The man stepped forwards,respectfully pushing his master on one side as he did so.He bent down over the corpse,and looked,and listened and then reaching a candle off the table,he signed Mr.Wilkins to close the door.And Mr.Wilkins obeyed,and looked with an intensity of eagerness almost amounting to faintness on the experiment,and yet he could not hope.The flame was steady--steady and pitilessly unstirred,even when it was adjusted close to mouth and nostril;the head was raised up by one of Dixon's stalwart arms,while he held the candle in the other hand.Ellinor fancied that there was some trembling on Dixon's part,and grasped his wrist tightly in order to give it the requisite motionless firmness.
All in vain.The head was placed again on the cushions,the servant rose and stood by his master,looked sadly on the dead man,whom,living,none of them had liked or cared for,and Ellinor sat on,quiet and tearless,as one in a trance.
"How was it,father?"at length she asked.
He would fain have had her ignorant of all,but so questioned by her lips,so adjured by her eyes in the very presence of death,he could not choose but speak the truth;he spoke it in convulsive gasps,each sentence an effort:
"He taunted me--he was insolent,beyond my patience--I could not bear it.I struck him--I can't tell how it was.He must have hit his head in falling.Oh,my God!one little hour a go I was innocent of this man's blood!"He covered his face with his hands.
Ellinor took the candle again;kneeling behind Mr.Dunster's head,she tried the futile experiment once more.
"Could not a doctor do some good?"she asked of Dixon,in a hopeless voice.
"No!"said he,shaking his head,and looking with a sidelong glance at his master,who seemed to shrivel up and to shrink away at the bare suggestion."Doctors can do nought,I'm afeard.All that a doctor could do,I take it,would be to open a vein,and that I could do along with the best of them,if I had but my fleam here."He fumbled in his pockets as he spoke,and,as chance would it,the "fleam"(or cattle lancet)was somewhere about his dress.He drew it out,smoothed and tried it on his finger.Ellinor tried to bare the arm,but turned sick as she did so.Her father started eagerly forwards,and did what was necessary with hurried trembling hands.
If they had cared less about the result,they might have been more afraid of the consequences of the operation in the hands of one so ignorant as Dixon.But,vein or artery,it signified little;no living blood gushed out;only a little watery moisture followed the cut of the fleam.They laid him back on his strange sad death-couch.
Dixon spoke next.
"Master Ned!"said he--for he had known Mr.Wilkins in his days of bright careless boyhood,and almost was carried back to them by the sense of charge and protection which the servant's presence of mind and sharpened senses gave him over his master on this dreary night--"Master Ned!we must do summut."No one spoke.What was to be done?
"Did any folk see him come here?"Dixon asked,after a time.Ellinor looked up to hear her father's answer,a wild hope coming into her mind that all might be concealed somehow;she did not know how,nor did she think of any consequences except saving her father from the vague dread,trouble,and punishment that she was aware would await him if all were known.
Mr.Wilkins did not seem to hear;in fact,he did not hear anything but the unspoken echo of his own last words,that went booming through his heart:"An hour ago I was innocent of this man's blood!
Only an hour ago!"
Dixon got up and poured out half a tumblerful of raw spirit from the brandy-bottle that stood on the table.
