And now for the well-pleased John Standish Sawyer, came in what may be called the “sweet of the day.” His horse disposed of, two hundred and sixty-two pounds ten shillings in his pocket (for the Honourable Crasher’s word was as good as a bank-bill), and the wiry little grey under him, an animal for which he had not given a fourth of the above sum, and yet in whose pace and fencing he had the utmost confidence, with the additional delight of a certain find for the second fox—all these influences combined, were enough to put a man in thorough good-humour with himself. To do our friend justice, he was not of a mercenary disposition; but having been kept exceedingly short of funds during his youth, and in those hard times hunted under considerable pecuniary difficulties, he had insensibly imbibed a horror of what he called “riding upon too much money.” “A man must have good nerve,” he used to say, “who is not afraid to risk a couple of hundred every time he jumps a fence;” and I really believe he would shove a forty-pound screw along with greater satisfaction than the winner of the Liverpool. The grey was a right good little nag, easy to turn, quick at his fences, and thoroughly accustomed to his master’s hand. It is wonderful what a deal of time is saved by a horse that is pleasant to ride, and how rapidly a moderate galloper, with a fine mouth, and quick upon his legs, can slip over a country compared with an animal that may have the pace of a racehorse, but requires a segundo bridle, and a hundred-acre field to turn him in. Mr. Sawyer drew the curb-rein gently through his fingers, struck his heels down, and mingled in the crowd upon the best possible terms with himself.
As the smoking, laughing, chattering cavalcade trotted merrily along, he had an opportunity of scanning many well-known individuals whom his business avocations of the morning had prevented his hitherto recognising. “The talent,” as it is called, was present, from Melton,—Melton, once the very metropolis of the hunting world, now, thanks to railroads, rivalled, if not surpassed, by Leicester and Market Harborough; and yet, what a nice place it is! Who that has ever spent a season in the cosy, cheerful, joyous little town, but would wish to turn the stream of time, and live those golden days and pleasant nights over again?—would wish to be galloping his covert-hack once more through the fragrant air and under the dappled sky of a February morning, with a good horse to ride from Ranksborough Gorse or Barkby Holt, as his day’s amusement, and a choice of at least a couple of invitations, offering him the pleasantest society and the best dinner in England, for his evening’s gratification?
It is not more than thirty years since Nimrod wrote his celebrated “Quarterly Review Run”—the best description of fashionable hunting that has ever yet been printed, though many a hand, as light upon the bridle as the pen, has portrayed the same subject since then—not more than thirty years, certainly, and the ways of Melton are but little changed, only, of the dramatis person? there are not many left. Of those who charged the flooded Whissendine so boldly, the majority have already crossed the Styx. Nevertheless, a few of the old lot may still be seen ready, when the hounds run, to face “wood and water,” as of yore.
Mr. Sawyer, for an unimaginative man, was the least thing in the world of a hero-worshipper. As he rode along, contemplating from behind them the fine powerful frame and the slim and graceful figure of two Meltonians, who for many years have shone, a couple of lucida sidera, in the front rank, and of whom, indeed, so fast have they always gone, it may almost be said that
“Panting Time toils after them in vain,”
he was accosted by the pleasant, gentlemanlike personage with whom he had spent an agreeable quarter of an hour in the hovel, on that memorable day when his ambition had so completely “cooked the goose” of Hotspur with the Pytchley.
“Good-morning, sir,” said this affable individual, bringing his horse alongside of our friend, with a bow such as nobody in the Old Country could ever have perpetrated. “I thought you’d be out to-day, so I’ve a couple here for you to look at.”
When a nobleman not only touches his hat, but takes it off to you, at the same time offering you “a couple of horses to look at,” as if he were about to make you a present of them, such politeness, thought Mr. Sawyer, is rather overwhelming than reassuring. He returned the greeting, however, with his best air, and took off his hat in return, somewhat disconcerted, however, by the rude behaviour of Struggles and Brush, who were riding beside him, and who both burst out laughing.
The illustrious stranger, too—who, by the way, though still in a black coat, was “got-up” with the utmost splendour of which a hunting costume admits—looked rather surprised, and winked at the two irreverent laughers as they are certainly not in the habit of winking in the House of Peers.
“Is that a favourite one you are riding?” inquired Mr. Sawyer, who fancied he must say something, and could think, at the moment, of no more apposite remark.
“I don’t know much of him,” was the reply. “He’s only a five-year-old; and I haven’t had him a fortnight. A thundering well-bred one, though, and can jump like a deer! I gave a hat-full of money for him, without getting on his back; but we’ll see what he’s made of this afternoon, I hope. I should say, now, that he’d carry you alarming!”
Mr. Sawyer, whose conversational powers were soon exhausted, made no reply, but, more out of civility than curiosity, contented himself with scanning the five-year-old from his ears to his tail.
The illustrious unknown seemed to have no dislike to inspection: on the contrary, he courted further companionship, by producing the gorgeous cigar-case, and offering Mr. Sawyer a weed.
“You will find them pretty good,” said he, striking a light from a little bijou of a briquet that hung to his watch-chain. “I import them myself: it’s the only way to ensure getting them first-rate, and it certainly is the cheapest in the long-run.”
The cigar was indeed excellent. Mr. Sawyer thought this would be a good opportunity to draw his noble friend for a box. He might perhaps make him a present of a couple of pounds or so. At all events (as he said, it was the cheapest plan) there was no harm in risking the chance of having to pay for them. He asked him, accordingly, with some little hesitation, if he could do him the favour of procuring him a few?
“Certainly, certainly,” replied the other, in the most off-hand, good-humoured way possible. “You shall have them from my man. I’ll write to him to-night. How much shall I order? You can’t get anything like them at the money: they only stand us in five guineas a pound!”
Mr. Sawyer modestly opined “one pound would be quite sufficient for the present;” but he felt as if he had just lost a large double tooth. Without being stingy, it was not the custom in the Old Country thus to throw money away. He fell back upon Brush, sucking at the costly tobacco with considerable vehemence.
“Who is he?” said he, nodding towards the rider of the five-year-old, then cantering on ahead, and sitting well down in the saddle, as he prepared to “lark” over a large fence, to the admiration of the field, instead of defiling through the hand-gate.
“Why, you seem to know him very well,” rejoined Major Brush, smiling (as well he might) at the query: “I thought you seemed very thick, and were going to give him your custom.”
Mr. Sawyer had not the heart to repudiate the soft impeachment. He liked to be “very thick” with a peer, and to have the credit of “giving him his custom” as a visitor and intimate.
“Yes,” he said, “I am; but, somehow, I cannot, for the life of me, remember his title. I’ve no ‘Debrett’ at Harborough; and I’ve such a bad memory for names. Lord—Lord—what the deuce is it? Some Irish peerage, if I remember right?”
Major Brush fairly burst out laughing. “No more a lord than you are, Sawyer,” said he, “though, I grant you, he ought to be a Duke. I thought everybody knew Mr. Varnish, the horsedealer!” And the Major went off at score again, thinking what a capital story he had got against Sawyer for that day at dinner, and a good many days after. A joke, you see, lasts a long time in the hunting season, when the supply is by no means equal to the demand.
And Mr. Sawyer turned his horse’s head out of the crowd, feeling a little humiliated, and not a little disgusted. The five guineas for the cigars stuck horribly in his throat. However, he and Mr. Varnish, as will presently be shown, had by no means closed accounts yet.
But where are the low spirits, blue devils, or uncomfortable reflections that can hold their own for an instant against the cheering sound of “Gone away!”? Three notes on the huntsman’s horn, five or six couple of hounds streaming noiselessly across a field, the rest more clamorous, leaping and dashing through the gorse, a rush of horsemen towards the point at which the fox has broken; and the man who is really fond of hunting has not the vestige of an idea to spare for anything else in the world.
John Standish Sawyer could ride “above a bit.” Even in a strange country, and with hounds running “like smoke,” he was not a man to shrink from taking his own line; and scarcely valuing the grey, perhaps, according to its deserts, he had no scruple in risking that good little animal at whatever came in his way.
A quick turn to the five couple of leading hounds, that he spied racing down the side of a hedgerow, and the happy negotiation of a very nasty place, with a stake in it that would certainly have impaled a more costly nag, placed our friend on terms with the pack. A fine grass country lay spread out before him. The fox, evidently a good one, bore straight across the middle of the fields. The hounds, without forcing any extraordinary pace, appeared well settled to the scent, and not inclined to flash over it a yard. A large fence and a little brook had combined to afford them more room than usual. Everything seemed to look uncommonly like a run; and the Honourable Crasher, shooting by our friend, on Confidence, whom he rode with a shamefully loose rein, observed that “It was all right; and he shouldn’t wonder if they were going to have a gallop.”
Mr. Sawyer laid hold of the grey, and determined to assume a place in the front rank—of which the occupants would have been equally at home in the rows of stalls nearest the orchestra at the Opera. There was more than one lady riding as he never saw lady ride before—perfectly straight; turning aside from no obstacle; jumping a gate with extreme cordiality, if it should be locked; and taking it all in the earnest, yet off-hand, graceful manner, with which a woman sets about doing what she likes best. The Meltonians, stride for stride, and fence for fence, were sailing away with perfect ease, looking as if they were scarcely out of a canter; yet, do what he would—and it must be owned he was very hard upon the grey—Mr. Sawyer could not, for the life of him, decrease the distance between himself and these leading horsemen.
The Honourable Crasher, having got Confidence amongst some very intricate fences on the right, though a little wider than he liked of the hounds, was disporting himself therein with considerable gratification. Struggles and the Reverend Dove (to-day without the daughter) were forward with the flyers, though the former was already beginning to calculate on a check.
The double posts and rails about Norton-by-Galby were already visible: but the fox had evidently no intention of entering the gorse. Albeit much against the grain, and what he was totally unaccustomed to in the Old Country, when hounds were running, Mr. Sawyer found himself obliged to ride to a leader. That chestnut five-year-old was for ever in front of him, now doing an “in-and-out” cleverly, now topping a flight of rails gallantly, then creeping under a tree, with a discretion beyond his years, and anon facing and rasping through a bullfinch, in the successful temerity of youth, Mr. Varnish sitting very far back the while, with the graceful ease of a man who is playing a favourite instrument in an arm-chair.
Presently the hounds checked, under Houghton-on-the-Hill; and Mr. Varnish, turning round to our friend, and casting his eye pitifully on the grey’s sobbing sides, consigned them to reprobation for so doing, “just as the crowd was shook off, and the horses getting settled to their work!”
Mr. Sawyer’s dander was up. It had been rising for the last two or three fences. He vowed, in his wicked heart, that chestnut should be his own before nightfall; and the way in which the young one jumped out of the Billesdon Road, when they got to work again, only confirmed him in his determination.
Long before the crowd could come clattering up the high-road, the pack and the first flight had put a couple of grassy slopes once more between themselves and their pursuers. Considerable grief and discomfiture took place amongst the sportsmen, as must always be the case when hounds run straight, over Leicestershire. The holding pace at which they kept on, and the straight running of the fox, forbade the slightest chance of any but such as had got a good start at first, and stuck to them through thick and thin. Even these, well mounted and skilful as they were, had enough to do. The fox never turned but once, under the Coplow; and five minutes afterwards he was in hand, held high above the huntsman’s head, with the pack baying round him in expectation of their reward.
Those who were there to see, it would be invidious to name. Sufficient for me to say that Mr. Sawyer was not, though he came up whilst Warrior and Woldsman were disputing the last bit of a hind-leg.
Despite his judicious riding and undeniable nerve, he had not the material under him that was quite adapted for so severe a country. The grey had neither pace for the extensive fields, nor scope for the large fences, each of which, though he did them so gallantly, entailed too great an exertion to bear frequent repetition. Notwithstanding two falls, however, he struggled gamely to the end; and it speaks well both for man and horse, that they should have got there at all.
Mr. Sawyer, however, was now thoroughly bitten. He had never felt so keen in his life. He would never hunt anywhere else. He could ride with any of them, he thought: he was determined to be as well mounted. Mr. Varnish and he discussed the subject in all its bearings, as they rode home; and the result of their conversation was—the arrival of the chestnut five-year-old and a good-looking brown at Mr. Sawyer’s stables, and the transference to Mr. Varnish, in lieu thereof, of the Honourable Crasher’s cheque, and another signed in full with the perfectly solvent name of John Standish Sawyer.
Let us take a peep into Dove-cote Rectory, smiling in the wintry sun, as it lies snugly sheltered from the north winds by a thick plantation, and rejoicing in that most desirable advantage in our climate—a southern aspect. This house is one that would make any sportsman oblivious of the tenth commandment. Who could refrain from coveting possession of those cheerful rooms; that fine extensive view; above all, the excellent and commodious stables within reach of three packs of hounds, and situated in the best grass country in England?
It is however with the inside of the mansion that we have now to do, and with those gentle beings who constitute a home, without whom a palace is little better than a dungeon.
Breakfast has been over at the Dove-cote for an hour or so. Cissy and her mamma have established themselves in what they call “the little drawing-room”—a snug apartment of small dimensions, with windows opening to the ground, and “giving,” as the French say, on a neatly laid-out garden, in spring and summer the peculiar care of the daughter of the house. To-day, however, flowers and blossoms are replaced by a million sparkling gems, formed by last night’s white frost, which is melting rapidly under the noon-day sun. Inside, the furniture is of a rich and somewhat gaudy pattern, assorting well with the rose-tinted muslin curtains and multiplicity of looking-glasses, which are so characteristic of a lady’s bower; whilst a thousand pretty knick-knacks, and a graceful litter of books, music, work, paper-lights, stray gloves, and gossamer handkerchiefs betray at once the sex of the occupants. A little statuette of a Cupid in tears, with nothing on but a quiver, occupies a niche between the windows, under a portrait of Miss Dove, depicted by the artist in a graceful attitude on the chestnut horse, attired in a blue riding-habit, with her hat off, and her hair falling about her shoulders, as, it is only right to observe, she is not in the habit of wearing it when taking equestrian exercise. Altogether the painter’s idea seems to have been borrowed from a French print entitled “The Rendezvous,” representing a disconsolate damsel waiting for a gentleman in a wood—not in the best of humours, as is natural under the circumstances,—and sitting her white horse in a listless, woe-begone attitude, unworthy of an Amazon. The laggard, however, is perceptible in the far distance, making up for lost time on an exceedingly bad goer, whose “form” must at once absolve him of intentional unpunctuality in the eyes of his ladye-love. As a pendant to this work of art, hangs a portrait in crayons of Mrs. Dove, done some years ago, when people wore bunches of ringlets and a high comb at the back of the head—a fashion by no means unbecoming to the original, who must have been a sufficiently handsome young woman when she sat for this likeness. Indeed, the Reverend, no mean judge of “make-and-shape,” always declared (at least in his wife’s presence) that Cissy could not hold a candle to what her mother had been in her best days.
That matron, though somewhat voluminous in person and too highly coloured, is by no means bad-looking even now. As she sits at the window, shaping a little child’s shirt for a poor parishioner (Mrs. Dove is a managing, bustling person—prejudiced, it may be, and deaf to argument, as what woman is not? but overflowing with the milk of human kindness), a judicious artist might tone her down into a very picturesque study of “A lady in the prime of life.”
She looks up from her work, and casts her eye across the trim garden over many a mile of undulating prairie, to where a dim smoke in the far distance denotes the locality of Harborough.
“Cissy,” observes the matron, “wasn’t that Papa going round to the stables?”
Cissy raises those killing eyelashes from her crochet, and dutifully replies—“Yes, Mamma. He’s only going to smoke his cigar as usual. I’m glad it’s not a hunting-day: we shall have him all to ourselves till luncheon.”
Miss Dove pets her papa immensely; and it is needless to remark that, although on occasion he runs rusty with his wife, his daughter can wind him round her little finger at will.
“That reminds me,” continues Mrs. D., in the inconsequent manner in which ladies follow out the thread of their reflections—“that reminds me we haven’t had any visitors lately from over there,” nodding with her head in the direction of Market Harborough.
Cissy looks very innocent in reply, and observes that “Gentlemen seem to make hunting the one great business of life.”
Mamma, whose rest for the last five-and-twenty years has been broken every winter whenever the nights have been symptomatic of frost, and who can scarcely be expected to share the anxiety which drives the Reverend at short intervals from the connubial couch to open the window and look out, is unable to controvert so self-evident a proposition; so she tries back on their Harborough friends.
“Mr. Crasher never comes except on Sundays, or when there is a hard frost; and the rest of the gang I would just as soon be without, for they will light their cigars in the hall—a thing I’ve quite broke your papa of doing, till the whole place smells like a public-house. But I do think that Mr. Sawbridge, or whatever his name is, might have called in common civility, if it was only to ask how you were after your long day.”
Cissy was of the same opinion; but she adhered steadily to the crochet, and said nothing: perhaps she thought the more. She had confided to her mamma certain passages of the nocturnal ride into Market Harborough, and Mr. Sawyer’s categorical answers to her very pertinent queries. I do not think, however, she had quite made what is called “a clean breast of it.”
The mother, as is often the case in these days of improvement, had scarcely so much force of character as the daughter. She never dared cross-question “Cissy” beyond a certain point. Not that the girl was rebellious, but she had a quiet way of setting her mamma down, which was as uncomfortable as it was irresistible.
Mrs. Dove, however, was not without her share of matronly cunning. She had been young herself, and had not forgotten it; nay, she felt quite young again sometimes, even now. It does not follow that because a lady increases in bulk she should decrease in susceptibility. Look at a German baroness—fifteen stone good, in her ball dress, and ?sthetic to the tips of her plump fingers. Mamma got up to fetch her scissors; cut the little boy’s shirt to the true Corazza pattern, and, holding up that ridiculous little garment as if to dry, went on with her argument.
“I don’t think much of that Mr. Sawbridge after all, if you ask me,” said she, looking over the collar full in her daughter’s face. “He seems very shy, by no means good-looking, and I should say has not seen much of the world! Steadier perhaps than Brush, and not so stout as Struggles, but yet he don’t give me the idea of a very gentlemanlike person—like Mr. Crasher, for instance.”
The Honourable was one of the good lady’s great favourites. She admired hugely, as country dames will, his languor, his insouciance, his recklessness and dandyism—above all, his tendency to become torpid at a moment’s notice, which latter faculty frequently provoked the strong-minded “Cissy” beyond endurance.
The girl’s colour, always high, rose perceptibly. Like a true woman, she stood up for her new friend.
“Indeed, Mamma,” said she, “Mr. Sawyer is quite as gentlemanlike as anybody we meet anywhere, and as for being shy, I confess I like people all the better for not being forward, like that rude Mr. Savage, who told me I should look hideous with my hair à l’Impératrice. Now, Mr. Sawyer at least tries to make himself agreeable.”
“And seems to succeed, Cissy,” rejoined Mamma, with an arch smile that deepened the young lady’s colour still more, and consequently heightened her resemblance to her buxom parent. “Well, dear, I must remind Papa about asking some of them to dinner. Shall I tell him to send Mr. Sawbridge an invitation?”
“Really, I don’t the least care,” answered Miss Dove, with a toss of her shining black hair. “I suppose you can’t well leave him out. But, Mamma, I wish you would call the man by his right name. It isn’t Sawbridge, but Sawyer.”
“I’ll try and remember, Cissy,” answered her mother, with another of those provoking smiles, which might have been too much for the young lady’s equanimity, had not the entrance of the Reverend, bringing with him a strong perfume of tobacco, stables, and James’s horse-blister, put an end to the tête-à-tête, and diverted Mrs. Dove’s attack to her natural prey.
The Reverend was not in the best of humours. He had been feeling a horse’s legs—the swelling of which no stimulant, however strong, seemed to be able to reduce. It was aggravating to make his hands smell like a chemist’s shop, and at the same time to be aware that his favourite’s legs were getting rounder and rounder under the application. It was not consolatory to be told by the groom that “the old ’oss was about wore out.” Nor was it reassuring to reflect that he wanted for half-a-dozen other purposes the couple of hundred it would take to replace him. These, however, are the annoyances to which hunting men are subject; the metaphorical thorns that bristle round our rose, and make her all the dearer and the sweeter for their sharpness. As he returned to the house via the pigsties, he could scarcely raise sufficient interest to examine the lately-arrived litter of nine. Spotted black and white, they reminded him of fox-hound puppies; and to the Reverend, short of horses as he was, the association was but suggestive of annoyance.
When he entered the little drawing-room, Mrs. Dove knew by his face that the moment was an unpropitious one at which to hazard a request for anything she wanted to obtain; but having managed him for a quarter of a century, it would have been odd if she had not known exactly how to get her own way with him now.
“My dear,” she said, “I’ve a letter from that man at Brighton about the house we had last year. He wants to know if we would like to engage it for a couple of months in the spring. It would be a good opportunity to give Cissy a little sea-bathing, you know.”
Now, the Reverend had the same horror of that, as of other watering-places, which is usually entertained by middle-aged gentlemen of settled habits, who do not choose to accept second-rate dissipation and salt-water as equivalents for the comforts of a home. He had indeed, during the previous summer, been seduced into spending two months at Brighton, under the erroneous impression that on those Sussex downs the harriers hunted all the year round; but, having found out his mistake, had inwardly registered a vow never to be “let in” for such a benefit again. It was no wonder that he rose freely at the suggestion.
“Gracious Heavens! Mrs. Dove!” exclaimed the Reverend, plumping down into an arm-chair, and raising both hands in irritable deprecation, “knowing what you do, how can you ask such a question? Of course, if this house is too uncomfortable to live in, and it don’t matter about the parish going to the d— to the dogs, and the Bishop is to be a nonentity, and my duties a farce, you are perfectly right to go gadding about from here to Brighton, and from Brighton to London, and from London to Halifax, if you like, and I shall be happy to indulge you. I only wish you would tell me where the money is to come from—where the money is to come from, Mrs. Dove—that’s all!” And, having thus spoken, the Reverend took up the Leicester Journal, and looked over the top of it at his wife, as if he had indeed propounded a poser.
This was exactly what that dear artful woman wanted. She knew that when he had blown off his steam, her husband would settle down into his usual easy temper, and become perfectly malleable in about five minutes. So she folded the poor parishioner’s little shirt with the nicest accuracy, and replied in the most perfect good-humour—
“Well, dear, I’m sure I don’t want to move from here till we go to London. You know I’m so fond of my garden in the spring, and I like you to get your hunting as long as you can: it does you so much good. My idea is, London about the time of the Derby; then Ascot for a week; and home again by the beginning of July. After all, we are wonderfully well situated here for the country as regards society, and Harborough never was so full as it seems this season. What should we do in this part of the world if it wasn’t for hunting?”
Precious, in proportion to their rarity, opinions so orthodox sank like music in the Reverend’s ear. Five-and-twenty years’ experience had failed to teach him, that such congenial sentiments must as necessarily be followed by a request, as a soft southerly wind is succeeded by rain. And this is the strangest feature in our subservience to the other sex. Though they deceive us ninety-nine times, we believe them the hundredth, and, more foolish than the feathered biped, though its meshes be spread in our very sight, rush open-eyed, neck-and-heels into the net of the fowler.
The Reverend glanced at the wife of his bosom, and thought her wonderfully like that picture done a score of years ago. He said as much: but the compliment by no means diverted Mrs. Dove from the object she had in view. “Cissy and I were just talking,” said she simply, “of your friend Mr. Crasher, and the rest of them. By the bye, you really ought to ask some of them to dinner. There’s a barrel of oysters come by rail last night, and our turkeys this year are finer than usual. Better say Tuesday, don’t you think, Papa?” added she coaxingly.
But the Reverend was not so hospitably inclined as he would have been had the old horse been sound. “They can have plenty of oysters at Harborough,” said he. “They won’t care to drive all that way in the dark. Bad roads, wet nights, perhaps, and nobody to meet them. Better put it off, I think, Dottie, till the days get a little longer.”
You or I would hardly have thought of calling so ample a lady as Mrs. Dove, whose baptismal name indeed was Dorothy, by the above diminutive. Nevertheless, when in his best humour, it was the Reverend’s habit to address her by the old pet name, and she returned to the charge accordingly.
“Better do it at once, dear,” she replied. “The end of the season comes upon us before we know where we are. And if frost should arrive, or anything, they are all off to London by the express train. As for not liking to come, they’ll jump at it. Mr. Crasher says yours is the best claret within three counties, and I’m sure you all sit long enough at it to appreciate its merits. How you will talk about hunting: won’t they, Cissy? Well, we can’t wonder at it—gentlemen are so enthusiastic. Why, if I was a man, with such wine as that, I’d sell ’em every horse in my stable before coffee came in.”
The Reverend burst out laughing. The last argument was irresistible. “Have it your own way, Dottie,” said he; “I must be off to write my sermon.” And he betook himself to his study accordingly, leaving his wife and daughter to issue the invitations.
Of these it is unnecessary for us to trace the delivery of more than one. Mr. Sawyer, eating devilled kidneys the following morning for breakfast, felt his heart leap into his mouth at the reception of a primrose-coloured, highly-scented billet, in a long narrow envelope, bearing on the reverse what is called a “monogram”—a thing not unlike the puzzle-wit lock on a gate—consisting of the letter D and others twisted into every variety of shape. Though his experience in ladies’ letters was limited, being indeed confined to one from Miss Mexico at the conclusion of their intercourse, in which she “wished to have no further communication with him, but hoped always to remain friends,” something told him that the delicate, neatly-written superscription must have been indited by a fair hand. For an instant, the delightful suggestion flashed across him, that Miss Dove, forgetting maidenly reserve in the ardour of her affection, had plunged into a correspondence with himself, and he turned hot and cold by turns. Opening the missive with a trembling hand, it proved to be, if not from the young lady, at least from her mamma, and as it lay open all that day on his table, it is no breach of confidence on my part to publish its contents for the reader’s benefit. Thus it ran:—
“Dear Mr. Sawyer,
“Can you give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Tuesday next, at half-past seven o’clock? Mr. Dove desires me to say that as you will probably drive, you had better not attempt the short way, but come by the high-road. My daughter unites with me in hoping that your poor horse has recovered the hard day in which he carried you so well, and I remain,
“Dear Mr. Sawyer,
“Yours sincerely,
“Dorothy Dove.
“Dove-cote Rectory, Friday.”
There is nothing ambiguous in the above. It seems a simple invitation to dinner enough; you or I can gather its drift at a glance. Why the man should have read it over at least half-a-dozen times is more than I can divine.
Meanwhile in the stable of the Honourable Crasher is considerable consternation and bewilderment. The helpers look wise, and wink at each other, as they pass from stall to stall, in the execution of their duties. Mr. Tiptop is completely at his wits’ end. Can he, the knowing Tiptop, looked up to as the great unerring authority on training, pace, weight for age, and other racing mysteries—Newmarket all over—can he have made a mistake? He begins to think, not only that he can, but that he has.
First of all they gave the hapless Marathon a spin with Chance, as a mere breather, and I have already said with what result.
Mr. Tiptop being determined to get at “the rights of it,” then tried the horses a mile at even weights; the consequences admitted of less doubt than ever. Marathon’s “form” was so obviously bad, that the groom concluded he must be amiss.
“Why, he can’t go no faster than our mare can trot,” soliloquised Mr. Tiptop, as he contemplated the bay grinding away at his afternoon’s feed (to do Marathon justice, he was always good at this part of his day’s work), and thought that the animal did by no means show to advantage amongst his stable companions. “Can he be one of those extraordinary horses as I’ve hear’d of, wot can scarcely wag without they’re trained a’most to fiddle-strings, but as nothing mortal can touch if once you gets them fit?” He almost persuaded himself that the new purchase must indeed be such a phenomenon, and resolved on putting him through a severe course of physic, and into strong training forthwith. Before, however, resorting to such ulterior measures, he had the wisdom to think of applying to old Isaac for a solution of the mystery.
He found the senior busy in his little saddle-room, engaged in no less important an occupation than the improvement of The Boy’s morals and general deportment, for which I grieve to observe, since his arrival at Harborough, there was sufficient room. The youth, though he worked hard, was seldom sober now, and never told the truth but by accident. Isaac’s method of imparting ethical instruction was uncompromising, if not agreeable. With the lad’s collar in one hand, and a spare stirrup-leather in the other, he insisted forcibly on those maxims which he considered most salutary to the tender mind, accompanying each with a stinging illustration from the strap; the dialogue between the sage and his disciple being conducted much in this wise:—
Isaac: “I’ve told you over and over again, ye young warmint, and I’ll tell it ye every day I live, if I larrup the skin off ye.” (Whack.)
The Boy: “Oh, please!”
Isaac: “You’ll never rise in life, nor be fit to be called a stableman, without you can work them qualities which have made me what I am; that’s what I am a teaching of ye.” (Whack.)
The Boy: “Oh, please!”
Isaac: “First and foremost, sobriety.”—(Whack, and “Oh, please!”) “Secondly, honesty, coupled with early rising.”—(Whack again, and a howling “Oh, please!” from the pupil.) “Thirdly and lastly, sobriety.”—(Whack.) “I’ll go over ’em again; them’s the three cardinal virtues. You mind what I’m a tellin’ ye—Sobriety, honesty, coupled with early rising, and sobriety.” (Whack, whack, whack; and “Oh, please! oh, please! oh, please!”)
At this juncture, Mr. Tiptop entered. Casting an approving glance at the mode of treatment adopted, he seated himself on an inverted stable-bucket, and professed his readiness to await old Isaac’s leisure ere he asked to have “a word with him.” The other let go of The Boy’s collar—who darted from the place like a weasel—and put on his own coat and hat. Thus armed, he waited to hear what his guest had to say. Mr. Tiptop broached the subject at once.
“Rum go, this here!” said he, hoisting his hat on to his eyebrows. “Uncommon queer start it is, about your bay horse. Can’t get him out, I can’t, do what I will with him; the beggar seems well, too, and pretty fit, as far as I see, and I’ve trained a few of them! If I didn’t know he was a smartish nag now, I should say he was as slow as an eight-day clock when it runs down. What am I to think of it?”
Isaac’s little blue eyes twinkled for an instant, but turned to stone once more, as he replied slowly, “Think of it? Well, it seems to me, now, that he won’t be much use to your governor if he can’t win.”
“Not he!” answered Mr. Tiptop, contemptuously. “I could have told you that. What I want to know is, why the beggar was so much better in your stable than in ours? Come, old chap! you and me has always been good friends, give us an item now; what would you do with him, if you was me?”
Isaac’s face altered not a muscle, nor did the eyes twinkle now, while he replied gravely, “If I was in your shoes, Mr. Tiptop, this is what I’d do—I’d put him into this here race sure-lie, and lay agin him for the very shirt on my back!”
And like the Pythian of old, Isaac having thus delivered himself, could by no means be brought back to the subject. If Mr. Tiptop had looked puzzled when he entered the veteran’s saddle-room, the expression of his countenance, as he emerged from it, was that of a man whom mystery has so completely enfolded in her web, that he has no energy left to make an effort for escape. That he was so utterly bamboozled as to have recourse to his own master, thus risking his authority over the Honourable for ever after, may be gathered from the conversation held between the latter and Mr. Sawyer over their last cigar, before separating for the night, about two P.M. The Honourable, with an air of cordial approval, as that of a man who is paying another a well-merited compliment, drawls out—
“That’s an awful brute you sold me, Sawyer,—that bay of yours. You were quite right to part with him. My fellow tells me he can’t go a yard: wants me to ride him myself; told him I’d rather not, if I can walk as fast. Do you think there’s anything wrong with him, or used he always to gallop as if his legs were tied?”
This is not a very easy question for the former owner to answer, asked, as it is, in the Honourable’s off-hand careless manner. Mr. Sawyer thinks of trying the “virtuous indignation” tack; reflects that under the circumstances it would only make him ridiculous, and that thoroughly to carry it out, he ought to be prepared to take back the horse, a measure that in his wildest moments he has never contemplated, and finally subsides into a good-humoured smile, and affirms—
“We thought him a fair horse enough in the Old Country. Perhaps he don’t shine so bright amongst your clippers. He’s a sound, good-constitutioned beast, too, and never off his feed; that I can answer for, and you’ve seen him jump. I am sorry you don’t like him; but if you wanted a racehorse, you know, that sort of thing is quite out of my line.”
The Honourable, who is good-nature itself, laughs heartily. “I don’t hate him as much as Tiptop does; and if worst comes to worst, he’s good-looking enough for harness. By the bye, old fellow, do you dine over at Dove-cote to-morrow?”
“Well, I’ve been asked” replied our friend, as if he hadn’t set his heart upon going, and been thinking of it ever since. “Why?” he adds, smothering a blush, as he thinks his companion may have found out his secret, and is laughing in his sleeve.
“Only that we’re all going,” rejoins the Honourable; “I’m glad to hear you are not to be left in the lurch. It’s a fearful road, and an infernal long way; but Dove gives you such ’41 as is not to be got anywhere else, and a skinful of it, my boy, not forgetting to drink his own share. I like the mother Dove, too, and pretty Miss ‘Cissy’ is always good fun!”
Sawyer felt the blood tingling in his ears. Amongst the many annoyances that gird as with briars the man who is sufficiently ill-advised to take an interest in any one but himself, not the least is that ridiculous sensitiveness to remarks, hazarded by the most careless of bystanders on the “object” or its belongings. If it is praised, we are jealous; if censured, we are angry; and if not mentioned at all, we are disappointed. That Mr. Sawyer, who had no more “vested interest” in her than the Lord Chancellor, should feel annoyed at Miss Cissy being spoken of as “good fun,” by so amiable a critic as the Honourable Crasher, only shows the absurd organisation of the human mind, and how careful we should be never to put off that armour of selfishness and self-conceit, with which nature has provided us for our self-defence.
Mr. Sawyer made a move toward his bed-candle.
“Good-night, old fellow,” said the Honourable. “By Jove! we’ll go together to-morrow to the Dove-cote. I’ll drive you there in my phaeton; and, by Jove! we’ll put that bay horse of yours in, and see how it goes with a trap behind him—so we will.”
The Honourable appeared so delighted with his own suggestion, that it was impossible to controvert it; but as Mr. Sawyer wound up his watch and deposited it on his dressing-table, it certainly occurred to him that there was such a thing as retribution even at Market Harborough.
To walk a horse twice round a grass-field, in a set of light harness, allowing him afterwards to stand for half an hour in the stables without taking it off, can scarcely be called a thorough breaking-in of the animal to the duties of a coach-horse. Such, nevertheless, was all the tuition vouchsafed by the Honourable Crasher to Marathon’s inexperience, ere the bay found himself placed alongside of another, in that gentleman’s phaeton, for the purpose of taking his former and present owner out to dinner.
His companion—no other than the redoubtable chestnut which Crasher had been riding to covert on his first introduction to our friend—would have been rated as an experienced break-horse by few persons less reckless than his master. He was what is called “a bad starter,” but made up for that deficiency by being as difficult to stop, when once off, as he was at first to set in motion. He had a way, too, of hugging the pole when out of humour, most subversive of his companion’s equanimity. Such tricks were, doubtless, against the progress of Marathon’s education. Altogether a more unpleasant pair, for locomotive purposes, have seldom been “lapped in leather.”
There is no proverb more true than that “Where there is no fear, there is no danger.” The Honourable Crasher’s nerves seemed not only totally unsusceptible to the unworthy sensation
“Which schoolboys denominate ‘funk,’”
but he appeared utterly to ignore the possibility of anything like a casualty wherever horseflesh was concerned. The consequence was that, both in the saddle and on the coach-box, he came scathless out of scrapes that must have been fatal to a man of a more nervous temperament.
I will not dwell on the drive from Market Harborough to the Dove-cote—on the tension of Mr. Sawyer’s nerves, and corresponding rigidity of his muscles, whenever the wheel grazed a heap of stones or an ominous bang against the splash-board reminded him that Marathon had not forgotten how to kick. The Boy, indeed—selected for the office as being of light weight—spent most of the journey on the hind-step, prepared for the worst, but was not obliged to get down and run to their heads more than a dozen times in the course of as many minutes, after which they settled to their work and pulled like griffins. It is sufficient to say that, when they arrived at the Rectory door, close on the tracks of the ignominious fly that had preceded them at least half an hour, Mr. Sawyer’s white tie was uncrumpled, and the Honourable’s whiskers still in tolerable curl.
There was but one stranger present. The Reverend knew how to give a dinner, or if he didn’t his wife did, and had too much consideration for his Harborough friends to inundate them with a host of country neighbours with whom they were not acquainted. This exception was a widowed cousin of Mrs. Dove’s—a voluble lady, not so young as she had been, wearing her shoulders very bare, her dress very full, and her fair hair puffed out with considerable ingenuity. She was a little rouged, a little made-up, but very good-looking notwithstanding, in a blonde, full-blown, boisterous style. A better foil for “Cissy” could scarcely be imagined. This buxom beauty answered to the name of Merrywether, and, to all appearance, would have had no objection to change it.
I pass over the drawing-room ceremonials, generally somewhat dreary before dinner, and only enlivened, in the present instance, by the personal daring of Major Brush, whose idiosyncrasy compelled him at once to constitute himself Mrs. Merrywether’s devoted admirer, and will ask my reader to imagine the company fairly settled at table (circular, with a quantity of light, and flowers), the soup sipped, the first glass of sherry swallowed, turbot and lobster sauce travelling leisurely round—in short, to use a hunting metaphor, which most of the guests would understand, their fox found and run into, and broken up with much gusto and satisfaction. “Whoop! Worry! worry! worry! Tear him and eat him!”
Mr. Sawyer has got a good start and a good place. He did not succeed in taking the daughter of the house in to dinner; for Struggles’s stout figure was in the way, and he could not get by till that jolly personage had unwittingly offered his arm. He secured the chair however on the other side, and thought he spied the least shade of disappointment, succeeded by one of the brightest looks, as he did so. He was consoled accordingly, and, after the sherry, not so shy as usual.
Crasher, of course, in virtue of his rank, took in their hostess, who was supported on her other hand by Savage. Mrs. Merrywether sat between the Reverend and Brush. Everybody talked at once; and the champagne was beyond praise.
Miss Dove was very agreeable, sharing her attentions with great impartiality between Struggles and the agitated Sawyer; only, when she addressed the latter, she used a somewhat lower tone than to any one else. The dodge has a prodigious effect on a man who is not up to it; and our friend was honest and inexperienced enough, where women were concerned. He felt in the seventh heaven, and more inclined for drinking than eating; always a bad sign. What is left to fall back upon, when the stomach is affected by the maladies of the heart?
Not so Struggles. When she had seen the latter wholly engrossed in the merits of a “vol-au-vent” Miss Dove turned her pretty face and dangerous attention to her other cavalier.
“You’ve never asked me how I got home that dark night,” said she. “A long drive in the wet is no joke after such a hard day. I dare say you’ve forgotten all about it, Mr. Sawyer.” And the eyelashes went down till they swept the delicate peach-like cheek.
Our friend looked unutterable things. He could think of nothing more appropriate to say, however, than that “He—he hoped she hadn’t caught cold.”
Cissy laughed outright as she replied, “You wrapped me up too well for any fear of that. Do I look as if I had?” she added, lifting the eyelashes, and fixing our friend with one of her killing looks, as you run a great cockchafer right through the body with a pin.
You see, Mr. Sawyer wanted a good deal of bringing on; and the little witch encouraged him accordingly.
“You look remarkably well,” said he, mustering courage, and proceeding desperately, as, when once a shy man begins, he is always the boldest. “I never saw anything so becoming as that dress. The effect is perfectly lovely.”
“Hush!” replied Cissy; “you mustn’t say that. There’s our beauty. If you talk of loveliness, I am sure you must be perfectly smitten with that,” nodding towards Mrs. Merrywether as she spoke, and drawing his attention to the charms of that lady, who was fair, whereas Cissy herself was more of a brunette, and thus smoothing the way for another compliment.
“I don’t admire such light hair,” replied the gentleman, whose own chevelure was of the sandiest; “and she wants expression; and her eyes are too far apart; and people’s skins should be even whiter than hers to admit of such very low dresses.”
Why are ladies always pleased when other ladies’ dresses are thought too low? Cissy was not above the prejudices of her sex. She gave him a bewitching smile, and called him “a ridiculous creature.”
Even Mr. Sawyer could not misinterpret such signs of favour. Whatever Miss Mexico may have thought, she had never called him “a ridiculous creature” in her life.
“What I admire,” he proceeded, stealing a look at Miss Cissy as he enumerated her personal advantages, “is more colouring, darker hair, and arched eyebrows, and deeper eyes, long eyelashes, and altogether a fresher and brighter style of beauty; in short, I don’t think she would look at all well in a white dress with cherry-coloured trimmings.”
It was the very dress she wore herself. There was no mistake, thought the fair angler: she had hooked him. So she gave him another of the captivating glances, and changed the conversation by drawing his attention to her fan, of which the fragrant sandal-wood only added fuel to his flame, while she turned to Struggles, who, having made an excellent dinner, was vainly endeavouring to talk to her about the coming ball.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Merrywether, whose most prejudiced detractor could not have accused her, at this juncture, of wanting expression, was forcing the running with the agreeable Brush. She was shaking her head, and making eyes, and showing her teeth, and flourishing her shoulders at him, with a degree of energy that must have been fatal to a less experienced campaigner. The Major, however, was proof against all the usual weapons of the female armoury. A confirmed flirt, it was his habit just to stop short of love-making with every woman he sat next to; but, if truth must be told, he never yet had seen one whose attractions he could place in comparison with his cutlet, his champagne, his claret, and his after-dinner cigar. A good-humoured, brainless, easy-going bon-vivant, it was the Major’s eventual destiny to marry a learned lady, with blue spectacles, under whose dynasty he faded away, and was lost to the world altogether. But with this, at present, we have nothing to do.
Mrs. Merrywether was quite willing to take him as he was. Before the cheese was off the table, he had settled an expedition to the Crystal Palace with her, the first time they were both in London, and secured a flower from her bouquet, which he placed, with much mock-devotion, in a glass of sherry and water. Also, on the departure of the ladies, he dived for, and brought to the surface, the following articles, the property of the efflorescent widow: One French fan—epoch, Louis-Quatorze; one pair of white gloves, bound with ribbon, and numbered six and three-quarters; one gold vinaigrette, with tiny chain complete; and one lace-edged handkerchief, with a square inch of cambric in the middle—it is presumed, in case of necessity, to dry the fair mourner’s tears.
After this crowning feat, he threw himself back in his chair, and settled to his host’s claret, like a man who is thoroughly well satisfied with himself.
Never was a dinner that went off better. Mrs. Dove had Savage to listen to, who was well-informed, and Crasher to look at, who was well dressed. Struggles and Dove were congenial souls, and, if once they could get together uninterrupted, would talk about hunting by the hour. Mrs. Merrywether was pleased with her dinner; pleased with her neighbour; also—for she knew, even before she went to the glass in the drawing-room, that she was looking her best—pleased with herself. Cissy was satisfied; Sawyer enchanted; and Crasher, looking forward with lazy gratification to a dangerous drive in the dark, was in higher spirits than usual.
We will leave the ladies to their tea and coffee, undisturbed. The gentlemen close up round their host. A dry biscuit and a magnum of the undeniable make their appearance. The parson fills out a bumper of the rosy fluid, and proposes his first and only toast—“Fox-hunting!”
Each man drinks it with thirsty satisfaction.
When the Reverend’s butler came in the first time with a fresh supply of claret, he found the assembled guests making themselves happy each in his own way. His master and Struggles were crossing the Skeffington Lordship with great enthusiasm, in an imaginary run with Mr. Tailby’s hounds. Brush was expatiating on the merits of the vintage to the Honourable Crasher, who, saying but little in reply, was smiling faintly, and denoting his approval by the regularity with which he charged and emptied his glass. Savage, who dabbled in science, was explaining to Sawyer with considerable perspicuity, a new discovery termed phonography, by which sounds or vibrations of air are to be taken down as they arise, upon the principle of the photograph, and which, when thoroughly perfected and carried out, will make it no longer an impertinence to request a bystander “not to look at you in that tone of voice,” and flattered himself that so good a listener must be imbibing stores of valuable information from his remarks; Mr. Sawyer, however, was lost in delicious dreams, tinged, as the decanter waned, with rosier and rosier hues. He was, for the moment, unconscious of Savage, of Brush, of Crasher, and only recognised the Reverend as the purveyor of the best claret he had ever drunk, and the father of such an angel as all England could not match.
The second time the white-waistcoated functionary arrived with “another of the same,” things wore a far different aspect. Everybody was talking at once on the same subject. Like a bag-fox before an unruly pack of hounds, the topic of steeple-chasing had been started for the general confusion, and each ran his own line and threw his tongue for his own especial encouragement; there seemed no doubt about the long-talked-of race coming off. Preliminaries were adjusted, weights discussed, and a country suggested. Even Struggles seemed to have got over his aversion to the mongrel sport. But on the stout Ganymede’s third and last appearance with “the landlord’s bottle,” the storm was at its loudest, Mr. Sawyer laying down the law with the best. Betting-books were out: even the Reverend had produced what he called “some memorandums;” and the only intelligible sounds, amidst the clamour, were the ominous words “five-to-two”—current odds which everybody seemed to lay, and nobody to take. The discreet servant then whispered to his master that a second edition of coffee was ready to go into the drawing-room, and ere long a glass of brown sherry all round screwed our friends’ courage up to face the ladies once more.
Each man accordingly composed his features into a vacant simper, pulled his neckcloth up, and his wristbands down, and straddled into the presence of those indulgent beings, with an abortive attempt to look as if he, individually, had been drinking little or no wine.
Cissy was at the pianoforte. If Mr. Sawyer had thought her charming before, what must have been his opinion of that sparkling young lady now, seen through the medium of a fair share of champagne at dinner, and the best part of two bottles of claret afterwards? Lights, dress, and a general atmosphere of luxury and refinement, have a wonderful effect in enhancing the attractions of the fair. Alas, that we should have lived to admit it! Though the poet may opine that “beauty unadorned is adorned the most,” our hackneyed taste cannot but confess that it prefers the French maid’s coiffure to the dishevelled tresses; the trim silk stocking, and neat satin shoe, to the slippers down at heel; and the shapely corsage, with its abundant crinoline, to the limp and unassuming dressing-gown. Mr. Sawyer was quite satisfied with Cissy as she was.
The musician was playing “The Swallows,” or “The Humming Bird,” or “The Spring Geese;” Sawyer had no ear for music, and neither knew nor cared which. She just glanced at him as he entered the room, but the encouragement was sufficient to lead him to the instrument.
“How long you have been!” said Miss Cissy in a low voice, without looking up, rattling away at the keys in the loudest of finales, with a vehemence that drowned her observations to all ears but her admirer’s. Then she closed the instrument, whispered papa to order the whist-table, and went and sat on the sofa by Mrs. Merrywether in such a position that Mr. Sawyer couldn’t possibly get at her.
They do not read Izaak Walton, these young women, and yet how well they know how to play their fish! Is it constant reflection and mutual discussion, I wonder, that makes the least experienced of them such skilful anglers? or is it not rather an intuitive sagacity, akin to that with which the kitten teases her ball of cotton as dexterously as the cat does a full-grown mouse? They suck it in, the science of man-taming, I am inclined to believe, with their mothers’ milk. Mamma was just the same, doubtless; and grandmamma too, whom she can just remember, with a cough and crutches, and so on, up to Eve.
With the good-humoured Struggles for a partner and so much of his brains as the claret had left untouched, filled with the image of a dark-eyed young person in white muslin, it was Mr. Sawyer’s lot to do battle at the noble game of whist, against two no less formidable antagonists than Savage and Parson Dove, both first-rate performers even after dinner.
To be successful at this pastime, a man’s whole intellects should be engrossed by the cards, and this was by no means the case with our friend. In spite of his partner’s good-humoured entreaties to “pay attention,” he could not prevent his thoughts, and sometimes his eyes, from wandering to the sofa near the fire-place. He had never liked Brush quite as well as the rest of his companions, but on the present occasion he could not refrain from wishing him even in a hotter place than that which he had selected. The Major with devoted gallantry, having placed his back to a fire that would have roasted an ox, was holding forth in his most agreeable manner to Mrs. Merrywether and the laughing Cissy. Crasher, in the easiest of arm-chairs, was helping Mrs. Dove to make paper lights, and revolving in his own mind, while he listened amiably to the continuous discourse of his hostess, whether he wouldn’t pole up Marathon a little shorter going home, and try the more direct road against which the Reverend was in the habit of warning his guests. They would save a mile, in distance, he thought, and there was sure to be more light on their return. The Honourable had a sort of vague idea, that there was always a moon about one or two o’clock.
Suddenly an explosion of laughter from the window, under cover of which the unconscious Sawyer revoked, and was immediately found out, startled the whole assembly. “How absurd you are!” exclaimed that noisy dame, in answer to some proposition of the Major’s which appeared highly amusing to the ladies on the sofa. “Now I appeal to ‘Cissy’ whether she agrees with you. Girls are the best judges. Cissy! do you think the Major as invincible as he says he is?”
Mr. Sawyer, on thorns to hear the answer, trumped his partner’s best with considerable emphasis, and lost another trick.
“It’s not fair to ask me,” answered Miss Dove, laughing heartily. “He knows I admire him immensely; I’ve always told him so!” and the three went on with their conversation, which, I am bound to say, was great nonsense, but amused them considerably all the same.
After this, Struggles thought the sooner they left off whist the better. There is scarcely a mistake, of which that intricate game admits, into which Mr. Sawyer did not rush, so to speak, as if with a suicidal purpose. “Hang the fellow!” thought Struggles, eyeing his partner with a kind of good-humoured astonishment: “if he was drunk, one could understand it; never saw such a thing! never saw such cards so thrown away! and yet the man’s no fool. Oh! he must be drunk! must be! but carries his liquor with discretion!” and thereupon Struggles found himself looking upon his partner’s features with a more indulgent eye, and contemplating his own losses with the resignation of a man who suffers in a good cause.
Three rubbers! one of them a bumper! How many points, for the sake of my hero, I am ashamed to confess. It was indeed, as Struggles pathetically remarked, “about the worst night he’d ever had, since he left Westminster.”
Yet there was balm in Gilead, after all. The Honourable, resisting all entreaties to stay and have some supper, rang to order his phaeton round, and went fast asleep in his arm-chair after the exertion. Their host, exhilarated by his winnings, and in high good-humour, began about the steeple-chase; and the ladies, who, I am convinced, patronise these exhibitions chiefly on account of the silk jackets, and connect them remotely in their own minds with a fancy dress ball, began to betray great curiosity on the subject of the “colours of the riders,” “gorge de pigeon,” the Major’s selected hue, having decidedly the call. During the discussion which so favourite a topic was sure to engender, it came out, somehow, that Mr. Sawyer was going to take part in the hazardous amusement—an announcement which he made darkly, and with a sidelong glance at Cissy, that seemed to say he would rather break his neck than not. The young lady having teased him enough, was quite ready to meet him halfway. “Isn’t it very dangerous?” said she, with clasped hands and a look of affectionate interest. “Are you really going to ride, Mr. Sawyer? Oh! how I hope you’ll win!” And down went the eyelashes once more.
After that, what cared Mr. Sawyer for rubbers, bumpers, points and losses? Everything was couleur de rose again. Whilst the others gathered round the wine-and-water tray, he sank down on the sofa by her side, and for a delicious five minutes had his enslaver all to himself. In that brief period, he managed to find out her favourite colour, and promised to adopt it in the coming steeple-chase. A few stars were twinkling dimly through the cloudy atmosphere when he lit his cigar and got into the phaeton by the Honourable’s side. Why couldn’t Mr. Sawyer look at them without thinking of Cissy Dove?
“Sit tight,” exclaimed the Honourable, as the phaeton bumped forcibly against the stone post of the Rectory entrance, and proceeded into the road with what sailors call “a considerable slue to port,” consequent on that brute Marathon hugging the pole and setting his mouth with pig-headed obstinacy. “I must pitch into you!” added the driver, suiting the action to the word, and administering heavy punishment to the transgressing animal—a discipline which Marathon resented by kicking hard against the splash-board; whilst the chestnut, a sensitive, high-couraged five-year-old, was driven almost mad by the sounds of repeated flagellation. “Are you nervous on wheels?” added the charioteer quietly, as he felt his companion’s leg stiffen against his own with the instinctive rigidity of apprehension. “Nervous!” forsooth! Ask Launcelot fresh from the presence of Guenevere, or Charles Brandon tilting before the young Dauphiness of France, or Bothwell with his armour buckled on by Mary Stuart, if those doughty champions were afraid; but forbear to put so ridiculous a question at a moment like the present to John Standish Sawyer. “Nervous, indeed!” Our friend pressed his hat firmly on his head, folded his arms across his chest, and laughed grimly in his questioner’s face. “All right, old fellow!” said he; “drive on, if you like, to the devil!”
“He’s a rare plucked one,” thought the Honourable to himself, as he started the horses in a gallop, apparently with no other view than that of arriving at the destination proposed. The night was dark, and threatening rain as it clouded over rapidly; the way intricate, full of turns and difficulties; and The Boy, is it needless to observe, helplessly drunk in the rumble. He would have been a venturous speculator who had taken five to one that they arrived safe at Market Harborough.
The wheels flew round with frightful velocity, scattering the mud profusely over the occupants of the carriage. The horses with lowered heads laid themselves down to their work, pulling wildly. The Honourable’s arms were extended, and his feet thrust forward. He would not have admitted it, but it looked very much as if they were running away with him.
“An’t they getting a little out of your hand?” asked Mr. Sawyer, hazarding the question in its mildest form, as he recognised Marathon’s well-known manner of putting down his head when he meant mischief; and calculated if anything should give way, whereabouts his own body would shoot to, at that pace.
“Only going free,” answered Crasher with the utmost composure, though his cigar was burnt all the way down one side to his lips by the current of air created in the rapidity of their transit. “Remarkably free—but I like phaeton horses to run up to their bits.”
“Do you?” thought Mr. Sawyer; but, despite the enthusiasm and the claret, and the romance of the whole evening, he wished himself anywhere else. Independent of the ignominious ending of being dashed to pieces out of a phaeton, it would be hard lines never to see Cissy Dove again. However, there was nothing for it but to sit still and trust to Crasher’s coachmanship. Anything like expostulation with that gentleman he felt would be worse than useless.
I recollect to have seen or heard somewhere an anecdote of the celebrated “Hell-fire Dick,” which exhibits such sang-froid in a dangerous predicament as to be worth repeating. Dick, then, who had attained his flaming sobriquet by the dashing pace and general recklessness with which he drove, was not only one of the most skilful of the old-fashioned Long coachmen, but was equally noted for the cool imperturbability of his demeanour and the suavity of his replies. One very dark night, whilst proceeding at his usual pace, he was so unfortunate as to get off the road on a common where several gravel-pits yawning on each side for his reception, made the mistake as dangerous as it was disagreeable. With a tremendous lurch the coach swung over one of these ready-made graves, and there was just light enough to perceive the fifteen feet or so of sheer descent yawning for its victims. “Where have you got to now, Dick?” exclaimed the box-passenger, in accents of pardonable irritation and alarm. “Can’t say, sir,” replied Dick, with the utmost politeness, while they were all turning over together—“Can’t say, I’m sure—never was here before!”
Now, if the Honourable Crasher had been going to be shot the next minute, it is my firm conviction that impending destruction would not have ruffled his plumes, nor agitated the languor of his accustomed manner in the slightest degree. Whether such a temperament is entirely natural, or is not rather to a certain extent the result of education, enhanced by what we must call the affectation peculiar to a class, it is not our business to inquire: but we may fairly acknowledge to a respectful commiseration for a quiet respectable country gentleman who finds his neck committed to the keeping of one of these imperturbable, placid, yet utterly reckless adventurers.
The wind was getting up, and a heavy shower of mingled sleet and rain dashing in their faces, added considerably to the discomfort of the whole process.
“This can’t last long,” murmured Mr. Sawyer below his breath, and holding on vigorously to the side of the carriage the while, as they whirled fiercely through the obscurity, the rush of their career varied only by frequent jumps and bumps that threatened to jerk him clean out over the splash-board. He was not very far wrong in his calculations.
Their course lay along one of those field-roads so common in Leicestershire, where the track on a dark night is not easily distinguished from the adjacent ridge-and-furrow, and which, delightful to the equestrian for that very reason, as no jealous fence prevents him diverging for a canter on to the springy pasture, are less convenient for carriages owing to the number of gates that delay the passage of the vehicle. They were now approaching the first of these obstacles to their course, and Crasher had not yet got a pull at his horses.
“It’s open, I think,” remarked the Honourable, peering into the darkness ahead, and endeavouring to moderate the pace without effect.
“I think not!” replied Mr. Sawyer, setting his teeth for a catastrophe.
Right again! Three more strides and they were into it!
A crackling smashing noise of broken wood-work—one or two violent bangs against the splash-board—a faint expostulation of “Gently, my lads!” from the Honourable—a tremendous jolt against the post, which was torn up by the roots—and Mr. Sawyer found himself on his face and hands in an exceedingly wet furrow; a little stunned, a good deal confused, and feeling very much as if somebody had knocked him down, and he did not know whom to be angry with.
As he rose and shook himself to ascertain that no bones were broken, much struggling and groaning as of an animal in distress, mingled with weeping and lamentation from a human voice, smote on his ear. The former arose from Marathon, who couldn’t get up, with the other horse and the pole and part of the carriage atop of him: the latter from The Boy, who, frightened for the moment into a spurious sobriety, thus gave vent to his feelings of utter despondency and desolation.
“I thought the brute could jump timber,” said a calm voice in the surrounding darkness. “Let us see: here’s the carriage—there are the horses—and that must be The Boy. Where are you, Sawyer?”
“Here!” answered our friend, coming forward, rubbing his elbows and knees, to discover if he was hurt; the Honourable, who had never abandoned his cigar, endeavouring to extricate the horses—a measure only to be accomplished by dint of cutting the harness—and to estimate the amount of damage, and the impossibility of putting in to refit.
Our friend set to work with a will. By their joint endeavours they succeeded at last in getting the hapless Marathon and his companion clear of the wreck. Both were obviously lamed and injured; the carriage, as far as could be made out in the darkness, broken all to pieces.
The Boy, after flickering up for a few minutes, had become again unconscious. As the old watchman used to sing out, it was “Past one o’clock and a stormy morning!”
“Whereabouts are we?” asked Mr. Sawyer in dolorous accents, as he tried to persuade himself he ought to be thankful it was no worse. “Whereabouts are we, and what had we better do?”
“Over a hundred miles from London,” answered the Honourable, “that’s all I know about it. Holloaing, I suppose, would be no use—there can’t be a house within hearing, and the fly has gone the other road. Have a cigar, old fellow! and, just to keep the fun going, perhaps you wouldn’t mind singing us a song?”
It was only under a calamity like the present that the Honourable condescended to be facetious.
Mr. Sawyer was on the verge of making an angry reply, when the sound of a horse’s hoofs advancing with considerable rapidity changed it into a vigorous call for assistance.
“Hilli-ho! ho!” shouted Mr. Sawyer. “Hilli-ho! ho!” answered a jolly voice, as the hoofs ceased, and came clattering on again, denoting that the rider had pulled up to listen and was coming speedily to help. “What’s up now?” asked the jolly voice, in somewhat convivial accents, as an equestrian mass of drab and leggings, which was all that could be made out through the darkness, loomed indistinctly into the foreground. “What’s up now, mates? got the wrong end uppermost this turn, sure-lie.”
“Come to grief at the gate,” explained the Honourable. “Didn’t go quite fast enough at it, Sawyer,” he added, half reflectively, half apologetically, to his friend.
“Why, it’s Muster Crasher!” exclaimed the jolly voice, in delighted tones. “Well, to be sure! Not the first gate, neither, by a many—only to think of it, well, well! But come, let’s see what’s the damage done—dear! dear! you’ll never get home to-night. You must come up to my place, ’tain’t above a mile through the fields—we’ll get you put up, nags and all, and send down for the trap first thing i’ the morning. How lucky I was passing this way! Coming back from market, ye see, I’d just stopped to smoke a pipe with neighbour Mark down at The Holt, and was maken’ for home in a hurry, ’cause it’s rather past my time, you know, when I hear this gentleman a hollerin’ murder! Up I comes and finds the ship overboard with a vengeance. What a start it is, sure-lie!”
Thus moralising, and never leaving off talking for an instant, the jolly yeoman jumped off his horse, and lent his powerful assistance to clear away the wreck; shaking The Boy into life again with considerable energy. In a few minutes the four men, leading the two damaged carriage-horses, were stumbling and groping their way across the fields towards the new arrival’s farm.
Ere they reached their destination, the owner, with considerable politeness, introduced himself to our friend. “No offence, sir,” said he, “my name’s Trotter—Trotter of Trotter’s Lodge, and that’s my place where you see the lights a shinin’—Mr. Crasher, he knows me well—think I’ve met you out a huntin’ more than once this season—allow me, sir, we’ll have the missus up in no time, and a hearty welcome to you both.”
As Mr. Trotter thus hospitably concluded, he ushered his guests into a comfortable kitchen, where a tallow candle was still glimmering in its accustomed place. The master was obviously in the habit of coming home late; but that the practice was contrary to the rules of domestic discipline Mr. Sawyer gathered from the accents of a shrill voice raised in tones of reproach from an upstairs dormitory.
“Trotter! Trotter!” exclaimed the voice, unconscious of visitors, and proceeding apparently from beneath a considerable weight of bed-clothes, “is that you at last? It’s too bad! It’s nigh upon two o’clock. Mind you rake out the fire, and don’t go spilling the candle-grease all about as you come upstairs!”
Mr. Trotter, still perceptibly elevated, winked facetiously at his guests. “Get up, Margery!” he called out; “get up, I tell ye! make haste and come down. Never mind your night-cap. Here’s two gentlemen come to see ye!” And with many apologies and repeated allusions to the substantive “keys,” Mr. Trotter stirred up the fire, lit another candle, and proceeded upstairs to rouse his better-half.
In less time than you or I as a bachelor could believe it possible, a smiling dame made her appearance from above-stairs, with a neat morning cap over her comely head, and a bright rosy face, very different from the sallow hues of many a fine lady when first she wakes, blushing beneath it. That her petticoat was put on in a hurry, and her gown unfastened behind, was only what might be expected in such a rapid turn-out. These trifling drawbacks detracted not the least from the bustling hospitality with which she received her guests. It was only by the most pathetic entreaties that the Honourable dissuaded her from having a fire lighted in the best parlour, and extorted her permission for them to sit in the kitchen.
Dry slippers were soon provided for the guests. The horses, inspected by the stable lantern, were discovered not to be irremediably injured, though Marathon’s chance was out for the steeple-chase, “if indeed,” as his former and present owners remarked in a breath, though with different emphasis, “he ever had one.” The Boy was put to bed, where he might be heard snoring all over the house. What Mr. Trotter called a “snack” was set on the table, consisting of a round of beef, a ham, some cold pork-pie, an Eddish cheese, and a few other trifles of a like nature, adapted for a late meal as being light and easy of digestion. Port and sherry were produced and declined in favour of huge steaming beakers of hot brandy-and-water. Arrangements were entered into for forwarding the two gentlemen to Harborough in the farmer’s gig “first thing to-morrow morning.” Mr. Trotter produced a box of cigars and announced his intention of “making a night of it!”
A faint scream from his wife promised to a certain extent to modify the conviviality of the meeting. “She couldn’t abear the sight of blood,” she said, with many excuses for her feminine susceptibility, and drew the company’s attention to the personal appearance of Mr. Sawyer, which everybody had hitherto been too busy to observe, and which indeed presented a sufficiently ghastly aspect to excuse the good dame’s reiterated assurances that it “had give her quite a turn.”
A severe contusion on the eyebrow, accompanied by a cut extending to the cheek-bone, and which had covered one side of his face with dried blood, made him look much more damaged than he really was, and though kindly Mrs. Trotter quickly recovered her equanimity and brought him warm water and vinegar and balsam, and eventually plastered him up with about half a sheet of diachylon, she could not help shuddering during the operation, and seemed glad when it was over. Our farmers’ wives of the present day are not quite so much accustomed to broken heads as bonny “Ailie,” the helpmate of immortal Dandie Dinmont.
The borderer, however, could not have been more hospitably inclined than was the jovial Leicestershire farmer. Setting aside the difference of time and locality, they had indeed many qualities in common. The same love of hunting, the same daring in the saddle, the same open-hearted hospitality and tendency to push good-fellowship a little over the bounds of sobriety. The only difference perhaps was this that Dandie Dinmont would have been getting up before Mr. Trotter was thinking of going to bed.
I am not going to recapitulate the sayings and doings of those jovial small hours after Mrs. Trotter had betaken herself once more hopelessly to her couch. The Honourable Crasher, always a gentleman, though rather a torpid one, was equally at home with a duke and a drayman, perhaps more in his element with a hunting friend like Trotter than either. The good runs they recapitulated, the horses they remembered, the grey that was bought by Mr. G——, and the chestnut that had carried Lord W—— so well for years, the fences they had negotiated—nay, the very toasts they proposed and did justice to, would fill a chapter. It is sufficient to say that when Mr. Sawyer awoke in the best bedroom about sunrise the following morning, he had a racking head-ache, his mouth felt like the back of a Latin grammar, and the only distinct recollection with which he could charge his memory of the previous night’s conversation was his host’s recipe for making a young horse a safe fencer, which he certainly did not then feel in a condition to adopt.
“If you’ve got a green horse as you’re not very confident on at strong timber,” said Mr. Trotter, about the fourth glass of brandy-and-water, “you tackle him my way. You take him out o’ Sundays or any afternoon as you’ve nothing particular to do, and pick him out some real stiff ones. Give him two or three good heavy falls, and I’ll warrant you’ll have very little trouble afterwards. That’s the way to make ’em rise!—ain’t it, Mr. Crasher?”
After such a night’s amusement as I have described, gentlemen are apt to be later in the morning than they originally proposed.
Our belated travellers had intended getting back to their quarters at Harborough by eight or nine o’clock, there to make their toilets, discuss their breakfasts, and so proceed to covert methodically as usual, in time to meet Mr. Tailby’s clipping pack at Carlton Clump. It was nine, however, before either of them was stirring, and then the hospitable Trotter, who was himself going to hunt, and who came in from shepherding as rosy and fresh as if he had never seen brandy-and-water in his life, would not hear of their going away without breakfast. Altogether they did not get clear of Trotter’s Lodge much before ten o’clock, and as they drove out of the farmyard they had the mortification of seeing their entertainer mounted on his four-year-old (“Fancy riding a four-year-old after such a night!” thought Mr. Sawyer) on his way to the meet. “And we’ve got to go home and dress, and then come all this way back again,” moralised the Honourable. “I say, Sawyer, I wish I could make this beggar go as fast as we did last night,” and Crasher smiled at the recollection, as a man smiles who recalls some peaceful scene of his youth, or some good action which he will never find cause to repent.
This beggar, however, though a good farmer’s nag enough, knew quite well that it wasn’t his day for Market Harborough, and displayed great unwillingness to improve upon seven miles an hour in that direction. The chance of being in time faded away momently. Already they had overtaken several grooms with hunters; worse still, one or two early men on their hacks had overtaken them, and they had not yet struck into the high-road. At last the sound of wheels behind them caused the old horse to quicken his pace—not sufficiently so, however, to prevent the pursuing carriage from gaining on them rapidly. Mr. Sawyer looked back. Oh for a gig umbrella! It was none other than Parson Dove driving his daughter to the meet, that young lady’s very becoming costume denoting that it was her intention to join in the pleasures of the chase. Here was a predicament! To be detected by the queen of his affections, with whom he had parted at midnight, in all the correct decorum of evening costume, still in the same dress, so inappropriate at 10.30 A.M., bearing obvious tokens of having been out all night, and worse than all, with an inflamed countenance, blood-shot eyes, and a face half-eclipsed in plaister! Perdition! It was not to be thought of!
With the energy of despair he snatched the whip from the Honourable’s astonished grasp, and applied it with such good will to the old horse’s ribs, that the animal broke incontinently into a gallop, and turned into the high-road some fifty yards ahead of its pursuers, who would cross that thoroughfare directly, whereas Mr. Sawyer and its driver would follow its broad track to Harborough. “Cover me up!” exclaimed our friend to his laughing companion, as he crouched in the bottom of the carriage, under the scanty gig-apron, and devoutly hoped he had escaped recognition—“cover me up! I wouldn’t be seen in this plight by any of that family for a hundred pounds!” Nevertheless, he resolved, so to speak, to substantiate his alibi by swearing the Honourable to secrecy, and abstaining altogether for that day from the chase.
About this period there might have been—and indeed, by his intimates, there was—remarked an obvious change in the appearance, habits, and general demeanour of our friend. No longer dressed in the rough-and-ready style which had heretofore been at once his glory and his peculiarity, Mr. Sawyer now began to affect a strange refinement of costume, bordering on effeminacy. His boots were thinner and much tighter than of old; he turned his collars over his neckcloth, after the prevailing fashion, thereby imparting to his physiognomy an expression of romantic vacuity; anointed his head till it shone again; affected gloves on all occasions, and set up a ring. Altogether, his exterior was as symptomatic of his disorder as that of Benedict. Also he purchased, at a printseller’s over the way, a representation of a young person washing her feet in a stream, and purporting to be a “Highland Lassie,” but of a meretricious aspect which, it is only fair to state, is rarely to be observed amongst the Scottish mountaineers. It was one of those startling accidental likenesses to the lady of his affections, which a man must be as hard hit as Mr. Sawyer to detect. In the hunting-field, too, he adopted an ambitious style of riding, totally at variance with his previous quiet, straightforward form; and a considerable interval of bad-scenting weather enabled him to distinguish himself to his heart’s content. When hounds run best pace, horses have not wind for extraordinary exertions in the matter of fencing; and, moreover, such saltatory exploits as are out of the common way can be witnessed but by few, and those are completely engrossed in their own doings; but when the pack checks in every field, a man who chooses to single himself out by charging the ugliest bullfinches and the stiffest rails, either because he wants to attract attention or to sell his horse, has every opportunity of showing up the latter and calling down upon himself the animadversions of all true sportsmen. Our friend, with the two horses he bought from Mr. Varnish—both capital leapers—in addition to Hotspur and the grey, had no lack of material on which to flourish away in too close proximity to the chase. Charles Payne, though with a strong fellow-feeling for “keenness,” began to hate the sight of him, Mr. Tailby to dread his appearance as he would that of a black frost, and Lord Stamford to find that even his imperturbable good-humour might be exhausted at last.
What is to be expected, however, of a gentleman who has taken to repeating Montrose’s well-known lines—
“If doughty deeds my lady please,
Right soon I’ll mount my steed;
And keen his lance, and strong his arm,
That bears from me the meed;”
varied by the resolute sentiment—
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all!”
One or other of these romantic stanzas was continually on Mr. Sawyer’s lips. After their enunciation, he was used to sigh deeply, shake his head, and light a cigar, which he would smoke vehemently for a quarter of an hour or so, in a brown study.
Our friend’s reflections, however, were not wholly dipped in the roseate hues of hope. Stern misgivings would come across him, as to the imprudence of the career on which he had embarked. He was spending a deal of money, that was the fact; and he had always, hitherto, been of a saving disposition, rather than otherwise. In the prosecution of his schemes against Miss Mexico, his outlay, indeed, had been principally in cheap jewellery and lavender-water—articles of fascination for the purchase of which he would have been handsomely reimbursed by that lady’s thirty thousand pounds, if he had got it. But in the present case, not only was his extravagance much greater, but it is mere justice to state, that he had never weighed Miss Dove’s fortune or the want of it in the balance with her attractions. The former flame had half a plum; the present might not have half-a-crown. Bah! what of that? Those eyelashes alone were worth all the money!
Nevertheless, a stud of horses, though consisting only of the modest number of four hunters and a hack, are not to be kept for nothing, more particularly when away from home. Independent of stable-rent, forage, subscriptions to hounds, and necessary douceurs to different individuals, any man who has ever paid a groom’s book will bear witness to the extraordinary rapidity with which its different items accumulate. Naphtha alone is as dear as claret, and consumed with equal liberality; sponges, rubbers, currycombs, and dandy-brushes require to be replaced with astonishing frequency; and, what with shoeing and removing, the blacksmith’s bill is as long as his stalwart arm. When you add to all this an everyday dinner of the best, with champagne and claret à discrétion—if such a quality, indeed, can be said to exist in a bachelor party—you will not share Mr. Sawyer’s surprise at discovering that his present expenditure far exceeded his calculations. The four hundred he had paid to Mr. Varnish for two horses completed a good round sum; and, for a minute or two, he thought he had better have remained at The Grange.
This last item, however, in his outlay, suggested to him a method by which he might combine fame with money-making, and, if Fortune stood his friend, have his season almost for nothing. The chestnut five-year-old, whom, out of compliment to Miss Dove, he had resolved to call “Wood-Pigeon,” was really a good nag. He was a quick and fine fencer, could gallop fast, and go on. Altogether, Mr. Varnish was not beyond the mark when he described him to the purchaser as adapted for “safety, punctuality, and dispatch.” Why not put him into this steeple-chase they made such a fuss about, win a hatful of money in stakes, bets, &c., to say nothing of the “honour and glory,” and then sell the whole stud, and retire upon his laurels? Should Fortune smile, and land him first past the post, it would be the proudest day of his life; and even in the event of failure, why, “If doughty deeds my lady please,” &c.; and Miss Dove could not but look upon him with a more favourable eye, when he had worn her colours in the race.
Old Isaac must be taken into consultation. For the first time, his master rather shunned the glance of that keen, hard eye. He walked into the stable one evening, after hunting, and began to sound his servant on the important position.
“By the by, Isaac,” said he, in an off-hand tone, “they’re talking of a steeple-chase here. Only amongst the gentlemen, you know; we sha’n’t want much training. I think I should have a fair chance with Wood-Pigeon?”
Isaac shook his head. “Well, sir,” said he, “you know best. Who’s to ride?”
“Oh, I should ride him myself, of course,” replied his master, with a toss of the head that as much as said, “With such a jockey, he’s sure to win.” “Ride him myself, and do all I know, you may depend,” he added facetiously.
Old Isaac reflected. “Have you ever ridden a steeple-chase?” he asked, after a moment’s consideration.
Mr. Sawyer was obliged to admit that he never had.
“Well, then, I have,” said the groom. “You don’t know what it is. Such a blazin’ pace through the fields! and such an owdacious scuffle at the fences! Nothin’ but a professional can keep his head at that work; and he often gets it broke. Better not try it, master: better let it alone. They’ll only make a fool of ye.”
Mr. Sawyer waxed indignant. “That’s my business,” said he; “yours is to get the horse fit. I tell you I’ve entered him—Wood-Pigeon by Wapiti. He’ll be first favourite the day of the race. Do you hear? I depend upon you to get him thoroughly fit.”
Isaac scratched his head. “Fit!” he repeated. “Yes—I’ll get the horse fit: you get the rider. If you must have a turn at it, take my advice, master. You get yourself in good wind; keep your head clear; jump off at the moment the flag drops; never let his head go; and, above all, sit still.”
After this, Isaac could never again be brought to open his mouth on the subject.
When a man has not been provided by Nature with more than an average share of personal advantages, that same process of dressing for a ball after a bachelor’s dinner-party is an affair of considerable trouble and dissatisfaction. To devote those minutes, that are wont to pass so pleasantly in the enjoyment of conviviality or repose, to the cares of the toilet, is in itself a sufficient infliction; but the contrast is rendered all the more aggravating by abortive efforts to eradicate the effluvia of tobacco-smoke, to disguise the appearance of satiety, not to say repletion, attendant on four courses and a dessert, with champagne and claret at discretion, and to achieve that general aspect of light and airy gaiety which even middle-aged gentlemen of spherical proportions consider most captivating in the eyes of the fair.
All these difficulties had Mr. Sawyer to encounter on the night of the Harborough Ball.
Yes, the important event had arrived at last, after much discussion by stewards and lady patronesses, and general differences of opinion amongst all concerned. After protestations from some that they could by no means fill their houses, and assurances from others that nothing would induce them to travel such distances by night in bad weather, and declarations from all that, for their own part, they voted the whole thing a bore, the day was at length fixed, the musicians engaged, the supper ordered, and the room prepared.
“It was to be a capital ball,” said one, “comprising the élite of three counties, and at least as many beautiful débutantes.” “There would be nobody there,” vowed another, “but the M.F.H., and the M.P., and old Mrs. Halfcaste, with a bevy of the townspeople.” The room would be cold, prophesied the malcontents; the supper scanty, the roads slippery, and the moon obscured. Miss Cecilia Dove, in talking the matter over with her mamma, inclined first to one, and then the other of these opinions; supporting each in turn with vigour and tenacity. Under any circumstances, however, she had determined to go.
Behold Mr. Sawyer then, in his little smoky bedroom, struggling into a white neckcloth, about ten P.M., and contemplating a pale face and heavy eyes; the unattractive appearance of which he could not wholly attribute to the bad glass which adorned his dressing-table. He was nervous, too, was our friend John Standish Sawyer; unquestionably nervous. Of all nights in his life this was the one when he would fain have borrowed, if he could, the exterior of another hunting-man, a very different-looking person, whom painters strive to represent as worthy to be the Queen of Beauty’s choice, in their embodiment of the hapless loves of Venus and Adonis. Alas! Mr. S. could not conceal from himself that he was anything but a good-looking fellow.
Nevertheless, a plain exterior, like a bad farm, must equally be cultivated at the proper season. Dress works wonders, and the tailor, if you employ Poole, doubtless helps to make the man. Like Brummel, our friend spoilt a good many white neckcloths before he effected the desired tie. At last, however, he got it to his liking, swung himself into a roomy dress-coat—scarlet, with silk lining—and proceeded, not without trepidation, to the scene of action.
Is there any penalty or disgrace attached to the solecism of being earlier than one’s neighbours at ball, concert or other public occasion of festivity? It is wonderful what pains people will take to avoid this appearance of over-punctuality. I cannot call to mind any occasion on which I have thus had the room entirely to myself; nor did I ever meet any one who would confess that he had enjoyed this monopoly of vacuity. And yet somebody must arrive first! I wonder how that desolate one employs the long leaden moments. Does he wander about with his hands in his pockets, trying to look as if he expected something, and scanning the decorations with critical sang froid! Does he fraternise with the musicians, who, drawn up in a row, must present, indeed, a formidable array of eyes to a person of moderate apprehensions, and win their eternal goodwill by performing a pas seul to their voluntary strains? or does he give way to a cowardly despair, and, retreating in disorder, retire incontinently to bed? Probably not the latter, or the ball would never begin.
Mr. Sawyer had none of this to confront single-handed. Loitering about the cloak-room door, he came upon Struggles, Brush, Savage, and Co.; all equally averse with himself to plunge prematurely into the festive scene, and was greeted by the conclave, from whom he had parted about an hour previously, with a boisterous cordiality born of their potations.
“He’s meant!” said one, talking of our friend as if he were a racehorse in strong training, whom each had backed heavily to win. “Got-up to the nines!” exclaimed another, scanning him from top to toe, as an adjutant scans a recruit. “Hang it! Sawyer, you’ve done it to-night!” laughed a third; “they won’t let you out of this alive!” And Mr. S., who rather flattered himself the general effect was favourable, did not quite know whether to be pleased with their approbation or to take huff at their familiarity. Meanwhile carriages were setting down with increasing frequency. The clatter was quite alarming in the paved streets of the little country town; the steam of horses almost obscured the carriage-lamps, and sweet little satin-slippered feet stepped daintily from inside, over an interregnum of wet straw, on to a soppy foot-cloth. When ankles are neatly turned, but not otherwise, it is surprising what a deal of holding-up is required by the compressible and expansive crinoline. Warm greetings and affectionate pressures of the hand were exchanged between such swains as were lucky enough to intercept them and their own peculiar damsels in the passage to the cloak-room, whither the ladies betook themselves forthwith, there to leave their becoming and coquettish little burnouses ere they shook out their canvas and got under sail in all the splendour of fall dress.
Mammas looked approvingly at their bridling daughters, as the latter tripped into the ball-room before them; mammas, the very counterpart of those blooming beauties, had you rolled up two or three into one, but fair-shouldered, brown-haired, and comely yet, as English matrons are, up to a very uncertain period. Papas, with white gloves and red faces, slapped each others’ backs, and talked about yesterday’s gallop. The musicians struck up the prettiest waltz of the last season but one; Major Brush, with unexampled temerity, dashed into the enchanted ring with Lady Barbara Blazer in his arms; Bob Blazer followed suit with flirting Miss Tiptoes. A whirling maze of tulle, and wreaths, and sparkling gems, and perfumed floating tresses pervaded the magic circle; louder pealed the cornet-à-piston, brighter glanced the eyes, faster flew the dancers, the top of the room began to fill, and the ball might now be said to have fairly begun.
It is only your habitual ball-goer, however, who can thus, like some consummate swimmer, dash in with a header and strike out at once into the flood. Less experienced performers may be excused for shivering awhile on the brink. Shy gentlemen congregating round the doorway fitted their gloves on with tedious accuracy, looking over their collars meanwhile at their future partners, with an air of melancholy defiance; the weaker-minded ones informing each other confidentially that it was “going to be a capital ball!” The ranks of these waverers thinned perceptibly though, as the dance wore on, and Mr. Sawyer, who did not waltz, found himself ere long stranded high and dry at the top of the room amongst the grandees; a little bewildered, truly, and lost in such a crowd of strangers, but greatly sustained, nevertheless, by Hope and Bordeaux.
These stimulants, as might be expected, waned simultaneously. Fresh arrivals blocked the doorway; and still she didn’t come! Not she, indeed! Catch Miss Cissy doing anything half so green as arriving early or staying late. No, no; if you want to be sought after, ladies, you must be sparing of your presence and economical of your smiles. There is no dog so obedient as the one you keep sitting up on his hind legs, to beg for a crumb of biscuit at a time.
Mr. Sawyer was in despair. As a stranger, however, he was presented to the grandees, and found himself, he scarcely knew how, engaged to dance “The Lancers” with Lady Barbara Blazer, a formidable beauty, of dashing, not to say, overwhelming manners, and who attributed to extraordinary forwardness, for which she rather liked him, our friend’s confused and half-unconscious request that she would favour him with her hand.
Now dancing was not Mr. Sawyer’s forte, and he had never before attempted “The Lancers.” It is no wonder, then, that the intricacies of that measure should have utterly bamboozled him, or that he should have set to the wrong people, got in everybody’s way, and made himself supremely ridiculous. Add to this, that in the midst of the most difficult man?uvre, when, hunting over the set for his own partner in vain, he caught Cissy Dove’s eyes fixed upon him with an expression of malicious amusement; and it is needless to specify that his discomfiture was complete: Cissy Dove looking radiant as a Peri. Oh, after that, it was all magic and moonshine. Lady Barbara never alluded to him subsequently as anything but “the poor queer man I met at Harborough;” and that magnificent dame’s opinion of his intellectual attainments I had rather not be compelled to declare.
Mr. Sawyer was no sooner released from his self-imposed penance than he flew to the side of his charmer, whom he found, as might be expected, hemmed in by Mamma and Papa, surrounded by a bevy of female acquaintances, and receiving the homage of one or two elaborate dandies of considerable calibre and pretension.
She shook hands with him, however, across young Vainhopes; after which he was forced to fall back upon Parson Dove, whom he accosted with great cordiality and affection.
A man never shows to such advantage as in the presence of his ladye-love. How many a Hercules have we not seen holding her silks for Omphale; his lion-front looking sheepish—not to say asinine; his strength degenerated to clumsiness; his whole exterior denoting helpless subjection and dismay! Mr. Sawyer was no exception to the general rule. He pulled at his neckcloth; twitched his gloves on and off; looked at his boots! listened to the Parson’s platitudes, without hearing a word; finally, made a desperate plunge, and entreated Miss Dove to dance the next quadrille with him.
Miss Dove was engaged.
“Well, the one after that.”
Miss Dove glanced at a tiny list of running horses, so to speak, that she held in her hand.
“Dear me; she was engaged for that too!”
Our friend was disgusted beyond measure: he fell back with a mortified bow, and resolved he would not speak to her for the rest of the night. It would be a poor pastime to watch the dancers from a remote corner without participating in their amusements; nevertheless he entered at once on the self-inflicted penance. The ball, however, went on none the less gaily for his abstinence. Lady Barbara nearly swept him off his legs in a whirlwind of crinoline as she waltzed by him at the rate of forty miles an hour. The Tiptoes and the Vainhopes and the rest seemed as unconscious of his presence as if he had never left The Grange, and Cissy Dove, herself dancing with a succession of dandies, each more resplendent and more taken up with himself than another, never glanced but once in the direction of her disappointed swain. That single look, however, had in it something of a pleading expression, that found its way through the embroidered plaits of Mr. Sawyer’s best shirt-front, and mollified the stern heart beneath. It brought him out of his corner; it induced him to think more favourably of life in general, and of the Scotch quadrilles, now striking up merrily, in particular; it even prompted him to select the youngest Miss Hare, a blushing virgin making her first appearance in public, as his partner; and, lastly, tempted him to request Miss Dove and her cavalier, no less a swell than Bob Blazer, to be their vis-à-vis.
Cissy watched him pretty narrowly during the dance. Ladies, as we all know, have the abnormal faculty of seeing without looking. I am bound to confess that his dialogue with little Polly Hare was of so harmless a nature as could not have excited the ghost of an apprehension in the most jealous disposition. It proceeded something in this wise.
Mr. Sawyer, with his whole attention absorbed in the lady opposite: “Are you fond of dancing?”
The youngest Miss Hare: “Oh! very.”
Mr. S.: “What a pretty room this is!”
Miss H.: “Yes, very.”
Mr. S.: “The music is remarkably good for a country band.”
Miss H.: “Oh! very.”
[Grand Round strikes up, much to their joint relief, and promises to put a speedy termination to the solemnity.]
But in the revolutions of this highly-exciting pastime there is one figure which admits of the gentleman and lady opposite saying nearly three words to each other; and it is needless to insist on the necessity of condensing as much meaning as possible into so short a sentence.
“Why so cross?” said Miss Cissy, as she approached her adorer at this propitious moment; and, although Mr. Sawyer had neither presence of mind nor opportunity to make an appropriate reply, he looked like a different individual henceforth, and almost forgot to return his little partner, none the worse for her excursion, to the maternal wing.
Little did Mr. Sawyer dream, as she thanked him with her demure curtsey, how that sly puss, who had been indeed the life and soul of the school-room she had just left, would act the whole scene over again that night in her dormitory for the edification of three elder sisters and a Swiss maid; how she would mimic to the life his stiff shy manner and preoccupied demeanour; nay, make her very draperies stick out like the square tails of his coat. In virtue of her sex, the little minx detected his secret, and saw through him at a glance, though she was but sixteen. He thought it was very good of him to dance with her, and she was making a study and a character of him the whole time. Dear, dear! how little we know of them! Happy the man who wraps himself in a waterproof garment of vanity; who is determined to ignore the reflection, that the smile he resolves to accept as approval may be nothing better than derision after all; who leaves them to their own devices, and thanks his stars that he has served his apprenticeship and is “out of his time!”
A quadrille with Miss Dove put everything to rights. She seemed resolved to make amends, and she did it so prettily. She gave him her fan to hold, and her bouquet to smell, and asked his opinion of the different beauties, and smiled upon him and petted him, till her dancing-bear was in thorough subjection once more. He almost made up his mind he would propose to her in the tea-room. An eligible spot for the purpose, as it was likely to contain about fifty couples wedged together in the closest possible proximity. He could hardly be mistaken, he thought, this time; yet a cold shudder crept over him as he recollected Miss Mexico. If this business should have the same termination, he felt he had lived long enough. He would go and drown himself in the Whissendine, or retire to the mountain fastnesses of Wales, there to hunt with the Plinlimmon harriers and that united pack, the glory of three districts, whereof no mortal tongue can pronounce the names.
He drew her nervously with him towards the tea-room. Ere they reached its entrance they were intercepted by young Vainhopes—all gloves and studs and curls and chains and smiles.
“Our waltz at last, Miss Dove,” said he, with a captivating grin; “thought you’d forgotten me; quite in despair; waited all the evening.” And he carried her off, amidst a running fire of such complimentary phrases as constituted his usual conversations with the fair, and which they were quite willing to accept at their real value.
It needs little knowledge of chemistry to be aware that cold water poured on hot iron generates steam. I think Mr. Sawyer showed his sense in retiring to blow his off, with one or two convivial spirits, who finished the evening in the Honourable Crasher’s rooms on cigars and brandy-and-water; the latter gentleman, who had asked Lady Barbara to dance, and then forgotten all about it, having made an early retreat to those comfortable quarters.
Here we may leave these choice spirits to their potations. Mr. Sawyer, as his friends remarked, was noisier that usual, and mixed his glass remarkably strong. He did not feel inclined to go to bed, but was quite determined not to return to the ball. Perhaps, without knowing it, he could not have adopted a more judicious resolution.
Cissy looked for him everywhere. She even excused herself from dancing, more than once, in expectation of his return—meaning, however, to pay him off to some purpose when he did come back. But even at the cloak-room door there was no Mr. Sawyer. Bob Blazer got her shawl and Savage called the carriage, and Vainhopes put her into it. Yet Cissy felt out of spirits and out of humour. Though she declared she had never enjoyed a ball so much, her mamma thought she was very silent all the way home; and she took her bedroom candle and retired upstairs the very moment they arrived at the Rectory.
It was a “new sensation” to Miss Dove not to have everything entirely her own way.