Downstairs, the teams made merry, wondering a little what had happened to their hostess. Somebody had seen a car come up; perhaps she was wanted on business. That Wigmore chap had disappeared, too. Pity! They would have liked a word with him. Somebody said he was stopping at Watters, so probably he had cleared off at once. He had certainly looked thoroughly played out. Stubbs, explaining to a bursting Saunders exactly how and where he would not be hit by him again, was unaware of any tragedy passing overhead. Only the little curate, emerging last from a flying bath, with his round face glowing above the neatest of clericals, paused on the landing upstairs, brought to halt by a sure instinct of trouble. As he did so, the door sprang open in his face, and a desperate man strode out on top of him. He recoiled when he saw the parsonic figure, as if it had struck him.
“What’s brought you along?” he demanded roughly. “He’s not dead, yet—not going to be dead, I tell you! You can take yourself and your psalm-singing off again!”
Davids said: “Hockey—bath—just passing—can I help?” with cogent simplicity, and the other relaxed. He thrust a paper into the curate’s hand.
“Fetch the nearest doctor, will you, and ask him to bring anything he can? Car at the door. There’s a chemist somewhere in this county, I suppose? If not, send the chauffeur to Lancaster—Manchester—anywhere. Fire along, and never mind limits. We pay. But for God’s sake hurry!”
He shut the door as abruptly as he had opened it, and the little curate slid downstairs as if dropped from the banisters. They called him in to tea as he passed, but he did not stop to reply. Hungry but valiant, he tore down the path, sending before him the name of the profession that sets every wheel racing and every hoof at the beat. The chauffeur had his engine started before the passenger was in the car, and leaped back to his seat. They became a very sudden blur in the distance. Whatever his philosophy, the curate certainly had the knack of being always on the spot.
Tea finished in the house-place, and Johnson, shouting down a perfect roar of argument and contradiction, was busy illustrating with Harriet’s china just how Wigmore had got his goal, when a cool medical voice broke across the hubbub.
“Will somebody kindly tell me who owns this house?”
Stubbs took his head out of a teacup, and came forward and said that he did, which was not in the least true, but sounded well.
“Then perhaps you will forgive me for asking that it may be kept as quiet as possible? Mr. Wigmore is upstairs, dangerously ill. I doubt if he will live through the night.”
He disappeared before anybody’s breath had come back, and the stricken teams hunted hats and coats in a graveyard silence, stealing forth as if from a meeting in the Catacombs. Queer that Stubbs shouldn’t have known!—but then Stubbs never did know anything for two minutes together. Made a chap feel such a bounder, yelling and roaring with a sick man overhead! Certainly, Harriet had vanished clean off the earth; they might have guessed something was up, from that. It had been a queer match altogether; one they wouldn’t be likely to forget in a month of Sundays. The push-bikes crept down into the road, and silently faded away, and a death-like, terrible peace descended upon the farm.