III
MR. CAMPBELL, MRS. CRASHAW, MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS
Willis, pausing in contemplation: ‘Hello! What’s the matter? What’s she trying to get out of you, Roberts? Don’t you do it, anyway, old fellow.’
Mrs. Roberts, in an ecstasy of satisfaction: ‘Willis! Oh, you’ve come in time to see him just as he is. Look at him, Willis!’ In the excess of her emotion she twitches her husband about, and with his arm fast in her clutch, presents him in the disadvantageous effect of having just been taken into custody. Under these circumstances Roberts’s attempt at an expression of diffident heroism fails; he looks sneaking, he looks guilty, and his eyes fall under the astonished regard of his brother-in-law.
Willis: ‘What’s the matter with him? What’s he been doing?’
Mrs. Roberts: ‘’Sh, Edward! What’s he been doing? What does he look as if he had been doing?’
Mrs. Crashaw: ‘Agnes—’
Willis: ‘He looks as if he had been signing the pledge. And he—smells like it.’
Mrs. Roberts: ‘For shame, Willis! I should think you’d sink through the floor. Edward, not a word! I am ashamed of him, if he is my brother.’
Willis: ‘Why, what in the world’s up, Agnes?’
Mrs. Roberts: ‘Up? He’s been robbed!—robbed on the Common, not five minutes ago! A whole gang of garotters surrounded him under the Old Elm—or just where it used to be—and took his watch away! And he ran after them, and knocked the largest of the gang down, and took it back again. He wasn’t hurt, but we’re afraid he’s been injured internally; he may be bleeding internally now—Oh, do you think he is, Willis? Don’t you think we ought to send for a physician?—That, and the cologne I gave him to drink. It’s the brandy I poured on his head makes him smell so. And he all so exhausted he couldn’t speak, and I didn’t know what I was doing, either; but he’s promised—oh yes, he’s promised!—never, never to do it again.’ She again flings her arms about her husband, and then turns proudly to her brother.