Part 84 (1/2)
”Don't let the poor girl hear you!” said the sympathetic bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly, dropping on her knees beside it:
”O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----”
It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love.
It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:
”Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pa.s.s?”
”Born to be hung, I should say,” commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to his mate. ”Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you,” he added, as the stretcher was lifted. ”And tell her, when she comes to, that we've taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place.”
”Rum critters, women,” commented another bystander, not untender in his manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs.
”Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could walk now, miss, if you tried to?”
She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be pitiful, and tell her where ”they” had taken him. Then, when she was told, and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.
Saxham st.i.tched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent cast....
”You shall git well, deer,” Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty times a day. ”You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you.”
”A' right,” her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: ”Mend me an' marry me.
That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?”
She crimsoned, gasping:
”You don't never mean it?”
”Stryte I mean it,” declared W. Keyse. ”Wot d'you tyke me for?”
His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:
”S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----”
He said it with the lean arm round her.
”An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----”
He swore it.
”You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!”
”An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?” Her face was coming close....
”Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up,” he declared.
”You did--that?” she quavered, marvelling at the greatness of his nature.