“It doesn’t rain now a drop. There’s nothing but wind; and look, look; the people are running down now in crowds, and there goes a company of soldiers at the double. Oh, there’s going to be something very exciting, uncle, and we must see.”
“But the dinner, boy, the dinner! What is this to us?”
“Dinner, uncle!” cried the lad indignantly. “Who’s going to stop for dinner when there are boats out yonder full of men going to board and take a ship?”
“Humph! Well,” grunted Uncle Paul, “I suppose it would be rather exciting, and we shall be able to see; but I don’t know, though. There’ll be firing, and who knows which way the bullets will fly?”
“Oh, they; won’t hit us, uncle. Come on.”
Uncle Paul was rapidly growing as excited as his nephew, while the waiter, if it were possible, was as full of eagerness as both together, and forgetting all his duties and the dinner that he had ordered to be prepared, he cried—
“Ze rain is ovare; you come vith me. I take you out ze back way and down ze little rue which take us to the quay.”
That was enough for Rodd, and the next minute they were following the waiter down the big staircase through the great kitchen once more, which was now quite deserted, and out into a walled yard to a back gateway, beyond which, mingling with the roaring of the wind, they could hear the trampling of many feet.
“Zis way; zis way!” the bare-headed waiter kept crying, as he put his serviette to quite a new use, battling with the wind as he folded it diagonally and then turned it into a cover for his head by tying the corners under his chin.
“Here, I say,” cried Rodd, as the man kept on at a trot; “I want to get to the harbour.”