Even while he speaks, he watches the still white face so near him with his finger on his trigger, Sir Robin discreetly backing away and rending the air with noisy and impotent curses; then a plunge, a long, resounding call from Grigson; the two lackeys agog at finding themselves alive, Sir Robin’s coach starts on as if the very devil himself were in its wake.
Percy does not draw Peggy to him; he lays her back among the pillows; he bathes her head and lips and hands with liquor from his flask; he holds the slender fingers in his palm, as, amid awful terror lest his Lady die, he is racked with consternation and wonder at the present outcome, and in his distraught mind endeavors to patch and piece out the strange network of the mystery now beginning to solve itself before his eyes.
As he prays God to spare her, if not for him, for some better man, a shrill, weird sound smites his ear.
Percy throws back his head and listens; ’tis the long roan neighing for the last time back on Farnham Heath, where Sir Robin, picking up his money, dejectedly shivering like an aspen (since he would rake hell with a nail to secure a ha’penny, and fairly weeps at the six-pences he can’t recover), presently and ruefully, one of his men behind him, pillion fashion, t’other running at his side, turns back to Tooting on top of Grigson’s black, his fox teeth chattering in his wide mouth as he congratulates himself on his second and miraculous escape from the famous Sir Percy de Bohun.
’Twas, in sooth, for this latter a bitterly sad hour which was spent in covering the distance between the heath and the Castle. Revived a bit, no doubt by the fumes of the liquor, Her Ladyship’s lids quivered, contracted, and finally opened, but it was with a distraught and unrecognizing stare that she surveyed her companion.
“’S death!” cries she aloud, her feeble right hand seeking her sword-side, “I tell ye, Chock, your mistress is now full-fledged a man! Hist, girl, an you love me, keep it close. Sir Percy’s wed to Lady Diana! Aye!” Peggy laughs with such a heart-break in her voice and such tears in her winkers as causes Percy a pang of cruelest misery.
“Tut, tut, Chock! What’s his marriage to me? Fetch the pack, Mr. Brummell; aye, I’m at your service, loo, crimp, or whist! I, Sir Robin McTart, ’ll lay you a thousand to nothing! Zounds! Sir, fetch coffee to stain my face with! and where, oh, where’s my precious bundle with my woman’s duds in’t, my patch-box that I burned, and the long tail of my hair I cut off when you, Chock, bought me the counterfeit of Sir Robin’s own wig at the perruquier’s in Lark Lane. Aye! So!—No! No! No!” and now a shiver and a lower tone, as Lady Peggy, with her wide wild eyes, shrank back in the far corner of the jolting coach.