“I am ready,” says the trooper, coming back. “Phil, you can carry this old gentleman to his coach, and make nothing of him.”
“Oh, dear me! O Lord! Stop a moment!” says Mr. Smallweed. “He’s so very prompt! Are you sure you can do it carefully, my worthy man?”
Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles away, tightly hugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts along the passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old gentleman to the nearest volcano. His shorter trust, however, terminating at the cab, he deposits him there; and the fair Judy takes her place beside him, and the chair embellishes the roof, and Mr. George takes the vacant place upon the box.
Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from time to time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind him, where the grim Judy is always motionless, and the old gentleman with his cap over one eye is always sliding off the seat into the straw and looking upward at him out of his other eye with a helpless expression of being jolted in the back.
CHAPTER XXVII
More Old Soldiers Than One
Mr. George has not far to ride with folded arms upon the box, for their destination is Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When the driver stops his horses, Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window, says, “What, Mr. Tulkinghorn’s your man, is he?”
“Yes, my dear friend. Do you know him, Mr. George?”
“Why, I have heard of him—seen him too, I think. But I don’t know him, and he don’t know me.”