THE faces, with one exception, had receded into the background, when June returned slowly and painfully to a knowledge of what was happening. Maw was bending over her, and holding a cracked cup to her lips, and also “telling off” the others with a force and a scope of language that added not a little to June’s fear.
Perhaps the smell of its contents had quite as much effect upon the sufferer as the cup’s restorative powers. It was so distasteful to one who had been taught to shun all forms of alcohol, that a sheer disgust helped to bring her round.
At first, however, her mind was hardly more than a blank. But when, at last, a few links of recognition floated up into it out of the immediate past and hitched themselves to this strange present, a shock of new terror nearly overwhelmed her again. Recollection was like a knife stab. The Van Roon! The Van Roon! Where was it? Oh, God—if she had not got it after all!
The thought was pain, pure and exquisite. But the case did not really call for it. She was clutching the Van Roon convulsively to her breast like a child holds a doll. As she wakened slowly to this fact her brain wonderfully cleared.
The mind must be kept alive, if only to defend this talisman for whose sake she had already suffered so outrageously. She did not know where she was, and the evil presence holding the foul cup to her lips, and those other evil presences filling the background beyond gave her an intense apprehension.
Maw, however, in spite of a general air of obscenity, meant well. It was not easy for this fact to declare itself through that loud voice and ruthless mien; but gradually it began to percolate to June’s violated nerves, and so gave her a fleck of courage to hold on to that sense of identity which still threatened at the first moment again to desert her.
“Where was you goin’, deery?”
Rude the tone, but when June’s ear disentangled the words, she was able to appreciate that they were spoken in the way of kindness. But if the knowledge brought a spark of comfort it was quickly dowsed. Where was she going? To that grim question there was no possible answer.
“Scared out of her life, poor lamb!” said Maw. With furtive truculence she announced the fact to the rather awed spectators who gathered once more about the sufferer.
“Where you come from?”
June’s only answer was a shiver. The frozen silence was so full of the uncanny that Maw shook her own head dismally and tapped it with a grimy finger.
In the view of Maw, for such a calamity there was only one remedy. Once more the cup was pressed to June’s lips; once more it was resisted, this time with a hint of fierceness reassuring to the onlookers, inasmuch that it implied a return of life.
“Looks respectable,” said the cracked voice of the crone, who was now at Maw’s elbow.
“Where was you goin’?” demanded Maw again.
June was beyond tears, or she would have shed them. Now that the facts of the situation in all their hopelessness were streaming back to her, a feeling of sheer impotence kept her dumb.
“Off her rocker,” said Elbert gloomily.