The butler is just beyond the lobby, and the firm voice of the Baronet is audible above his terrified undertone. "Who is it?... Sir Alfred Challis?... Badly?" The speaker then passes out of hearing, going to the entrance-hall.
Mrs. Cream has come, and finds that her mistress has not fainted away, though not far short of it. Her ladyship rallies, saying to her son-in-law: "Never mind me, Frank!" Whereupon Lord Felixthorpe says: "You'll excuse me, Brownrigg, but I must see to my wife. She'll be frightened if I don't." And goes three steps at a time up a side-staircase, leaving Mr. Brownrigg embarrassed, and feeling in the way.
When Sir Murgatroyd set foot outside his house, the first thing he saw was the face of his daughter, still seated in the car, supporting the head of the man who was with her, but shrinking from it, covered as it was with some shawl or cloth, in terror. The first words he heard, above the drumming beat of the stationary car's machinery and the hysterical excitement of the chauffeur, dismounted from his seat, were a relief to him. His daughter, at any rate, was uninjured, or only shaken at the worst. "I am not the least hurt," she said, with perfect self-command, though in a bewildered, stony way. Her dress was not soiled or seriously disordered, so she could not have been thrown from the car.
His hearers at first thought M. Louis incoherent. "C'était la faute de ce sacré aveugle—qui m'y trouvera à redire—moi? Qu'ai-je pu faire, moi?—c'est l'arbre du frein qui m'a trompé. J'ai tiré la manivelle—oui!—et elle m'a trompé. Peste soit de cet aveugle...." And so on. He was understood by no one.
"Get this man out of the way; he's no use. Where's Bullett?" Thus the Baronet. "Now, Elphinstone, get that deck-chair—the long one, you know—look sharp about it!" Elphinstone departed, as Bullett, the model groom, came running. "The roan, in the dogcart," said his master; and then: "Yes, my dear, you shall tell me directly." For Judith was beginning: "It has not been my fault...." She was speaking like a woman in a dream, or one half waking from one.
Her father only glanced at the white face with the blood on it, then covered it again. "He might be able to get some brandy down," said he. He stood with his finger on Challis's pulse till it came, and then tried to get him to swallow some, but without success. "We must get him in," he said. "Where's Frank?" Samuel testified that his lordship was just coming downstairs. The fact was that his lordship, although his solicitude for his wife had been appreciated, had been told not to be absurd, but to go away and make himself useful.
He arrived just as the long deck-chair was brought—one such as one sees on passenger boats for India and China—and assisted in transporting the man who lay absolutely insensible on it to the room he had occupied when he had visited the house as a guest—the room where he missed that postscript of Marianne's, and probably sowed the seeds of all this mischief. It was easy for three to carry the chair—one on either side and one behind—so the Baronet left it to his son-in-law and Elphinstone and Samuel, and went to speak to Bullett, who had just arrived with the dogcart. On his way, coming from the lobby, he met Mr. Brownrigg, looking horribly shocked.
"Is it Challis?" said that gentleman. The Baronet nodded.
"It's the author," said he. "Is my wife still there?" He pointed to the lobby.