Where Love Is by William John Locke

Author:William John Locke [Locke, William John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anboco
Published: 2017-01-17T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter XV—MRS. HARDACRE LAUGHS

THEY took Jimmie into the house, and Norma, looking neither to right nor left, walked by the side of those carrying him, the front of her embroidered dress smeared with blood. Every time her hands came in contact with the delicate fabric, they left a fresh smear. Of this she was unconscious. She was unconscious too, save in a dull way, of the staring crowd; but she held her head high, and when Morland spoke to her by the drawing-room window through which they passed, she listened to what he had to say, bowed slightly, and went on.

“It is only a flesh wound. If it had been the lung, he would have spat blood. I don’t think it is serious.”

He spoke in a curiously apologetic tone, as if anxious to exculpate himself from complicity in the attempted murder.. He was horribly frightened. Two deaths laid in one day at a man’s door are enough. The possibility of a third was intolerable. The sense of the unheroic part he had just played was beginning to creep over him like a chilling mist. The consequences of confession, the only means whereby Jimmie could be rehabilitated, loomed in front of him more and more disastrous. It would be presenting himself to the world as a coward as well as a knave. That prospect, too, frightened him. Lastly, there was Norma, white, terror-stricken, metamorphosed in a second into a creature of primitive emotions. Like the other shocks of that unhallowed day, her revelation of unsuspected passions brought him face to face with the unfamiliar; and to the average sensual man the unfamiliar brings with it an atmosphere of the uncanny, the influence to be feared. His attitude, therefore, when he addressed her was ludicrously humble.

She bowed and passed on. By this time she knew that Jimmie was not dead. Morland’s words even reassured her. Her breath came hard through her delicate nostrils, and her bosom heaved up and down beneath the open-work bodice with painful quickness. Only a few were allowed to stay in the dining-room, Morland, Mr. Hardacre, Theodore Weever on behalf of the duchess, and one or two others, while the Cosford doctor, who had been invited to the garden-party, made his examination. Norma went through into the hall. At the bottom of the stairs she met Connie in piteous distress.

“Oh, my poor dear, my poor dear, we did n’t know! I have just heard all about it. It is terrible!”

Norma put up her hand beseechingly.

“Don’t, Connie dear; don’t talk of it. I can’t bear it. I must be alone. Send me up word what the doctor says.” She went to her room, sat there and waited. Presently her maid entered with the message from Mrs. Deering. The doctor’s report was favourable—the wound not in any way dangerous, the bullet easily extractable. They had carried the patient to his bedroom, and Mrs. Deering had wired for Miss Marden to come down by the first train. Norma dismissed the maid, and tried, in a miserable wonder, to realise all that had happened.

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