“You seem to be in a hurry,” said the
unknown Englishman, falling back a step or two in
order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness.
“What’s it all about, eh?” Then
before MacIan could get past his sprawling and staggering
figure he ran forward again and said with a sort of
shouting and ear-shattering whisper: “I
say, my name is Wilkinson. You know—Wilkinson’s
Entire was my grandfather. Can’t drink
beer myself. Liver.” And he shook
his head with extraordinary sagacity.
“We really are in a hurry, as you say,”
said MacIan, summoning a sufficiently pleasant smile,
“so if you will let us pass——”
“I’ll tell you what, you fellows,”
said the sprawling gentleman, confidentially, while
Evan’s agonized ears heard behind him the first
paces of the pursuit, “if you really are, as
you say, in a hurry, I know what it is to be in a
hurry—Lord, what a hurry I was in when
we all came out of Cartwright’s rooms—if
you really are in a hurry”—and he
seemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity—“if
you are in a hurry, there’s nothing like a good
yacht for a man in a hurry.”
“No doubt you’re right,” said MacIan,
and dashed past him in despair. The head of
the pursuing host was just showing over the top of
the hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked
under the intoxicated gentleman’s elbow and
fled far in front.
“No, but look here,” said Mr. Wilkinson,
enthusiastically running after MacIan and catching
him by the sleeve of his coat. “If you
want to hurry you should take a yacht, and if”—he
said, with a burst of rationality, like one leaping
to a further point in logic—“if you
want a yacht—you can have mine.”
Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him.
“We are really in the devil of a hurry,”
he said, “and if you really have a yacht, the
truth is that we would give our ears for it.”
“You’ll find it in harbour,” said
Wilkinson, struggling with his speech. “Left
side of harbour—called Gibson Girl—can’t
think why, old fellow, I never lent it you before.”
With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell
flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh
softly, and turned towards his flying companion a
face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan’s
mind went through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry,
in which it may be that he decided wrongly; but about
how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt.
Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull
and told the tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull
had somehow tumbled into the yacht called the Gibson
Girl and had somehow pushed off from the Isle
of St. Loup.
