"Never mind, Lord Verney! don't mind—I'll take care of you—I'm your vanguard," exclaimed Captain Shrapnell, with a dare-devil gaiety, inspired by the certainty that it could not be a carriage, and the conviction that the adventure would prove nothing more than some children and nursery maids playing with a perambulator.
His feelings underwent a revulsion, however, when old Vane Etherage, enveloped in cloak, and shawls, his hat gone, and his long grizzled hair streaming backward, with a wild countenance, and both hands working the directing handle, came swooping into sight, roaring, maniacally, "Ease her! back her!" and yawing frightfully in his descent upon them.
Captain Shrapnell, they say, turned pale at the spectacle; but he felt he must now go through with it, or for ever sacrifice that castle-in-the-air, of which the events of the day had suggested the ground-plan and elevation.
"Good heaven! he'll be killed, about it!" exclaimed Lord Verney, peeping from behind a tree, with unusual energy; but whether he meant Shrapnell, or Etherage, or both, I don't know, and nobody in that moment of sincerity minded much what he meant. I dare say a front-rank man in a square at Waterloo did not feel before the gallop of the Cuirassiers as the gallant Captain did before the charge of the large invalid who was descending upon him. All he meditated was a decent show of resistance, and as he had a stout walking-stick in his hand, something might be done without risking his bones. So, as the old gentleman thundered downward, roaring, "Keep her off—keep her clear," Shrapnell, roaring "I'm your man!" nervously popped the end of his stick under the front wheel of the vehicle, himself skipping to one side, unhappily the wrong one, for the chair at this check spun round, and the next spectacle was Mr. Vane Etherage and Captain Shrapnell, enveloped in cloaks and mufflers, and rolling over and over in one another's arms, like athletes in mortal combat, the Captain's fist being visible, as they rolled round, at Mr. Vane Etherage's back, with his walking-stick still clutched in it.
The chair was lying on its side, the gentlemen were separated, and Captain Shrapnell jumped to his feet.
"Well, Lord Verney, I believe I did something there!" said the gallant Captain, with the air of a man who has done his duty, and knows it.
"Done something! you've broke my neck, you lubber!" panted Mr. Vane Etherage, who, his legs not being available, had been placed sitting with some cloaks about him, on the bank.
Shrapnell grinned and winked expressively, and confidentially whispered, "Jolly old fellow he is—no one minds the Admiral; we let him talk."
"Lord Verney," said his lordship, introducing himself with a look and air of polite concern.
"No, my name's Etherage," said the invalid, mistaking—he fancied that Jos. Larkin, who was expounding his views of the accident grandly to Cleve Verney in the background, could not be less than a peer—"I live up there, at Hazelden—devilish near being killed here, by that lubber there. Why I was running at the rate of five-and-twenty knots an hour, if I was making one; and I remember it right well, sir, there's a check down there, just before you come to the mill-stile, and the wall there; and I'd have run my bows right into it, and not a bit the worse, sir, if that d—— fellow had just kept out of the—the—king's course, you know; and egad! I don't know now how it is—I suppose I'm smashed, sir."