Lord Dunholm helped Miss Vanderpoel to lay the young man down carefully.
"I am afraid," he said; "I am really afraid his leg is broken.
It was twisted under him.What can be done with him?"Miss Vanderpoel looked at her sister.
"Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily, Rosy?" she asked."There is apparently nothing else to be done.""Yes, yes," said Lady Anstruthers."How could one send him away, poor fellow! Let him be carried to the house."Miss Vanderpoel smiled into Lord Dunholm's much approving, elderly eyes.
"G.Selden is a compatriot," she said."Perhaps he heard I was here and came to sell me a typewriter."Lord Westholt returning with two footmen and a light mattress, G.Selden was carried with cautious care to the house.
The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the ancestral oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white young face.Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt each lent a friendly hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping near, once or twice wiped away an insistent trickle of blood which showed itself from beneath the handkerchiefs.Lady Dunholm followed with Lady Anstruthers.
Afterwards, during his convalescence, G.Selden frequently felt with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of his cortege at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be for once in a position he would have designated as "out of sight" in the novelty of its importance.To have beheld him, borne by nobles and liveried menials, accompanied by ladies of title, up the avenue of an English park on his way to be cared for in baronial halls, would, he knew, have added a joy to the final moments of his grandmother, which the consolations of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition.
His own point of view, however, would not, it is true, have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature.His enjoyment, in fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of humour, whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would have been full fed by the incongruity of "Little Willie being yanked along by a bunch of earls, and Reuben S.Vanderpoel's daughters following the funeral." That he himself should have been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like "throwing away money."The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found slight concussion of the brain and a broken leg.With Lady Anstruthers' kind permission, it would certainly be best that he should remain for the present where he was.So, in a bedroom whose windows looked out upon spreading lawns and broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably established as was possible.G.Selden, through the capricious intervention of Fate, if he had not "got next" to Reuben S.Vanderpoel himself, had most undisputably "got next" to his favourite daughter.
As the Dunholm carriage rolled down the avenue there reigned for a few minutes a reflective silence.It was Lady Dunholm who broke it."That," she said in her softly decided voice, "that is a nice girl."Lord Dunholm's agreeable, humorous smile flickered into evidence.
"That is it," he said."Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying me with a quite delightful early Victorian word.I believe I wanted it.She is a beauty and she is clever.She is a number of other things--but she is also a nice girl.If you will allow me to say so, I have fallen in love with her.""If you will allow me to say so," put in Westholt, "so have I--quite fatally.""That," said his father, with speculation in his eye, "is more serious."
