"It does not signify. Go on!"
Cherry brushed his hand across his eyes. "I saw them carrying him along the road. Oh, my lady, in all the years I've served the Colonel I never thought to see such a sight as met my eyes! My poor master like one dead, and the blood soaked right through the horse-blanket they had laid him on! He was taken straight to the cottage at Mont St Jean, where those damned sawbones - saving your ladyship's presence! - was busy. I thought my master was gone, but he opened his eyes as they put him down, and said to me: 'Hallo, Cherry!' he said, 'I've got it, you see'."
He fairly broke down, but Barbara, gripping the open chaise door, merely said harshly: "Go on!"
"Yes, my lady! But I don't know how to tell your ladyship what they done to my master, Dr Hume, and them others, right there in the garden. Oh, my lady, they've taken his arm off! And he bore it all without a groan!"
She pressed her handkerchief to her lips. In a stifled voice, she said: "But he will live!"
"You would not say so if you could but see him, my lady. Four horses he's had shot under him this day, and a wound on his leg turning as black as my boot. We got him to the inn at Waterloo, but there's no staying there: they couldn't take in the Prince of Orange himself, for all he had a musketball in his shoulder. Poor Sir Alexander Gordon's laying there, and Lord Fitzroy too. Never till my dying day shall I forget the sound of Sir Alexander's sufferings - him as always was such a merry gentleman, and such a close friend of my master's! Not but what by the time we got my master to the inn he was too far gone to heed. I shouldn't have spoken of it to your ladyship, but I'm that upset I hardly know what I'm saying."
Worth ran down the steps of the house at that moment, and curtly told Cherry to get up on the box. As he drew on his driving-gloves, Barbara said: "I have put my smelling-salts inside the chaise, and a roll of lint. I would come with you, but I believe you will do better without me. 0 God, Worth, bring him safely back!"
"I shall certainly bring him back. Go in to Judith, and do not be imagining anything nonsensical if I'm away some hours. Goodbye! A man doesn't die because he has the misfortune to lose an arm, you know."
He mounted the box; the grooms let go the wheelers' heads, and as the chaise moved forward one of them jumped up behind.
For the next four hours Judith and Barbara, having made every preparation for the Colonel's arrival, waited, sick with suspense, for Worth's return. The Duke of Avon walked round the Hotel de Belle Vue at ten o'clock, and, learning of Colonel Audley's fate from Judith's faltering tongue, said promptly: "Good God, is that all! One would say he had been blown in pieces by a howitzer shell to look at your faces! Cheer up, Bab! Why, I once shot a man just above the heart, and he recovered!"