‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ I exclaimed with compunction, as she solemnly marched off to look for it. ‘Let me find it for you.’
‘Do not trouble yourself,’ she replied sharply; and immediately dashed in between the laurel and a very prickly rose-bush, whose long sprays caught her muslin dress and tore it. I saw her straw-hat amongst the big dark branches, and her little hand searching under them for a moment or two; then she started up suddenly with a quick cry, and bounded into the path again.
‘What is the matter? Have you hurt yourself,’ I asked anxiously.
Her hat fell to the ground, and she stood before me with the blazing sun on her pretty head, and a wide-eyed horror in her face. ‘Wait a minute for me!’ she panted breathlessly; ‘I want you to help me—I have been bitten.’ Before I could collect my senses to understand what she meant, she had sped like a flash of light into the house; and dashing into the laurel bush, I saw what had happened. A big black snake was gliding away from the spot where she had been kneeling.
What was to be done? I stood still for a moment paralysed; then I sent up a hurried prayer for help, and simultaneously ‘cooeyed’ three or four times with all the force of a powerful pair of lungs, for Don at the wool-shed. Then I hurried after her, and met her coming through the door of my brother’s dressing-room with one of his razors in her hand. Her face was white and set as she seized my hand and hurried me into the smoking-room, which was near us, and turned the key in the lock. I knew what she wanted; and I set my teeth in an agony that no words could express, and which I can never think of now without a shudder.
‘Look!’ she said piteously, with a little sob in her throat; and I looked, and saw one of the fingers of her left hand tied round tightly with a piece of string below the first joint, and the end of it already livid and swollen and shewing the unmistakable punctures of the snake’s fangs. She laid her other hand on my arm, and looked up at me with a beseeching face that nearly unmanned me.
‘Help me!’ she whispered eagerly; ‘now—now; before the others come!’ And she held out the razor, open and shining. ‘It is no use to suck it—it only wastes time,’ as I seized her finger and put it in my mouth. ‘Don’t, don’t! I want to be on the safe side. I don’t want to die! O pray, pray help me!’—now sobbing passionately—’or else I must try to do it myself. I won’t cry out; I won’t mind it. I will turn my head away.’ She laid her finger on the edge of the table, and I took the razor from her, and with all the courage I could muster, excised the wounded part. She bore the cruel operation without a murmur.