought over one we had feared was lost----"

"Not--not Bernel?"

"Yes, my child, Bernel, by G.o.d's good mercy! He was picked up by a Granville trawler, and lay there ill for some days, and could only get back by Jersey and Guernsey. He was to come along with the Senechal in a quarter of an hour--"

But Nance had fallen on her knees and buried her face in the bed-clothes, lest any but G.o.d should see it in the rapture of its breaking.

"Dieu merci! Dieu merci! Dieu merci!" she was crying, though none of them heard it.

And "Thank G.o.d!" said Stephen Gard with fervour--for Bernel, and for himself, but most of all for Nance.

NOTE.--The names used in this book are necessarily the names still current in Sark. None of the characters presented, however, are in any way connected with any persons now living in the Island.