"Hold your tongue, man!" said Undershaw at last, losing his temper. "You disgrace your master. It would be a public scandal to refuse to help a man in this plight! If we get him alive through to-night, it will be a mercy. I believe the cart's been over him somewhere!" he added, with a frowning brow.
Dixon silenced, but by no means persuaded, followed the little procession, till it reached a side door of the Tower, opening on the terrace just beyond the bridge. The door was shut, and it was not till the doctor had made several thunderous attacks upon it, beside sending men round to the other doors of the house, that Mrs. Dixon at last cautiously opened it.
Fresh remonstrance and refusal followed on the part both of husband and wife. Fresh determination also on the part of the doctor, seconded by the threatening looks and words of Faversham's bearers, stout Cumbria labourers, to whom the storming of the Tower was clearly a business they enjoyed. At last the old couple, bitterly protesting, gave way, and the procession entered.
They found themselves in a long corridor, littered with a strange multitude of objects, scarcely distinguishable in the dim light shed by one unshuttered window through which some of the evening glow still penetrated. Dixon and his wife whispered excitedly together; after which Dixon led the way through the corridor into the entrance hall—which was equally encumbered—and so to a door on the right.
"Yo' can bring him in there," he said sulkily to Undershaw. "There's mebbe a bed upstairs we can bring doon."
He threw open the drawing-room—a dreary, disused room, with its carpets rolled up in one corner, and its scanty furniture piled in another. The candle held by Mrs. Dixon lit up the richly decorated ceiling.
"Can't you do anything better?" asked Undershaw, turning upon her vehemently. "Don't you keep a spare bedroom in this place?"
"Noa, we doan't!" said Mrs. Dixon, with answering temper. "There isn't a room upstairs but what's full o' Muster Melrose's things. Yo' mun do wi' this, or naethin'."
Undershaw submitted, and Faversham's bearers gently laid him down, spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could be found. Dixon and his wife, in a state of pitiable disturbance, went off to look for one, while Undershaw called after them:
"And I warn you that to-morrow you'll have to find quarters for two nurses!"