So, indeed, it proved; and they had been richly rewarded. Not that any of them had been in time to see anything; but there were them as had, and (as several voices assured his lordship) a rare bumble-broth it must have been, such as hadn’t happened in these parts, not since anyone could remember. Dicked in the nob they were, surely, for what must they do, with a good three acres of clear ground under them, but bear down on a clump of trees, and get all tangled up in the branches. Oh, it was a terrible accident! for although one of the gentlemen climbed down safe enough, the other, which was trying to help the nipperkin they had with them, made a right mull of it, by all accounts, and broke his arm; while, as for the nipperkin, he came crashing through the branches, with blood all over him, and was taken up for dead. “Which,” a senior member of the gathering told the Marquis, “wasn’t so laughable, nor anything like.”

“Where?” Jessamy demanded hoarsely. “Where?”

“Oh, you won’t see nothing now, sir! They was all gone off to Monk’s Farm above an hour ago, with the nipperkin stretched out on a hurdle. Well, all of us which came from Watford was too late to get a sight of aught but the balloon, with its ropes caught up in the elm-tree, and there’s no saying when they’ll start in to get it down, which don’t hardly seem worth waiting for. So we come away.”

“I seen the doctor drive up in his gig!” piped up an urchin.

“Ay, so you did, and got a clout from Miss Judbrook for your pains, poke-nose!”

“Where is the farm?” asked Alverstoke, interrupting the goodnatured mirth caused by this last remark.

He was told that it was at Clipperfield: a statement immediately qualified by the ominous words, as you might say; but when he asked for more precise information all that he was able to gather from the conflicting, and generally incomprehensible, directions offered by half-a-dozen persons was that the lane leading to the village joined the post-road at King’s Langley.

Cutting short the efforts of a helpful youth to describe the exact situation of Monk’s Farm, he drove on, saying: “We shall more easily discover the whereabouts of the farm when we reach Clipperfield.” He glanced briefly at Jessamy, and added: “Pluck up! There’s a doctor with him, remember!”

Jessamy, ashen-pale, trying desperately to overcome the long shudders that shook his thin frame, managed to speak. “They said — they said — ”

“I heard them!” interrupted Alverstoke. “He was taken up for dead, and he was covered with blood. Good God, boy, have you lived all your life in the country without discovering that illiterates always invest the most trifling accident with the ingredients of melodrama? Taken up for dead may be translated into was stunned by his fall; and as for covered in blood —! What the devil should make him bleed but scratching his face, when he missed his hold, and tumbled down through the branches?”

Achieving a gallant smile, Jessamy said: “Yes — of course! Or — or a nose-bleed!”

“Very likely!”

“Yes. But — ” He stopped, unable for a moment to command his voice, and then said jerkily: “Not — a trifling — accident!”

“No, I am afraid he may have broken a bone or two,” replied Alverstoke coolly. “Let us hope that it will be a lesson to him! Now, my young friend, I am going to do what you have been wishing me to do from the start of this expedition: spring ’em!”

As he spoke, the team broke into a canter, quickly lengthening their strides to a gallop. At any other time, Jessamy’s attention would have been riveted by the consummate skill displayed by a top-sawyer driving strange horses at a splitting pace along a winding road, too narrow for safety, and by no means unfrequented; but, in the event, a dreadful anxiety absorbed him, and his only impulse, when Alverstoke faultlessly took a hill in time, or checked slightly at a sudden bend, was to urge him to a faster speed. It was not he, but Curry, grimly hanging on, who shut his eyes when Alverstoke feather-edged a blind corner, leaving an inch to spare between the phaeton and an oncoming coach; and it was Curry, who, when the first straggling cottages of King’s Langley came into sight, gasped: “For God’s sake, my lord —!”

But even as these words were jerked out of him, he regretted them, for the Marquis was already checking his horses. As the team entered the little town at a brisk trot, he said, over his shoulder: “Yes, Curry? What is it?”

“Nothing, my lord! Except that I thought you was downright obfuscated, for which I’m sure I beg your lordship’s pardon!” responded his henchman, availing himself of the licence accorded to an old and trusted retainer.

“You should! I’m not even bright in the eye.”

“Look! There’s a signpost!” Jessamy said suddenly, leaning forward in his seat.

“Clipperfield and Sarratt!” read Curry.

His lordship turned the corner in style, but was forced immediately to rein the team in to a sober pace. The lane was winding and narrow, bordered by unkempt hedges, and so deeply rutted, so full of holes, that Curry remarked, with dour humour, that they might think themselves lucky the month was June, and not February, when the lane would have been a regular hasty-pudding. At the end of two difficult miles, which stretched Jessamy’s nerves to snapping-point, he said: “Cross-road ahead, my lord, and I can see a couple of chimneys off to the left. This’ll be it!”

Whatever excitement had been aroused in Clipper-field by the recent accident had apparently died away. There was only one person to be seen: a stout woman, engaged in cutting a cabbage in the patch of garden in front of her cottage. Having, as she informed him, far too much to do without troubling herself with balloons, she was unable to give Jessamy any news of Felix; but she told Alverstoke that Monk’s Farm lay about a mile down the road, towards Buckshill. She pointed with her knife to the south, and said that he couldn’t miss it: a statement which he mistrusted, but which turned out to be true.

It was set a hundred yards back from the lane, a large, rambling house of considerable antiquity, with its barns, its pigstyes, and its cattle-byre clustered round it. Before its open door stood the doctor’s gig, in charge of his man. Alverstoke turned in through the big white gate, and drove up to the farm.

Before the phaeton had stopped, Jessamy sprang down from it, and almost ran into the house. A shrill voice was heard demanding to know who he might be, and what his business was. “Ah!” said the Marquis. “The lady who clouted young — er — poke-nose, I fancy!”

XXI

The door of the farmhouse opened on to an unevenly flagged passage, at the end of which a flight of worn oak stairs rose to the upper floor. Jessamy, hesitating after his impetuous entrance, found himself confronted by an angular woman, whose sharp-featured countenance wore all the signs of chronic ill-temper. In answer to her angry enquiry, he stammered: “I beg pardon! It’s my brother! The — the boy who was carried in here!”

This reply, far from mollifying her, had much the same effect as a match applied to a train of gunpowder. Her eyes snapped, her colour rose, and she said: “Oh, he is, is he? Then I’m mightily glad to see you, young sir, and I trust you’ve come to take him away! This house isn’t a hospital, nor a public inn neither, and I’ve got too much to do already without looking after sick boys, let me tell you! What’s more, I’m not a nurse, and I won’t take the responsibility, say what you like!”

At this point, in what threatened to be a lengthy diatribe, she stopped, and her jaw dropped. Alverstoke was standing on the threshold. At all times an imposing figure, he was, on this occasion, a startling one, for although he wore a long driving-coat of white drab, with a number of shoulder-capes, it was unbuttoned, and revealed the exquisite attire he habitually wore in London, which included an extremely elegant waistcoat, the palest of pantaloons, and highly polished Hessian boots. In Bond Street he would have been complete to a shade; in a country village he looked quite out of place; but Miss Judbrook was almost as much impressed as she was astonished.

He said, pleasantly, but with a faint touch of hauteur: “Why should you, indeed? I fancy you must be Miss Judbrook: I am Lord Alverstoke. I should like to see the doctor, if you please.”

Miss Judbrook was so much overcome that she dropped a slight curtsy, and said: “Yes, my lord!” However, she was a redoubtable woman, and she made a swift recovery. “I hope I’m not an unfeeling woman, my lord, nor one as doesn’t know her duty, but it’s none of my business to be nursing boys which fall out of balloons, and I can’t and I won’t undertake it, as Judbrook should have known, instead of having him brought here without a word to me, let alone calling Betty out of the dairy to sit with him! I’m not going to do her work, so he needn’t think it! I’m sure I’m very sorry for the young gentleman, but as for having him laid up here, as bad as he is, and having to be sat with, and waited on hand and foot, I haven’t the time nor the patience to do it, which I told Dr Elcot to his head. And if Mrs Hucknall sets foot inside this house I leave it, and that’s flat!”

“Yes, well, all these matters can no doubt be arranged — when I have had word with the doctor!” said Alverstoke.

Miss Judbrook sniffed resentfully, but his evident boredom disconcerted her. She said, rather more mildly: “I’m sure I hope so, my lord! The doctor’s in my parlour — mussing it up with his splints and his bandages, and bowls of water, and I don’t know what more beside! This way!”