CHAPTER XXIV.

A FATHER'S MISGIVING.

A figure crouched low in the darkness of that narrow passage, listening at the door, and shrinking with shudders when a groan broke through the ill-fitted panels. There was some confusion in the room beyond, voices, and guarded footsteps, quick orders given, then dull, dead silence, and a sharp scream of agony.

"That was his cry! They are killing him! they are killing him!" cried that poor girl, springing to her feet.

Ruth opened the door in rash haste, and her pale face looked in.

"Back! Go back, child!"

It was the impatient voice and white hand of the surgeon that warned Ruth Jessup back; and she shrunk into the darkness again, appalled by what she had seen--her father's gray hair, scattered on the pillow, his face writhing, and his eyes hot and wild with anguish.

It was a terrible picture, but while it wrung her heart, there was hope in the agony it brought. Anything was better than the deathly stillness that had terrified her under the cedars. It was something that her father could feel pain.

"Now," said the kind surgeon, looking through the door, "you can come in. The bullet is extracted."

In his white palm lay a bit of bent lead, which he looked upon lovingly, for it was a proof of his own professional skill; but Ruth turned from it with a shiver, and creeping up to her father's bed, knelt down by it, holding back her tears, and burying her face in the bed-clothes, afraid to meet the wild eyes turned upon her.

The wounded man moved his hand a little toward her. She took it in her own timid clasp, and laid her wet cheek upon it in penitent humility.

"Oh, father!"

The hard fingers stirred in her grasp.

"Did it hurt you so? Has it almost killed you?"

The old man turned a little and bent his eyes upon her.

"It isn't _that_ hurt," he struggled to say. "Not that."

Ruth began to tremble. She understood him.

"Oh, father!" she faltered, "who did it? How could you have been hurt?"

A stern glance shot from the sick man's eye.

"You! oh, you!"

"Oh, father! I did not know. How could I?"

The old man drew away his hand, and shook off the tears she had left upon it, with more strength than he seemed to possess.

"Hush!" he said. "You trouble me."

Ruth shrunk away, and once more rested her head on the quilt, that was soon wet with her tears. After a little she crept close to him again, and timidly touched his hand.

"Father!"

"Poor child! Poor, foolish child!"

"Father, forgive me!"

The sick man's face quivered all over, and, spite of an effort to restrain it, his poor hand rose tremblingly, and fell on that bowed head.

"Oh, my child! if we had both died before this thing happened."

"I wish we had. Oh, how I wish we had!"

"It was my fault," murmured the sick man.

"No, no! It was mine. I am to blame, I alone."

"I might have known it; poor, lost lamb, I might have known it."

Ruth lifted her head suddenly.

"Lost lamb! Oh, father! what do these words mean?"

The gardener shook his head faintly, closed his eyes, and two great tears rolled from under the lids.

"Oh! tell me--tell me! I--I cannot bear it, father!"

That moment the surgeons, who had gone out for consultation, came back and rather sternly reprimanded Ruth for talking with their patient.

The girl rose obediently, and turned away from the bed. The surgeons saw that a scarlet heat had driven away the pallor of her countenance, but took no heed of that. She had evidently agitated their patient, and this was sufficient excuse for some degree of severity, so she went forth, relieved of her former awful dread, but wounded with new anxieties.

Two days followed of intense suffering to that wounded man and the broken-hearted girl. Fever and delirium set in with him, terror and dread with her. The power of reason had come out of that great shock. In trembling and awe she had asked herself questions.

Who had fired that murderous shot? How had the gun disappeared from behind the passage door, where Richard Storms had surely left it? Had there been a quarrel between the father she loved and the husband she adored? If so, which was the aggressor?

The poor girl remembered with dread the questions with which her father had startled her so that night, the sharp gleam of his usually kind eyes, and the set firmness of his mouth, while he waited for her answer. Did he guess at the deception she had practised, or were his suspicions such as made the blood burn in her veins?

With these thoughts harassing her mind, the young creature watched over that sick man until her own strength began to droop. In his delirium, he had talked wildly, and uttered at random many a broken fancy that cut her to the soul; but even in his helpless state there had seemed to be an undercurrent of caution curbing his tongue. He raved of the man who had shot him, but mentioned no names; spoke of his daughter with hushed tenderness, but still with a sort of reserve, as if he were keeping some painful secret back in his heart. Sometimes he recognized her, and then his eyes, lurid with fever, would fill with hot tears.

After a while this fever of the brain passed off, and left the strong man weak as a child. It seemed as if he had lost all force, even for suffering; but Ruth felt that some painful thing, that he never spoke of or hinted at, haunted him. He was strangely wakeful, and at times she felt his great eyes looking out at her from their deepening caverns, with an expression that made her heart sink.

One day he spoke to her with a suddenness that made her breath stand still.

"Ruth!"

"Father, did you speak to me?"

"Where is he?"

"Who, father?"

"You know. Is he safe out of the way?"

"Do you mean--"

The girl broke off. She could not utter Walton Hurst's name. The sick man also seemed to shrink from it.

"Is he safe?"

"Oh, father! he was hurt like yourself."

"Hurt!--he? I am speaking of Walton Hurst, girl."

The man spoke out plainly now, and a wild questioning look came into his eyes.

"Oh, father! he was found, like yourself, lying on the ground, senseless. We thought that he was dead."

"Lying on the ground! Who hurt him? Not I--not I!"

Ruth flung herself on her knees by the bed; a flush of coming tears rushed over her face.

"Oh, father! oh, thank God! father, dear father!"

"Did you think that?" whispered the sick man, overwhelmed by this swift outburst of feeling.

"I did not know--I could not tell. It was all so strange, so terrible! Oh, father, I have been so troubled!"

The sick man looked at her earnestly.

"Ruth!"

"Yes, father!"

"Was he shot like me?"

"I do not know. They say not. Some terrible blow on the head, but no blood."

"A blow on the head! But how? As God is my witness, I struck no one."

Ruth fell to kissing that large, helpless hand, as if some awful stain had just been removed from it. In all her father's sickness she had never touched him with her sweet lips till now. Then all at once she drew back as if an arrow had struck her. It was something keener than that--one of the thoughts that kill as they strike. After a struggle for breath, she spoke.

"But who? Oh, father, you were shot. Was it--was it--"

"Hush, child! Not a word! I--I will not hear a word. Never let that question pass your lips again so long as you live. I charge you--I charge you!"

The sick man fell back exhausted, and gasping for breath. The question put so naturally by his daughter seemed to have given him a dangerous shock.

"But how is he now?"

The question was asked in a hoarse whisper, and more by the bright eyes than those trembling lips.

"I--I have not dared to ask. I--I could not leave you here alone," answered Ruth, with a fitful quiver of the lips.

"How long is it?"

"Two days, father."

"Two days, and no news of him."

"They would not keep it from us if he had been worse," said Ruth, who had listened with sickening dread to every footstep that approached the cottage during all that time, fearing the news she expected, and gathering hope because it did not come.

"Has Sir Noel been here?"

"He was here that night," answered Ruth, shuddering, as she thought of the awful scene, when her father was brought home so death-like.

"Not since? He knew that I was hurt, too."

"He has sent the doctors here."

"What news did they bring?"

"I--I did not dare to ask."

A look of deep compassion broke into those sunken eyes, and, turning on his pillow, the old man murmured in a painful whisper:

"Poor child! Poor child!"

Then Ruth fell to kissing his great hand again, murmuring:

"Oh, father! you are so good to me--so good!"

"I am weak--so weak," he answered, as if excusing something to himself. "But how could he--Well, well, when I am stronger--when I am stronger."

The cottage was small, and the jar of an opening door could be felt through the whole little building. Some one was trying at the latch then, and a step was heard in the passage.