Stella could and did, but she drank none of it herself. A dead weight of apprehension lay like lead in her breast. Her conscience pointed a deadly finger. First Billy Dale, now her brother, and, sandwiched in between, the loosed fire furies which were taking toll in bodily injury and ruinous loss.
Yet she was helpless. The matter was wholly out of her hands, and she stood aghast before it, much as the small child stands aghast before the burning house he has fired by accident.
Fyfe next. That was the ultimate, the culmination, which would leave her forever transfixed with remorseful horror. The fact that already the machinery of the law which would eventually bring Monohan to book for the double lawlessness of arson and attempted homicide must be in motion, that the Provincial police would be hard on his trail, did not occur to her. She could only visualize him progressing step by step from one lawless deed to another. And in her mind every step led to Jack Fyfe, who had made a mock of him. She found her hands clenching till the nails dug deep.
Linda’s head drooped over the teacup. Her eyelids blinked.
“Dear,” Stella said tenderly, “come and lie down. You’re worn out.”
“Perhaps I’d better,” Linda muttered. “There’s another room in there.”
Stella tucked the weary girl into the bed, and went back to the kitchen, and sat down in the willow rocker. After another hour the nurse came out and prepared her own breakfast. Benton was still sleeping. He was in no danger, the nurse told Stella. The bullet had driven cleanly through his body, missing as by a miracle any vital part, and lodged in the muscles of his back, whence the surgeon had removed it. Though weak from shock, loss of blood, excitement, he had rallied splendidly, and fallen into a normal sleep.
Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One couldn’t kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one burden from her mind.
The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place. Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it was drawing near ten o’clock, she walked up the road past the corner store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.
The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along, St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank. She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of mist.