Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

desperation.

"We have him in here, ma'am. But he's bad, too! Here's my husband. Have ye the brandy, Tom?"

Rosalind struggles to her feet from the little settee they had laid her on. Her head is swimming, and she is sick, but she says: "Let me come!" She has gathered this much--that whatever has happened to Sally, Vereker is there beside her, and the other doctor she knows of. She can do nothing, and Gerry is close at hand. They let her come, and the woman and her husband follow. The one or two others go quietly out; there were too many for the tiny house.

That is Gerry, she can see, on the trestle-bedstead near the window with the flowerpots in it. He seems only half conscious, and his hands and face are cold. She cannot be sure that he has recognised her. Then she knows she is being spoken to. It is the fisherman's wife who speaks.

"We could find no way to get the gentleman's wet garments from him, but we might make a shift to try again. He's a bit hard to move. Not too much at once, Tom." Her husband is pouring brandy from his flask into a mug.

"Has he had any brandy?"

"Barely to speak of. Tell the lady, Tom!"

"No more than the leaving of a flask nigh empty out in my boat. It did him good, too. He got the speech to tell of the young lady, else--God help us!--we might have rowed him in, and lost the bit of water she was under. But we had the luck to find her." It was the owner of the cobble who spoke.

"Gerry, drink some of this at once. It's me--Rosey--your wife!" She is afraid his head may fail, for anything may happen now; but the brandy the fisherman's wife has handed to her revives him. No one speaks for awhile, and Rosalind, in the dazed state that so perversely notes and dwells on some small thing of no importance, and cannot grasp the great issue of some crisis we are living through, is keenly aware of the solemn ticking of a high grandfather clock, and of the name of the maker on its face--"Thomas Locock, Rochester." She sees it through the door into the front room, and wonders what the certificate or testimonial in a frame beside it is; and whether the Bible on the table below it, beside the fat blue jug with a ship and inscriptions on it, has illustrations and the Stem of Jesse rendered pictorially. Or is it "Pilgrim's Progress," and no Bible at all? Who or what is she, that can sit and think of this and that, knowing that a world--her world and her husband's--is at stake, and that a terrible game is being played to save it, there within twenty yards of them? If she could only have given active help! But that she knows is impossible. She knows enough to be satisfied that all that can be done is being done; that even warmth and stimulants are useless, perhaps even injurious, till artificial respiration has done its work. She can recall Sally's voice telling her of these things. Yes, she is best here beside her husband.

What is it that he says in a gasping whisper? Can any one tell him what it is has happened? She cannot--perhaps could not if she knew--and she does not yet know herself. She repeats her question to the fisherman and his wife. They look at each other and say young Ben Tracy was on the pier. Call him in. It is something to know that what has happened was on the pier. While young Ben is hunted up the opportunity is taken to make the change of wet clothes for extemporised dry ones. The half-drowned, all-chilled, and bewildered man is reviving, and can help, though rigidly and with difficulty. Then Ben is brought in, appalled and breathless.

The red-eyed and tear-stained boy is in bad trim for giving evidence, but under exhortation to speak up and tell the lady he articulates his story through his sobs. He is young, and can cry. He goes back to the beginning.

His father told him to run and hunt round for the life-belt, and he went to left instead of to right, and missed of seeing it. And he was at the top o' the ladder, shooat'un aloud to his father, and the gentleman--he nodded towards Fenwick--was walking down below. Then the young lady came to the top stair of the ladder. The narrator threw all his powers of description into the simultaneousness of Sally's arrival at this point and the gentleman walking straight over the pier-edge. "And then the young lady she threw away her hat, and come runnin' down, runnin' down, and threw away her cloak, she _did_, and stra'at she went for t' wa'ater!" Young Benjamin's story and his control over his sobs come to an end at the same time, and his father, just arrived, takes up the tale.

"I saw there was mishap in it," he says, "by the manner of my young lad with the lady's hat, and I went direct for the life-belt, for I'm no swimmer myself. Tom, man, tell the lady I'm no swimmer...." Tom nodded assent, "... or I might have tried my luck. It was a bad business that the life-belt was well away at the far end, and I had no chance to handle it in time. It was the run of the tide took them out beyond the length of the line, and I was bound to make the best throw I could, and signal to shore for a boat." He was going to tell how the only little boat at the pier-end had got water-logged in the night, when Rosalind interrupted him.

"Did you see them both in the water?"

"Plain. The young lady swimming behind and keeping the gentleman's head above the water. I could hear her laughing like, and talking. Then I sent the belt out, nigh half-way, and she saw it and swam for it. Then I followed my young lad for to get out a shore-boat."

It was the thought of the merpussy laughing like and talking in the cruel sea that was to engulf her that brought a heart-broken choking moan from her mother. Then, all being told, the fisher-folk glanced at each other, and by common consent went noiselessly from the room and lingered whispering outside. They closed the outer door, leaving the cottage entirely to Rosalind and her husband, and then they two were alone in the darkened world; and Conrad Vereker, whom they could not help, was striving--striving against despair--to bring back life to Sally.

* * * * *


A terrible strain--an almost killing strain--had been put upon Fenwick's powers of endurance. Probably the sudden shock of his immersion, the abrupt suppression of an actual fever almost at the cost of sanity, had quite as much to do with this as what he was at first able to grasp of the extent of the disaster. But actual chill and exposure had contributed their share to the state of semi-collapse in which Rosalind found him. Had the rower of the cobble turned in-shore at once, some of this might have been saved; but that would have been one pair of eyes the fewer, and every boat was wanted. Now that his powerful constitution had the chance to reassert itself, his revival went quickly. He was awakening to a world with a black grief in it; but Rosey was there, and had to be lived for, and think of his debt to her! Think of the great wrong he did her in that old time that he had only regained the knowledge of yesterday! Her hand in his gave him strength to speak, and though his voice was weak it would reach the head that rested on his bosom.

"I can tell you now, darling, what I remember. I went off feverish in the night after you left me, and I suppose my brain gave way, in a sense. I went out early to shake it off, and a sort of delusion completely got the better of me. I fancied I was back at Bombay, going on the boat for Australia, and I just stepped off the pier-edge. Our darling must have been there. Oh, Sally, Sally!..." He had to pause and wait.

"Hope is not all dead--not yet, not yet!" Rosalind's voice seemed to plead against despair.

"I know, Rosey dearest--not yet. I heard her voice ... oh, her voice!... call to me to be still, and she would save me. And then I felt her dear hand ... first my arm, then my head, on each side." Again his voice was choking, but he recovered. "Then, somehow, the life-belt was round me--I can't tell how, but she made me hold it so as to be safe. She was talking and laughing, but I could not hear much. I know, however, that she said quite suddenly, 'I had better swim back to the pier. Hold on tight, Jeremiah!'..." He faltered again before ending. "I don't know why she went, but she said, 'I must go,' and swam away."

That was all Fenwick could tell. The explanation came later. It was that unhappy petticoat-tape! A swimmer's leg-stroke may be encumbered in a calm sea, or when the only question is of keeping afloat for awhile. But in moderately rough water, and in a struggle against a running tide--which makes a certain speed imperative--the conditions are altered. Sally may have judged wrongly in trying to return to the pier, but remember--she could not in the first moments know that the mishap had been seen, and help was near at hand. Least of all could she estimate the difficulty of swimming in a loosened encumbered skirt. In our judgment, she would have done better to remain near the life-belt, even if she, too, had ultimately had to depend on it. The additional risk for Fenwick would have been small.

After he had ended what he had to tell he remained quite still, and scarcely spoke during the hour that followed. Twice or three times during that hour Rosalind rose to go out and ask if there was any change. But, turning to him with her hand on the door, and asking "Shall I go?" she was always met with "What good will it do? Conrad will tell us at once," and returned to her place beside him. After all, what she heard might be the end of Hope. Better stave off Despair to the last.

She watched the deliberate hands of the clock going cruelly on, unfaltering, ready to register in cold blood the moment that should say that Sally, as they knew her, was no more. Thomas Locock, of Rochester, had taken care of that. Where would those hands be on that clock-face when all attempt at resuscitation had to stop? And why live after it?

She fancied she could hear, at intervals, Dr. Conrad's voice giving instructions; and the voice of the Scotsman, less doubtfully, which always sounded like that of a medical man, for some reason not defined. As the clock-hand pointed to ten, she heard both quite near--outside Lloyd's Coffeehouse, evidently. Then she knew why she had so readily relinquished her purpose of getting at Dr. Conrad for news. It was the dread of seeing anything of the necessary manipulation of the body. Could she have helped, it would have been different. No, if she must look upon her darling