Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Wheels of Chance
“Eigh?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, feigning a certain stupidity. There was a brief discussion. Secretly he was delighted at her insistence in paying. She carried her point. Their talk came round to their immediate plans for the day. They decided to ride easily, through Havant, and stop, perhaps, at Fareham or Southampton. For the previous day had tried them both. Holding the map extended on his knee, Mr. Hoopdriver’s eye fell by chance on the bicycle at his feet. “That bicycle,” he remarked, quite irrelevantly, “wouldn’t look the same machine if I got a big, double Elarum instead of that little bell.”
“Why?”
“Jest a thought.” A pause.
“Very well, then, – Havant and lunch,” said Jessie, rising.
“I wish, somehow, we could have managed it without stealing that machine,” said Hoopdriver. “Because it IS stealing it, you know, come to think of it.”
“Nonsense. If Mr. Bechamel troubles you – I will tell the whole world – if need be.”
“I believe you would,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, admiring her. “You’re plucky enough – goodness knows.”
Discovering suddenly that she was standing, he, too, rose and picked up her machine. She took it and wheeled it into the road. Then he took his own. He paused, regarding it. “I say!” said he. “How’d this bike look, now, if it was enamelled grey?” She looked over her shoulder at his grave face. “Why try and hide it in that way?”
“It was jest a passing thought,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, airily. “Didn’t MEAN anything, you know.”
As they were riding on to Havant it occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver in a transitory manner that the interview had been quite other than his expectation. But that was the way with everything in Mr. Hoopdriver’s experience. And though his Wisdom looked grave within him, and Caution was chinking coins, and an ancient prejudice in favour of Property shook her head, something else was there too, shouting in his mind to drown all these saner considerations, the intoxicating thought of riding beside Her all to-day, all to-morrow, perhaps for other days after that. Of talking to her familiarly, being brother of all her slender strength and freshness, of having a golden, real, and wonderful time beyond all his imaginings. His old familiar fancyings gave place to anticipations as impalpable and fluctuating and beautiful as the sunset of a summer day.
At Havant he took an opportunity to purchase, at small hairdresser’s in the main street, a toothbrush, a pair of nail scissors, and a little bottle of stuff to darken the moustache, an article the shopman introduced to his attention, recommended highly, and sold in the excitement of the occasion.
XXIX. THE UNEXPECTED ANECDOTE OF THE LION
They rode on to Cosham and lunched lightly but expensively there. Jessie went out and posted her letter to her school friend. Then the green height of Portsdown Hill tempted them, and leaving their machines in the village they clambered up the slope to the silent red-brick fort that crowned it. Thence they had a view of Portsmouth and its cluster of sister towns, the crowded narrows of the harbour, the Solent and the Isle of Wight like a blue cloud through the hot haze. Jessie by some miracle had become a skirted woman in the Cosham inn. Mr. Hoopdriver lounged gracefully on the turf, smoked a Red Herring cigarette, and lazily regarded the fortified towns that spread like a map away there, the inner line of defence like toy fortifications, a mile off perhaps; and beyond that a few little fields and then the beginnings of Landport suburb and the smoky cluster of the multitudinous houses. To the right at the head of the harbour shallows the town of Porchester rose among the trees. Mr. Hoopdriver’s anxiety receded to some remote corner of his brain and that florid half-voluntary imagination of his shared the stage with the image of Jessie. He began to speculate on the impression he was creating. He took stock of his suit in a more optimistic spirit, and reviewed, with some complacency, his actions for the last four and twenty hours. Then he was dashed at the thought of her infinite perfections.
She had been observing him quietly, rather more closely during the last hour or so. She did not look at him directly because he seemed always looking at her. Her own troubles had quieted down a little, and her curiosity about the chivalrous, worshipping, but singular gentleman in brown, was awakening. She had recalled, too, the curious incident of their first encounter. She found him hard to explain to herself. You must understand that her knowledge of the world was rather less than nothing, having been obtained entirely from books. You must not take a certain ignorance for foolishness.
She had begun with a few experiments. He did not know French except ‘sivver play,’ a phrase he seemed to regard as a very good light table joke in itself. His English was uncertain, but not such as books informed her distinguished the lower classes. His manners seemed to her good on the whole, but a trifle over-respectful and out of fashion. He called her I Madam’ once. He seemed a person of means and leisure, but he knew nothing of recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he spend his time? He was certainly chivalrous, and a trifle simpleminded. She fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had never met with such a man before. What COULD he be?
“Mr. Benson,” she said, breaking a silence devoted to landscape.
He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles.
“At your service.”
“Do you paint? Are you an artist?”
“Well.” Judicious pause. “I should hardly call myself a Nartist, you know. I DO paint a little. And sketch, you know – skitty kind of things.”
He plucked and began to nibble a blade of grass. It was really not so much lying as his quick imagination that prompted him to add, “In Papers, you know, and all that.”
“I see,” said Jessie, looking at him thoughtfully. Artists were a very heterogeneous class certainly, and geniuses had a trick of being a little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. “I don’t do MUCH, you know.”
“It’s not your profession?
“Oh, no,” said Hoopdriver, anxious now to hedge. “I don’t make a regular thing of it, you know. Jest now and then something comes into my head and down it goes. No – I’m not a regular artist.”
“Then you don’t practise any regular profession?” Mr. Hoopdriver looked into her eyes and saw their quiet unsuspicious regard. He had vague ideas of resuming the detective role. “It’s like this,” he said, to gain time. “I have a sort of profession. Only there’s a kind of reason – nothing much, you know.”
“I beg your pardon for cross-examining you.”
“No trouble,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Only I can’t very well – I leave it to you, you know. I don’t want to make any mystery of it, so far as that goes.” Should he plunge boldly and be a barrister? That anyhow was something pretty good. But she might know about barristry.
“I think I could guess what you are.”
“Well – guess,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“You come from one of the colonies?”
“Dear me!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. “How did you find out THAT?” (the man was born in a London suburb, dear Reader.)
“I guessed,” she said.
He lifted his eyebrows as one astonished, and clutched a new piece of grass.
“You were educated up country.”
“Good again,” said Hoopdriver, rolling over again into her elbow. “You’re a CLAIRVOY ant.” He bit at the grass, smiling. “Which colony was it?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You must guess,” said Hoopdriver.
“South Africa,” she said. “I strongly incline to South Africa.”
“South Africa’s quite a large place,” he said.
“But South Africa is right?”
“You’re warm,” said Hoopdriver, “anyhow,” and the while his imagination was eagerly exploring this new province.
“South Africa IS right?” she insisted.
He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her eyes.
“What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive Schreiner’s, you know – ‘The Story of an African Farm.’ Gregory Rose is so like you.”
“I never read ‘The Story of an African Farm,’” said Hoopdriver. “I must. What’s he like?”
“You must read the book. But it’s a wonderful place, with its mixture of races, and its brand-new civilisation jostling the old savagery. Were you near Khama?”
“He was a long way off from our place,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “We had a little ostrich farm, you know – Just a few hundred of ‘em, out Johannesburg way.”
“On the Karroo – was it called?”
“That’s the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got along very well in the old days. – But there’s no ostriches on that farm now.” He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the moment, but he stopped and left a little to the girl’s imagination. Besides which it had occurred to him with a kind of shock that he was lying.
“What became of the ostriches?”
“We sold ‘em off, when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I have another cigarette? That was when I was quite a little chap, you know, that we had this ostrich farm.”
“Did you have Blacks and Boers about you?”
“Lots,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, striking a match on his instep and beginning to feel hot at the new responsibility he had brought upon himself.
“How interesting! Do you know, I’ve never been out of England except to Paris and Mentone and Switzerland.”
“One gets tired of travelling (puff) after a bit, of course.”
“You must tell me about your farm in South Africa. It always stimulates my imagination to think of these places. I can fancy all the tall ostriches being driven out by a black herd – to graze, I suppose. How do ostriches feed?”
“Well,” said Hoopdriver. “That’s rather various. They have their fancies, you know. There’s fruit, of course, and that kind of thing. And chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment.”
“Did you ever see a lion?” “They weren’t very common in our district,” said Hoopdriver, quite modestly. “But I’ve seen them, of course. Once or twice.”
“Fancy seeing a lion! Weren’t you frightened?”
Mr. Hoopdriver was now thoroughly sorry he had accepted that offer of South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the Solent languidly as he settled the fate on that lion in his mind. “I scarcely had time,” he said. “It all happened in a minute.”
“Go on,” she said.
“I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted ostriches were.”
“Did you EAT ostriches, then? I did not know – ”
“Eat them! – often. Very nice they ARE too, properly stuffed. Well, we – I, rather – was going across this paddock, and I saw something standing up in the moonlight and looking at me.” Mr. Hoopdriver was in a hot perspiration now. His invention seemed to have gone limp. “Luckily I had my father’s gun with me. I was scared, though, I can tell you. (Puff.) I just aimed at the end that I thought was the head. And let fly. (Puff.) And over it went, you know.”
“Dead?”
“AS dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired. And I wasn’t much over nine at the time, neither.”
“I should have screamed and run away.”
“There’s some things you can’t run away from,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “To run would have been Death.”
“I don’t think I ever met a lion-killer before,” she remarked, evidently with a heightened opinion of him.
There was a pause. She seemed meditating further questions. Mr. Hoopdriver drew his watch hastily. “I say,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, showing it to her, “don’t you think we ought to be getting on?”
His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his confusion to modesty. He rose with a lion added to the burthens of his conscience, and held out his hand to assist her. They walked down into Cosham again, resumed their machines, and went on at a leisurely pace along the northern shore of the big harbour. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no longer happy. This horrible, this fulsome lie, stuck in his memory. Why HAD he done it? She did not ask for any more South African stories, happily – at least until Porchester was reached – but talked instead of Living One’s Own Life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She talked wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver’s mind fermenting. By the Castle, Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in little shore pools. At Fareham they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards the hour of sunset, under such invigorating circumstances as you shall in due course hear.
XXX. THE RESCUE EXPEDITION
And now to tell of those energetic chevaliers, Widgery, Dangle, and Phipps, and of that distressed beauty, ‘Thomas Plantagenet,’ well known in society, so the paragraphs said, as Mrs. Milton. We left them at Midhurst station, if I remember rightly, waiting, in a state of fine emotion, for the Chichester train. It was clearly understood by the entire Rescue Party that Mrs. Milton was bearing up bravely against almost overwhelming grief. The three gentlemen outdid one another in sympathetic expedients; they watched her gravely almost tenderly. The substantial Widgery tugged at his moustache, and looked his unspeakable feelings at her with those dog-like, brown eyes of his; the slender Dangle tugged at HIS moustache, and did what he could with unsympathetic grey ones. Phipps, unhappily, had no moustache to run any risks with, so he folded his arms and talked in a brave, indifferent, bearing-up tone about the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, just to cheer the poor woman up a little. And even Mrs. Milton really felt that exalted melancholy to the very bottom of her heart, and tried to show it in a dozen little, delicate, feminine ways.
“There is nothing to do until we get to Chichester,” said Dangle. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” said Widgery, and aside in her ear: “You really ate scarcely anything, you know.”
“Their trains are always late,” said Phipps, with his fingers along the edge of his collar. Dangle, you must understand, was a sub-editor and reviewer, and his pride was to be Thomas Plantagenet’s intellectual companion. Widgery, the big man, was manager of a bank and a mighty golfer, and his conception of his relations to her never came into his mind without those charming oldlines, “Douglas, Douglas, tender and true,” falling hard upon its heels. His name was Douglas-Douglas Widgery. And Phipps, Phipps was a medical student still, and he felt that he laid his heart at her feet, the heart of a man of the world. She was kind to them all in her way, and insisted on their being friends together, in spite of a disposition to reciprocal criticism they displayed. Dangle thought Widgery a Philistine, appreciating but coarsely the merits of “A Soul Untrammelled,” and Widgery thought Dangle lacked, humanity – would talk insincerely to say a clever thing. Both Dangle and Widgery thought Phipps a bit of a cub, and Phipps thought both Dangle and Widgery a couple of Thundering Bounders.
“They would have got to Chichester in time for lunch,” said Dangle, in the train. “After, perhaps. And there’s no sufficient place in the road. So soon as we get there, Phipps must inquire at the chief hotels to see if any one answering to her description has lunched there.”
“Oh, I’LL inquire,” said Phipps. “Willingly. I suppose you and Widgery will just hang about – ”
He saw an expression of pain on Mrs. Milton’s gentle face, and stopped abruptly.
“No,” said Dangle, “we shan’t HANG ABOUT, as you put it. There are two places in Chichester where tourists might go – the cathedral and a remarkably fine museum. I shall go to the cathedral and make an inquiry or so, while Widgery – ”
“The museum. Very well. And after that there’s a little thing or two I’ve thought of myself,” said Widgery.
To begin with they took Mrs. Milton in a kind of procession to the Red Hotel and established her there with some tea. “You are so kind to me,” she said. “All of you.” They signified that it was nothing, and dispersed to their inquiries. By six they returned, their zeal a little damped, without news. Widgery came back with Dangle. Phipps was the last to return. “You’re quite sure,” said Widgery, “that there isn’t any flaw in that inference of yours?”
“Quite,” said Dangle, rather shortly.
“Of course,” said Widgery, “their starting from Midhurst on the Chichester road doesn’t absolutely bind them not to change their minds.”
“My dear fellow! – It does. Really it does. You must allow me to have enough intelligence to think of cross-roads. Really you must. There aren’t any cross-roads to tempt them. Would they turn aside here? No. Would they turn there? Many more things are inevitable than you fancy.”
“We shall see at once,” said Widgery, at the window. “Here comes Phipps. For my own part – ”
“Phipps!” said Mrs. Milton. “Is he hurrying? Does he look – ” She rose in her eagerness, biting her trembling lip, and went towards the window.
“No news,” said Phipps, entering.
“Ah!” said Widgery.
“None?” said Dangle.
“Well,” said Phipps. “One fellow had got hold of a queer story of a man in bicycling clothes, who was asking the same question about this time yesterday.”
“What question?” said Mrs. Milton, in the shadow of the window. She spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper.
“Why – Have you seen a young lady in a grey bicycling costume?”
Dangle caught at his lower lip. “What’s that?” he said. “Yesterday! A man asking after her then! What can THAT mean?”
“Heaven knows,” said Phipps, sitting down wearily. “You’d better infer.”
“What kind of man?” said Dangle.
“How should I know? – in bicycling costume, the fellow said.”
“But what height? – What complexion?”
“Didn’t ask,” said Phipps. “DIDN’T ASK! Nonsense,” said Dangle.
“Ask him yourself,” said Phipps. “He’s an ostler chap in the White Hart, – short, thick-set fellow, with a red face and a crusty manner. Leaning up against the stable door. Smells of whiskey. Go and ask him.”
“Of course,” said Dangle, taking his straw hat from the shade over the stuffed bird on the chiffonier and turning towards the door. “I might have known.”
Phipps’ mouth opened and shut.
“You’re tired, I’m sure, Mr. Phipps,” said the lady, soothingly. “Let me ring for some tea for you.” It suddenly occurred to Phipps that he had lapsed a little from his chivalry. “I was a little annoyed at the way he rushed me to do all this business,” he said. “But I’d do a hundred times as much if it would bring you any nearer to her.” Pause. “I WOULD like a little tea.”
“I don’t want to raise any false hopes,” said Widgery. “But I do NOT believe they even came to Chichester. Dangle’s a very clever fellow, of course, but sometimes these Inferences of his – ”
“Tchak!” said Phipps, suddenly.
“What is it?” said Mrs. Milton.
“Something I’ve forgotten. I went right out from here, went to every other hotel in the place, and never thought – But never mind. I’ll ask when the waiter comes.”
“You don’t mean – ” A tap, and the door opened. “Tea, m’m? yes, m’m,” said the waiter.
“One minute,” said Phipps. “Was a lady in grey, a cycling lady – ”
“Stopped here yesterday? Yessir. Stopped the night. With her brother, sir – a young gent.”
“Brother!” said Mrs. Milton, in a low tone. “Thank God!”
The waiter glanced at her and understood everything. “A young gent, sir,” he said, “very free with his money. Give the name of Beaumont.” He proceeded to some rambling particulars, and was cross-examined by Widgery on the plans of the young couple.
“Havant! Where’s Havant?” said Phipps. “I seem to remember it somewhere.”
“Was the man tall?” said Mrs. Milton, intently, “distinguished looking? with a long, flaxen moustache? and spoke with a drawl?”
“Well,” said the waiter, and thought. “His moustache, m’m, was scarcely long – scrubby more, and young looking.”
“About thirty-five, he was?”
“No, m’m. More like five and twenty. Not that.”
“Dear me!” said Mrs. Milton, speaking in a curious, hollow voice, fumbling for her salts, and showing the finest self-control. “It must have been her YOUNGER brother – must have been.”
“That will do, thank you,” said Widgery, officiously, feeling that she would be easier under this new surprise if the man were dismissed. The waiter turned to go, and almost collided with Dangle, who was entering the room, panting excitedly and with a pocket handkerchief held to his right eye. “Hullo!” said dangle. “What’s up?”
“What’s up with YOU?” said Phipps.
“Nothing – an altercation merely with that drunken ostler of yours. He thought it was a plot to annoy him – that the Young Lady in Grey was mythical. Judged from your manner. I’ve got a piece of raw meat to keep over it. You have some news, I see?”
“Did the man hit you?” asked Widgery.
Mrs. Milton rose and approached Dangle. “Cannot I do anything?”
Dangle was heroic. “Only tell me your news,” he said, round the corner of the handkerchief.
“It was in this way,” said Phipps, and explained rather sheepishly. While he was doing so, with a running fire of commentary from Widgery, the waiter brought in a tray of tea. “A time table,” said Dangle, promptly, “for Havant.” Mrs. Milton poured two cups, and Phipps and Dangle partook in passover form. They caught the train by a hair’s breadth. So to Havant and inquiries.
Dangle was puffed up to find that his guess of Havant was right. In view of the fact that beyond Havant the Southampton road has a steep hill continuously on the right-hand side, and the sea on the left, he hit upon a magnificent scheme for heading the young folks off. He and Mrs. Milton would go to Fareham, Widgery and Phipps should alight one each at the intermediate stations of Cosham and Porchester, and come on by the next train if they had no news. If they did not come on, a wire to the Fareham post office was to explain why. It was Napoleonic, and more than consoled Dangle for the open derision of the Havant street boys at the handkerchief which still protected his damaged eye.
Moreover, the scheme answered to perfection. The fugitives escaped by a hair’s breadth. They were outside the Golden Anchor at Fareham, and preparing to mount, as Mrs. Milton and Dangle came round the corner from the station. “It’s her!” said Mrs. Milton, and would have screamed. “Hist!” said Dangle, gripping the lady’s arm, removing his handkerchief in his excitement, and leaving the piece of meat over his eye, an extraordinary appearance which seemed unexpectedly to calm her. “Be cool!” said Dangle, glaring under the meat. “They must not see us. They will get away else. Were there flys at the station?” The young couple mounted and vanished round the corner of the Winchester road. Had it not been for the publicity of the business, Mrs. Milton would have fainted. “SAVE HER!” she said.
“Ah! A conveyance,” said Dangle. “One minute.”
He left her in a most pathetic attitude, with her hand pressed to her heart, and rushed into the Golden Anchor. Dog cart in ten minutes. Emerged. The meat had gone now, and one saw the cooling puffiness over his eye. “I will conduct you back to the station,” said Dangle; “hurry back here, and pursue them. You will meet Widgery and Phipps and tell them I am in pursuit.”
She was whirled back to the railway station and left there, on a hard, blistered, wooden seat in the sun. She felt tired and dreadfully ruffled and agitated and dusty. Dangle was, no doubt, most energetic and devoted; but for a kindly, helpful manner commend her to Douglas Widgery.
Meanwhile Dangle, his face golden in the evening sun, was driving (as well as he could) a large, black horse harnessed into a thing called a gig, northwestward towards Winchester. Dangle, barring his swollen eye, was a refined-looking little man, and he wore a deerstalker cap and was dressed in dark grey. His neck was long and slender. Perhaps you know what gigs are, – huge, big, wooden things and very high and the horse, too, was huge and big and high, with knobby legs, a long face, a hard mouth, and a whacking trick of pacing. Smack, smack, smack, smack it went along the road, and hard by the church it shied vigorously at a hooded perambulator.
The history of the Rescue Expedition now becomes confused. It appears that Widgery was extremely indignant to find Mrs. Milton left about upon the Fareham platform. The day had irritated him somehow, though he had started with the noblest intentions, and he seemed glad to find an outlet for justifiable indignation. “He’s such a spasmodic creature,” said Widgery. “Rushing off! And I suppose we’re to wait here until he comes back! It’s likely. He’s so egotistical, is Dangle. Always wants to mismanage everything himself.”
“He means to help me,” said Mrs. Milton, a little reproachfully, touching his arm. Widgery was hardly in the mood to be mollified all at once. “He need not prevent ME,” he said, and stopped. “It’s no good talking, you know, and you are tired.”
“I can go on,” she said brightly, “if only we find her.” “While I was cooling my heels in Cosham I bought a county map.” He produced and opened it. “Here, you see, is the road out of Fareham.” He proceeded with the calm deliberation of a business man to develop a proposal of taking train forthwith to Winchester. “They MUST be going to Winchester,” he explained. It was inevitable. To-morrow Sunday, Winchester a cathedral town, road going nowhere else of the slightest importance.
“But Mr. Dangle?”
“He will simply go on until he has to pass something, and then he will break his neck. I have seen Dangle drive before. It’s scarcely likely a dog-cart, especially a hired dog-cart, will overtake bicycles in the cool of the evening. Rely upon me, Mrs. Milton – ”
“I am in your hands,” she said, with pathetic littleness, looking up at him, and for the moment he forgot the exasperation of the day.
Phipps, during this conversation, had stood in a somewhat depressed attitude, leaning on his stick, feeling his collar, and looking from one speaker to the other. The idea of leaving Dangle behind seemed to him an excellent one. “We might leave a message at the place where he got the dog-cart,” he suggested, when he saw their eyes meeting. There was a cheerful alacrity about all three at the proposal.
But they never got beyond Botley. For even as their train ran into the station, a mighty rumbling was heard, there was a shouting overhead, the guard stood astonished on the platform, and Phipps, thrusting his head out of the window, cried, “There he goes!” and sprang out of the carriage. Mrs. Milton, following in alarm, just saw it. From Widgery it was hidden. Botley station lies in a cutting, overhead was the roadway, and across the lemon yellows and flushed pinks of the sunset, there whirled a great black mass, a horse like a long-nosed chess knight, the upper works of a gig, and Dangle in transit from front to back. A monstrous shadow aped him across the cutting. It was the event of a second. Dangle seemed to jump, hang in the air momentarily, and vanish, and after a moment’s pause came a heart-rending smash. Then two black heads running swiftly.
“Better get out,” said Phipps to Mrs. Milton, who stood fascinated in the doorway.
In another moment all three were hurrying up the steps. They found Dangle, hatless, standing up with cut hands extended, having his hands brushed by an officious small boy. A broad, ugly road ran downhill in a long vista, and in the distance was a little group of Botley inhabitants holding the big, black horse. Even at that distance they could see the expression of conscious pride on the monster’s visage. It was as wooden-faced a horse as you can imagine. The beasts in the Tower of London, on which the men in armour are perched, are the only horses I have ever seen at all like it. However, we are not concerned now with the horse, but with Dangle. “Hurt?” asked Phipps, eagerly, leading.
“Mr. Dangle!” cried Mrs. Milton, clasping her hands.
“Hullo!” said Dangle, not surprised in the slightest. “Glad you’ve come. I may want you. Bit of a mess I’m in – eigh? But I’ve caught ‘em. At the very place I expected, too.”
“Caught them!” said Widgery. “Where are they?”
“Up there,” he said, with a backward motion of his head. “About a mile up the hill. I left ‘em. I HAD to.”
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Milton, with that rapt, painful look again. “Have you found Jessie?”
“I have. I wish I could wash the gravel out of my hands somewhere. It was like this, you know. Came on them suddenly round a corner. Horse shied at the bicycles. They were sitting by the roadside botanising flowers. I just had time to shout, ‘Jessie Milton, we’ve been looking for you,’ and then that confounded brute bolted. I didn’t dare turn round. I had all my work to do to save myself being turned over, as it was – so long as I did, I mean. I just shouted, ‘Return to your friends. All will be forgiven.’ And off I came, clatter, clatter. Whether they heard – ”
“TAKE ME TO HER,” said Mrs. Milton, with intensity, turning towards Widgery.
“Certainly,” said Widgery, suddenly becoming active. “How far is it, Dangle?”
“Mile and a half or two miles. I was determined to find them, you know. I say though – Look at my hands! But I beg your pardon, Mrs. Milton.” He turned to Phipps. “Phipps, I say, where shall I wash the gravel out? And have a look at my knee?”
“There’s the station,” said Phipps, becoming helpful. Dangle made a step, and a damaged knee became evident. “Take my arm,” said Phipps.
“Where can we get a conveyance?” asked Widgery of two small boys.
The two small boys failed to understand. They looked at one another.
“There’s not a cab, not a go-cart, in sight,” said Widgery. “It’s a case of a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”
“There’s a harse all right,” said one of the small boys with a movement of the head.
“Don’t you know where we can hire traps?” asked Widgery. “Or a cart or – anything?” asked Mrs. Milton.
“John Ooker’s gart a cart, but no one can’t ‘ire’n,” said the larger of the small boys, partially averting his face and staring down the road and making a song of it. “And so’s my feyther, for’s leg us broke.”
“Not a cart even! Evidently. What shall we do?”
It occurred to Mrs. Milton that if Widgery was the man for courtly devotion, Dangle was infinitely readier of resource. “I suppose – ” she said, timidly. “Perhaps if you were to ask Mr. Dangle – ”
And then all the gilt came off Widgery. He answered quite rudely. “Confound Dangle! Hasn’t he messed us up enough? He must needs drive after them in a trap to tell them we’re coming, and now you want me to ask him – ”
