CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST.
WOUNDED.
AT the extreme end of Mr. Mabbott’s long double-countered shop was an expansive archway, closed in general by folding doors, through which entrance was afforded to a narrow sitting-room, the length of which was just by so much less than the width of the shop as was required for a passage and staircase. Once a year the open archway revealed a shimmering mass of snowy sugar-work, the towers and turrets of a castle on a rock, or the illuminated windows of a magnificent palace, fit for any princess of fairyland, with pleasure-gardens and lake, or fountain and pond, wherein stately swans floated, and were overlooked by dames and cavaliers created by the confectioner and his satellites.
For the fifty other weeks it was simply a snug parlour, comfortably furnished according to the fashion of the time.
And it was in this room we left Jabez, whilst good-natured Ben Travis, leaving his more patriotic comrades to “hack and hew” at their pleasure, galloped hither and thither in search of a surgeon to dress the wounded arm.
Every doctor in the Infirmary had his hands full; Dr. Hull, from his windows in Mosley Street, and Dr. Hardie from his in Piccadilly, had been satisfied that if they ventured forth they might soon need doctoring themselves—and they both pleaded “medical etiquette” in excuse for their lukewarmness. They were “physicians, not surgeons.” He bethought himself of Mr. Huertley, in Oldham Street, but even he had more than one wounded patient in his surgery, and was loth to encounter the danger outside. Ben Travis, however, would take no denial. He waited until sundry gaping wounds were closed, cuts plaistered and bandaged, a broken limb set, and a bullet extracted, even lending a hand himself where unskilled help could be available, being less bemused with liquor than many of his cavalry corps. Then, although they were almost within a stone’s throw of their destination—as Oldham Street was not safe for a civilian to cross on foot, with loaded cannon in such close proximity—Travis mounted the surgeon behind him, the latter not sorry to have the yeoman’s capacious body in its conspicuous uniform for a shield, as they dashed across into Back-Piccadilly to Mabbott’s back door.
As they passed Chadwick’s the younger man cast a sharp glance of scrutiny at the drawing-room windows, and bowed low in recognition of the face for which he was looking—the face he had seen so pale and pitiful, bending over an afflicted father, and so shocked to hear of even an apprentice wounded in that father’s behalf.
Ben Travis had a big body and a big heart, but he had little knowledge of the hearts of womankind, or he might have found another solution for Ellen Chadwick’s fainting fit. He did not know how she had trembled for another on seeing him dismount at Mr. Huertley’s door, nor how she had watched, too sick and sad to descend to the dining-room, when the spoiled dinner was at length set on the table—watched eagerly and anxiously, her heart’s pulsations counting each second a minute, as hours elapsed before she saw them mount and away, and noted the direction they took. And she saw no admiration in the low bow of the fine soldierly young gentleman—only the polite salutation of a stranger introduced casually by the untoward events of the day, albeit, having rendered her father a service, and professed himself the friend of Jabez, she was bound to recognise him as he passed.
To Jabez himself, lying faint and exhausted with loss of blood, on kind Mr. Mabbott’s chintz-covered squab-sofa, everything was a haze, and the people around him little more than voices. He was perfectly conscious when Mr. Mabbott hastily cut away the sleeve of his jacket, and bound the wounded arm as tightly as towels could bind. When Mr. Ashton put his troubled face into the confectioner’s small parlour, Mr. Mabbott was in the act of reaching from a corner cupboard a small square spirit decanter, and an engraved wine-glass, in order to administer a dose of brandy to the young man, then rapidly sinking into unconsciousness.
Under its influence he revived for awhile; but, as the blood gradually soaked through the towelling, he grew fainter, in spite of brandy, and by the time Ben Travis (who had surely kept the promise made in school-boy days) brought Dr. Huertley to his aid he had lapsed into a stupor from which the manipulations of the surgeon barely aroused him.