Chapter Five.
Blown Up.
“Well, I never!” panted out Jupp as he raced down the incline at a headlong speed towards the spot where he had seen Teddy disappear, and whence had come his choking cry of alarm and the splash he made as he fell into the water. “The b’y’ll be drownded ’fore I can reach him!”
But, such was his haste, that, at the same instant in which he uttered these words—more to himself than for anyone else’s benefit, although he spoke aloud—the osiers at the foot of the slope parted on either side before the impetuous rush of his body, giving him a momentary glimpse of the river, with Teddy’s clutching fingers appearing just above the surface and vainly appealing for help as he was sinking for the second time; so, without pausing, the velocity he had gained in his run down the declivity carrying him on almost in spite of himself, Jupp took a magnificent header off the bank. Then,—rising after his plunge, with a couple of powerful strokes he reached the unconscious boy, whose struggles had now ceased from exhaustion, and, gripping fast hold of one of his little arms, he towed him ashore.
Another second and Jupp would have been too late, Teddy’s nearly lifeless little form having already been caught in the whirling eddy of the mill-race. Even as it was, the force of the on-sweeping current was so great that it taxed all Jupp’s powers to the utmost to withstand being carried over the weir as he made for the side slanting-wise, so as not to weary himself out uselessly by trying to fight against the full strength of the stream, which, swollen with the rains of April, was resistless in its flow and volume.
Swimming on his side, however, and striking out grandly, Jupp succeeded at length in vanquishing the current, or rather made it serve his purpose; and, presently, grasping hold of the branch of an alder that hung over the river at the point of the bend, he drew himself up on the bank with one hand, holding poor Teddy still with the other, to find himself at the same moment confronted by Nurse Mary, with Cissy and Liz, who had all hurried down the slope to the scene of the disaster.
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!—he’s dead, he’s dead!” wailed Mary, taking the little fellow from Jupp and lifting him up in her arms, preparing to start off at a run for the vicarage, while the little girls burst into a torrent of tears.
“You just bide there!” said Jupp, preventing her from moving, and looking like a giant Triton, all dripping with water, as he stepped forward. “You just bide there!”
“But he’ll die if something’s not done at once to restore him,” expostulated Mary, vainly trying to get away from the other’s restraining hold.
“So he might, if you took him all that long way ’fore doin’ anything,” replied Jupp grimly. “You gie him to me; I knows what’s best to be done. I’ve seed chaps drounded afore aboard ship, and brought to life ag’in by using the proper methods to git back the circularation, as our doctor in the Neptune used to call it. You gie him to me!”
Impressed with his words, and knowing besides now from long acquaintance that Jupp was what she called “a knowledgeable man,” Mary accordingly surrendered the apparently lifeless body of little Teddy; whereupon the porter incontinently began to strip off all the boy’s clothing, which of course was wringing wet like his own.
“Have you got such a thing as a dry piece of flannel now, miss?” he then asked Mary, hesitating somewhat to put his request into words, “like, like—”
“You mean a flannel petticoat,” said the girl promptly without the least embarrassment in the exigencies of the case. “Just turn your back, please, Mr Jupp, and I’ll take mine off and give it to you.”
No sooner was this said than it was done; when, Teddy’s little naked body being wrapped up warmly in the garment Mary had surrendered, and turned over on the right side, she began under Jupp’s directions to rub his limbs, while the other alternately raised and depressed the child’s arms, and thus exercising—a regular expansion and depression of his chest.
After about five minutes of this work a quantity of water that he had swallowed was brought up by the little fellow; and next, Mary could feel a slight pulsation of his heart.
“He’s coming round! he’s coming round!” she cried out joyously, causing little Cissy’s tears to cease flowing and Liz to join Mary in rubbing Teddy’s feet. “Go on, Mr Jupp, go on; and we’ll soon bring him to.”
“So we will,” echoed her fellow-worker heartily, redoubling his exertions to promote the circulation; and, in another minute a faint flush was observable in Teddy’s face, while his chest rose and fell with a rhythmical motion, showing that the lungs were now inflated again and in working order.
The little fellow had been brought back to life from the very gates of death!
“Hooray!” shouted Jupp when Teddy at length opened his eyes, staring wonderingly at those bending over him, and drawing away his foot from Liz as if she tickled him, whereat Mary burst into a fit of violent hysterical laughter, which terminated in that “good cry” customary with her sex when carried away by excess of emotion.
Then, all at once, Teddy appeared to recollect what had happened; for the look of bewilderment vanished from his eyes and he opened his mouth to speak in that quaint, formal way of his which Jupp said always reminded him of a judge on the bench when he was had up before the court once at Portsmouth for smuggling tobacco from a troopship when paid off!
“Were’s Puck an’ de bunny?” he asked, as if what had occurred had been merely an interlude and he was only anxious about the result of the rabbit hunt that had so unwittingly led to his unexpected immersion and narrow escape from drowning.
No one in the greater imminence of Teddy’s peril had previously thought of the dog or rabbit; but now, on a search being made, Puck was discovered shivering by the side of the river, having managed to crawl out somehow or other. As for the rabbit, which was only a young one or the little woolly terrier could never have overtaken it in the chase down the glade, no trace could be seen of it; and, consequently, it must have been carried over the weir, where at the bottom of the river it was now safe enough from all pursuit of either Puck or his master, and free from all the cares of rabbit life and those ills that even harmless bunnies have to bear!
When this point was satisfactorily settled, much to the dissatisfaction, however, of Master Teddy, a sudden thought struck Mary.
“Why, wherever can Miss Conny be all this time?” she exclaimed, on looking round and not finding her with the other children.
“See’s done home,” said Cissy laconically.
“Gone home!” repeated Mary. “Why?”
“Done fets dwy c’o’s for Teddy,” lisped the little girl, who seemed to have been well informed beforehand as to her sister’s movements, although she herself had hurried down with the nurse to the river bank in company with the others immediately Jupp had rushed to Teddy’s rescue.
“Well, I never!” ejaculated Mary, laughing again as she turned to Jupp. “Who would have thought the little puss would have been so thoughtful? But she has always been a funny child, older than her years, and almost like an old woman in her ways.”
“Bless you, she ain’t none the worse for that!” observed Jupp in answer. “She’s a real good un, to think her little brother ’ud want dry things arter his souse in the water, and to go and fetch ’em too without being told.”
“I expect you’d be none the worse either for going back and changing your clothes,” said Mary, eyeing his wet garments.
“Lor’, it don’t matter a bit about me,” he replied, giving himself a good shake like a Newfoundland dog, and scattering the drops about, which pleased the children mightily, as he did it in such a funny way. “I rayther likes it nor not.”
“But you might catch cold,” suggested Mary kindly.
“Catch your grandmother!” he retorted. “Sailors ain’t mollycoddles.”
“Wat’s dat?” asked Teddy inquiringly, looking up at him.
“Why, sir,” said Jupp, scratching his head reflectively—he had left his cap under the elm-tree on top of the hill, where he had taken it off when he set about building the fire for the kettle—“a mollycoddle is a sort of chap as always wraps hisself up keerfully for fear the wind should blow upon him and hurt his complexion.”
“Oh!” said Teddy; but he did not seem any the wiser, and was about to ask another question which might have puzzled Jupp, when Liz interrupted the conversation, and changed the subject.
“There’s Conny coming now, and Pa with her,” she called out, pointing to the top of the glade, where her father and elder sister could be seen hurrying swiftly towards them, followed closely by Joe the gardener bearing a big bundle of blankets and other things which the vicar thought might be useful.
“My! Master must have been scared!” cried Mary, noticing in the distance the anxious father’s face. “Master Teddy do cause him trouble enough, he’s that fond of the boy!”
But, before Jupp could say anything in reply, the new arrivals had approached the scene of action, Conny springing forward first of all and hugging Teddy and Cissy and Liz all round. In the exuberance of her delight, too, at their being safe and sound, when in her nervous dread she had feared the worst, she extended the same greeting to Mary and Jupp; for, she was an affectionate little thing, and highly emotional in spite of her usually staid demeanour and retiring nature.
The vicar, too, could hardly contain himself for joy, and broke down utterly when he tried to thank Jupp for rescuing his little son; while Joe the gardener, not to be behindhand in this general expression of good-will and gratitude, squeezed his quondam rival’s fist in his, ejaculating over and over again, with a broad grin on his bucolic face, “You be’s a proper sort, you be, hey, Meaister?” thereby calling upon the vicar, as it were, to testify to the truth of the encomium.
He was a very funny man, Joe!
When the general excitement had subsided, and Teddy, who had in the meantime been stalking about, a comical little figure, attired in Mary’s flannel petticoat, was re-dressed in the fresh suit of clothes Joe had brought for him amidst the blankets, the whole party adjourned up the hill to their old rendezvous under the elm-tree.
Here they found, greatly to their surprise and gratification, that Jupp’s well-built fire had not gone out, as all expected, during the unforeseen digression that had occurred to break the even tenor of their afternoon’s entertainment, although left so long unattended to.
On the contrary, it was blazing away at a fine rate, with the kettle slung on the forked sticks above it singing and sputtering, emitting clouds of steam the while, “like an engine blowing off,” as the porter observed; so, all their preparations having been already completed, the children carried out their original intention of having a festal tea in honour of “Pa’s birthday,” he being set in their midst and told to do nothing, being the guest of the occasion.
Never did bread and butter taste more appetisingly to the little ones than when thus eaten out in the woods, away from all such stuck-up surroundings as tables and chairs, and plates, and cups and saucers, and the other absurd conventionalities of everyday life. They only had three little tin pannikins for their tea, which they passed round in turn, and a basket for their dish, using a leaf when the luxury of a plate was desired by any sybarite of the party—those nice broad ones of the dock making splendid platters.
Now, besides bread and butter, Molly the cook had compounded a delicious dough-cake for them, having plums set in it at signal distances apart, so conspicuous that any one could know they were there without going to the trouble of counting them, which indeed would not have taken long to do, their number being rather limited; and, what with the revulsion of feeling at Teddy’s providential escape, and the fact of having papa with them, and all, they were in the very seventh heaven of enjoyment.
Conny and Cissy, who were the most active of the sprites, assisted by the more deliberate Teddy and Liz, acted as “the grown-up people” attending as hostesses and host to the requirements of “the children,” as they called their father and Mary and Jupp, not omitting Joe the gardener, who, squatting down on the extreme circumference of their little circle, kept up a perpetual grin over the acres of bread and butter he consumed, just as if he were having a real meal and not merely playing!
The worthy gardener was certainly the skeleton, or cormorant, so to speak, of the banquet, eating them almost out of house and home, it must be mentioned in all due confidence; and, taking watch of his depravity of behaviour in this respect, the thoughtful Conny registered an inward determination never to invite Joe to another of their al fresco feasts, if she could possibly avoid doing so without seriously wounding his sensibilities. The way he walked into that dough-cake would have made anyone almost cry.
The fête, however, excepting this drawback, passed off successfully enough without any other contretemps; and after the last crumb of cake had been eaten by Joe, and the things packed up, the little party wended their way home happily in the mellow May evening, through the fields green with the sprouting corn, with the swallows skimming round them and the lark high in the sky above singing her lullaby song for the night and flopping down to her nest.
Towards the end of the month, however, Teddy managed somehow or other to get into another scrape.
“There never was such a boy,” as Mary said. He was “always in hot water.”
The queen’s birthday coming round soon after the vicar’s, Jupp, remembering how it used to be kept up when he was in the navy, great guns banging away at royal salutes while the small-arm men on board fired a feu de joie, or “fire of joy,” as he translated it by the aid of Miss Conny, who happened just then to be studying French, he determined to celebrate the anniversary as a loyal subject in similar fashion at the vicarage, with the aid of a couple of toy cannon and a small bag of powder which he purchased for the purpose.
Teddy, of course, was taken into his confidence, the artillery experiments being planned for his especial delectation; so, coming up to the house just about noon on the day of the royal anniversary, when he was able to get away from the station for an hour, leaving his mate Grigson in charge, he set about loading the ordnance and getting ready for the salute, with a train laid over the touch-holes of the cannon to set light to the moment it was twelve o’clock, according to the established etiquette in the navy, a box of matches being placed handy for the purpose.
As ill luck would have it, though, some few minutes before the proper time, Mary, who was trying to sling a clothes-line in the back garden, called Jupp to her assistance, and he being her attentive squire on all occasions, and an assiduous cavalier of dames, hastened to help her, leaving Teddy in charge of the loaded cannon, the gunpowder train, and lastly, though by no means least, the box of matches.
The result can readily be foreseen.
Hardly had Jupp reached Mary’s side and proceeded to hoist the obstreperous clothes-line, when “Bang! bang!” came the reports of distant cannonading on the front lawn, followed by an appalling yell from the little girls, who from the safe point of vantage of the drawing-room windows were looking on at the preparations of war.
To rush back through the side gate round to the front was but the work of an instant with Jupp, and, followed by Mary, he was almost as quickly on the spot as the sound of the explosion had been heard.
He thought that Master Teddy had only prematurely discharged the cannon, and that was all; but when he reached the lawn what was his consternation to observe a thick black cloud of smoke hanging in the air, much greater than could possibly have been produced by the little toy cannon being fired off, while Teddy, the cause of all the mischief, was nowhere to be seen at all!