And they might have reached Florence that night if it had not been for Giulia Barlozzi.
To the human eye Giulia Barlozzi, sitting by the roadside to beg, appeared little but a bundle of rags. To the equine perception she was evidently something much more portentous, and the horses testified their aversion in a very effective way. The postilion basely if prudently contrived to slip off before the pace became impossible, and the masterless animals tore unchecked down the steep Apennine road, the open carriage swaying and banging behind them. The crash came at the bottom, where, to make matters really final, there was a sharp turn and a stone bridge. Tristram was flung clear, landing, slightly stunned, not six inches from the parapet. When he picked himself up, half stupefied, peasants, miraculously sprung from nowhere, had seized the horses and were dragging Dormer, apparently dead, from beneath the shattered carriage.
Frenzied with apprehension, Tristram struggled across the road, but before he got to his friend a curtain seemed to come down over his vision. He heard excited, encouraging voices in his ears, arms supported him, and, half carried, half led, he found himself, after an uncertain interval, seated in a room with someone bathing his head. Around him was a babel more awful than he had ever imagined could proceed from the human tongue, lamentations, explanations, curses, cries and prayers. And on a table in the middle of the room, white, dusty, and bleeding a little from a cut on the temple, lay Dormer, very still.
"Charles!" cried Tristram in a voice of anguish, springing to his feet. Instantly the torrent of talk was turned on to him.
"Non è morto! non è morto!" he was volubly assured a score of times before he had satisfied himself that it was true. A pæan of inward thanksgiving burst from him when he ascertained that Dormer, though unconscious, was certainly breathing. Voices of commiseration and intense sympathy surged round him as he bent over his friend, voices appreciative of Dormer's appearance—"he has a face like San Giovanni himself"—voices informing him that the priest had been sent for——
"A priest!" cried Tristram in his stumbling Italian. "It is a doctor that is wanted!" But when he tried to explain that he and his friend did not belong to their Church, a dirty hand waved before his eyes a missal which Dormer had bought at Bologna, and which had been jerked out of his pocket in the catastrophe, and he was assured that his friend was a Christian, and that the parroco was coming as fast as he could. However, when Tristram gathered that the medical skill of this ecclesiastic—which was represented as being very great—was all that he was likely to obtain that day, there being no doctor within many miles, he was prepared to welcome him more warmly, especially as just at that juncture he had made the unpleasant discovery that Dormer's right leg was certainly broken.
The parroco had not arrived, and discussion was still raging round the table and its burden when Dormer came back to consciousness. Tristram, who was wetting his lips with brandy at the time, stopped as he saw his friend's eyes open, and said, in no very steady voice, "Thank God! ... Charles, my dear fellow, I am afraid your leg is broken. But I thought ... O, thank God it is no worse."
Dormer lay quiet a moment, his head on Tristram's arm. "This ... reminds me ... of Eton, he said at last, faintly. And, sick with pain, he added, very characteristically, "It is entirely my own fault ... for insisting on returning ... to Florence."
CHAPTER XVI
(1)