“I’m in the hall,” his voice answered her, a trifle faintly but reassuringly cheerful. “The devil’s in it that I missed the fellow!”
She hurried down the stairs, holding the lamp up, and saw him rather unsteadily picking himself up. “Nicky! Good God, do not tell me he did indeed come back?”
“Come back? Of course he did!” Nicky said, cautiously feeling his shoulder. “What’s more, I should have had him if you would not keep a damned suit of armor in the stupidest place anyone ever thought of!
Oh, I beg pardon! But indeed it is enough to try the patience of a saint!”
“Nicky, you are hurt!” she cried, quite horrified. “Oh, if I had dreamed that anything was likely to happen I would never—My poor boy, lean on me! Did he fire at you? I heard two shots and I was never more shocked in my life! Good God, you are bleeding! Let me help you into a chair this instant!”
“I think he winged me,” said Nicky, allowing himself to be assisted to a tattered leather chair and sinking down into it. “I never touched him, but I did shatter his lantern, and that would have been pretty fair shooting, I can tell you, if I had been aiming at it. But it is the most cursed mischance, Cousin! I have no notion who he was or what he wanted, except that he was making for the bookroom, which I guessed he would be in any event.”
“Oh, never mind that!” she said, setting the lamp down on the table and running to shut the front door.
“As long as you are not badly wounded! Oh, what in the world will Lord Carlyon say to this? I am culpably to blame!”
Nicky grinned feebly. “Hell say it was just like me to make such a botch of it. Don’t be in a taking! It’s only a scratch!”
By this time Barrow had appeared on the scene, a tallow candle held waveringly in one hand and on his face an expression compound of amazement and consternation. He was sketchily attired in breeches and his nightshirt, but he forgot this unconventional raiment when he saw Nicky clutching one hand to his left shoulder and came hurrying down the stairs, clucking with dismay. He was almost immediately followed by his spouse, scolding and exclaiming at once. Between them, she and Elinor eased the coat from Nicky’s shoulders and laid bare a wound which, though it bled nastily, Mrs. Barrow announced to be not by any means desperate.