And then he saw a couple of young men and Lucille striving to raise the recumbent body of a man. The General snorted as snorts the wart-hog in love and war, or the graceful hippopotamus in the river.
“What the Devil’s all this?” he growled. “Some poor fella fainted with the exertions of putting?” A most bitter old gentleman.
Lucille turned to him and his fierce gaze fell upon the pale, contorted, and tear-stained face of Dam.
The General flushed an even deeper purple, and the stick he held perpendicularly slowly rose to horizontal, though he did not raise his hand.
He made a loud but wholly inarticulate sound.
Haddon Berners, enjoying himself hugely, volunteered the information.
“He saw a little grass-snake and yelled out. Then he wept and fainted. Coming round now. Got the funks, poor chap.”
Lucille’s hands closed (the thumbs correctly on the knuckles of the second fingers), and, for a moment, it was in her heart to smite the Haddock on the lying mouth with the straight-from-the-shoulder drive learned in days of yore from Dam, and practised on the punching-ball with great assiduity. Apparently the Haddock realized the fact for he skipped backward with agility.
“He is ill, Grumper dear,” she said instead. “He has had a kind of fit. Perhaps he had sunstroke in India, and it has just affected him now in the sun….”
It may have penetrated Dam’s comatose brain, indeed, for at that moment, with a moan and a shudder, he struggled to a sitting posture.
“The Snake,” he groaned, and collapsed again.
“What the Devil!” roared the General. “Get up, you miserable, whining cur! Get indoors, you bottle-fed squalling workhouse brat! Get out of it, you decayed gentlewoman!” … The General bade fair to have a fit of his own.
“Can’t you see he’s very ill, Grumper? Have you no heart at all? Don’t be so cruel … and … stupid.”
The General gasped…. Insults!… From a chit of a girl!… “Ill!” he roared. “What the Devil does he want to be ill for now, here, to-day? I never …”
Dam struggled to his feet with heroic efforts at self-mastery, and stood swaying, twitching, trembling in every limb, and obviously in an agony of terror.
“Ha!” barked General Stukeley. “Been fighting forty boa-constrictors, what? Just had a fearful struggle with five thousand fearful pythons, what? There’ll be another Victoria Cross in your family soon, if you’re not careful.”