folded his hands tightly on the box which he held on his knees.
“Lord bless you!” said Mr Yarde, observing this gesture with a tolerant smile,
“What’s a boman prig?” asked Pen innocently.
“There, now! If you ain’t a werry suckling!” said Mr Yarde, almost disconcerted. “A boman prig, young gentleman, is what I trust you’ll never be. It’s a cove as ends up in Rumbo—ah, and likely on the Nubbing Cheat afore he’s much older!”
Much intrigued, Pen demanded a translation of these strange terms. Sir Richard, having pondered and discarded the notion of commanding her to exchange places with him, lay back and listened with lazy enjoyment to her initiation into the mysteries of thieves’ cant.
A party of young gentlemen, who had been spectators of a cock-fight held in the district, had been taken up at Chippenham, and had crowded on to the roof. From the sounds preceding thence, it seemed certain that they had been refreshing themselves liberally. There was a good deal of shouting, some singing, and much drumming with heels upon the roof. The motherly woman and the thin spinster began to look alarmed, and the lawyer’s clerk said that the behaviour of modern young men was disgraceful. Pen was too deeply engaged in conversation with Jimmy Yarde to pay much heed to the commotion, but when, after the coach had rumbled on for another five miles, the pace was suddenly accelerated, and the top-heavy vehicle bounced over ruts and pot-holes, and swung perilously first to one side and then to the other, she broke off her enthralling discourse, and looked enquiringly at Sir Richard.
A violent lurch flung her into his arms. He restored her to her own seat, saying dryly: “More adventure for you. I hope you are enjoying it?”
“But what is happening?”
“I apprehend that one of the would-be sprigs of fashion above has taken it into his head to tool the coach,” he replied.
“Lord ha’ mercy!” exclaimed the motherly woman. “Do you mean that one of they pesky, drunken lads is a- driving of us, sir?”
“So I should suppose, ma’am.”
The spinster uttered a faint shriek. “Good God, what will become of us?”
“We shall end, I imagine, in the ditch,” said Sir Richard, with unruffled calm.
Babel at once broke forth, the spinster demanding to be let out at once, the motherly woman trying to attract the coachman’s notice by hammering against the roof with her sunshade, the farmer sticking his head out of the window to shout threats and abuse, Jimmy Yarde laughing, and the lawyer’s clerk angrily demanding of Sir Richard why he did not
“What would you wish me to do?” asked Sir Richard, steadying Pen with a comfortingly strong arm.
“Stop the coach! Oh, sir, pray stop it!” begged the motherly woman.
“Bless your heart, ma’am, it’ll stop of its own this gait!” grinned Jimmy Yarde.
Hardly had he spoken than a particularly sharp bend in the road proved to be too much for the amateur coachman’s skill. He took the corner too wide, the near-hind wheels mounted a slight bank, and skidded down the farther side into a deep ditch, and everyone inside the vehicle was flung rudely over. There were screams from the women, oaths from the farmer, the cracking noise of split wood, and the shatter of broken glass. The coach lay at a crazy angle with sprigs of thorn-hedge thrusting in through the broken windows.
Pen, whose face was smothered in the many capes of Sir Richard’s drab driving-coat, gasped, and struggled to free herself from a hold which had suddenly clamped her to Sir Richard’s side. He relaxed it, saying: “Hurt, Pen?”
“No, not in the least! Thank you so very much for holding me! Are you hurt?”
A splinter of glass had cut his cheek slightly, but since he had been holding on to the leather arm-rest hanging in the corner of the coach, he had not been thrown, like everyone else, off his seat. “No, only annoyed,” he replied. “My good woman, this is neither the time nor the place for indulging in a fit of the vapours!”
This acid rider was addressed to the spinster, who, finding herself pitch-forked on top of the lawyer’s clerk, had gone off into strong hysterics.
“Here, let me get my dabblers on to that there door!” said Jimmy Yarde, hoisting himself up by seizing the opposite arm-rest. “Dang me if next time I travel in a rattler I don’t ride on the roof, flash-culls or no!”
The coach not having collapsed quite on to its side, but being supported by the bank and the hedge bordering the ditch, it was not difficult to force open the door, or to climb out through it. The spinster had indeed to be lifted out, since she had stiffened all over, and would do nothing but scream and drum her heels, but Pen scrambled out with an agility which scorned helping hands, and the motherly woman said that provided every gentleman would turn his back upon her she would engage to get out by herself too.
It was now considerably after nine o’clock, but although the sun had gone, the summer sky was still light, and the air warm. The travellers found themselves on a deserted stretch of road, a couple of miles short of the little town of Wroxhall, and rather more than thirty miles from Bristol. The most cursory inspection of the coach was enough to convince them that it would need extensive repairs before being able to take the road again; and Sir Richard, who had gone immediately to the horses, returned to Pen’s side in a few moments with the news that one of the wheelers had badly strained a tendon. He had been right in thinking that the reins had been handed over to one of the outside passengers. To tool the coach was a common enough pastime amongst young men who aspired to be whips, but that any paid coachman could have been foolish enough to relinquish his seat to an amateur far gone in drink was incomprehensible, until the coachman’s own condition had been realized.
Pen, who was sitting on Sir Richard’s portmanteau, received the news of complete breakdown with perfect equanimity, but all the other inside passengers burst into vociferous complaint, and besieged the guard with demands to be instantly conveyed to Bristol, by means unspecified. Between his indignation at his colleague’s gross misconduct, and his exasperation at being shouted at by six or seven persons at once, the unfortunate man was for some time incapable of collecting his wits, but presently it was suggested that if the travellers would only be patient, he would ride back on one of the leaders to Chippenham, and there try to procure some sort of a vehicle to convey them to Wroxhall, where they would be obliged to remain until the next Accommodation coach to Bristol picked them up there early on the following morning.
Several persons decided to set forward on foot for Wroxhall at once, but the spinster was still having hysterics, the motherly woman said that her corns would not permit of her tramping two miles, and the lawyer’s clerk held to it that he had a right to be conveyed to Bristol that night. There was a marked tendency in one or two persons to turn to Sir Richard, as being plainly a man accustomed to command. This tendency had the effect of making Sir Richard, not in the least gratified, walk over to Pen’s side, and say languidly, but with decision: “This, I fancy, is where we part company with our fellow-travellers.”
“Yes, do let us!” assented Pen blithely. “You know, I have been thinking, and I have a much better scheme now. We won’t go to Bristol at all!”
“This is very sudden,” said Sir Richard. “Do I understand you to mean that you have made up your mind to return to London?”
“No, no, of course not! Only now that we have broken down I think it would be silly to wait for another coach, because very likely we should be overtaken by my aunt. And I never really wanted to go to Bristol, after all.”
“In that case, it seems perhaps a pity that we came so far upon the road to it,” said Sir Richard.
Her eyes twinkled. “Stupid! I mean, my home is not in Bristol, but near to it, and I think it would be much better, besides being like a real adventure, to walk the rest of the way.”
“Where is your home?” demanded Sir Richard.
“Well, it is near Queen Charlton, not far from Keynsham, you know.”
“I don’t,” said Sir Richard. “This is your country, not mine. How far, in your judgment, is Queen Charlton from where we now are?”
“I’m not
“Are you proposing to walk twenty miles?” said Sir Richard.
“Well, I dare say it is not as much. As the crow flies, I expect it is only about ten miles off.”
“You are not a crow,” said Sir Richard dampingly. “Nor, I may add, am I. Get up from that portmanteau!”
