“Sausages and bacon, Lady Dysart! Yes, indeed, that was his breakfast, and that for a man who—if you’ll excuse the expression, Lady Dysart, but, indeed, I know you’re such a good doctor that I’d like you to tell me if it was quite safe—who was vomiting lake water for half an hour after he was brought into the house the night before.”
“Do you really mean that he came down to breakfast?” asked Lady Dysart, with the flattering sincerity of interest that she bestowed on all topics of conversation, but especially on those that related to the art and practice of medicine. “He ought to have stayed in bed all day to let the system recover from the shock.”
“Those were the very words I used to him, Lady Dysart,” returned Mrs. Lambert dismally; “but indeed all the answer he made was, ‘Fiddle-de-dee!’ He wouldn’t have so much as a cup of tea in his bed, and you may think what I suffered, Lady Dysart, when I was down in the parlour making the breakfast and getting his tray ready, when I heard him in his bath overhead—just as if he hadn’t been half-drowned the night before. I didn’t tell you that, Mrs. Gascogne,” she went on, turning her watery gaze upon the thin refined face of her spiritual directress. “Now if it was me such a thing happened to, I’d have that nervous dread of water that I couldn’t look at it for a week.”
“No, I am sure you would not,” answered Mrs. Gascogne with the over-earnestness which so often shipwrecks the absent-minded; “of course you couldn’t expect him to take it if it wasn’t made with really boiling water.”
Mrs. Lambert stared in stupefaction, and Lady Dysart, far from trying to cloak her cousin’s confusion, burst into a delighted laugh.
“Kate! I don’t believe you heard a single word that Mrs. Lambert said! You were calculating how many gallons of tea will be wanted for your school feast.”
“Nonsense, Isabel!” said Mrs. Gascogne hotly, with an indignant and repressive glance at Lady Dysart, “and how was it—” turning to Mrs. Lambert, “that he—a—swallowed so much lake water?”
“He was cot under the sail, Mrs. Gascogne. He made a sort of a dash at Miss Fitzpatrick to save her when she was falling, and he slipped someway, and got in under the sail and he was half-choked before he could get out!” A tear of sensibility trickled down the good turkey-hen’s red beak. “Indeed, I don’t know when I’ve been so upset, Lady Dysart,” she quavered.
“Upset!” echoed Lady Dysart, raising her large eyes dramatically to the cut glass chandelier, “I can well believe it! When it came to ten o’clock and there was no sign of them, I was simply raging up and down between the house and the pier like a mad bull robbed of its whelps!” She turned to Mrs. Gascogne, feeling that there was a biblical ring in the peroration that demanded a higher appreciation than Mrs. Lambert could give, and was much chagrined to see that lady concealing her laughter behind a handkerchief.
Mrs. Lambert looked bewilderedly from one to the other, and, feeling that the ways of the aristocracy were beyond her comprehension, went on with the recital of her own woes.