We went home slowly in the early evening, turning our backs upon a sunset that made sea and sky a glory of scarlet and gold. It had been a merry day, apart from the mishap that might so easily have ended in tragedy: but since Jack was alive and well, we were young enough to forget our brief time of terror, and we sang lustily, if not tunefully, as the launches glided over the still sea. Jack, perched on the extreme point of the bow, was loudest in the choruses. I could see, however, that his wounds were beginning to stiffen; when we landed I hurried him up to the house so that I might cleanse and dress them properly. He wriggled with disgust at my scientific bandages.
“Much better give ’em a dab of iodine and let the air cure ’em,” he said: at which I shivered. I hadn’t had the heart to apply iodine to so wide an acreage of skinned boy.
“Comfortable?” I asked, as I adjusted the last safety-pin and pulled his stocking gently over the whole.
“Oh yes. It’s all right. But I do feel an awful idiot, trussed up like this!”
“But nobody can see, Jack.”
“No—that’s a comfort,” he said. And then he astonished me, for he suddenly slipped an arm about my neck and gave me a rough hug. “Thanks, awfully,” he said. “You’re no end of a brick, Miss Earle!”—and was gone.
CHAPTER VIII
I HEAR STRANGE THINGS
DR. FIRTH appeared next day after breakfast and borrowed me, with the children, for the day. Mrs. McNab was immersed in writing, and seemed glad to let us go. She had shown real feeling over the news of Jack’s escape, and had come to my room at night to thank me for my small share in it. I had remarked that I was afraid she would blame me for letting him out of my sight: to which she had replied mournfully that if one had a hundred eyes it would be impossible always to keep Judy and Jack in their line of vision. Then she had drifted away.
We went off in high spirits, my own raised to the seventh heaven because Dr. Firth allowed me to drive. I had not had the wheel of a car in my hands since the good days when I used to drive father on his rounds; one of the bitterest moments of our poverty had been when we saw our beloved Vauxhall driven away by the fat bookmaker who had bought her. He couldn’t drive a bit, either: he scraped one mudguard at our very front gate. Dr. Firth’s car was a Vauxhall also, and it was sheer joy to feel her purring under one’s touch. We went for a fifty-mile run before we came back to his house for lunch.
The house was a fine old place, of deep-red brick, half smothered in Virginia creeper. Judy and Jack evidently knew their way about, and they promptly disappeared towards the stables, where two ponies were at their disposal. It was with difficulty that I retrieved them for lunch, which we ate at a table on the verandah, in a corner shut in by a wall of climbing roses. A delightful old housekeeper, motherly and gentle, fussed over us. The whole place breathed an atmosphere of home.