The dreary breakfast gulped down; the post-chaise rattling up to the door—I had hoped until the last moment that it would not come; the bumping along the road in the cool, bright summer morning; the gruesome, long, narrow box that lay on the front seat of the chaise; the packet of letters which Giles had given me and which seemed to weigh a hundred tons in my pocket,—all these were so many horrors to haunt the memory for ever. But I must say that, apparently, the misery was all mine; for I never saw Giles Vernon show so much as by the flicker of an eyelash that he was disturbed in any way.
About half-way from the meeting-ground we left the highway and turned into a by-road; and scarcely had we gone half a mile when we almost drove into a broken-down chaise, and standing on the roadside among the furze bushes were the coachman, the surgeon,—a most bloody-minded man I always believed him,—Mr. Buxton, and Overton.
Our chaise stopped, and Giles, putting his head out of the window, said pleasantly, “Good morning, gentlemen; you have had an accident, I see.”
“A bad one,” replied Mr. Buxton, who saw that their chaise was beyond help, and who, as he said afterward, was playing for a place in our chaise, not liking to walk the rest of the distance.
Giles jumped out and so did I, and the most courteous greetings were exchanged.
The two drivers, as experts, examined the broken chaise, and agreed there was no patching it up for service; one wheel was splintered.
Mr. Buxton looked at Giles meaningly, and then at me, and Giles whispered to me,—
“Offer to take ’em up. By Jupiter, they shall see we are no shirkers.”
Which I did, and, to my amazement, in a few moments we were all lumbering along the road; Overton and Mr. Buxton on the back seat, and Giles and I with our backs to the horses, while the surgeon was alongside the coachman on the box.
Nothing could exceed the politeness between the two principals, about the seats as about everything else. Overton was with difficulty persuaded to take the back seat. Mr. Buxton seated himself there without any introduction. (I hope it will never again be my fortune to negotiate so delicate an affair as a meeting between gentlemen, with one so much my superior in rank as Mr. Buxton.)