‘Guitar be diddled!’ cried he;
’’tis gone—where we’re
going—to the bottom. What devil possessed
you, Sir, to drown us this way?’
Puddock sighed. They were passing at this moment
the quiet banks of the pleasant meadow of Belmont,
and the lights twinkled from the bow-window in the
drawing-room. I don’t know whether Puddock
saw them—Cluffe certainly did not.
‘Hallo! hallo!—a rope!’ cried
Cluffe, who had hit upon this desperate expedient
for raising the neighbourhood. ’A rope—a
rope! hallo! hallo!—a ro-o-o-ope!’
And Aunt Becky, who heard the wild whooping, mistook
it for drunken fellows at their diversions, and delivered
her sentiments in the drawing-room accordingly.
SWANS IN THE WATER.
‘We’re coming to something—what’s
that?’ said Puddock, as a long row of black
stakes presented themselves at some distance ahead,
in the dusky moonlight, slanting across the stream.
‘’Tis the salmon-weir!’ roared Cluffe
with an oath that subsided into something like a sickening
prayer.
It was only a fortnight before that a tipsy fellow
had been found drowned in the net. Cluffe had
lost his head much more than Puddock, though Cluffe
had fought duels. But then, he really could not
swim a bit, and he was so confoundedly buckled up.
‘Sit to the right. Trim the boat, Sir!’
said little Puddock.
‘Trim the devil!’ bawled Cluffe, to whom
this order of Puddock’s, it must be owned a
useless piece of marinetism in their situation, was
especially disgusting; and he added, looking furiously
ahead—’’Tisn’t the boat
I’d trim, I promise you: you—you
ridiculous murderer!’
Just then Puddock’s end of the boat touched
a stone, or a post, or something in the current, and
that in which Cluffe sat came wheeling swiftly round
across the stream, and brought the gallant captain
so near the bank that, with a sudden jerk, he caught
the end of a branch that stretched far over the water,
and, spite of the confounded tightness of his toilet,
with the energy of sheer terror, climbed a good way;
but, reaching a point where the branch forked, he
could get no further, though he tugged like a brick.
But what was a fat fellow of fifty, laced, and buckled,
and buttoned up, like poor Cluffe—with his
legs higher up among the foliage than his head and
body—to do, and with his right calf caught
in the fork of a branch, so as to arrest all progress,
and especially as the captain was plainly too much
for the branch, which was drooping toward the water,
and emitting sounds premonitory of a smash.
With a long, screaking crash the branch stooped down
to the water, and, so soon as the old element made
itself acquainted with those parts that reached it
first, the gallant captain, with a sort of sob, redoubled
his efforts, and down came the faithless bough, more
and more perpendicularly, until his nicely got-up
cue and bag, then his powdered head, and finally Captain
Cluffe’s handsome features, went under the surface.
When this occurred, he instantaneously disengaged his
legs with a vague feeling that his last struggle above
water was over.
