CHAPTER XIV
For the dripping Peckover was still holding tenaciously on to the side of the punt, with a fixity of purpose which no mere considerations of stage effect seemed likely to dispose him to relax. Added to this, there was more of his body above the surface of the water than appeared quite consistent with the idea of imminent and deadly peril; this was accounted for by the fact that he was standing, miserably enough, on the bottom of the lake.
"Get down! Let go of the punt! D'ye hear?" commanded Gage, in an exasperated undertone. "What's the good of hanging on there like a fool? Get down, will you? Duck that idiotic mug of yours under water, or how am I to go after you?"
"I—d—d—daren't," chattered Peckover: "my feet are slipping or sinking or something; it's dashed deep mud at the bottom."
"I wish your head was in it instead of your feet," retorted his prospective heroic rescuer, all the while making a fine show of bustle, for which, however, as viewed from the shore there was no obvious need. "Will you get down, before I knock you under?"
As he spoke Gage was surreptitiously jabbing at Peckover's fingers, and, incidentally, at his face with the butt-end of his rod. This somewhat drastic method of enforcing his orders and ensuring the vraisemblance of the performance was perhaps justified by the manifest absurdity and uselessness of his taking a showy and heroic dive in order to rescue a man who was, to the spectator's eye, holding comfortably on to a substantial punt with his breathing organs high out of the water. As matters—that is to say, Peckover—stood, danger was the last thing that would suggest itself to the casual onlooker. The note at the moment was farcical; it was urgently necessary to change it to the tragic, even at the expense of loosening a few of Peckover's front teeth.
That unhappy dissembler, finding the episode of having a brass-capped butt in forcible contact with the more sensitive and damageable parts of his physiognomy more than he had bargained for, spluttered forth an objurgatory remonstrance, and, to cut short the objectionable attentions, let go, disappearing forthwith under the side of the punt. Whereupon Gage, uttering a wild and wholly unnecessary shout, poised himself for a few moments with one foot on the gunwale, and then, having attracted the attention he desired, took a tremendous dive into the water. With such vigour did he go down that he forced his head and arms into a thick bed of weeds, which demanded for a time his breathless attention. On extricating himself from the difficulty, and coming to the surface, he was much concerned to find that Peckover was nowhere to be seen. Instantly he took another superfluous dive, and as he came up, knocked his head against the bottom of the punt. Half dizzy with the blow, he now saw Peckover watching his efforts from the other side of the craft whither he had worked his way round while the diving was in progress.
"What are you doing round there, you idiot?" he gasped. "Get right down into the water at once and shout for help till I come along and catch hold of you."
With the word, he struck out manfully and swam round to the other side of the punt, only to find on arriving there that Peckover had disappeared. Whereupon he dived again, only to come up empty-handed once more, and to see the anxious face watching him, alertly apprehensive, over the farther gunwale.
"What fool's game is this?" he hissed.
"None of your larks," returned Peckover in a tone of resolute desire for self-preservation. The cold water, the weeds and the mud were beginning to tell upon him; all sense of a practical joke had evaporated.
Gage looked round. On the right the farmer and the butcher, on the left the two women had come down to the margin of the lake and were watching the proceedings in a silence which betokened some doubt in their minds as to how they ought to take it.
"Will you get under water and let me come to the rescue?" Gage demanded with exasperation.
"Not good enough," Peckover replied, and thereupon he began a spirited effort to climb back into the punt.
"Fool!" Gage shut his mouth with a snap, and took a vicious dive under the punt as the shortest cut to his objective.
As he rose, Peckover was half on board. Without further expostulation Gage seized the leg which still hung in the water and furiously tried to drag it down. Peckover resisted, kicking, and a very pretty struggle ensued, which taking place, as might be supposed, between a millionaire and a peer of the Realm, must have given rise to singular reflections and conjectures in the minds of the onlookers.
Eventually the turn of the position favoured Gage. The conditions under which Peckover fought rendered the struggle additionally painful; by degrees he lost ground and finally was dragged back exhausted into the water.
"You stupid ass, I've a good mind to shove you under and keep you there," Gage growled.
His victim could only gasp and shiver.
"What must we look like from the shore?" Gage demanded savagely.
Peckover made no reply, but from his manner it might have been gathered that his mental attitude on the subject was one of complete indifference.
"Haven't we had enough of this tommy-rot?" at last he ventured to suggest.
Gage was maintaining a fine show of keeping afloat in the four-foot-six. "I think we have," he returned. "I'm getting chilly, so we had better come to business. Now, will you keep down in the water when you've quite done advertising the fact that it isn't up to our shoulders?"
All the response Peckover made was—"Look at the punt!"
Keeping the corner of an eye warily on his companion, Gage turned and looked. The distance between them and the punt instead of a few feet was now some twenty yards. The cause of this alteration was obvious. Their struggles had caused the cord which made fast the craft to one of the poles to become untied and the other pole to work loose. There was some wind, under which the punt was now moving at a fair pace over the lake, dragging one pole with it.
"All right," said Gage, "I'll soon catch it and bring it back."
But Peckover clutched him with the tenacity of despair. "No, you don't," he exclaimed, anxiously resolute. "You don't leave me here. How am I to get ashore if you don't come back?"
"Walk," answered Gage, trying to free himself.
"Yes, I dare say," Peckover retorted. "You don't catch me trying it. It's not the same depth all over. We're on a bit of a bank here."
"Look at the blamed thing going off," Gage cried. "Let go! She'll be a quarter of a mile away directly."
But Peckover was not to be shaken off. "You don't go and leave me here," he insisted wildly, "for any old punt."
The situation was an interesting one, and as such, no doubt the four spectators acknowledged it. Their comments, however, had not so far been directed to the performers.
"What are you going to do?" Peckover asked, still gripping the plunging Gage.
"Going for a swim," he answered unfeelingly, at the same time making spirited but futile efforts to dive.
"No, you don't," Peckover returned, restraining his companion's attempts with all the energy that the chill and unusual element allowed him.
Gage, kicking and struggling, was at length obliged to desist, after having furnished a several minutes' novel and exhilarating exhibition to the puzzled spectators. Short of actual murderous violence, it was not possible for him to free himself from the tenacious Peckover. It was difficult, he had to own, to do much in the way of natation with a desperate person hanging like grim death on to his legs, moreover, Peckover's embrace had a tendency to send Gage's head under water and to keep it there. So, exasperated and vindictive as he felt, he had to compromise.
"Well," he said, veiling his displeasure and sense of defeat with a cheerless grin, "am I going to save your life or not—before we catch our death of cold?"
"You've got to," was the dogged reply. "Five thousand a year is too good to say good-bye to in the middle of a pond."
"It is all your silly rot that has stuck us here," Gage returned. "If you hadn't played the drivelling idiot, the life-saving performance would have been comfortably over half an hour ago."
"Well, get it over now," retorted Peckover, "as quick as you like, and no tricks."
"All right; come on," said Gage ill-humouredly. "Let's hope those fools won't see through the fake."
"This way," said Peckover, starting off breast-high in the water, towards the nearest shore, and still holding tightly to his companion.
"You are not going to walk?" Gage exclaimed aghast.
"I'm going to do what I can do best, and I can't swim," Peckover replied, with a determination which was apparent even through his shivering. "We'll have to try this life-saving joke in some other form. It's getting a bit stale this way."
Slowly their progress towards the shore, impeded by mud and thick weeds, began. They had not noticed that the farmer, actuated by humanitarian motives or with an eye to reduction of rent, had run off to an old boat-house, and was now hurrying back with an oar and a coil of rope.
"All right, my lord!" shouted the butcher, as taking credit for his friend's action. The two men, shivering and struggling unromantically through the jungle of weeds, smiled unpleasantly at the cry.
Suddenly Peckover became aware that the water was up to his chin. "It's getting deeper," he gasped, trying to hold his companion back.
"Let it," Gage retorted sulkily. "We've got to get to shore, dead or alive."
With an energy which suggested his preference for the latter mode of arrival Peckover threw his arms around Gage and tried to draw him back. "Try another way," he panted.
"You can. I'm going straight on. You should learn to swim," was the unkind response. "If you don't let go, not another penny of my money shall you see," Gage added, beginning to have doubts about his own ultimate safety in those dreadful weeds.
"You're not going to leave me here to drown?" Peckover remonstrated, shaking with terror.
"You can go back."
"What's the good of that?"
"I'll fetch a boat."
Water had become so utterly distasteful to Peckover that even the comparative shallows had no longer the slightest attraction for him. "What am I to do?" he shrieked. "Gage, you must save me!"
"Don't feel up to it now; too cold," was the unfeeling reply.
Peckover now found that the extra six inches in the depth of the water made all the difference when it came to a struggle. The margin below the breathing point was too small to permit of a sustained effort. Gage struck out, and Peckover, choosing what a momentary consideration suggested as the lesser of the two evils, let go his hold and stayed behind where at least his mouth was above water.
What the four people on the bank now saw was this. The supposed Lord Quorn leaving his companion, and energetically striking out for the shore, while the head which was all that was visible of the pretended millionaire remained a weird and ghastly object on the green expanse of water. To add to the interest of the scene, Peckover, finding the mud on which he stood, had a tendency to give way beneath him, was forced, as he gradually sank, to keep jumping, with the object of maintaining his head well above water. That the situation had grown critical was now fairly apparent, and it became borne in upon the farmer and his friend that heroic measures were indicated.
Directed by the butcher, who assumed an important (and dry) superintendence of the operations, the farmer now waded to the tops of his gaiters into the lake, and flung out the oar with the rope attached towards the wildly struggling Gage.
"There you are, my lord. Lay 'old!" shouted the butcher. "Then you can go back for the gentleman. You'll 'ave to get a little farther out, Mr. Purvis; the rope's a bit short."
"Wish you'd come and lend a hand yourself, Mr. Fanning, instead o' telling me what any fool can see," Mr. Purvis called back testily, as the water lapped over the rim of his gaiters.
"You're all right, Mr. Purvis," Mr. Fanning cried encouragingly, ignoring the invitation. "Pull the oar in and throw it out again to his lordship."
"Thought you could swim, Fanning," observed Mr. Purvis, wrestling uncomfortably with the difficulties of the situation.
"Never," Mr. Fanning protested promptly and mendaciously. "Wish I could. Now, out with it! Take care of his lordship's 'ead."
Once more the oar hurtled through the air, and fell this time within a yard of Gage's blanched face. Making a desperate and supreme effort, he seized it, and, once sure of the timely support, clung to it panting and exhausted. As he rested there, his feet naturally sank till they met with an obstruction. Moving them about to clear himself, Gage found that they had touched the bottom; he forthwith stood up and disclosed the fact that he had been swimming for his life in three feet of water.
"Look to the other gentleman, Mr. Purvis," directed Mr. Fanning from his post of high and dry observation.
Mr. Purvis and Gage accordingly directed dubious glances at the bobbing head of the unhappy Peckover.
"If your lordship would swim out with the oar to the gentleman," Purvis suggested, "I can pull you both in."
"I dare say," returned Gage with chattering teeth. "I'm not going back, the fun doesn't pay for the trouble. You wade out as far as you can and throw the oar to him, and let your friend hold the rope. Hi!" he called, to the complacent Mr. Fanning, "come here and catch hold. Hurry up or there'll be an inquest."
The dictatorial Mr. Fanning's expansive face, together with his self-centred spirits, fell at the invitation. "Sorry I can't swim, my lord," he objected, advancing along the margin with dry and lagging steps.
"No one wants you to," retorted Gage as he heavily emerged, dripping and pitiful from the water. "Go in, and hold the rope," he commanded, "or my friend will be drowned."
And indeed Peckover's sharp cries, uttered so as to fill the opportunities when his mouth was above water, gave colour to the statement.
Mr. Fanning, perhaps by the nature of his trade, rendered somewhat indifferent to the question of life and death where he was not personally concerned, had been congratulating himself on being well out of the affair; and now the order coming as it did from so important a personage and customer as Lord Quorn, was neither pleasant nor to be disregarded. Personal discomfort was a thing to be endured by him only in other people, and now as he waded reluctantly into the water he resolved to avenge his outraged feelings and damp extremities by an extra penny a pound all round on his future deliveries at Staplewick Towers.
"Now throw me the end of the rope, Mr. Purvis," he commanded when the water reached half-way up his calves.
"You must come right out, Mr. Fanning," was the peremptory reply, "or we shall never reach the gentleman."
Accordingly Mr. Fanning, standing between a cross fire of admonishment and objurgation, was fain to advance till waist-deep.
Encouraged by the recently indicated shallowness of the water, Mr. Purvis now went boldly forward, as much with the idea of exhibiting superior prowess compared with Mr. Fanning, as of ingratiating himself with the lord of Staplewick. The resoluteness of the proceeding, however, had the effect of demonstrating its own superfluity, for as Mr. Purvis pushed forward he sank no deeper in the water and was able to approach waist-deep within the oar's length of Peckover who, it appeared, had unfortunately come upon a hole and, in his fright, stayed there. Clutching the end of the oar he was pulled out into safety, not, however, without a great show of superfluous energy on the part of Mr. Purvis, who wished to make the most of his effort and have the greatest possible return for his ruined breeches and gaiters; and so the three, rescuers and rescued, stumbled with mixed feelings to the shore.