With many men, and those not the least dashing and brilliant horsemen, courage is apt to be very much a question of caloric: their pluck rises and falls with the thermometer. When the mercury stands at 45 or 50 deg. they negotiate with pleasure the largest and most dangerous of fences; at a few degrees above freezing they are content to seek humbly for the gaps or weak places, and a gate, instead of being jumped, is lifted off its hinges; whilst at 32 deg. the turnpike-road has invincible attractions, and is not to be deserted under any provocation.
Granting such meteorological affinities, it is needless to observe that a steeple-chase is usually contested in the bitterest possible weather, with a cutting east wind.
The great event at Market Harborough was no exception to this general rule, and the important day was ushered in by about as unpleasant a morning as any gentleman could desire for the purpose of exposing himself in a silk jacket and racing leathers about the thickness of kid gloves. Frequent storms swept across the sky, bearing with them heavy showers of mingled sleet and hail, which stung the unprotected face like pins and needles. It was a bad day to see; a bad day to hear; above all, a bad day to ride.
Struggles observed: “It was lucky they were not out hunting.”
Behold, then, between the storms, under a delusive gleam of sunshine, about two P.M., half-a-dozen canvas booths erected in a large, sloppy grass-field, within a few miles of Market Harborough. Behold, congregated around the same, a motley group of tramps, list-sellers, vagrants of every description, gipsies, and card-sharpers. Behold a few jolly yeomen and farmers, pulling their wet collars over their mouths to concentrate the fumes of that last glass of brandy, and poking their horses about in the crowd, to stumble ever and anon over certain mysterious ropes, placed, for no apparent purpose, in everybody’s way. Behold two or three carriages of the gentlefolks herding together, as if rather ashamed of their company, and a pretty face or two, amongst which you may recognise that of Miss Dove, a little paler than usual, peeping out from under a multiplicity of wrappers, with an air of vague astonishment, the owner having been on the ground for more than an hour, and nothing done yet. Behold also Mr. Tiptop, galloping his master’s best hack as fast as the animal can lay legs to the ground, in the direction of a dripping marquee, near which there is a little knot of gentlemen in waterproof clothing, who seem to constitute an assemblage of their own. Let us lift the dank, heavy sackcloth, and peep in.
Mr. Sawyer, paper-booted, silk-capped, and clad in a gorgeous raiment of plum-colour, with face, too, on which the cares of an empire seem to sit, is “spread-eagled” in a weighing machine, vainly trying to keep his spurs off the wet straw, and to nurse on his uncomfortable lap a saddle, a bridle, a breastplate, a martingale, five pounds of dead weight, and a whip, of which the top is ornamented with an elaborate and massive design. He is what he calls “weighing in”; and the process appears to be troublesome, not to say painful.
Behind him, and preparing for the same ordeal, is Major Brush, tucking himself and his under-garment, with considerable difficulty, into a pair of extremely tight leathers, he having selected this most inappropriate shelter as his dressing-room.
The Honourable Crasher, with a large cigar in his mouth, is watching the proceedings vacantly, having to go through them in his turn; and a quiet, clean-shaved man, with a keen eye, who is prepared for the fray, but has wisely wrapped himself up once more in a long greatcoat, is busy with his betting-book. This worthy, who answers to the name of Stripes, has come a hundred miles to ride Mr. Savage’s bay horse Luxury. Judging from the use he makes of his pencil, he seems to think he has a good chance of coming in first. Already there has been a wrangle as to whether he is qualified to ride as a gentleman; but the only argument against his pretensions to that title being the superiority of his horsemanship, the objection has been suffered to fall through.
The stewards will have an easier task than they expected. The race has not filled well, and will probably not produce half-a-dozen starters. As the Harborough tradespeople say, “It’s a poor affair.” Nevertheless, a deal of money has been wagered on it; and the devoted few are resolved to do their best.
Under the lee of an outhouse—the only one, by the way, within a mile—old Isaac is walking Wood-Pigeon carefully up and down, with his usual imperturbable demeanour. It is hard to make out what he thinks of the whole affair—whether he esteems it an unheard-of piece of tomfoolery, or looks upon it as a means of making an addition to his yearly wages. Under either contingency, he has done his duty by Wood-Pigeon. Beneath all that clothing, the horse is as fine as a star; and even Mr. Varnish could not find fault with his condition. That worthy, however, is gone to ride a horse of Napoleon the Third’s, at Chantilly, and is supposed by his admirers to be staying with the Emperor at Compiègne, for the event.
Mr. Tiptop and old Isaac are barely on speaking terms.
Presently, a heavier shower than any of its predecessors sweeps across the scene; and the only steward who can be got to attend, not seeing the fun of waiting any longer, has given the gentlemen-riders a hint that, if they are not mounted and ready in ten minutes, he will go home to luncheon. The threat creates considerable confusion and dismay. “Lend me a fourteen-pound saddle!” exclaims one; “Where are my girths?” shouts another; “I can’t ride him without a martingale!” groans a third; “Where’s my whip? and has any one seen my horse?” asks a fourth: and, for a time, things look less like a start than before. Nevertheless, the steward is known to be a man of his word; and his announcement produces the desired effect at last.
Let us take advantage of Parson Dove’s kind offer, and, placing ourselves on the box of his carriage, abstract our attention from his pretty daughter inside, and take a good view of the proceedings.
A preliminary gallop, in the wind’s eye, with a sharp sleet driving in their faces, prepares the heroes for their agreeable task. Flags mark out the extent and the direction of “danger’s dark career.” Starting in this large grass-field, they jump a hedge and ditch into yonder less extensive pasture, fenced by double posts and rails, which, successfully negotiated, brings them, after a succession of fair hunting leaps, to The Brook. Fourteen feet of water is a tolerable effort for a horse, everywhere but in print; and as the weather will probably have wet the jockeys through before they arrive at this obstacle, it matters little whether they go in or over. After that, the fences are larger and more dangerous, an exceedingly awkward “double” enclosing the next field but one to the run-in.
The Parson thinks the ground injudiciously selected. As he had no voice in the matter, it is as well to agree with him. Mrs. Dove’s attention is a little distracted by the hamper with the luncheon; and Cissy hopes fervently that “nobody will be hurt.”
Let us count the starters. One, two, three, four, five, six. Mr. Crasher’s Chance, blue, and white sleeves (owner); Major Brush’s Down-upon-’em, “gorge de pigeon,” crimson cap (owner); Mr. Savage’s Luxury, scarlet, and black cap (Mr. Stripes); Mr. Brown’s Egg-Flip, white (owner); Mr. Green’s Comedy, by Comus, black and all black (Mr. Snooks); and lastly, Mr. Sawyer’s Wood-Pigeon, plum-colour, and blue cap (owner).
The latter’s appearance excites considerable admiration, as he takes his breathing canter. Wood-Pigeon is a remarkably handsome animal; and Mr. Sawyer, at a little distance, looks more like a jockey than any of them, with the exception of the redoubtable Stripes.
Old Isaac goes up to his master for a few last words before the flag drops. “You mind the double comin’ in,” says the wary old dodger. “Close under the tree’s the best place, ’cause there’s no holes in the bank; and, pray ye now, do ye sit still!”
A faint exclamation from Miss Dove proclaims they are off. Out with the double-glasses! From the carriage, we can see them the whole way round.
One, two, three! They fly the first fence in a string, Chance leading. The Honourable means to make running all through. Wood-Pigeon is a little rash; but Mr. Sawyer handles him to admiration. He goes in and out of the double posts and rails like a pony.
This difficulty disposes of Mr. Snooks, who lets Comedy by Comus out of his hand, falls, and never appears again.
The others increase the pace, as the lie of the ground takes them a little downhill towards the brook. As they near it, you might cover them with a sheet; but, while the whole increase their velocity, Chance and Wood-Pigeon, the latter followed closely by Mr. Stripes on Luxury, single themselves out from the rest. All three get over in their stride; and a faint shout rises from the crowd on the distant hill. Egg-Flip jumps short, and remains on the further bank with his back broken, the centre of a knot of foot-people, who congregate round him in a moment, from no one knows where. Down-upon-’em struggles in and out again, striding over the adjacent water meadow as if full of running; but Brush is far more blown than his horse. His cap is off, his reins are entangled, he has lost a stirrup, and it is obvious that the Major’s chance is out.
The race now lies between the leading three; and Crasher, who has great confidence in Chance’s pedigree and stoutness, forces the running tremendously. He and Sawyer take their leaps abreast, the latter riding very quietly and carefully, mindful of old Isaac’s advice, to “sit still.” Luxury is waiting close upon them.
“That fellow has been at the game before,” remarks Parson Dove, eyeing Mr. Stripes through his glasses, and struck with admiration at the artistic manner in which that gentleman pulls his horse together for the ridge-and-furrow.
The Parson is not far wrong. Few professionals would care to give Mr. Stripes the usual allowance of five pounds.
“Wood-Pigeon ... chucks his rider into the field before him.”
Thus they near the “double”—the last obstacle of any importance. It consists of two ditches, and a strong staked-and-bound fence on a bank. No horse can fly it all in his stride, after galloping nearly four miles. Perhaps that is the reason why Stripes, who knows he is on a quick one as well as fast one, shoots a little to the front, and comes at it at such an awful pace, seducing his two adversaries, by the force of example, into the same indiscretion. Crasher, who never “loses his stupidity,” as he calls his presence of mind, diverges for a rail that he spies where the ditch is narrowest, takes the chance of breaking that or being killed, and going at it forty-miles-an-hour, smashes it like paper, and succeeds, as Chance rises not an inch, in covering both ditches at a fly. He lands almost abreast of Luxury, who has struck back at the fence with the rapidity and activity of a cat.
Mr. Sawyer, though remembering the place under the tree, dare not pull his horse off enough, lest he should lose too much ground, and Wood-Pigeon, who is a little blown, attempting to do it all at once, lands with both fore-feet in the farther ditch, chucks his rider into the field before him, and then rolls over the plum-coloured jacket in an extremely uncomfortable form. The horse rises, looking wild and scared; not so the rider: “He’s down!” exclaim the crowd; but their attention is so taken up by a slashing race home between Crasher and Stripes, in which the former is out-ridden by the latter, and beaten by half-a-length on the post, that probably no one present but Miss Dove knew who it was that was down. As the plum-colour still lay motionless, poor Cissy turned very pale and sick, and then began to cry.
Our friend was not dead, however, very far from it—only stunned, and his collar-bone broken. He recovered sufficiently to be taken past the Doves’ carriage before Cissy had done drying her eyes; and although he was not able to join the dinner-party at his hotel, with which the day’s sports concluded, and at which an unheard-of quantity of champagne was consumed, I have been credibly informed that he partook of luncheon within less than a fortnight at Dove-cote Rectory, and was seen afterwards with his arm in a sling, taking a tête-à-tête walk to look for violets with the daughter of the house.
Lounging past Tattersall’s one baking day in June, I had the good fortune to encounter Mr. Savage, apparently as busily employed as myself in the agreeable occupation of doing nothing. If you have ever been addicted to the fascinating pursuit of fox-hunting, you will understand how, even in London, the presence of a fellow-enthusiast is as a draught of water to a pilgrim in the desert sand. Linking arms, we turned unconsciously down the yard, and were soon mingling with the motley crowd who fill that locality on a sale-day.
“Any horses you know to be sold here?” I asked, as we stepped into the office for a list.
“None but Sawyer’s,” answered Mr. Savage; “pretty good nags, too. I shall bid for one of them myself.”
Then we fell to talking of the grass countries and their delights, of the different rumours afloat as to this master and that, how one county was to change hands, and another to be hunted six days a week, how the young Squire was getting keen, and the old Lord was growing slack, and how, under all conditions, the foxes were not so stout nor the sport so brilliant as it used to be. Lastly, we got upon the doings of our Market Harborough friends. Struggles was as jolly as ever, nothing changed, putting on weight, and looking for weight-carriers every day. Brush? Oh, Brush had lost a “cracker” on the Derby, would back “Skittle-Sharper,” though Savage warned him not, and had been obliged to go on fall pay. What of the Honourable Crasher? He had appeared in London as usual, and was gone for a little change of air to New York! I pictured to myself how enchanted the “Broadway Swells” would be with Crasher’s superfine languor and general debility; how they would worship him as the “real article” in dandyism; how they would quote his sayings and imitate his nonchalance, and how favourable a contrast such an imitation would offer to their moral state of hurry and confusion, particularly about dinner-time. But I wondered what could have taken Crasher there, of all places in the world. Then I mentioned that I had seen nothing of my old friend Sawyer for a considerable period, and indeed had received no intelligence of his doings since the steeple-chase, in which he got so bad a fall.
“Haven’t you heard?” exclaimed Savage. “Why Sawyer’s married, poor fellow! Married pretty Cissy Dove, that flirting girl, who used to look so well on a chestnut horse. You must remember Cissy Dove. Why, there’s the very horse going up to the hammer with Sawyer’s lot. I suppose she’s given up riding now—got something else to do.”
Sure enough there was the late Miss Dove’s exceedingly clever palfrey, looking fat and in good case, as horses always do when they are “to be sold without reserve.” There was Wood-Pigeon, twice his hunting size. There was the brown and the grey, and one I didn’t know, and Jack-a-Dandy himself, submitting, not very patiently, to the attentions of a villainous-looking man in dirty-white cords, who was coughing him and punching him, and feeling his legs, and narrowly escaped having his brains knocked out for his pains.
I turned to moralise with Savage, but he was gone. You never can speak to anybody in London for more than five minutes together, and I walked out of the yard musing upon man’s weakness and woman’s power, on the uncertain tenure by which a bachelor holds his freedom, on the common lot, and how nobody is safe. “I never would have believed it of Sawyer,” methought, as I turned meditatively into Piccadilly; but then I did not know he had been out gathering violets in seductive company, with his arm in a sling.
Turning into Sam’s Library, with intent to secure a stall at the French play for my niece, I politely awaited the leisure of a very smartly-dressed lady examining the plan of the Opera House, and bending studiously over the same at the counter. Her cavalier, a thick-set man, attired with considerable splendour, was engrossed in a volume which he had taken up, as it would appear, to wile away a long and tedious interval of consultation between his companion and the shopman. The lady looked up first, and under her little white bonnet with its innocent bride-like lilies-of-the-valley, I discovered a pretty dark-eyed face, such as ere this has tempted many a son of Adam, forgetful of his progenitor’s mishaps, into the commission of matrimony.
“An’t you ready yet?” she inquired, addressing her cavalier with just the slightest possible turn of asperity, to give piquancy, as it were, to the dregs of honey still remaining from the moon. “An’t you ready?” she repeated in a sharper key, perceiving the student so engrossed as to be unconscious of her observation. This time there was more of the vinegar and less of the honey, and he started to “attention” forthwith.
“Quite ready, dearest,” was the reply in the most submissive of tones, as he laid his book down upon the counter and disclosed to my astonished view the features of my old friend John Standish Sawyer.
Our greeting was of the most cordial. I was presented in due form to the bride, who vouchsafed me so sweet a smile as made me wonder less than ever at Mr. Sawyer’s subjugation. After putting her into the hired brougham that was in waiting for them, he lingered for a moment to tell me of his late-won happiness. “The horses go up to-day,” said he, “and I cannot affirm that I am sorry for it. With such an attraction at home, a man don’t want to go out hunting. I don’t think somehow I shall ever care to ride to hounds again!”
As I turned back into the shop, the book my friend had been studying so assiduously lay upon the counter. I took it up with a pardonable curiosity. It was the “Life of Thomas Assheton Smith, Esq.”
I shall expect to hear of Sawyer’s buying two or three hunters yet, before November.
“I hope you feel your arm a little easier, sir, this evening?” says Miss Lushington, reappearing in her own peculiar department, fresh and blooming from the revision of her toilet, which usually takes place about seven P.M. Miss Lushington’s habits are peculiarly regular and methodical; her attractions of a dazzling, not to say gaudy, description; she is a thorough woman of business, if indeed such a designation be not a contradiction in terms; but when she does take a day’s pleasure, there are few ladies who can produce a more satisfactory effect than Miss L.
I raise my eyes to reply with becoming gratitude. The object on which they rest is no everyday sight—a full-bodied, fresh-coloured, buxom damsel, with shining hair dark and lustrous as ebony, suggestive of no small expenditure in pomatum; a pair of light-grey eyes, restless and vivacious, called black by courtesy, because fringed with lashes of jet, and surmounted by arching eyebrows of the same colour, swarthy and strong of growth: a straight well-cut nose; a wide mouth, with red lips and white teeth, large, regular, and wholesome; not forgetting those captivating manners which spring from habitual good-humour and perfect self-possession in mixed society, backed by a pair of ear-rings that would have looked rich even on the Queen of Sheba. All this I take in at a glance for the twentieth time, and catch myself confessing, also for the twentieth time, that the barmaid of the Haycock Hotel and Posting-house, Soakington, is the most fascinating, as doubtless she is the most fastidious of her sex.
Miss Lushington, I need hardly observe, is no longer young. Barmaids of tender years, albeit extremely attractive to the usual frequenters of the snug locality over which they preside, cannot be expected to possess the aplomb with which mature experience and the rejection of many offers invest the lady of more autumnal charms. They are apt to be a little flurried by the attentions of the military, and somewhat over-excited by their anxiety for the commercial interest; also prone, if good-looking, to fly away and better themselves matrimonially and otherwise. But Miss L. is far above all such weaknesses as these. Not a red-coat in the whole British army could raise a corresponding hue in her cheek by the most ardent avowal of devotion; nay, even a cornet of Hussars (and I take an officer of that rank and service to be more at his ease in female society than other children of men) has been known to retire abashed and worsted from a little match at quiet persiflage with Miss Lushington. As for the commercial gents! why, though they worship the very keys she jingles, and the lemons in the nets above her head, they would no more think of proposing to her than to the mother of the Gracchi. I have often wondered what Miss Lushington’s early history can have been. Was she ever a little girl with long tails and frills above her ankles, swinging a slate to a day-school? Had she a mother, who washed her face, and scolded her, and taught her to sew, and eventually launched her on the boards of a minor theatre; for surely those majestic manners must have been acquired before the foot-lights? Was there ever a time that she came home wearied and saddened, pressing some girlish treasure to her heart, with a thrill, half joy, half pain, and looking along an endless vista in the future, containing a house, a garden, a pig, some rosy children, a couple of bee-hives, and a fresh-coloured young man at his tea. Was she ever young? or did she descend from her attic some fine summer’s day, this perfect and finished creature of for—well! of between thirty and forty, just as Minerva sprang ready-armed from the brain of Jove, or Venus wet and glowing, with nothing on but her shells, emerged from the blushing sea? I incline to the latter supposition. I believe that Caroline Lushington (of course, with that colour on her cheek, her name is sure to be Caroline; besides, I saw it on her workbox)—I say I believe that Caroline Lushington never was the least different from what she is now, and that I should always have been as much afraid of her as I am at this present moment. I am a shy man—not too shy to confess it. I blush to the lobes of my ears, in replying to her kind inquiries; but Miss L. does not laugh at me; for, woman-like, she has a prejudice in favour of shy men, and she pities my infirmities, and my arm in a black leather sling.
“Your tea will have drawn in five minutes, sir, and your toast is down at the fire now,” says she, patting and smoothing the cushions of her own particular arm-chair in her own particular corner, that I may sit at ease despite my injuries. How kind, how thoughtful she is! And heavens! what a torso the woman has! Though her dressmaker lives over the saddler’s, in the High Street, at Waterborough, that black satin fits as if it came direct from Paris. Even now, mixing a glass of brandy-and-water for a customer, the turn of her waist and the cling of her corset would drive an artist into ecstasies. I am no artist, yet I cannot but think of Alfred de Musset’s song about his Andalusian Marquesa, of which, as the language and the sentiments are both French, I need not write them down here.
Whilst the customer drinks and pays for his glass of brandy-and-water, it is high time that I should explain how I came to be domiciled in the bar of the Haycock Hotel and Posting-house, Soakington, with a contused shoulder, a broken collar-bone, and a black eye.
Since my earliest boyhood I have been enthusiastically fond of hunting. I am not a skilful horseman; I never was what is called a fine rider, perhaps not a forward one, though I have tried hard to think so; nor am I one of those who know about hunting (by the way, I have often wondered what it is they do know), but in ardent affection for the pursuit I yield to none. My godfather, one of the old Holderness lot, and not the worst of those hard-riding East-Riding undeniables, used to say of me, “The lad has a loose seat, and heavy hands, and not an over-quick eye, but his heart is in it. That’s what gives me hopes of him—his heart is in it!” And my godfather was right; my heart was in it. As a boy at school, I kept a few beagles, and ran with them on foot, imitating, as far as a biped can, the actions and motions of a horse. At Oxford, I was a regular attendant on the far-famed drag, and to this day can remember vividly the merits of a certain game little chestnut called Jumping Jemmy, whom I used to ride unmercifully at a pecuniary consideration which must have cost me less than a shilling a leap. J. J. could jump like a cat, and had carried too many of us ever to allow an undergraduate to throw him down. That I never took my degree is the less to be wondered at, when I remember my favourite course of literature, in which, unfortunately, the examiner never thought of gauging my proficiency. I could have taken a “double-first” in all poor Nimrod’s works, and could have repeated a page or two right on end from any part of the famous run in the “Quarterly,” knowing the exact places in which Lord Gardner said, “A fig for the Whissendine!” and Lord Brudenel heard a cracking of rails behind him, and could not identify the man in the ditch because “the pace was too good to inquire!”
So they plucked me; but I persevered in my course of study notwithstanding. Do I not know and love Jorrocks? If I could find out Soapy Sponge in the flesh, would I not ask him to come and stay with me, and feed him and mount him, and let him smoke as much as he liked in his bedroom? Nay, I think I would even have bought the piebald pony of him as a cover hack; for to ride either Sir ’Ercles or Multum-in-Parvo would have been beyond my highest aspirations. Nay, with all his absurdities and affectations, I have a sneaking kindness for the dismounted sportsman in “Ask Mamma” who hung his wet towel out at window on doubtful nights, though he had not a horse to his name, and was no more likely to go out hunting than if he had been bed-ridden. Yes, I like the whole thing—the hounds, the horses, the servants, the second-horse men, the splashes on my top-boots, the golden drops on the gorse covert, and the wreath of cigar-smoke curling upward into the mild soft air.
People talk about hunting going out; being on its last legs; civilised away before the advance of railroads, the march of intellect, &c. All this is sheer nonsense. There are more men hunt to-day than hunted twenty years ago, twice as many as hunted thirty, and probably ten times as many as hunted fifty years ago. Hounds run harder than they did in the time of our fathers; horses are better bred, better kept, better bridled, and better ridden. The country is also more enclosed, and there is consequently a deal more jumping, and more occasion for skill and quickness, than when High Leicestershire was an open upland, and Naseby field an unfenced marsh. The best of the old ones could not have gone “a cracker” in higher form than the dozen or so of men who may be seen any morning in the week with any of our crack packs of hounds in a quick thing; and in the “days of Old Meynell” there was a good deal more room for those who liked to try. It really is by no means an easy matter to thread a crowd of a hundred horsemen in a narrow lane, all going racing pace, and then to jockey the best ten or a dozen of these for the easiest place in the first fence. The actual feat of keeping near hounds when they run hard requires skill and quickness; but the difficulty is much enhanced when it has to be performed by a score of men where there is only comfortable space for five. It is a pleasant sensation, too, when the first impediment has been disposed of, and a man feels what the fast ones of the present day call “landed,” to sail away with the hounds, always supposing he is riding a hunter, and to feel that he will not now be interfered with till they check, but can do his own places at his own pace, without pulling his horse out of his stride, and gain all the advantages of seeing the hounds turn, while he has all the pleasure of watching them as they shoot across the fields, in swift, streaming line.
Great artists, indeed, boast that under such favourable circumstances, they can distinguish and criticise the performances of each individual of the pack: but for myself I confess that I never had either coolness or leisure for such details. By the time I have marked the best place in the next fence, chosen the soundest ridge, or the wettest furrow, by which to get there, given my hat a firm push down on my head, and arranged my four reins, which are apt to get confused together and entangled with the thong of my hunting-whip, in the manner I am accustomed to hold them, I have small attention to spare for anything else; and I have always been of opinion that the cheering to particular hounds in a rapid burst, from huntsmen and other professionals striving hopelessly to catch them, is the offspring of a vivid imagination, and a happy audacity in guess-work.
This forward riding, however, to a man who means to ride at all, is decidedly the best method of crossing a country, both on the considerations of pleasure and profit. Horses take their leaps in a more collected form when they see none of their own species in front of them; the hounds create quite excitement enough in a hunter to make him do his utmost; while the emulation he conceives of his own kind is apt to degenerate into a jealousy, that makes him foolhardy and careless. Also a great amount of unnecessary exertion is entailed upon him, by being pulled off and set going again, which must be done repeatedly in a run by a man who follows another, however straight and well his leader may ride. Also, the sportsman’s nerves are spared much needless anxiety and misgiving. Can anything be more distressing than to see our front-rank man fall, in the uncertainty he has attained on the further side of a thick fence, or cover it with an obvious effort and struggle? Caution whispers, we had better decline. Shame urges that “what one horse can do another can.” Self-esteem implores us not to fall back into “the ruck” behind. So we first of all check our horse from hesitation, and then hurry him from nervousness. The probable result is a “cropper,” with the additional disgrace of having been incurred at a place which the pioneer cleared easily, and an assumption, as unjust as it is unwelcome, that our horse is not so good as his. Now, in riding for himself a man preserves his confidence till he is in the air. Should he be luckless enough to light in a chasm, he has at least the advantage of not being frightened to death in advance; and I am convinced that all the extraordinary leaps on record have thus been made by these forward horsemen, who, trusting dame Fortune implicitly, find that she nearly always pulls them through. With regard to the distance a horse can cover when going a fair pace and leaping from sound ground, even with thirteen or fourteen stone on his back, it is scarcely credible to those who have not witnessed it. Two- and three-and-thirty feet from footmark to footmark and on a dead level have often been measured off. There are few fences in any country that would let us in, if we could trust to such a bound as this; and the activity displayed by a good horse, when he finds the ditch on the landing side wider than he calculated, is perhaps the noblest effort of the bodily powers of the animal.
2. In the Black Forest in Germany there are two stones standing to this day, sixty feet apart, to commemorate the leap made across a chasm by a hunted deer, attested by several sportsmen who were eye-witnesses of the wonderful and desperate effort.
Of course, we must fall sometimes. Of course, without that little spice of what we can hardly call danger, but which produces what we may safely call funk, it wouldn’t be half the fan it is. Going down, indeed! Look at the column of advertisements, weather permitting, in the Times; look at the price of hay and corn; look at the collector’s accounts of assessed taxes for saddle-horses (if you can get them); look at Poole’s trade in coats, and Anderson’s in breeches, and Peel’s (not Sir Robert’s) in boots. Why, the very shoemakers, though on foot, hunt regularly. So do the tradesmen and the farmers, and all the liberal professions; the army, the navy, the House of Commons, the Peers of the realm, her Majesty’s Ministers, and the principal Commissioner of the Court of Bankruptcy; nay, the heir to the crown is an enthusiastic sportsman, and an excellent rider; and so Floreat Diana! and God save the Queen!
Talking of falls brings me back to my broken collar-bone, and the bar of the Haycock. I must explain, then, how I came to be established as the habitual inhabitant of that snuggery.
After so wet a summer as that of 1860, I confess I was sanguine as to an open winter: I have always supported the doctrine of compensation. If we don’t get it in one way, we do in another. A deal of warmth was doubtless due on the year, and what was more natural than to anticipate an open season, and plenty of sport? With this conviction, I kept my eyes open all the summer, and raising my modest stud from the complement of three to five, was fortunate enough to purchase at Tattersall’s two raw-boned, Roman-nosed animals, called respectively “Apple-Jack” and “Tipple Cider,” who turned out to be sound, useful, and well-trained hunters. Lest I should delude the unwary into thinking it a good plan thus to put one’s hand into “the Lucky-bag,” let me observe, that I paid the full value for them, and esteem myself unusually fortunate not to have been “stuck,” or, in plain English, cheated out of good money for a bad horse.
I then sent my stud down to the stables I had taken for them at Soakington, under the care of a steady old groom, who is as sagacious as he is obstinate, and engaging for myself the large parlour and the little blue bedroom at the Haycock, prepared for a comfortable five months’ spell at hunting and nothing else. No society to distract me; no books that I couldn’t go to sleep over, if I was tired; above all, no female influence to make one late in the mornings, restless in the day-time, and sleepless at night—an effect I have remarked as the usual consequence of a quiet bachelor suffering himself to be deluded into the company of that insidious creature, woman.
“Beautiful she is,
The serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss,
The snake but vanquished dust; and she will draw
Another host from heaven, to break heaven’s law.”
I did not then know of Miss Lushington’s presidency at the board of control. I had not even pictured to myself the possibility of such a Siren in such a collection of satins, more innocent than Ulysses—who, I am convinced, was a finished profligate from the first, and only went to Troy to get away from Penelope—I did not even mistrust the cup of Circe. Ah! she made a pig of her admirer, that ancient enchantress; and in Miss Lushington’s presence the admirer makes an ass of himself: that is all the difference. But I anticipate.
Soakington is a delightful situation for hunting; though perhaps for other purposes the extremely wet nature of the soil and dampness of the atmosphere might make it a less desirable locality. The village consists of a few buildings, of which the Haycock with its stables and out-houses forms far the largest part: there are half-a-dozen straggling cottages, a dilapidated barn, always open and always empty; a pair of stocks with no foot-hold, and a pound; the church is three-quarters-of-a-mile off, and it always rains on a Sunday, except when it snows.
But the surrounding district for many miles would gladden a sportsman’s heart. There are large wild pastures, all overgrown with rushes, and not half-drained, that cannot fail to carry a scent; the arable land is badly cultivated, and badly cared for; boys never combine the scaring of crows and heading of foxes in this favoured region, and when you do see a plough, it is generally lying stranded in an unfinished furrow, deserted by man and horse. Large woods, with deep clay ridings, holding no end of foxes, lie at intervening distances from each other, to afford a succession of famous gallops, and a certainty of hounds being left to work for themselves. Ay, and in the month of May, when the primroses are out, and the violets scenting the air, and other hounds have left off for the season, you may still follow up the chase, in these deep dark glades, with an ardour proportioned to the heat of the sun over your head. Large straggling ill-conditioned fences are the obstacles with which the hunter has to contend; and nothing but a good horse, with discretion as well as courage, is likely to see a run in safety; whilst for the latter quality there is no lack of occasion, inasmuch as the Sludge, a deep, wide, and treacherous brook, winds and doubles through the whole country, where it is least expected, and obtrudes itself in the most unwelcome manner, as one of the principal features, in every run that takes place. I have said enough to show that Soakington is no bad billet for a man who means to devote himself to the sport; and when I add that the field is usually small in number, consisting principally of hard-riding farmers, and the lords of the soil, whilst the hounds themselves are of the best blood in England, and established in the same kennels for half a century, it is no wonder that I looked forward to my season’s amusement with considerable anticipations of delight.
I pass over my first fortnight’s doings. It takes at least that period at the beginning of the season for a man to renew his familiarity with his old horses, and make acquaintance with his new ones. I have always envied the nerve and address of those who can jump on a strange hunter’s back at a moment’s notice, twist and turn him at will in any direction, and lark him over every description of fence, with a confidence as surprising as it is usually successful. This is a gift, however, that I do not myself enjoy. It takes me a week at least to feel really at home in boots and breeches; nor, until I have ridden each of my horses twice in his turn, do I consider that he is fit to go, or that I have acquired thorough confidence in his abilities. By the third week in November, when the ditches are beginning to get clear of tangled grass, and it is possible to see through a fence, that you cannot see over, I consider myself fairly embarked on the sport.
There were but three days without rain, to the best of my recollection, during the whole of the above-named month, in the year of grace 1860. Behold me, then, congratulating myself on the prospect of at last reaching the covert-side without being wet through, as I mounted my horse at the door of the Haycock, and caught a glimpse of Miss Lushington’s black head above the window-blinds, not wholly uninterested in my departure. The fixture was at Claybridge, less than three miles from Soakington; and as the famous pack to which I almost exclusively confine my attentions meets at half-past ten, I had ample time to breakfast comfortably, and ride my hunter on.
Although not sufficiently Spartan in my habits to do without a covert-hack for long distances, I have found out, in common with most men, I believe, that one’s horse never carries one so pleasantly as when one has ridden him to covert oneself. Apple-Jack is a calm and deliberate animal enough, with none of the crotchets and fancies peculiar to so many superior hunters; and yet even he seems always a little less staid and careful than usual when he has carried my groom a dozen miles or so along the road. Few sensations are more enjoyable than to jog quietly to the meet, after a leisurely breakfast, with a good cigar in one’s mouth, a horse that feels like a hunter under one, and the satisfactory conviction that one is in plenty of time.
It is not my province nor my intention to describe minutely the Castle-Cropper hounds. All the world knows that the Earl of Castle-Cropper is a thorough sportsman; that you might hunt with him from year’s end to year’s end, and, except to beg you civilly to “hold hard,” never hear him open his lips; and that he is supposed to be as facetious and agreeable in private life as he is reserved and silent in his public capacity. The same world knows, too, that Will Hawk, who was with his father, the old Earl, in the famous days of Musters and Tom Smith, a sort of heroic period “ante Agamemnona” is the prince of huntsmen, and the flower of veterans; that the horses are undeniable, the servants respectable, well dressed, and trustworthy, though scarcely so quick as they might be; the whole thing goes like clockwork, and the hounds are beyond all praise. Well they may be; they have had that advantage which is so indispensable to the perfection of a pack, and, in these days of change, so often denied it, viz., time. In the best part of a century, a uniform height, an equal excellence, and a family likeness are to be attained, with constant perseverance and unlimited expense. From generation to generation the Earls of Castle-Cropper have devoted their leisure, their money, and their attention, to this favourite hobby. The present successor may well be satisfied with the result.
They are rather large, solemn-looking hounds, extremely rich in colour; the dark and tan, both in dogs and bitches, predominating. They have a strong family likeness in the depth of their girth, the width of their loins, and the quality of the timber on which they stand. You might seek through the kennels at the Castle for a summer’s day without finding a pair of legs that were not as straight and square as a dray-horse’s, with feet as round as a cat’s. In hunting they run well together, without flashing to the front; and although other hounds may seem to make their way quicker across a field, the Castle-Croppers keep continuously on, over a country, seldom hovering, as it is called, for a moment, and carrying the scent with them, as it were, in defiance of all obstacles. Old Hawk assists them but little, and holloas to them not at all. These hounds are never seen with ears erect and heads up, waiting for information. If they want to know where their fox is gone, they put their noses down, and find out for themselves. Also, they come home with their sterns waving over their backs; and finally, I cannot describe their uniformity of appearance and general strength and efficiency better than by saying, that the bitches are so like the dogs, you can hardly tell the one pack from the other, but by the shriller music of its tones.
A dozen sportsmen, including the master, constituted our field at Claybridge. There were half-a-dozen red-coats, one belonging to an undergraduate, on for the first time; two or three farmers; a horse-breaker, who kept at a most respectful distance from the pack, and a nondescript. The latter might have been anything you please. I believe he was a grocer. He wore a pair of low shoes, a grey frieze shooting-jacket, a black satin waistcoat, and a hunting-cap! His horse, a mealy bay, had a long coat, a long tail, a long pedigree, and long legs. The man rode with one spur, an ash stick, and a snaffle bridle. Nevertheless, I saw him jump a locked gate just after they found, with considerable address and determination.
Although I arrived at half-past ten to a minute, ere I could look about me, a nod from the silent Earl motioned Will Hawk to begin. Eagerly, yet under perfect control, twenty couple of dog-hounds dashed into a wood of some seventy or eighty acres, the noble master and his huntsman accompanying them down a ride, that seemed to take them up to their girths at every stride. The first whip galloped off in another direction without a word; and the second, before plunging into the obscurity of the forest, posted the small and obedient field in a corner by a hand-gate, from which we were forbidden to stir upon any provocation whatsoever.
Though you often wait several anxious minutes by the side of a patch of gorse the size of a flower-garden, in these large woods, you almost always find instantaneously; and we had not occupied our station for many seconds ere the note of a hound brought our hearts into our mouths. Another and another certified the truth of the declaration, and presently a grand crash and peal of deep-mouthed music proclaimed that there was a capital scent. Twice they forced their fox to the very gate at which we were standing. Twice huntsmen and master came splashing and floundering up the deep ride, to go away with them; but the third time the fox made his point good, as these game woodland gentlemen will, and whisking his brush gallantly, put his head straight for the open within twenty yards of us.
I had just turned to holloa; nay, was opening my mouth for the purpose, when a low, quiet voice in my ear whispered, “Don’t make a noise;” and the Earl was close to me. How he got there I never knew; but he seemed to have an instinctive perception of my intention, and a morbid fear lest I should “get their heads up.”
In another moment the music, increasing in volume, reached the edge of the wood, and then the whole pack (not one missing, for I heard the Earl say so to the second whip) came pouring out over the fence, and proceeded to run in a steady, business-like stream over the adjacent field.
“Give them a moment!” said the master; and away he went alongside of them—best pace.
There was none of the usual hurry and confusion that may be witnessed in most fields, when a fox goes away. The red-coats dropped at once into their places, the undergraduate taking the lead gallantly, in a line of his own. The farmers caught hold of their horses, and proceeded as if they meant business. The nondescript charged the gate I have mentioned, in preference to a straggling hedge with an awkward bank, and seemed determined to see all the fun while he could; and I followed his Lordship hoping to take advantage of his experience, although contrary to my usual principle. It was only the third time I had ridden Apple-Jack, and I had not yet acquired thorough confidence in my horse. Alas! my amusement was doomed to meet with an early termination. The first fence I negotiated most successfully; the second I avoided by making use of a friendly gate; the third landed me in a rushy pasture, over which the hounds were streaming, and whence I obtained an extensive view of the surrounding country, and the line we were likely to run. A black belt of wood crowned the horizon, and towards it the fox was obviously pointing. In the interval lay a fair, flat country—green and pastoral; but a foot-bridge, a quarter of a mile to the right, and a stunted willow or two in the next field, denoted the vicinity of the omnipresent Sludge. I dreaded it even then. But I might have spared myself my apprehensions. Before I arrived at it, a low hedge and ditch were to be crossed, which I saw his Lordship accomplish with ease, and rode at myself in perfect confidence. Apple-Jack did it beautifully. Alas! he landed in a covered drain (I believe the only one in the country), and I remember nothing more, except a confused sensation of jolting in a post-chaise, till I felt the doctor’s finger on my pulse, as I lay on my back in my own bed at the Haycock.
“It’s a long business, a broken collar-bone,” I observed to Miss Lushington, as I sipped my tea comfortably in the arm-chair she had vacated for my use. “I am only thankful to be in such good quarters, and—and—in such pleasant company,” I added, with a little hesitation.
Miss Lushington smiled, showing all her white teeth, and shooting glances of consolation out of her bright eyes. “You must keep up your spirits, sir,” said she (she pronounced it sperits). “Patience and water-gruel is a cure for most diseases, and a broken collar-bone is less painful than a broken heart, and easier cured than a broken neck!”
An observation like the above, involving the two fertile topics of physical and mental suffering, was an opening to further confidences, of which I should, doubtless, have availed myself, had our tête-à-tête not been interrupted at this interesting juncture by the arrival of two fresh customers, one of whom walked into the bar with the air of an habitué of the place, whilst his companion, evidently about to be treated to “something to drink,” followed in a more diffident manner, and entered the snuggery, as it were, under protest.
“What shall it be, Tips?” said a cheery voice, in the loud, frank tones of a man who “stands treat,” but of which I could not see the owner, on account of a wooden screen interposing between his person and the corner where I sat. “What shall it be? Glass of sherry and bitters? Warm ale, with a stick in it? Brandy-and-water hot? Name the article, and Miss L. will measure it off for you, without a moment’s delay.”
“I’ll take a little gin-and-water, Mr. Naggett,” replied Tips, in a low hoarse voice. “Cold, if you please, Miss,” he added, with the utmost deference, as he drew the back of his hand across his mouth, in anticipation of his favourite beverage; to my mind the most comfortless of all potations.
Whilst Miss Lushington, like a Hebe in maturity, was supplying the nectar, I had an opportunity of studying the exterior of Mr. Tips, the horse-breaker, a public functionary of whom I could not have been long in the neighbourhood without hearing, but whom I had as yet had no opportunity of meeting, so to speak, in private life.
Crippled as I was, I may here remark, once for all, that I was solely dependent for amusement on the perusal of such characters as I met in the bar at the Haycock. Deprived of my hunting, not overfond of reading, here was a book laid open, so to speak, before me, of which I had not even the trouble to turn the page, whilst the peculiarities of these different visitors furnished an inexhaustible fund of amusement; their rapid succession preserved me from the dangers of prolonged têtes-à-têtes with Miss Lushington—interviews that could but have resulted in my total subjection by that seductive being, herself cold and unimpressionable as marble, experienced in the falsehood of our sex, and superior to the weaknesses of her own.
Off his horse, Tips was, to say the least, a very singular-looking person. He was a low, strong, broad-shouldered man, a perfect Hercules down to his waist, and with a length of arm and depth of chest that would have made him an ugly customer in the ring, an appellation to which his physiognomy also fully entitled him. Not that he had what is termed a “fighting nob;”—far from it. High features, bushy eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and a long, prominent chin gave him a sort of resemblance to a dilapidated Henri Quatre; but the nose had been smashed and thickened by a fall, the chin knocked on one side by the kick of a horse, and one of the eyes, rent and lacerated by a thorn, was disfigured by a ghastly droop of the lid, and a perpetual crimson in what ought to have been the white of the eye; very large, thick whiskers, of a rusty brown, framed this singular face, and a knowing, wide-awake leer in the undamaged eye, would have told an observer, without the aid of the blue-spotted neckerchief, that its proprietor was a “party concerned about horses.” Nevertheless, the man had a game, bold look about him, all the same,—that latent energy in his glance, which denotes physical courage, and without which a good judge of his species does not care to select one of the half-score he requires for the manning of a life-boat, the capturing of a gun, or the performance of any other dare-devil feat, that demands more boldness than brains. Had Tips been moulded in fair proportions, he would have been a heavy-weight; but below the waist, I must acknowledge, his limbs were more like those of a monkey than a man. His stomach seemed all to have gone up into his chest; and although his thighs were long, his thin shrivelled legs were absurdly short and small below the knee. He was made for a horseman and nothing else; nor, when you saw him at daybreak, exercising some lawless three-year-old, with its mouth full of “keys” and its dogged, sullen eye, prepared to take the slightest advantage of its rider, either to jump, kick, rear, or go backwards, could you help acknowledging that here, at least, was the right man in the right place. Of his early history I gathered some particulars from himself. I give them as an additional proof, if indeed any such were wanting, that in every grade and situation,
“There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft,
To take care of the life of poor Jack.”
Tips, then, began his career as a chimney-sweeper’s boy, and to this appointment in tender years, may perhaps be attributed the physical development of his upper man, and the malformation of his lower limbs. His promotion, or rather I should perhaps say, his descent into the saddle, originated in a manner as alarming as it was unexpected. The master chimney-sweeper’s wife was attacked with that malady which peoples this world and the next. The doctor lived three miles off, in the nearest market town. The pony that carried the soot was dead. Under such a concatenation of unfavourable circumstances, it is needless to observe that the master-sweep had taken refuge in inebriety. Beyond blessing the unborn, and cursing everything else above an inch high, he was incapable of any decided effort, and little Tips was started off in a hurry, on the back of a well-bred chestnut filly of the baker’s, to go for the doctor. The boy was fall of pluck, but deficient in practice. The filly full of corn, and quite well aware of the five stone of inexperience she carried on her back. It was not unnatural that her shambling trot should soon become a canter, which a desperate shy at a drove of pigs converted into a gallop under the most unfavourable circumstances. Little Tips, when she swerved, held on manfully by the bridle; the baker’s tackle was old and frayed; the head-band broke, and the bit came out of the filly’s mouth; no pleasant predicament for an urchin of nine years old, careering along a turnpike-road, on market-day, at top speed. He stuck to her, however, like a monkey, and devoutly hoped the gate at the town-end might not be shut.
Now it happened fortunately for Tips, that a certain old veterinary surgeon, the kindliest and best of sportsmen, was jogging into this very town on his thorough-bred mare, half a mile ahead of the runaway. The old man heard the clattering of hoofs, and looked back to see a child in imminent danger of its life. Quick-witted, cool, and sagacious, he bethought him at once of the winding streets, the slippery pavement, and the crowded vehicles. To enter the town at that pace would be certain death, and the child must be stopped somehow at all risks. There was a grass siding to the high-road, and nearly a mile farther to go.
The old man was not long making up his mind. Putting his own mare into a gallop, he allowed the filly to come alongside of him, and encouraged her little rider with voice and gesture. The child gathered confidence immediately, and sat cool and collected, as if racing. Edging him by degrees off the road, the old man at last jostled his companion into the fence, where the filly attempting to take it sideways, of course remained, pitching little Tips over her head into a soft grass-field.
“Be’ant hurt a mossel!” exclaimed the child in high glee, scrambling once more through the hedge, to assist his preserver in righting the filly, on whom, after properly securing the bridle, he again mounted to proceed on his errand, with unshaken nerve. The old man was so pleased with the coolness of the urchin that he begged him of his master, and took him into his own service, where Tips learned all of horses and horsemanship that he ever knew, and where he might have remained for life but that his employer died, and he was thrown upon the world once more, with nothing but his natural abilities to depend upon.
And here let me lift up my voice, to correct a very erroneous notion, rife amongst the unsporting portion of the community, to the effect that rough-riders and that class of persons are men of dissipated habits. Except in some rare instances, the very contrary is necessarily the case. No man can preserve that cool, clear-headed daring which we call nerve, if he addicts himself habitually to the use of stimulants. The sensitive fibres of the human interior, which when injured and irritated by alcohol, react upon the courage, spirits, and temper, exist equally in the rudest day-labourer as in the most delicate fine lady. When these are affected, the nerve begins to fail, and no man without that quality can pretend to tame unbroken, or to ride ungovernable horses. Practice will do much, and unquestionably the alarm created in the biped, by the hostility of the quadruped, is somewhat disproportioned to the real danger incurred; nevertheless, our own sensations and our daily observation of others cannot but prove to us, that there is much truth in the proverb which says, “He who would venture nothing, must not get on horseback!” However drunk some of these dare-devil equestrians may be willing to get on occasion, they are habitually men of temperate and abstemious habits; almost invariably early risers, and consequently sound sleepers during the night.
That a hardy, healthy habit of body is indispensable to such persons is obvious, when we consider the muscular exertion they have to go through, and the many hard knocks they are likely to sustain in their daily avocations. We all know that a prize-fighter, in training, is capable of receiving an amount of punishment without inconvenience, of which a tithe would knock the same man “out of time” were he not toughened and hardened against it by the severity of his preparation. The cutting blow that would raise a swelled and angry sore on the face or person of a man who had been indulging in gluttony and idleness, leaves but a slight red mark on the clear skin of the thoroughly purified athlete; and the latter rises rather refreshed than otherwise from a fall “over the ropes,” that would have stunned and stupefied the former for an hour, and given him a bilious attack for a fortnight.
Now the same argument holds good with men who are liable to be thrown and kicked by horses, or exposed to the disagreeable contingency of being rolled over or laid upon by their pupils, in that early education at their fences, which all young hunters must go through. A rider in perfect training, with his muscles developed into the elasticity and toughness of gutta-percha, without a pound of superfluous flesh on his ribs or an ounce of undigested food in his stomach, not only rides with coolness, quickness, and confidence—the mental result of this physical condition—but rises uninjured from the severe falls and violent concussions to which his daring must occasionally subject him; and should he even be unfortunate enough in some more than usually complicated “cropper” to break a bone or strain a sinew, is cured by dame Nature in so short a space of time as to astonish the attending doctor, who has sufficient presence of mind, nevertheless, to take the whole credit of the recovery on himself. Tips seemed to be made of iron. According to his own account, he never was hurt but once, and that was out of a gig. The circumstances were a little singular, and I had them from his own lips on the first evening of my convalescence, whilst he sipped his gin-and-water, by permission of Miss Lushington, inside the bar.
Mr. Naggett, whom I gathered, from his order of “Port-wine-negus, with a scrape of nutmeg and a slice of lemon in it,” to be of the genus “swell,” was summoned away in a hurry to a “gent who wished to see him on business,” as the waiter said, before he could put his own lips to the fragrant mixture or burst on my astonished sight from behind the wooden screen. Tips, accordingly, with the utmost diffidence, and at Miss Lushington’s earnest entreaty, came alongside of my arm-chair, where he remained standing, with his glass in his hand, shifting from one leg to the other, and stirring his gin-and-water with an unnecessary tea-spoon the while. He was dressed in wide cord breeches, leather gaiters, a brown cut-away coat, the thickest worsted waistcoat I ever saw, and the blue-spotted neckerchief, in which I believe he was born, and I am quite sure he will die.
“Sorry to see you laid on the shelf, sir,” observed he, with a dab at his forehead as if to remove an imaginary hat, for men of all nations who are much concerned with horses acquire a sort of knowing politeness.
I answered feebly that “it was a tedious accident, but, I should think, nothing in his eyes, who had probably broken every bone in his body.” And Miss Lushington smoothed the cushions while I spoke, and adjusted my arm in its sling.
The rough-rider shook his head, took a sip of his gin-and-water, and looked thoughtfully into his glass.
“Far from it, sir,” said he. “Far from it. Bones isn’t broke so easy as gentlemen think. Ask your pardon, sir; now how was it as your accident came about? Collar-bone, sir, warn’t it? Well, sir, it wasn’t a young horse as let you down that way, I’ll take upon me to—” swear, he was going to say, but, looking respectfully at Miss Lushington, Tips put his broad hand over his mouth, and rounded off his sentence with the word “suppose.”
I was forced to confess that the culprit Apple-Jack was by no means a young horse. In fact, he “owned” to ten; and, like seven-and-twenty in a woman, that is an age at which a horse remains for an indefinite period.
“That’s where it is, sir,” answered Tips. “Now, a young one will spoil your face sometimes, and strain you in the groin, and kick at you when you’re down; and I’ve even known of ’em breaking of a man’s ribs. But a collar-bone?—no. If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll tell you the reason why. When a man breaks his collar-bone, ’tis because him and his horse comes to the ground all of a heap; and a young one never falls all of a heap without he’s blown, and then he seldom gets to the far side of his fence at all.”
“You’ve ridden a good many young ones?” I asked, not without some little admiration of a man who seemed to consider an inexperienced horse the safest mount.
“Here and there a one, sir,” replied Tips, looking modestly downwards. “My old master, he bred a good sort; you don’t see many such nowadays. And I mostly had the schoolin’ of ’em, both with Sir ’Arry and the Squire. Bless ye, sir, the young ones isn’t the most troublesome as we have to do with. A young horse is very teachable, as I call it; and the sooner you get him, the easier it is to show him what you mean. A little timorsome perhaps they are at first, and frightened at what they’re about. I’ve seen the same with the women-folk.—[Here Miss Lushington coughed loudly, and frowned.]—But when they do go, they mean going, and no mistake.—[“Well, I’m sure!” said Miss L., gathering up her work, and preparing to draw some beer.]—I’d as leave ride a four-year-old, if he could have the condition in him, as a fourteen. If things don’t go cross with him at first, to my thinking, he’s the pleasanter mount of the two.”
“But you don’t mean to say a young horse can jump as well as an old one!” I exclaimed, completely aghast at such an upsetting of all my preconceived notions; and recollecting, not without a qualm, how my banker’s book might testify to the value I placed on seasoned and experienced hunters. “Suppose you come to ‘doubles’! Suppose you come to timber! Suppose you want to creep quietly through a gap by a tree!”
Tips indulged in a pitying smile. “Have you never had a violent old horse, sir?” said he. “How many nags have you owned that you could trust after half-a-dozen seasons to do a gate to a certainty, or land clear of the second ditch, when they knowed nothing beforehand, or to go by a post in a hurry without jamming of your leg against it? Now a young one takes notice, as the women say of their babies.—You’ll excuse me, miss.—A young one is all for learning, for doing the best he can to please you—for going your way instead of his own. A young one may put you down quietly once or twice from ignorance, or because you won’t let him alone; and he hasn’t learnt yet to disregard your pulling him about, but he makes it up to you before the day’s over. And if I was a-going to ride for my life to-morrow over a country I’d never seen before, I’d ask for a four-year-old to do it on, if I was quite sure that he was a fast one, a bold one, and with a spice of the devil that he got from the mare that bred him!”
With this startling exposition of his theory, Tips swallowed his gin-and-water at a gulp, and then looked anxiously at the door, seemingly for the reappearance of Mr. Naggett.
As that worthy, however, did not return, I could but entreat the rough-rider to allow Miss Lushington to replenish his glass at my expense; and lighting a cigar myself, by that lady’s permission, I begged Tips to take a chair, and proceeded with my inquiries.
“Is there no sort of horse then,” I asked, “that you consider dangerous? or do you believe that whenever an accident happens, collar-bones or otherwise, it must be the fault of the rider?”
“Plenty of dangerous horses about, sir,” answered Tips, preparing to make himself comfortable—“plenty of ’em, more’s the pity, even for horse-breakers and such-like, as I am myself. We never get no credit of them. Even if we get them pretty handy, and return them as quiet to ride or drive, why as soon as they’re back in their own stable, they begin at their old tricks again. There was one as I had from Mr. Mohair, the draper in Waterborough; a grey he was, and up to all manner of games. Wouldn’t go by the milliner’s shop in the High Street, not at no price. Mrs. Mohair was just mad about it, sir, I can tell you. Well, they sent him over to me to break; and says the missus to me, says she, when I took him away, ‘Break the spirit of him, Mr. Tips,’ says she, ‘if whip and spur will do it. And don’t let me see of him backing and sidling into the windows of them bold hussies again,’ says she, ‘not if you cut him into ribbons for it!’ You see the ladies is mostly for strong measures,—asking your pardon, Miss,—’specially where there’s other ladies concerned. Well, I didn’t cut him into ribbons, I didn’t, because it’s not my way; but I coaxed and humoured of him, and once or twice when we did have a tussle, I showed him pretty plainly who was master: and I rode him backwards and forwards into Waterborough and what not, and he passed the milliner’s windows and took no more notice than if there hadn’t been a pretty girl in the whole shop, front or back. So I takes him to Mr. Mohair, and says I, ‘You may ride him anywheres now, sir,’ says I, ‘for if you do but shake a whip at him, he goes as quiet as a lamb.’ And I charged him for the horse’s keep, and a sovereign besides, and so thought no more about it.
“Well, sir, in less than a fortnight, I happened to be in Waterborough on market-day; and as I came out of the horse-market, I see a crowd of foot-people running towards the High Street, and I hear a precious stamping and scuffling, and clattering of horses’ feet just round the corner where the milliner’s shop stands; so I walk on to see what the disturbance is. A precious shindy I found too. There was a donkey-cart drawed on to the pavement, and a hamper of greens upset on the door-step, and a old apple-woman cursing awful, and the foot-people flying into the middle of the street; and in the heart of them all, there was the grey horse right up against the milliner’s front-door, with his head going one way and his body another, and his tail tucked down in his quarters as if he meant mischief enough for a week; and Mr. Mohair (he’s a timid gentleman, Mr. Mohair), sitting on his back as white as a sheet, pulling of him by the bridle, and kicking of him in the ribs, afraid to quilt him as he should have done by rights; afraid to stick to him handsome, and yet more afraid still to get off his back, for there stood Mrs. Mohair in her best black satin gown, with a shawl pulled over her head, a rowing of him tremendous, and all the pretty girls in the milliner’s windows laughing fit to break their hearts. Well, I caught hold, and led him back to his own stable for pity’s sake; and Mr. Mohair behaved quite like a gentleman; but he sold him to run in the ’bus, and never got on his back again.”
“Very awkward for all parties,” observed Miss Lushington, probably following out a train of ideas of her own.
Tips stared at her for a considerable period, winked solemnly with his damaged eye, and then subsided once more into his gin-and-water.
“Do you think these vicious horses, then,” said I, “the most dangerous customers you have to deal with?”
“No, sir, I don’t,” was the reply; “vice in a horse is the most troublesome fault of all to cure, because it’s always breaking out again, and because a vicious beast is sure to be a sensible beast too. The horse-riders, you know, sir—them as teaches horses to fire pistols, and make tea, and dance on the tight-rope, and what not—they always give the preference to what they call a restive one, because you see it’s the beast’s sagacity that makes him so difficult to break, if so be the breaker has begun with him the wrong way. It’s all humbug, sir, is horsemanship, that’s what it is; and the easier a horse is humbugged, the pleasanter he is to ride and drive. Now a real knowing ’un won’t be humbugged at no price, and so we come to forcing of him, which is always a difficult business, and then it’s ‘pull devil, pull baker,’ and if the baker pulls hardest, why we call him vicious. But he’s always got his wits about him, he has. He may be aggravating, very: but you can’t call him dangerous. He won’t put himself into a mess, not if he knows it, and so he’s bound to take care of you, so long as you don’t part company. I recollect of a nag, a very neat one, as belonged to a friend of mine, who says to me one evening, ‘Tips,’ says he, ‘I’ll sell you my bay Galloway,’ says he, ‘for seventeen sovereigns, there, and a glass of gin-hot, for I dursn’t ride him, and that’s the truth.’ ‘I’ll give you three five-pun’ notes and a bottle of French brandy,’ says I, ‘if it’s all on the square.’ ‘Done!’ says he. ‘Done!’ says I; ‘and now what’s his little game?’ says I, when I’d ordered the brandy. ‘Well,’ says my friend, ‘whenever I ride down wharf-side to my business, he makes a dash for the canal, and tries to plunge over head in the deep water.’ ‘Has he ever been in with you?’ says I. ‘Never!’ said he, ‘and I’ll take care he never shall. I’m a family man, Mr. Tips, and plagued with the rheumatics besides.’”
“So I brought the little nag home: and next day I took a sharp pair of spurs, and an ash-plant, and rode him down wharf-side quite easy and confidential. Sure enough he takes the bit in his mouth, and away he goes best pace for the canal. We came at it so fast I thought we must both have been in; and he stopped so short on the edge, if I hadn’t been ready for him, I must have gone clean over his head. Well, he fought and fought, but I couldn’t force him into it, till at last I got his hind legs close to the brink, and I slipped off his back, and with a jerk of the bridle, tipped him over as neat as wax. He had to swim for a hundred yards and more alongside the towing-path afore he could get out, and he never tried on that game agin, you may take your oath. He was a sweet cob as ever you see to carry fourteen stone, and I sold him to an old gentleman at Croydon for five-and-forty sovereigns, money down. But he didn’t want to go into the canal, bless ye; though once he was in, he swam like an otter.”
“I have always heard a frightened horse is worse than a vicious one,” I observed, hazarding the remark with a certain hesitation in presence of so high an authority.
“That’s right, sir,” answered Tips with a smile, born of gin-and-water and approval. “It’s a frightened horse that will face anything and go anywheres. He’s a mad horse for the time, that’s what he is. So long as you see your horse’s eye standing out wild and red, you know that he’s half out of his senses with excitement and likely to astonish you above a bit; but still he keeps the other half pretty cleverly, and though he might jump a brick wall, he won’t run his head against it. But when you see his eye turn blue, then look out! Nothing will stop him now, and he’ll go overhead into the deep sea as soon as look at it. You saw that gentleman as came in just now, and went out again, sudden—Mr. Naggett? A very nice gentleman he is, and quite the sportsman: dogs, greyhounds, fancy rabbits, and game-fowl, Mr. Naggett he likes to have a turn at them all, and a kind friend he’s been to me besides—we’ll drink his health, sir, if you please. Well, sir, Mr. Naggett owned a well-bred, raking-looking sort of mare about two years ago, that he was uncommon sweet upon, but somehow he never could do much good with her. Tried her hunting, but she was a sight too rash and violent for that; then he thought he’d make a hack of her; beautiful action she had, stepped away like a cat on hot bricks; but she was so unaccountable nervous, he couldn’t get her along the roads at all, if there was much traffic, on market-days and such-like. At last he comes to me in this very shop where we’re sitting now. ‘Tips,’ says he, ‘what’ll you have to drink? I have been thinking about Fancy-Girl,’ says he. You see we called her Fancy-Girl on account of her skittish ways. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to put her in harness.’ ‘Better not, master,’ says I: ‘them Fancy-Girls is bad enough without putting them in traces, a-purpose to kick over.’ ‘You’re a old woman,’ says he; ‘you send for her first thing to-morrow morning, and break her nicely for me, single and double harness, teach her to be generally useful, make tea, and wait at table if required.’ I didn’t like the job, but trade’s trade, and if your own brother’s a undertaker, why he can’t refuse to measure you for a coffin; so the mare came home, and we had her in the break alongside of a steady one afore the week was out.
“Well, sir, I took uncommon pains with ‘The Girl’ as we called her, uncommon to be sure! I drove her in double harness, and I drove her in single, and I was as gentle as a lady with her, and as quiet as a mouse. Somehow I knew she’d play me a trick afore we’d done, and I never let any one touch her but myself.
“One afternoon Mr. Naggett he comes up to my place and wants to see the Girl in harness, and to drive her himself. I told him it wouldn’t be safe, not yet, at no price; but Mr. Naggett he’d been a-drinking, for things had gone cross at home, and he wouldn’t be satisfied without a drive. Well, I got him set down to take a bit of dinner with me at my place (it’s a poor place, sir, for gentlemen like you, but you’re heartily welcome when you are passing that way), and he sent out for some brandy, and made himself quite comfortable. After he’d smoked a pipe or two, I tried to persuade him to go home. ‘Home!’ says he, ‘I ain’t going home for a fortnight! while Mrs. Naggett’s blowing off her steam, I’m a-getting mine up,’ says he; ‘and if I don’t have a jolly good spree this week and the next, I’m a Scotchman!’ says he, ‘and that’s all about it!’
“So we went into the stables, and had the Girl stripped; and at last, if it was only to content him, I was forced to put her into the trap, and take him out for a drive; but I got him to promise he wouldn’t lay a finger on the reins, ‘for,’ says I, ‘if anything should happen,’ says I, ‘without doubt Mrs. N. will cast it up to you, as you should have taken her advice and stayed at home.’ He’s not an obstinate gentleman, Mr. Naggett, and this convinced him at once.
“The Girl went kindly enough for the first half-mile, and I wanted to turn back and go home afore worse came of it; but Mr. Naggett says, ‘We’ll just go down to the Silver Bells at Willow-tree, take a pint of purl, and come back to tea; so, as it’s a good wide road and not much frequented, I put the whip in the bucket, and drove steadily on.
“Well, sir, as luck would have it, we hadn’t gone a mile, before we came to some chaps at the road-side, cutting down a tree. There isn’t many trees along that line, and I wished there was none, or else they’d leave them all standing. Them countrymen isn’t over cute, and though I got by as quick as ever I could, the tree fell with a crash close behind us. The Girl gave a jump, that I thought would have taken her clean out of her harness, and away she bolted like a frightened stag. Bless ye! I’d no more power over her than a baby. There was a hill to go down a few rods ahead. I says to Mr. Naggett, says I, ‘Hold on, master; when we get to the old Barn, the trap’ll run on to the Girl, and we’ll be kicked out, so look for a soft place!’ Mr. Naggett didn’t seem to care about arguing the point, but he swore awful.
“It soon came off, sir. The Girl wasn’t going to keep us waiting. A shy at a heap of stones took us off the road, and the next stride brought us into the fence. At the pace we were going, Mr. Naggett shot clean over my head into a wheat-field, and got up quite sober and none the worse, but he had to destroy the Girl; and as for me, why the trap, you see, unfortunately turned on to me, and I broke three ribs and my collar-bone, put out my wrist, lost two-and-seven-pence out of my breeches-pocket, and had a concussion of the brain. But it might have been worse! Here’s Mr. Naggett coming back to speak for himself, and I wish you good-evening, sir.”
As Tips took his departure, with a respectful inclination to myself, and a most polite bow to Miss Lushington, I observed that lady to adjust her shining locks, as it were mechanically, in obvious expectation of accustomed homage; and indeed ere I had sufficiently admired the attitude in which she performed this graceful movement, a fresh arrival swaggered into the bar, in as different a manner as possible from the modest entrance of his predecessor, Mr. Tips.
This gentleman, or perhaps the abbreviation gent would convey more distinctly the exterior of the individual thus designated—this gent, then, was a personage of dashing appearance, dressed in the style which the present age denominates “loud,” and which presents, as far as the wearer’s ingenuity will admit, a combination of extreme splendour, with a decided tendency to the sports of the field. I have remarked such a peculiarity of costume in several individuals, less distinguished for their general good sense and respectability than for a strong and somewhat perverted inclination in favour of dog-fighting, pigeon-shooting, excessive trotting against time, the pitting of game-fowl in deadly conflict armed with artificial spurs, and even the patronage of those human combats in which such profound secrecy is always preserved, and to witness which it is indispensable to be possessed of that mysterious passport termed by Bell’s Life “the office.”
Mr. Naggett, then, the well-known sporting butcher of the adjacent town of Waterborough, was turned out from top to toe exactly as a well-known sporting butcher ought to be. When he removed his low-crowned, close-shaved hat, and disclosed his abundance of crisp, short-curling flaxen hair, surmounting an extremely ruddy face with bright-blue eyes, good features, and the whitest of teeth, I could easily imagine that the respectful admiration of so well-looking an individual was an acceptable compliment even to Miss L. His fawn-coloured whiskers, of which he possessed a great abundance, were trained carefully to the very corners of his mouth, from which they descended in those seductive semicircles that are seen to their highest advantage in the commercial-room. Scorning the delusion of moustaches, Mr. Naggett rested a stronger claim to admiration on the brilliancy of his blue-satin neckcloth which, worn without shirt-collar, and ornamented by an enormous pin modelled to represent the head of the Champion of England in massive mosaic gold, irresistibly attracted the eye of the beholder, while it dazzled alike his fancy and his judgment. From the buttons of his waistcoat, scarlet cloth with a binding of gold thread, not unlike those of Lord M——’s footmen, or indeed of the gallant officers on the staff of the British army, depended a massive watch-chain in the form of a curb, life-size, if I may use the expression, and hung with many ornaments, of which a death’s head as big as a walnut, and a strike-a-light box, were perhaps the smallest and least conspicuous. Mr. Naggett’s coat was light-blue, very much off his person, and very short in the tails; his trousers were of drab, considerably tighter than is customary in these days of easy fitting; and his Wellington boots were thick, clumsy, and badly cleaned. He wore rings, but no gloves, and his hands were hardly so well washed as might have been desired.
Such was the man who now swaggered, with a good deal of noisy assumption, into the bar. Removing his hat with easy familiarity to Miss Lushington, he nodded a patronising “Servant, sir,” to myself, and then producing what he was pleased to call “a weed” from a leathern case the size of a portmanteau, proceeded to smoke, and drink the port-wine negus that had been kept hot for him, with a great appearance of comfort and gratification. The man had an air of rude health and bodily vigour about him, that was especially provoking to a cripple like myself. Though short and fleshy, his figure was round-made and strong, whilst the clearness of his eye and the colour in his cheek denoted an unimpaired digestion, and a circulation, to which languor, blue devils, and dyspepsia were unknown. There are some people in whose constitutions brandy-and-water and cigars seem to assimilate with the vital functions, and turn to health and strength. “They go all at once,” says the valetudinarian, and this may be true enough; nevertheless, I have seen many of these enviable bons-vivants go for a very long time.
Notwithstanding the freedom of his manners, his brilliant attire and sporting exterior, I did not much admire Mr. Naggett. These instincts, prejudices—call them what you will—of likes and dislikes are oftener right than we suppose; and when I came to learn the antecedents of the sporting butcher, as in such a gossiping place as Soakington I was not long in doing, I was even less prepossessed in his favour than at first.
Mr. Naggett had begun life as the only son of a respectable tenant-farmer in the neighbourhood of Soakington. As a boy at a forty-pound school, he had distinguished himself less in mathematics, classics, and the use of the globes, than in such games of skill or chance as enabled him to get the better of his companions, to the increasing of his own stores in marbles, pocket-money, and what not. He smoked a short pipe in the playground, ate lollypops during school-hours, and smuggled shrub into the dormitory. When the master had him up for any of these offences, he was notorious for arguing the point, and comported himself on all disputed questions of discipline, like that troublesome mutineer who is called in the army and navy “a lawyer.” Unlike this individual, however, he took his punishment without wincing, and this Spartan quality made amends in the opinion of his schoolfellows for a good many shady tricks and unenviable qualities. The lad could use his fists too, an accomplishment he had learnt from an old poaching labourer who worked on his father’s farm; and although he took care never to match himself with any boy whom he could not conquer pretty easily, his prowess in this line gained him immunity for a good many little peccadilloes and infringements of the schoolboy’s code of honour, which is exceedingly stringent as far as it goes.
When young Naggett’s education was supposed to be completed, and he came home to live with his father as a lad of sixteen, there was not probably a more finished young blackguard to be found within a circle of fifty miles. The old man tried hard to make him work, but it was hopeless; whilst at races, fairs, village feasts, anything in the shape of a junketing, he was safe to attend and safe to get into mischief. Then he always kept two or three greyhounds, much to the disgust of the Earl of Castle-Cropper, his father’s landlord; and though he generally had a pretty good nag of the old man’s to ride when he chose, he never won the Earl’s respect by any display of daring in the field. Young Naggett’s heart was not in the right place to ride well over a country, and although he liked the excitement and display of hunting, it was not for the sake of the sport that he attended at the covert-side.
His father died the year his son came of age, and the just old Earl, though much against the grain, on his usual principle let the latter continue the farm. Then began a career of extravagance that necessarily ran itself out in a brief space of time. Late breakfasts, silver forks, six-o’clock dinners, port, sherry, and punch till all the hours of the night, with three or four riding-horses in the stable, and a box of cigars always open in the hall, made Apple-tree Farm the most popular resort in the neighbourhood for every “good-for-nothing” in the country-side. This style of living went on for eighteen months. Then came a bad harvest, the failure of a county bank, and a sale at the farm, with Richard Naggett’s name amongst the list of bankrupts, and a loss to the Earl of Castle-Cropper of more than he cared to think about. Nevertheless, his old landlord never quite turned his back on his tenant, and therefore we may fairly suppose that, beyond reckless imprudence, there was nothing tangible against the latter, and that in the main, and when confronted with a Waterborough lawyer, he acted what is called “on the square.”
After this crisis, young Naggett was not much heard of, for some time. There was indeed an ugly poaching story in which the Earl was supposed to have dealt very leniently with the offender in consideration of certain old associations, and which, if possible, increased that nobleman’s popularity, to the detriment of the culprit he had screened; and there was likewise a very disagreeable show-up on Waterborough race-course in regard to a horse called Cat’s Cradle, who was entered, weighted, and described wrong for the Tally-ho Stakes, and then most indubitably pulled by young Naggett, riding as a tenant-farmer, without occupying one foot of land. There is a horse-pond at the end of the course, and it was only the good-nature of some of the townspeople, and the excitement created at the same moment by the detection of a maladroit pickpocket, that saved the adventurous jockey from involuntary immersion therein.
The next that was heard of our friend was his occupation of a stool as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and from that stool he dated his subsequent rise in life. At first it was a gloomy change for the young farmer and sportsman, to sit at a desk copying law parchments, accustomed as he had hitherto been to the free open air and out-of-door pursuits, which, notwithstanding his occasional dissipations, had constituted his everyday life. Old Nobbler, too, was a pretty tight hand, and although he hugely respected the astute qualities of his pupil, that very good opinion made him look pretty sharply after him, and keep him very close to his work. Nevertheless Old Nobbler was not a bad fellow on the whole; and as he generally had a good horse in his stable, and was getting too short-winded to ride much himself, he would occasionally give his new pupil a mount with the hounds, enjoining him, somewhat unnecessarily, not to rush into needless danger, and if he should see any gentleman rather sweet upon the nag, why not to disappoint him, if he could help it.
Few men were better qualified to ride a horse to sell than Dick Naggett. He had good hands, great caution, and an instinctive knowledge of a customer. His excessive regard for his own neck ensured him from getting into needless difficulties; and as he was never forward in a run, but always conspicuous at a check, his horse obtained a reputation for stoutness and safety, which he had not earned by going fairly over a country in the line of hounds. There is a great art in riding hunters for sale, quite different from the straightforward science. It is not the boldest and most conspicuous horsemen who can obtain the longest prices for the animals that carry him so brilliantly; the world is very suspicious. Men have an unaccountable objection to buying a horse they know anything about. Besides which, the hunter that has been ridden fairly, however good he may be, must occasionally have been seen in difficulties. It is impossible to cross a severe line of fences, at a good pace, and in the front rank, without an occasional mishap. A second Lottery may find an unexpected trap on the further side of a fence, which no exertion can clear, and another Eclipse might be blown in deep ground, if rattled along close to a pack of high-bred fox-hounds on a good scenting morning; then, when it comes to a question of buying, the purchaser is good-naturedly warned by half-a-dozen officious friends, each of whom has probably something of his own in the stall that he wants to get rid of, and that he thinks would suit him better. One considers the intended purchase very much over-rated; another saw him refuse some rails in a corner; a third heard he was down at the thick fence coming out of the wood; and a fourth has been informed that he was in difficulties when they killed their fox, and could not have gone on another half-mile. Like C?sar’s wife, a hunter must be above suspicion; so the alarmed purchaser goes and buys a soft bay horse from a dealer, of which mediocre animal nobody knows either good or evil—a beast that nobody has ever yet liked well enough either to “show him up,” or to give him a chance of putting his rider down. But a wary salesman knows better than to keep a good place when he has got it. Whilst his horse is fresh he flourishes away over a few fences, the larger the better, for all England to look on and admire, knowing quite well that, in the hurry and confusion of a run, he can decline when he pleases, and turn up again at the first check in a conspicuous position, as if he had been in front the whole time. The very few that could tell anything about it have probably been so much occupied, and so full of their own performances, that they do not know whether he was in their neighbourhood or not; whilst the general public in the hunting-field, like the general public everywhere else, are quite satisfied, if he is only loud enough and positive enough, to take a man’s assurances about himself on trust.
Now, Dick Naggett could do the selling business, especially the talking part of it, to admiration. Turning out in extremely neat attire, and with some article of dress, either coat, neckcloth, or hat, peculiarly conspicuous, he could not be overlooked, and whilst careful never to ask his horse to do more than the animal could handsomely accomplish, he at the same time gave a customer such glowing descriptions of its prowess, that he sold more than one very moderate hunter of Old Nobbler’s for about twice its value, and three times what the lawyer had given for it.
On these emergencies, too, Dick thought proper to affect the townsman, and sink the agriculturist altogether—a propensity which elicited on one occasion from Lord Castle-Cropper the only joke that reserved nobleman was ever known to perpetrate. Dick was holding forth, as usual at the covert-side, on the merits of the horse he was riding, and the silent Earl emerging from the recesses of Deepdale Wood, which had just been drawn blank, and followed by old Potiphar, a solemn badger-pied hound, not entirely unlike his Lordship in the face, paused to listen to the conversation.
“I’m only asking a hundred and seventy for him,” said Dick; “he’s the cheapest horse out to-day. I’ll appeal to my Lord if he isn’t.”
Lord Castle-Cropper ran his eye over the animal. “I could have bought him this time last year for that money exactly,” replied he, “barring the hundred.”
“Oh! but all stock has risen since then,” retorted Dick, loud and unabashed, “cent. per cent. I should say—sheep, cows, poultry, guinea-pigs, and fancy rabbits!”
The silent Earl was one of those provoking people who, always sticking to facts, always seem to have them, so to speak, at their fingers’ ends.
“I can only tell you, Mr. Naggett,” said his Lordship, “that I am glad to take now two-thirds of the price I paid six months back for all kinds of stock. I am a farmer myself, as perhaps you know.”
Dick was impudence personified. “Then you use us townspeople precious hard, my Lord,” said he. “A nice price you farmers make us pay for our mutton.”
“I think you lawyers make us pay a good deal dearer for the skins,” retorted his Lordship; and although he never moved a muscle of his own countenance, the bystanders raised such a shout of laughter as made old Potiphar erect his ears and bristles, thinking a fox must have been viewed away, and as shut up Dick Naggett for the next ten minutes at least, after which he recovered completely, and sold his horse for a trifle less than he asked, before the day was out.
Now, Old Nobbler had a daughter, like Shylock, and Jephthah, and Virginius, and many other doting old gentlemen. Of course he was very fond of the girl, and she did with him pretty much as she liked. Well, “’tis an old tale and often told;” it was not likely that Barbara Nobbler, in all the flush of eighteen summers, could abide constantly under the same roof with Dick Naggett, and remain insensible to his attractions. The lady was a swarthy bouncing brunette, cherry-lipped, bright-eyed, heavy-handed, and with a foot and ankle of the mill-post order, such as seldom belong to a good mover. Nevertheless, she was a healthy, vigorous girl, with a quick temper, and a good heart. It was natural that she should plunge at once chin-deep in love with rosy, trim, curly-headed, flaxen-haired Dick Naggett. Old Nobbler would not hear of the match, shut Barbara up in her room, and turned Dick off the stool in the office, and worse than that, out of the pig-skin in the saddle-room. There was a dreadful blow-up in the house. The father had a fit of the gout; the daughter was seen dissolved in tears; and the lover, looking trimmer, rosier, and saucier than ever, was observed to take tea, two days running, with Mrs. Furbelow, the dressmaker, a widow of a certain calibre, over the way.
Flirtations, however, in all classes of life, may have been carried on so far that it is better for all parties that they should not be interrupted. Old Nobbler, a man not without legal experience, was prevailed on to listen to reason, and an early wedding was the result, which placed Mr. Naggett’s head once more above water, and indeed put him in immediate possession of a little capital, with the prospective reversion of a little more.
It was in consequence of this windfall that Mr. Naggett embarked on the very flourishing business that he had conducted for some years, at the period when I made his acquaintance,—a business that, somehow or another, led him into all sorts of places where you would have supposed there was neither time nor opportunity for the purchase and sale of meat. It conducted him to Epsom annually, at the Metropolitan Spring Meeting, and required his punctual return, for the Derby and Oaks. It released him from Ascot, probably in consequence of the hot weather, and swarms of flies prevalent in the month of June, but imperatively demanded his attendance in Yorkshire, and twice or thrice within a reasonable distance of Cambridge during the autumn months. In its prosecution he was compelled, at great personal risk and inconvenience, to take an expensive ticket by the very identical train that bore the invincible Tom Sayers down the line to battle with his gallant antagonist; and in order to do it thorough justice, he has often been detained from his own home till the small hours of the morning, and compelled to return fragrant with the combined odours of alcohol and tobacco; nor does it appear that this mysterious business can remain established on a secure basis, apart from the assistance of those agreeable stimulants.
Why it should necessitate, as it seems to do, the proprietorship of a half-bred stallion, three pointers, an Angola cat, the smallest terrier, and the largest mastiff I ever saw, one cockatoo, and a dozen Cochin-China fowls is more than I can take upon me to expound. Probably Mrs. Naggett knows; for she has repeatedly demanded, not without high words, an explanation of its mysterious intricacies.
I should not say, from all I have heard, that Mr. Naggett is a domestic man. The habitual wearing of top-boots, combined with fancy waistcoats, I believe to be inimical to the fireside qualities. Although there are two or three Naggetts, with dark eyes like their mother, and flaxen curls like their father, to be seen playing at hide-and-seek amongst the grove of dead pigs and sheep that pervade the premises, and Mr. N. seems to notice and be fond of the urchins, yet loud altercations are often to be heard in his private residence behind the slaughter-house, and Mrs. N.’s dark eyes are not always undimmed by tears. Fame, however, whose hundred tongues are no less ubiquitous at Waterborough than elsewhere, does not scruple to intimate that the butcher’s lady is quite able to “hold her own;” and the gossips have been heard to affirm, with dark and threatening glances at their own liege lords the while, that “though she has been so put upon, poor dear, she can give him as good as he brings, and quite right too.” The inference is obvious, the moral doubtless not without its effect.
It was not in my nature to fraternise very cordially with a gentleman of Mr. Naggett’s superior qualities. I am bound, nevertheless, to admit, that his advances towards myself were cordial, not to say familiar in the extreme. The undisguised admiration, however, with which Miss Lushington regarded his every movement, and the terms of intimacy on which he obviously stood with that decorous lady, may have prejudiced me somewhat against him. There is a class of men, however, I have often observed, and I say it in justice to Miss Lushington, with whom the genus Barmaid seems to possess some mysterious affinity. As Eastern poets feign that there is a certain bird to which the tree involuntarily bends its branches, and the flower opens its petals, so I am convinced there is a description of individual who is looked on with peculiar favour by actresses, barmaids, hostesses, and other ladies whose avocations bring them much into the presence of a discerning public. These favourites of her sex are generally remarkable for exuberance of spirits, command of language, a vivid freshness of complexion, and general freedom of manner. They are loud in assumption, and great on all topics of political or public interest; also prone to plunge into quarrels, from which they invariably extricate themselves without recourse to ulterior measures. His female admirers, in describing such a one, generally sum up their catalogue of his merits by vowing that he is “very free in company, and quite the gentleman.”
Mr. Naggett, stirring the fire with his boot, and winking facetiously on Miss Lushington, as he drank her health in his hot negus, and asked her whether she had ordered her wedding-bonnet yet, obligingly remarked, that “it was a cold night, and he was sorry to see my arm in a sling;” also “that he had heard of my accident, and hoped it wouldn’t be long before I over-got it,” with which friendly wish, expressed in a compound verb, he finished his negus, and ordered some more, calling Miss L. “my dear,” unblushingly, to my excessive disgust. He then drew his chair to the fire, expressed his astonishment that Tips had gone to “perch,” as he called it, and proceeded to make himself agreeable.
“A nasty fall, sir, yours must have been, as I understand,” said he, “and it’s well as it wasn’t worse. You’ve a nice-ish team standing here, but you’ll excuse me, sir, they’re not exactly the class of horse for a gentleman like you to ride. I’ve been fond of horses all my life, from a boy, I may say, and I’m forty years of age now: forty years of age, though perhaps you wouldn’t think it, and in that time I’ve learned to keep my eyes open. Now, sir, you don’t ride so very light, I’ll be bound to say.”
I am a little touchy about my weight, I confess. I believe most men are, the heavy ones liking to be thought lighter and the light ones heavier than they really are. “I ride thirteen stone,” I replied. “Thirteen stone, to a pound; I weigh every day of my life, and I haven’t varied since I was five-and-twenty.”
“Thirteen stone! indeed, sir!” replied Mr. Naggett, running his eye, as I thought, in a very free-and-easy manner over my proportions. “Well, I shouldn’t have thought it. But you’re thick, sir; thick and a little fleshy. Now, your nags is hardly thirteen-stoners, sir—not in a country like this; I’m sure you must agree with me?”
Speechless with indignation, I seized the poker and split—not Mr. Naggett’s head, but a burning coal in the very centre of the grate, without farther reply. This coolest of butchers proceeded unhesitatingly:—
“It’s a pity to see a gentleman undermounted, specially in a country like this: so dangerous too! Why, sir, all the worst falls as I’ve known take place down here in our Soakington district, have been entirely owing to gentlemen riding horses below their weight. There was Squire Overend, only last season, got a little thorough-bred weed he called Happy Joe, as he swore nothing could touch. No more they couldn’t when the ground was light; but look what happened. There came a splash of wet, and the ground up to our girths, just as we’ve got it now, and likely to have it for the next six months; and Happy Joe, he turns a complete somersault over a stile the Squire puts him at, and falls on to his rider with a squelch, breaking the cantle of his own saddle into shivers, and inflicting such severe internal injuries on Squire Overend, that he has never been out hunting since, and all from obstinacy—sheer obstinacy, I call it; for I told the Squire myself how it would be, from the first.”
Somewhat discouraged, I admit, by the ghastly catastrophe of Mr. Overend, I began to think it was just possible that Apple-Jack might not be so good as he looked, and that perhaps it might be wise to purchase a horse or two more accustomed to the country, and with a little more power.
Mr. Naggett, who never took his clear blue eyes off my face, seemed to read my thoughts intuitively, and proceeded with more than usual volubility:—
“There’s a friend of mine, sir, got a horse, that I should say was just about your mark, and would carry you as I can see you like to be carried. I had him in price all last season myself, but money couldn’t buy him then; for my friend he was an out-and-out sporting chap, and could ride too! But he’s been and got married since, and gone to live in Drury Lane for good and all; so he’s no more use for a hunter now, than a cow has for a side-pocket, or a pig for a frilled-shirt. What a horse he is, to be sure!—dark-brown, tan muzzle, not a speck of white about him; up to fourteen stone; by Ratcatcher, out of Sly Puss by Mousetrap, and Mousetrap, you remember, was by Grimalkin, and the sire of Whittington, Cat’s-cradle and a many good ones. I know all about him, and have done since he was a foal. My friend he bought him off of the farmer that bred him.”
“Why, Ratcatcher has been covering at the Castle for years,” I replied, rather congratulating myself upon having Mr. Naggett “out;” “and Sly Puss never belonged to anybody but the Earl!”
“Well, sir,” retorted he, “and that’s exactly the farmer I mean. A very respectable farmer I call him too, and one that farms his own land, which is more than can be said for a good many of them. Talk of jumping, I wish you could only see this nag jump!”
There is something about the discussion of horseflesh in front of a big fire, with a cigar in his mouth, that disposes a man unaccountably to buy. Knowing I couldn’t hunt for six weeks, what did I want with another horse?
“Why should I not?” I rashly inquired. “I might look at him, at any rate. Where is he to be seen?”
“Well, sir, he’s at my place now,” replied Mr. Naggett, adding, with an air of charming frankness. “The fact is, I’ve got him to keep for my friend, who is a cousin of my wife’s, and I’ve got the riding of him for his corn. If it wasn’t that my business won’t allow me to hunt as much as I should like, I’d buy him myself, particularly considering the price.”
“What does he ask?” I inquired, walking as it were open-eyed into the pitfall prepared for me.
Mr. Naggett looked me over from top to toe, as if I had been a prize ox. Probably he was making a mental computation of my soft-headedness. I am afraid I looked very much like a fool, for he replied boldly—
“One hundred and twenty sovereigns; take him as he stands; no questions asked; and dirt-cheap at the money.”
“How old is he?” was naturally my next inquiry. “Is he quiet to ride?” I added; “and thoroughly temperate with hounds? Also, is he fit to go at present? and does your wife’s cousin warrant him sound?”
“Come up and see him, sir! Come up and see him!” was the only reply Mr. Naggett could be brought to give. “My business will take me away all to-morrow and the next day; but say Saturday, sir. You know my little place. Any time on Saturday I shall be at your service, and the horse too. Ride him, lark him, have him galloped, see him jump! If you can get him into a difficulty, I’ll give him to you—at least my wife’s cousin will. You may take my word for it, that if once you lay your leg over him, he’ll never go out of your stable again!”
And Mr. Naggett, suddenly remembering a very particular engagement, vanished incontinently, after wishing me an exceedingly civil “good-night.”
The hasty departure of Mr. Naggett seemed to produce a corresponding effect of drowsiness on Miss Lushington—an unusual weakness, to which I am bound to admit she was by no means subject. Like the Roman vestals, she never seemed tempted to quit her post, nor desirous of flinching from the duty of keeping alive the sacred fire, represented in her sanctuary by a blazing heap of coals through the day, and a jet of gas continually flaring from a pipe above the tap during the small hours towards morning. Now, however, she yawned most unreservedly, and hinted freely on the propriety of “shutting up for the night.” Perhaps, after the departure of the flash butcher, everything seemed by comparison tame and insipid. As I shall not have occasion to refer to Mr. Naggett again, I may here mention that as soon as I was able to move about, I did go to inspect the famous horse by Ratcatcher, out of Sly Puss by Mousetrap, and found him a good-looking animal enough,—large, strong, well-bred, and a fine goer, with many hunting-like qualities about him; but, on the other hand, by no means likely to emerge blameless from the ordeal of a veterinary surgeon’s examination, being indeed a little suspicious in one eye, very queer about the hocks, and with a curious catch in his windpipe, which Mr. Naggett triumphantly quoted as a proof of the excellence of his lungs, but which to my fancy seemed uncommonly like the respiration of a prospective whistler.
I need hardly observe that I declined the proprietorship of this high-bred animal upon any terms whatever, although I was offered him as a swap, as a contingent reversion, and as a temporary investment: nay, so anxious was Mr. Naggett to accommodate me, and so liberal in his professions, that I was compelled to decline very strenuously the purchase of him at a considerable reduction on his original price, with half the money down, and my bill at three months for the remainder.
Though I have often seen Mr. Naggett in the hunting-field, and have partaken of many excellent joints, both prime beef and Southdown mutton, of his purveying, this was the conclusion of my dealings with him in horseflesh, and the termination of our somewhat unexpected intimacy.
“Drat it!” exclaimed Miss Lushington, as I lit a bedroom candle, and she herself prepared to collect her different effects, such as keys, scissors, workbox, and thimble, preparatory to retiring for the night, “it’s never over here, it isn’t! One down, t’other come on! I did think I’d have had my hair in curl-papers to-night before one o’clock,” she added coquettishly, smoothing down the glossy bands that encircled her fair forehead; “but goodness gracious me! Old friends is welcome in season and out of season! If it isn’t Mr. Turnbull!”
So warm a greeting, from a lady of Miss Lushington’s self-control, impelled me to put down my chamber-candlestick and study with some curiosity the manners and appearance of the new arrival. On his first entrance he was so completely enshrouded and enveloped in a top-coat, a shawl-handkerchief, and a round low-crowned hat, that I could perceive nothing of him but his boots. These, however, were sufficiently characteristic. Strong, round-toed, and with deep mahogany tops, fastened up round the knee with the old-fashioned string, they harmonised well with the double-Bedford-cord breeches, of which they formed the appropriate termination. As their owner, unwinding himself gradually from the coils of his shawl, and emerging from his drab top-coat, stood at last conspicuous in the full glare of the gas-light, I could not help thinking that a man might travel through a long summer’s day, without meeting so fine a specimen of the real British yeoman as Mr. Turnbull.
I like the round-cropped bullet-head that you never see out of our own little island. I like the fresh healthy colour, that deepens, instead of fading, with age, and the burly thick-set form, square and substantial as a tower, deriving its solid proportions from a good English ancestry, “men of mould,” since the days of Robin Hood, and its vigour from good English beef and floods of nut-brown ale. These are the sort of men that kept the green wood in merry Nottinghamshire, and bore back the chivalry of Europe at Agincourt, Crecy, and Poitiers. These are the sort of men that would turn the tide of an invasion to-day, shoulder to shoulder in their dim grey ranks, handling the rifle as deftly as their fathers did the bow, yet impatient somewhat of long-bowls at five or six hundred yards, and longing withal to get to close quarters and try conclusions with the bayonet. When it comes to clash of steel, depend upon it “the weakest will go to the wall.”
Five foot ten in his stockings; fourteen stone, without an ounce of superfluous flesh upon his ribs; built in the mould of a Hercules, with a ruddy-brown complexion and dark crisp hair, short, close curling and grizzled about the temples, for our friend is nearer fifty than forty, Tom Turnbull, as he is called at every fair, market, and cattle-show in three counties, nods good-humouredly to Miss Lushington, and gives a backward scrape of his foot in deference to myself.
“Glass of strong ale, if you please, Miss,” says he, in cordial cheery tones, and holding it up to the light, tosses off the clear sparkling beverage, with a sigh of intense satisfaction. No wonder. Since a market dinner at one o’clock, Tom Turnbull has ridden the best part of thirty miles. He has nine more to go before he reaches Apple-tree Farm, where he has succeeded Mr. Naggett (what a contrast!), and he will be out to-morrow morning at daybreak, looking after the ploughs, and taking perhaps a vigorous spell between the stilts himself. There is a good animal, however, waiting for him at the door, submitting impatiently to the caresses of the admiring ostler, and having had her own suck of gruel, looking wistfully round for her master, who she knows is never very long having a suck of his.
If you want to be thoroughly acquainted with your horse to inspire him with that unreserved confidence which the animal is certainly capable of feeling in his master, ride him at night. An hour in the dark draws the bond of partnership tighter than a day in the sunshine. When you have made a journey or two together over bad roads, without a moon, you learn to depend upon each other thoroughly, and the animal will answer your hand and bend to your caresses with a willing promptitude he would never acquire by daylight. Tom Turnbull spends many an hour of darkness in the saddle, and except on one occasion when he took a short cut over some low fences, and tumbled neck-and-crop into an open culvert, breaking his own head and his horse’s neck, has never met with what he calls an accident.
I fancy the old-fashioned highwaymen knew more about the sagacity and powers of their horses than any more respectable sportsmen of the modern times. They rode, as their business obliged them, continually by night; and the distances they accomplished were so marvellous as to be incredible, had they not been attested by the most unimpeachable of evidence in the witness-box. Horses can see wonderfully well in the dark, and no doubt a man who was riding against time for an alibi, with so heavy a stake as his own life depending on his success, would be tolerably venturesome in his efforts to “get forward;” but yet, under the most favourable circumstances, it cannot but have proved haphazard work, jumping fences by moonlight; and what a good mare must poor Black Bess have been, when she started fresh on the North road for her journey to York!
In this one respect Tom Turnbull resembles Dick Turpin; the former, too, has a mare he rides long journeys by night, and for whose merits and reputation he entertains the profoundest respect. She is a lengthy, low, wiry, bay mare, with short flat legs, clean and hard as iron. She rejoices in a lean, game head, with a curl not unlike a sneer above her nostrils, and a wild eye; also, the long, fine, and rather lop ears, which belong to her high-born family. In the breeding of all stock Mr. Turnbull knows what he is about. If he wants a promising foal that shall grow into a couple of hundred pounds at five years old, he does not put an old worn-out mare, whose constitution and physical qualities are exhausted by hard work, to a fashionable stallion, and calmly expect the produce to excel the united excellencies of sire and dam in the best days of both. On the contrary, he begins, as we humbly opine, at the right end. He gets a foal or two out of the young fresh mare before she commences work, instead of after she is incapable of it. The dam’s functions are then in their highest state of vigour and redundance; nor is it possible but that this must materially enhance the value of her offspring. The infant is all the better, and the mother none the worse.
The Arabs, who are by no means behindhand in their knowledge of horses, and whose everyday wants necessitate their bringing the animal to its highest state of perfection, at least as regards their own purposes, have established, as an incontestable maxim, that while the colt inherits “make and shape” from his sire, his inner qualities—if we may so call them—his mettle, speed, temper, and powers of endurance come from his dam. None of us who have taken an interest in the rearing of young horses can have failed to observe the strong outward resemblance they usually bear to their sires. “How like the old horse!” is a remark one hears every day when looking at some dark-brown flyer by The Dutchman, or some commanding animal with extraordinary power and substance by Cotherstone; but we seldom see any striking resemblance to the dam, although, when some veteran sportsman is relating the feats of the “best he ever had in his life,” whether hunter, hack, or trotter, he generally winds up with the observation, “He was as good as the old mare!” Now, the Arab ought to be a capital judge, and though by no means despising speed, endurance is the quality which he most values in his horse, and puts most frequently to the test. It is no unusual feat for an Arab to ride a hundred miles a day for four days together, through the desert, carrying with him (no trifling addition to his own weight) the water that is to last him throughout his journeys, also the forage that must supply his steed, and the handful or two of pressed dates that shall serve to keep the rider alive till he reaches his destination. Now we have nothing of this sort in England, and, since the introduction of railroads, have indeed small occasion to prove the lasting qualities of our horses. The covert-hack of the present day is the animal that is required to prove his superiority to his stable companions, for he may be asked, by a master who likes to get his beauty-sleep after eight A.M., to do his fifteen miles, with as many stone on his back, in five minutes over the hour; and this is exceedingly good going. Still, a summer’s day’s journey of eighty or ninety miles, with only one stoppage to bait for an hour or two, such as used to be frequently accomplished by jockeys and other locomotive individuals on the old-fashioned hackney of the last century, was a very different matter, and required in the performer not only perfect soundness of limbs and constitution, but a very true and even style of going, that gave every point and articulation fair play, and no excess of work above its due share. Such a fault in a horse as hitting his legs of course would have rendered him utterly useless before two-thirds of his task was accomplished.
It is feared that we shall lose altogether the breed of animal that is capable of such performances. For many years we have been studying to acquire increased power, and consequently pace, to the disregard of stamina. It stands to reason that the larger a horse is, c?teris paribus, the faster he can go; but it does not the least follow that his size should enable him to go on. Doubtless the object for which we get into the saddle is dispatch, and “the slows” is the worst disease our horse can be troubled with; nevertheless, there is a good old rule in mechanics which affirms “nil violentum est perpetuum;” and if your engine is to go with the weight and momentum of an express train, you must calculate on a considerable expenditure of fuel, and great wear and tear on the nuts, screws, and fittings of the whole. Now, Nature, although the neatest and most finished of workers, will not submit herself to the laws of commensuration. She will not make you a model in inches, and supply you with a work on a corresponding scale in feet. It would seem as if she only issued a certain amount of stores in the aggregate, and if you are to get more iron, she gives you less steel; you shall have plenty of coke, but in return she stints you in oil. So, if the living creature she turns out for you on your estimate is to be very magnificent in its proportions, the chances are that it will either fail in activity, or be deficient in endurance.
We have now established half-mile races for our two-year-olds, as, with some few exceptions, the most important events of our English turf—our very Derbys and St. Legers—are but a scramble of a dozen furlongs, with little more than the weight of a child on a very young horse’s back. With all the forcing by which art strives to expel nature, it returns, in this instance, as Horace says, literally with a stablefork, we cannot get an animal to its prime at three years old, who ought not to arrive at maturity till twice that age. Still we continue to breed more and more for a “turn of speed,” utterly regardless of endurance, till our famous English racehorses have degenerated into such galloping “weeds,” that I myself heard an excellent sportsman and high authority on such matters affirm, in discussing the hounds-and-horses match, which was to have come off last October, that “he did not believe there was a horse at Newmarket that could get four miles at all; no, not if you trotted him every yard of the way!”
3. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.”
This, of course, was a jest; but, like many a random shaft pointed with a sarcasm and winged with a laugh, it struck not very far off the centre of the target. Even our hunters, too (and surely, if you want endurance in any animal alive, it is in a hunter), we are improving, year by year, into a sort of jumping camelopard. Where are the strong, deep-girthed horses on short legs of thirty years ago? horses that stood just under sixteen hands, and could carry sixteen stone. Look at what people call a first-class hunter now! (and it must be admitted that, for the high price he commands in the market, he ought to be as near perfection as possible.) Look at him, as you may see him in fifty different specimens with the Pytchley or Quorn hounds, any hunting-day throughout the winter! He is a bay or a brown—if the latter, more of a chocolate than a mottled, with white about his legs and nose. He stands sixteen two at least, with much daylight underneath him. He has either a very long weak neck, with a neat head; or more often a good deal of front and throat, with a general bull-headed appearance, that conveys the idea of what sailors term “by the bows,” and argues a tendency to hard pulling, which, to do him justice, he generally possesses. He has fine sloping shoulders, and can stride away in excellent form over a grass-field, reaching out famously with his fore legs, which, though long, are flat, clean, and good. Somehow you are rather disappointed with him when you get on his back. With no positive fault to find, you have yet an uncomfortable conviction that he does not feel like it; and, for all his commanding height, you are subjected to no irresistible temptation to “lark” him. When Mr. Coper asks you three hundred and takes “two fifty,” as he calls it, alleging the scarcity of horses, the excellence of this particular specimen, his own unbounded liberality, intense respect for yourself, and every other inducement that can mitigate the painful process of affixing your name to a cheque, you seem to give him your money without exactly knowing why; but when the new purchase stops with you in deep ground the first good scenting day, after you have bustled him along honestly for two-and-twenty minutes, you think you do know why exactly; and, although you may be, and probably are disgusted, you cannot conscientiously admit that you are surprised.
I have not seen these sort of nags, though, in the Soakington country; I presume they all go to “The Shires;” and this brings me back, after a long digression, to Tom Turnbull and Apple-tree Farm.
There never was such a farm for coziness and comfort as that. Surrounded by an ugly though sporting-looking country, it possesses the only undulating fields for many miles round, and consequently boasts a view from a certain eminence called Ripley Rise, that commands half-a-dozen of the Earl’s best fox-coverts, the distant towers of Castle-Cropper itself, and no less than seventeen church-steeples. There are stately old elms close to the dwelling-house, and a rich and plentiful orchard, from which it takes its name, adjoins a snug little walled garden, celebrated for the earliest summer fruit, and the best plums in the district—thanks to the late Mr. Naggett, a far-seeing, shrewd old agriculturist. Apple-tree Farm is a good deal better drained than most of the adjoining lands; consequently its acres of arable return a heavier produce, and its upland fields are more calculated for rearing young horses than any in the country.
Nothing gives a colt such a chance as a fine high and dry pasture, on a slope, where he can exercise himself in the practice of going up and downhill, unconsciously strengthening his hocks and acquiring liberty in his shoulders whilst he is at play.
Horses bred on uplands, too, have a far harder and sounder description of hoof than those that have been accustomed in youth to splash about in rank, marshy meadows; and, strange to say, their very coats are finer, and their whole appearance denotes higher blood than can be boasted by their own brothers, reared on lower grounds. Those who profess to be acquainted with the physiology of the horse, affirm that the produce of Arab stallions and mares, if suffered to breed in the rich wet marshes of Flanders, would, in half-a-dozen generations, without any sort of cross, and from the sheer influence of keep and climate, lose every trace of their noble origin. The Prophet himself would not recognise the dull-eyed, coarse-shaped, heavy-actioned progeny, for the lithe and fiery children of the Desert.
Here, then, Tom Turnbull breeds and rears many a good nag, taking care never to have above one or two at a time, so that sufficient attention may be devoted to the yearling, and, above all, that it may have plenty of keep.
The Arabs, to go eastward once more for our proverbs on this subject, have a saying, that “the goodness of a horse goes in at his mouth,” and it is incredible by those who have not watched the result, what improvement may be made in the animal by the very simple recipe of old oats and exercise, plenty of both; indeed, of the latter, in contradistinction to work, a young horse can hardly have too much. It is exercise that forms his shape, strengthens his joints, hardens his limbs, produces action, and clears his wind. All the time a young one is out, he is acquiring something—either how to use his legs, or to obey his bit, or to conform his inclinations to those of his master; whilst, even should he be standing still and unemployed, he is at least learning to see and hear, accustoming himself to sights and sounds with which it is of the greatest advantage both to himself and his rider that he should be familiar. Also, it is far better for him to be breathing the cold outward air than the more luxurious atmosphere of his stable; and it is not too much to say, that a horse of three or four years old cannot be brought out too often, so long as you take care that he shall never go home the least bit fatigued.
Tom Turnbull begins handling the foals as soon as they are born. By the time they are weaned, he has accustomed them thoroughly to the halter; and although he never backs them till three years old, they have been bridled and saddled long before that period, and are so accustomed to the human form and face, and so confident no evil is intended them, that you may do almost anything you please with such willing and good-tempered pupils.
Consequently, there is none of that rearing, and plunging, and buck-jumping, which usually make the mounting of an unbroken colt such an affair of discomfort, not to say danger, to the two parties immediately concerned. By the time Tom Turnbull has hoisted his fourteen stone of manhood on to his colt’s back, the pupil is quite satisfied of the bona fide nature of the whole performance, and walks away with him as quietly as any elderly gentleman’s cob who comes round to the door regularly every afternoon, for the sober and digestive exercise which elderly gentlemen are apt to affect.
Tom Turnbull, though he puts a strong bridle in his mouth, then takes his young friend lightly by the head, and proceeds to ride him leisurely about, as he overlooks his farm. There are, of course, many gates to open, and the horse in learning this very essential accomplishment, receives at the same time a valuable lesson in the moral virtues of patience and obedience. If he see anything to alarm him, a scarecrow, an old man pulling turnips, or a sheep-trough on its beam ends (the latter, like all inverted objects, being much dreaded by the animal), he is not whipped, and spurred, and hurried by it in a matter that agitates his nerves for the rest of the day, but is coaxed and reassured, and persuaded gently and by degrees to examine it for himself, and so discover its innocuous nature. The next time he observes the same bugbear, he probably shies for fun, but that is a very different thing from shying for fear; and the same practice repeated will make him pass it the third or fourth time with no more notice than he would take of his own currycomb. He is by this time getting accustomed to his rider’s hand, has learned to put his head down, and toss the bit about his mouth, and is beginning to feel some confidence in his own activity, and a certain pleasure in doing what he is bid.
There are short cuts on Apple-tree Farm, like every other, which lead from field to field without going round by the gate. These entail the necessity of crossing certain gaps, which are periodically made up, and gradually destroyed again as the year goes round. Here the colt takes his first lesson in fencing. He is permitted to do the job exactly in his own way, without interference from his rider, except so far as a continual pressure of his legs warns the young one that it must be done somehow. Generally, after poking his nose all over it, and smelling every twig of the adjoining hedge, he walks solemnly into the very bottom of the ditch, and emerges somewhat precipitately on the farther side; then his rider pats and makes much of him, as if he had done his work in the most scientific form possible. Thus encouraged, he tried next time to improve for himself, and soon jumps it standing, without an effort. Ere he has been ridden half-a-dozen times he will trot up to any ditch about the farm, and, breaking into a canter the last stride, bound over it like a deer, perhaps giving his head a shake and his hind-quarters a hoist on landing, in sheer exuberance of spirits at the fun. In this manner he soon learns to do the fences equally well; Tom Trumbull’s plan being, in his own words, as follows:—“First, little places at a walk, then at a trot, then at a canter, and then bustling of them off their legs to make them quick. After that, fair hunting fences the same way. To my mind, a hunter ought to jump upright places, such as walls and timber, at a slow trot; but he ought to be able to do them if required, at speed, not that I, for one, would ask him for that, except as a lesson. All fair fences he should do with a loose rein, at an easy canter.”
But he is no theorist, my friend Mr. Turnbull. It is a treat to see him get away with the Castle-Cropper hounds on a good scenting day and in a stiff country, say for instance the Soakington Lordship. Though there is hard upon fifteen stone on his back, his horse seems to make no extra exertion, and though the rider keeps very close to the hounds, and follows no man, not even the Earl himself, he never appears to be out of a canter. How well he brings his horse (probably a five-year-old, who has done very little hunting, but has had plenty of practice, “shepherding,” and consequently jumping over the farm) up to his leaps! How he screws him through the thick place under the tree, and hands him in and out of the blind double, as you would hand a lady into an outside car! When you come to the rails in the corner, which he trotted up to so quietly, and seemed to rise at with such deliberate ease, you are surprised to find a dip in front of them, a bad take-off, a ditch beyond, and a general uncompromising appearance about the timber, that makes you wish that you were halfway across the next field, and “all were well.”
If you mean to see the run to your own satisfaction, and belong to that numerous and respectable class of sportsmen who are unable to ride for themselves, you cannot do better than follow Tom Turnbull; and should you cross the Sludge, which in that district you will probably do more than once, you will acknowledge that it is a treat to see him get triumphantly over that obstacle where its sluggish waters are deepest, and its banks most treacherous and rotten.
But it is not for a man with a broken collar-bone and his arm in a sling, to call up such dreams of enjoyment as a quick thing across the Vale with the Castle-Cropper hounds; so I took my chamber-candlestick once more, and wishing Miss Lushington a courteous “good-night,” which she returned with a gracious politeness, that would drive sleep for many an hour from the pillow of a younger and more inflammable swain, I shook Mr. Turnbull by the hand, and paused on my way to my dormitory to see him get into the saddle for his homeward ride.
“It’s a very dark night,” I remarked, as I watched him stuffing a well-filled note-case, the produce of his sale at to-day’s market, into his breast-pocket. “I wonder you like to travel these bye-roads with all that money about you, and such a lot of ‘roughs’ hereabouts, always on the tramp.”
Turnbull grinned, and taking me by the sound arm, pointed to the mare’s head—“They’ve tried that on, once before, sir,” said he; “and within half-a-mile of the Haycock. Look ye here, sir! that’s the way I done ’em that time: that’s the way I’ll do ’em again.”
Following the direction of his glance, I saw that he had run his bridle (a single snaffle) through his throat-lash, so that no part of it when he mounted would hang below the mare’s neck.
“There, sir,” said he; “that’s the way to keep ’em at out-fighting. When they tried it on, last winter, there was a pair on ’em. One chap he run out o’ the hedge on the near side, and makes a grab at the reins. He didn’t catch ’em though, but he caught something else, I expect, as he wasn’t looking for, right across his wrist, fit to break his arm. He sung out, I can tell you, and bolted right off without waiting for his mate. T’other had gripped my right ankle at the same time, to give me a hoist out of the saddle; but you see, sir, I knowed the trick of it, and just let my leg double up at the knee quite easy, and came down upon his head with a back-hander, from a bit of stick I had in my fist, that felled him like a bullock in the road. So I took him easy, and by that means we got the other one in a day or two, and they were both transported. So that’s the reason, whenever I travel this way, I always run my reins through my throat-lash. I wish you good-night, sir, and pleasant dreams, if so be as your arm will let you sleep!”
With these words Mr. Turnbull trotted off, and I betook myself leisurely to the privacy of my own room, and the tedium of a somewhat restless couch.
In a day or two, with the constant attendance of my medical man, himself rather a character in his way, and the considerate cares of Miss Lushington, I was sufficiently recovered from the effects of my accident to crawl to the stable and visit those now useless animals which I had reviewed with such pride and pleasure on the first Sunday afternoon that I had taken up my quarters at Soakington. In my opinion, there are few more unsatisfactory performances than these inspections of a stud thus thrown out of work. The horses all look so blooming in their coats, so high in their condition, and altogether so fit to go, that it seems a pity that they should be disappointed of their hunting, and compelled to limit their energies to that exploit which is called “eating their heads off”—a feat never performed with such an appetite as during a course of enforced idleness either from frost or any other cause that stops the fascinating pursuit for which they have been bought, and summered, and got into condition. Also, on these occasions, partly from their actual fulness and vigour consequent upon losing a turn, partly from that peculiarity in the human mind which enhances the value of everything out of reach, we cannot help fancying the nags a good deal better than they are, and ourselves much more enthusiastic and skilful than we know ourselves to be, in our cooler moments, say, for instance, when mounted and at the covert-side, a fine country before us, every probability of a run, a north-east wind rather keener than agreeable, bathing our uncovered face like cold water, and a chill misgiving that last week’s frost is not thoroughly out of the ground, particularly just under the fences, and that the thaw which rejoiced us so exceedingly after dinner, has only succeeded in making the surface greasy, and not in rendering it soft. Ah! if we could always feel as we do for that glorious hour from about seven to eight P.M., when we stretch our napkin-covered legs towards the cheerful fire, blazing and crackling, and sparkling into rubies, as it reflects itself in our brimming glass of Bordeaux, what good fellows we should all be! how generous, how open-hearted, and how successful in our avocations and pursuits! The process of digestion, that highly important function, when properly performed, seems to endow us with all the most admirable qualities of manhood. We become conscious that we are possessed of sagacity, courage, humour, and general benevolence. We could lend a friend a hundred pounds willingly, if we had it. We could go the best run that ever was seen, on the very backs of the hounds, if that was only an actual existing country, which we trace in the glowing embers, instead of a dream of fairyland, the offspring of Newcastle coal and Chateau Lafitte. Then how we can converse on the inexhaustible topic, of “The Horse and how to ride him!” We are never tired of laying down the law “what to jump, creep, and avoid.” We do not believe we are deceiving ourselves, or our listeners, when we profess our partiality for high timber, or our proficiency and personal experience in water-jumping. We combine, in our heated imaginations, the “science of Meynell,” with the courage and dexterity of the late Mr. Assheton Smith. We believe, for the nonce, in many fallacies that our better judgment has so often proved to be such by the testimony of sad experience; to wit, that “if a horse can only gallop, he is sure to jump;” that, “what one hunter can clear, another can;” that, “if a man’s heart is in the right place, his horse is sure to carry him well with hounds:” and that, “large fences are the safest to ride at”—established positions which nobody thinks it worth while to dispute, laid down as they are by retired sportsmen, confirmed valetudinarians, and other non-hunting members of the community, but which to-morrow morning too clearly demonstrates to be mere after-dinner sentiments, unsafe to act upon, and in practice but a delusion and a snare.
If we were to pin our faith on what we hear, and what we read, concerning the engrossing theme of horsemanship, we should ere long be led to believe that nothing was so easy as to keep alongside of a clipping pack of fox-hounds running hard over a grass country intersected with those formidable impediments which defend such verdant districts. Poor Nimrod tells us how to get our horses into condition; Beckford, Cooke, Delmé Radcliffe, Grantley Berkeley, Smith (not Assheton), and a host of others, instruct us patiently and at considerable length, in the scientific details of our favourite amusements. The author of “Soapy Sponge” presents to our delighted view the humours and ridiculous side of the question, conveying, by means of Mr. Jorrock’s inimitable vein of absurdity, many home-truths and incontrovertible reflections; whilst last of all comes Sir Francis Head, with the brilliancy of his reputation, and the weight of his personal experience, to give the finishing touches to our education. He tells us in the simplest language, and as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do it as well as himself, how we are to saddle our horse and bridle our horse, how to dress and how to feed, how to go out in the morning and how to come at night, how to transform our hack into a hunter, and, when so metamorphosed, how to ride the astonished animal over the highest gates and the widest brooks that can be found in the midland counties of merry England; the whole performance to be achieved in a jovial off-hand style, as if it were the simplest and safest thing in the world. Now this is all very well in theory, but becomes a more complicated question when reduced to a matter of practice. It seems to me that to achieve excellence in riding to hounds, something more is required than a hard heart and a light pair of hands; that with all the advantages of courage, strength, and activity, being good horsemen, and with excellent hunters to ride, many men go out day after day, and season after season, without ever seeing a run to their own satisfaction; nay, with a certainty, unless they are piloted by some more gifted sportsman, of losing the hounds in the first three fields. A man may be as bold as Alexander, and as well mounted too, never giving less than “three figures” for his Bucephalus, and yet unless he be possessed of a peculiar knack of finding his way over a country which it is almost impossible to explain, he will invariably be left behind in a quick thing.
This knack is a sort of instinct rather than an acquirement, an intuitive sagacity, akin to that faculty by which the Red Indian, in common with other savages, takes the right direction through the pathless woods, and over the monotonous prairies of the West. We will suppose a man to be riding his own line, fairly with a pack of fox-hounds, in a country he has never seen before, with a good scent, and a fox’s head set up-wind. He jumps into a field from which there are but two possible egresses, a quarter of a mile apart, the one to the right, the other to the left; he goes unhesitatingly to the former, and the hounds bend towards him almost as soon as he is clear of the obstacle which has obliged him to diverge from his line. He could not, probably, explain why he thus acted; yet he did it, and he was right. All through a run you will see some men gaining every turn upon the hounds, just as others lose them. This happy facility is but a modification of that which makes the difference between a bad huntsman and a good one. The latter seems to possess an intuitive knowledge of the run of a fox, independent of all extraneous accidents, such as wind, sheep, dogs, people ready to head him at every turn, and the thousand obstacles that are always present to destroy the chance of a good run—nay, even of country, for such men exhibit it in districts with which they have no acquaintance. I begin to think people are born sportsmen, just as they are born poets, painters, and peers of the realm. We see them in every class of life; and there is many an honest fellow who loses half a day’s work, and wears out his shoe-leather, to make the best he can of his fox-hunting on foot, who, in a higher position, would have achieved a brilliant reputation in the eyes of the sporting world.
What leads me to this reflection is the glimpse I had of Miss Lushington, at the window of her sanctuary commanding the stableyard, pouring out a wineglassful of a fluid that looked like water, but smelt like gin, and handing the same to one of the most dilapidated individuals it has ever been my fortune to encounter.
As I entered the back-door of the “Haycock,” he touched an extremely damaged hunting-cap, and greeted me with much cordiality. I then recognised a character with whom I could not fail to have made acquaintance, even during my short stay in the Soakington country, and whom I never heard called by any other name than “Old Ike, the Earth-stopper.” As an example of what I have above alluded to—the creature in whom the sporting instinct seems fully developed, the man who must obviously have been intended by Nature for a sportsman—Old Ike deserves to have his portrait taken, more especially as the office he fills so well is the only one in which he could have found his appropriate place in the world.
He is a tough, spare old man, very lean and very wrinkled, who looks as if all the juices had been exuded from his body by severe and unremitting exercise, till nothing has been left but sinew, gristle, and a pair of keen, dark eyes, like those of a hawk. It is as if the original Isaac had been boiled down to what chemists call a residuum, and “Ike” was the result. He must have been a tall fellow in his youth, although he is now so bent, and twisted, and knotted, that he carries his head at a much lower elevation than was intended by Nature, and his light, wiry form still denotes the possession of considerable strength. To look at him, you could swear he was the sort of fellow who was the best runner, leaper, cricketer, and fisherman of his parish; who could throw a stone further, and consequently hit harder, than any of his brother-yokels, and who was sure to be at the core of all the merry-making, and half the mischief that angered the squire and made the parson grieve. There is always one such scapegrace in every hamlet. As a boy at the village school, he climbs the tallest elms, takes the earliest birds’ nests, and is constantly prowling about the belfry, to curry favour with the ringers, and interfere, with unspeakable interest, when anything is done to the church clock. As a lad, he turns out a swift bowler, a dead hand at skittles, and a very useful fellow at all odd jobs; yet somehow, continually out of work. By degrees, he becomes an irregular attendant at church, and is always hankering about the stream, partly to make love to the miller’s daughter, and partly (as the squire’s keeper—a wary old bird, who began in exactly the same way himself—has found out) to set night-lines, trimmers, and such abominations, thereby entering unfailingly on the downward career of the poacher, to which “the contemplative man’s recreation” is apt to be the first step. After that, he gets thoroughly inoculated with the fatal passion. Then come the “shiny nights,” the slaughtered pheasants, and the netted hares; the sleep by day; the pot-house rendezvous; the covered cart driven to a poulterer’s, who ought to know better, in the neighbouring market-town; the general laxity of principle, and utter demoralisation consequent on a life of habitual crime—perhaps the irresistible temptation of too heavy a sweep, the conflict with the keepers, fought out fiercely and unsparingly on both sides, to result in a verdict of manslaughter, and transportation for life.
Old Ike’s beginning, however, although sufficiently unpromising as regarded steadiness of habits, or the prospect of ever doing well in some settled trade or profession, was not destined to end in so fatal a catastrophe. Moreover, his was one of those characters so often met with, of which it is difficult to reconcile the apparent contradictions. With a tendency amounting to a passion for every pastime that could possibly come under the category of the term “sport,” he was yet the gentlest and most amiable of created beings, where his fellow-man was concerned. Although as a boy he would risk his neck with the greatest delight to get a bird’s nest, and when obtained seemed utterly pitiless of the poor parents’ anxiety for their offspring, the same reckless lad would sit still for hours to rock the cradle of a suffering child, or run any number of miles in the wet and the dark to bring home the medicine for itself or its mother.
Though he could handle a game-fowl with remarkable coolness in the pit, and, what is a far more brutal and debasing amusement, look on with excited interest whilst two faithful and high-couraged dogs tore and worried each other for a five-shilling stake, he could not bear to see a fellow-creature in pain, and would soothe any of the village urchins, with whom he was a prime favourite, under the infliction of a bruised knee and cut finger, as gently and tenderly as a woman. “Ike” was made up of contradictions, both within and without, nor was his moral being less twisted, and toughened, and knotted, than his frame.
Like a good many other persons in a higher sphere, “Ike” was ruined by the agreeable process of having a small fortune left him. This legacy acting on a temperament in which the love of approbation largely predominated, made him for a time an exceedingly conspicuous and remarkably popular individual in his own humble circle. He was not an idle man—far from it; but his habits were desultory—a much more dangerous characteristic. In fact, an idle man seldom does himself great positive harm. Like a vegetable, he may run to seed, or he may be trampled down; but he will not seek misfortune, and that unwelcome visitor is often a long time before she finds a tranquil person out.
Now Isaac must always be doing something; only, unluckily, it was the profitable work that ever seemed to him the most laborious. To set-to with a will, and earn a shilling by six hours’ labour, would have been the most unwelcome proposal you could have made him; yet he would readily have paid you the same money, if he had it, to carry a game-bag for fourteen or fifteen hours, over the roughest country you could choose. You see the game-bag was unproductive, and therefore attracted him irresistibly.
Ike’s fortune was not a large one. It consisted of two hundred pounds, and this he spent in about fourteen months, during which period he constantly treated some of the worst characters in the parish, and lived almost entirely in the open air, undergoing great hardship, both of work and weather, in the pursuit of that sport which to him was certainly synonymous with pleasure.
Just as he arrived at the last five-pound note of his two hundred, an Irish gentleman who was staying at Castle-Cropper, and delighted the whole neighbourhood with the breadth of his brogue, the daring of his horsemanship, and the vivacity of his manners, took a great fancy to Ike, from the masterly way in which he saw the latter fishing a pool below the Mill, and easily persuaded him to accompany him back to Ireland, as a sort of humble sporting companion. There being no profit and nothing definite to do, the situation was exactly suited to our friend; and as he could neither read nor write, it is needless to state that his patron called him his private secretary forthwith.
Most men have some period in their lives—not always the happiest while it was actually present—on which they are continually looking back, and to which they lose no opportunity of reverting, as a sort of Utopian existence, rendering everything else tame and desolate by comparison. Such, it would appear, was Ike’s residence in the county Galway. Whenever the old man’s heart was warmed and his nose reddened by his usual potation, “a little gin-and-cloves,” he would enlarge upon his favourite theme. He was never tired of detailing the glories of Bally-Blazer, the improvidence of the housekeeping, the liberality and general recklessness of “The Master.” The latter, by Ike’s account (although the narrator, it must be admitted, varied a little in his statistics), seems to have kept more young horses and old servants, drank more claret, and betted more freely on the Curragh, than any other gentleman in the West of Ireland. Here Ike acquired his principal knowledge of hunting, and a taste, which rapidly grew into a passion, for that amusement. Mounted by The Master upon what he was pleased to call “the pick of the stable,” Ike, by his own account, distinguished himself for his daring feats of horsemanship as well as by his scientific knowledge of the chase.
It is difficult to make out whether the aborigines of the country believed him to be an English relative of The Master’s, or a foreigner of distinction on a special mission from his Holiness the Pope. Isaac rather leads us to infer that the latter supposition was the favourite theory in and about the demesne. Be this as it may, under the auspices of his patron he soon became, in every sense of the word, a leading characteristic with “The Flamers,” that celebrated hunt, which has so often been immortalised in song and story. “Mr. Isaacs,” as he vows he was always called, drank, talked, and rode with the boldest, the loudest, and the thirstiest of them. He seems to have ridden in and out of the celebrated Pound at Ballinasloe, on an average, once every half-hour, during the two days and nights that well-known horse-fair is supposed to last; and it was here that Ike distinguished himself by the great and crowning exploit of his life.
It was in the old fighting, roistering days. Captain Bounceable quarrelled with Major O’Toole, upon the merits of a “harse,” as each of the belligerents was pleased to term the noble animal that originated their differences. The lie which had been told pretty frequently during the dispute, was at length given with offensive directness; and nothing but “thunder an’ turf:” pistols and coffee, could be the result. The time was hard upon midnight; the next morning was Sunday; the principals, men of the strictest orthodoxy and the soundest Protestantism. The quarrel could not possibly keep till Monday morning. Major O’Toole was impatient for action: Captain Bounceable thirsted for blood. They must have it out then and there, in the inn-garden, without waiting for daylight.
Except at the two ends of a handkerchief, however, even Irishmen cannot conveniently fight a duel in the dark. It was proposed, therefore, and agreed to with considerable cordiality, that each combatant should hold a lighted torch in his left hand, to direct his adversary’s fire; a loaded pistol in his right, to return it. But here arose an unexpected difficulty. Major O’Toole had but one arm; and, although Captain Bounceable had but one eye, the advantage was obviously on the side of the latter, in a case of steady pistol practice.
The duel might now have been postponed—perhaps even prevented altogether—had it not been for the self-devotion of Mr. Isaacs.
“The gentlemen shall not be disappointed,” said Ike—“I’ll see fair, and hold the candle for both of ’em.”
“Where will you stand?” asked Major O’Toole.
“Halfway between ye,” replied the daring Englishman, “and take the chance of both of ye missing me. Give us a lantern, though,” he added; “for the wind’s rising from the south-west.”
“Faith, if it’s a bull’s-eye,” quoth Bounceable, “I’ll be safe to snuff it out; and we’ll be worse in the dark than ever, for a second shot.”
So Mr. Isaacs placed himself in a cross-fire, at five paces’ distance from the muzzle of each pistol; and it is not surprising that one bullet should have gone through the tail of his coat, and the other grazed his elbow, so as to incapacitate him for ever for that hard work to which he had always shown such a profound disinclination.
After this truly Hibernian satisfaction had been given and received, the party all sat down again, and drank claret till church-time.
But these days could not last for ever. One rainy morning, Ike’s good-humoured patron sent for his old nurse, his huntsman, his trainer, and the parish priest, bid the three first an affectionate farewell, and took his own departure very peaceably under the offices of the last. He left a handsome amount of debt, accumulated during many years, but no ready money, except a crooked sixpence on his watch-chain. Mr. Isaacs, returning to England without a shilling, became plain “Ike” once more.
He tried life in towns, under many different characters. As a billiard-marker, a light porter, an assistant-ostler, and a penny-postman; but the temptation to the copses and hedgerows was too strong for him, and the receipt of regular wages so unnatural as to be almost unpleasant. Even the tinker’s nomadic profession, which he adopted for a time, was of too settled and business-like a nature; and he gave it up ere long, in a fit of impatience and disgust.
This wandering trade, however, brought him one winter into the neighbourhood of Soakington; and a day with the Castle-Cropper hounds, beginning on the old pony that drew his cart, and ended on his own active and enduring feet, revived all his smouldering passion for the chase.
From that time, he took up his residence in one of the tumble-down cottages near The Haycock, of which he rented a little apartment like a dog-kennel. Hence he hunted as regularly as any other sportsman with half-a-dozen horses and a covert-hack. No distance was too great for him in the morning; indeed he generally travelled to the meet with the hounds, stayed out all day, and came home in the same good company. Whatever might be the pace he contrived to live with them, even before he became thoroughly familiar with the country, and would face the large Soakington fences—ay, and clear them, too—in his stride, as gallantly as a thorough-bred horse sixteen hands high, and up to fourteen stone.
“Old Ike,” as he began in the lapse of time to be called throughout the Hunt, must have made a good thing of it during the winter season, in the many half-crowns and shillings with which he was presented by his riding friends, to whom he was often useful, in the way of pulling up girths, tightening curb-chains, and catching loose horses. Nay, on one occasion he is reported to have ridden a young one over the Sludge, on behalf of a cautious sportsman following his property on foot, but who, not calculating on the difficulty of clearing some fourteen feet in boots and breeches, landed (if we may use the expression) up to his chin in water, and was extricated, at great personal inconvenience, by the daring pedestrian to whom he had entrusted his horse. Old red-coats, too, were amongst the perquisites freely bestowed on Ike. At one time, I have been informed, he had no less than forty of these cast-off garments in his wardrobe—the origin of many jests and much amusement, at the expense of their previous wearers.
It may be supposed that Ike’s Irish experience had not failed to sharpen his powers of repartee; and many anecdotes were current anent the “retorts courteous” with which, on several occasions, he had turned the laugh against those who thought either to brow-beat or what is vulgarly termed “chaff” him.
One frosty morning, at the covert-side, bidding a cordial “Good-morrow” to a certain patron not distinguished for sweetness of temper, the gentleman, who seemed to have forgotten the universal courtesy which alone gives a man a title to the name, replied by telling him to “go to ——” a place not mentioned in good company.
“Faith,” says Ike, “it’s warmer there than here, at any rate; for I’m just come from it.”
Struck by so strange an answer, the mounted sportsman asked the one on foot “How things were going on in those lower regions?”
“Much as usual,” replied Ike, with a sly twinkle in his eye, and a glance at his interrogator, who had lately inherited a large fortune—“much as usual, and terribly crowded about the doorway. The poor all coming out, and the rich all going in!”
The wealthy man struck spurs into his horse, and forbore to ask Ike any farther questions.
But Time, which, as the poet tells us, will “rust the keenest blade,” did not fail to leave the marks of his progress upon old Ike. Hard work, hard fare, and the lapse of years eventually disqualified him for such severe exertion as that of following fox-hounds on foot; and the Earl of Castle-Cropper, with that consideration which, under his calm exterior, has always attested the warmth of his heart, gave him the appointment of earth-stopper in his establishment—an office which the old man fills thoroughly con amore, and for which his exceedingly active habits, his utter disregard of all conventional hours or customs, and his extraordinary familiarity with the habits of wild animals, render him peculiarly fitted.
It is not often he indulges, as I saw him at the bar-window, in the use of stimulants; but when he does “take a drop of anything, it is always a glass of gin-and-cloves.” In this fragrant compound he invariably drinks the same toast—an old-world sentiment almost forgotten—
“Horses stout, and hounds healthy;
Earths well stopped, and foxes plenty!”
I always think convalescence is a more tedious process than actual illness. A man of active habits, who has lived a great deal out-of-doors, pines to be at work in the open air again; and although intellectual pleasures are doubtless very delightful, there is something in the sense of rapid motion, and strong physical exertion, which “leavens the blood” far more effectually than the richest mental food the Bodleian itself can afford. Before I had been confined to the inside of The Haycock for a week, or had digested a tenth of the contents of such new books as I had brought down with me in anticipation of occasional frosts, I had begun to loathe the very sight of the dust-coloured curtains in my bedroom, the staring paper in my sitting apartment, the smell of coffee that pervades the passages of an inn at all hours of the day and night—none the less because that beverage is seldom consumed within its precincts—and the general features of the prison I had chosen of my own accord. Nay, I almost caught myself, on more than one occasion, doubtful of my loyalty to Miss Lushington herself, censorious as to her appearance, sceptical on her excellence, and even insensible to her charms.
In this frame of mind I descended the stairs about ten days after my accident, with a strong feeling in favour of any novelty that might accidentally turn up, to divert the current of my thoughts.
During my late and protracted toilette, no whit accelerated by the difficulty of shaving in my crippled state (for I am no Volunteer, beared like the pard, and hold that a smooth chin denotes a respectable man), I had been disturbed and a little irritated by sundry bumpings and thumpings on the stairs and passages, which I attributed on reflection to the awkwardness of a new chambermaid. Expecting to meet, in my descent, nothing more formidable than this red-armed personage, I was surprised, not to say startled, to encounter on the landing one of the smartest ladies’-maids I have ever seen, who started—as ladies’-maids always do, at the unprecedented apparition of a stranger in the principal thoroughfare of an edifice erected for the accommodation of travellers—screamed faintly, placed her hand on her side, and turned away in an attitude of graceful and elaborate confusion.
Such a functionary, with the trimmest of figures, the most voluminous of crinolines, the neatest of boots, and a silver-spangled net gathering “the wandering tresses of her sun-bright hair,” was sufficiently in character with a couple of wide imperials, an enormous wicker basket covered with black oilcloth, looking like a trunk of considerable weight and substance, but which, instead of containing family jewels, plate, and valuables to a high amount, enclosed huge volumes of some cloudlike fabric, and when lifted, proved as light as a feather; two or more cap-boxes, a writing-case, a dressing-ditto, a leather bag, a square portfolio, several wraps, rugs, and shawls fastened together by a strap, and a bundle of parasols, en-tout-cas, and attenuated umbrellas, from the midst of which peeped an unaccountable but suggestive apparition in the shape of the sweetest little apology for a hunting-whip I have ever set eyes upon.
I am not a curious man—far from it; but it was to be expected that I should be at least interested in so extraordinary an arrival at a place like The Haycock: nor was it entirely unnatural that I should come to a halt on the landing with such a strategical disposition as brought me face to face with the well-dressed attendant, and satisfied me that the countenance over against mine own was an exceedingly pretty one. Ere I had half scanned it, however, a voice from an adjacent bedroom calling “Justine! Justine!” prompted me to identify its owner at once as a foreigner; but the accent in which Justine replied, “Coming in a minute, ma’am!” was so undoubtedly English, that my speculations were again completely at a loss; neither was the maid inclined to hurry herself, till she had given me an opportunity of perusing an extremely pretty face, with sparkling black eyes and an expression of determined coquetry, scarcely modified by dark hair dressed “à l’Impératrice,” and two little curls, something like those in a mallard’s tail, plastered down to her cheek-bones in a mode that I am given to understand is termed the “accroche c?ur,” or “heart-hooker,”—not at all an inappropriate title.
“Justine! Justine!” repeated the same lady-like and pleasing voice, this time in accents of command rather than entreaty; and Justine, after thanking me with great sweetness for stopping up the way, was compelled to obey the summons of her invisible lady.
Completely mystified, I descended to the bar, there to find Miss Lushington for the first time in the worst of humours, or what that lady herself was pleased to call “uncommonly put about.” She ordered the waiter to and fro like a drill-sergeant, rang the ostler’s bell with vindictive vehemence, and mixed a glass of brandy-and-water for a customer that must have knocked his head off. Also she tossed her curls so haughtily, and carried herself so uprightly, as to denote she was prepared at any moment, if I may use the expression, to run her guns out and clear for action.
Without being a deep student in natural history, I have not failed to observe, that when a cow begins to put her muzzle to the ground, and throw the earth about with her feet, she is prepared to toss and gore. Also, that when a woman cocks her nose in the air, giving at the same time an occasional sniff through that elevated organ, while a perceptible rise and fall heaves the snowy cambric that veils her bosom, it is the forerunner of a breeze. In either case it is advisable to change the locality as rapidly as is practicable, and without reference to the ordinary forms of politeness.
Under these circumstances, I made my way forthwith into the stableyard, and had scarcely weathered the pump which commands its entrance, ere I came face to face with a very important-looking personage, whom I could not call to mind as having ever before seen within the precincts of The Haycock. There was no mistaking his profession, which was that of stud-groom. Not one of your working servants, who strips to his shirt on occasion, and straps like a helper; but a real swell groom, always in review order, just as I saw him now, and rejoicing in the only costume of the present century which has not varied the least in my recollection. These men have all the same figure—plump, dapper, and short-legged: clad in the same attire, to wit—a straight-brimmed hat, rather high in the crown; a pepper-and-salt cut-away coat, single-breasted, and of a length in the back only equalled by the shortness of its skirts; a blue-spotted neckcloth, with a horse-shoe pin; a waistcoat of the most extensive dimensions; drab breeches, with gaiters to match; and the old-fashioned watch-ribbon with a key at the end. Like the Ph?nix, the race is immortal and unchangeable. It possesses its own language, its own customs, its own traditions. As Napoleon the First said of the Bourbons, it learns nothing, and forgets nothing. It is reflective, sagacious, sober, and methodical; but on the other hand, it is opiniate, obstinate, wilful, and deaf to the voice of reason. You may leave one of the order, with perfect confidence, in charge of twenty horses, and be sure that everything will go on like clockwork, and that you will not be robbed of a shilling more than what he considers the due perquisites of his office; but if you want to arrange about your nags for yourself, to move them here and there, to enjoy for a day the pleasure of doing what you like with your own, be sure that you will reap only vexation and disappointment, confessing at length, in the bitterness of your heart, that the most accomplished of servants is but one degree removed from the most tyrannical of masters.
The man touched his hat to me with respectful politeness. Vanity whispered: “He acknowledges you at once for a gentleman, and perhaps you even look a little Crimean with your arm in that sling.” I replied to his salutation by a remark on the weather and the sport; and having informed him I was staying at the hotel, and detailed to him somewhat circumstantially the particulars of my accident and progress of my recovery, to all of which he listened with grave courtesy, I asked him, “Whose horses occupied that range of stabling?” which I now perceived by the straw around the door-sills, and hermetically sealed appearance of the windows, were inhabited by some valuable stud.
“They’re ours, sir;” answered the man, as if I must necessarily know who “we” were. “I shall be happy to show them to you before they are shut up;” and producing the ring-key from his pocket, he called a very neat light-weight pad-groom to his assistance, and ushered me, without further parley, into the sanctum of his stud.
Four better-looking animals, even as they showed then and there, with their clothes on, and littered up to their hocks in straw, it has seldom been my lot to set eyes on. They were much of the same pattern and calibre: small heads, large bodies, short flat legs, great power behind the saddle, and the best shoulders I ever saw. Two of them had been just run over with the irons, but not sufficiently to create an eyesore; the others had not a speck or blemish about them. What struck me most was, that while their appearance denoted they must be quite thorough-bred, they had none of the wincing, swishing, lifting ways that usually distinguish these high-born creatures when you approach them in the stable. On the contrary, they seemed as tame and docile as so many pet-lambs.
The first that was stripped, a flea-bitten grey, of extraordinary beauty and symmetry, may serve as a specimen of the rest. His head, when turned round in the stall, showed like that of an Arab, so square was it in the forehead, and so tapering at the delicate velvet-like muzzle. The small silken ears, too, might have listened for the bells of the caravan in the glowing Syrian air, so pointed and symmetrical was their form, so restlessly they quivered at the slightest noise; and the mild black eye, with its latent fire, might have belonged equally to a gazelle in the rose groves of El-Gulbaz, or an Arab maid at the door of her father’s tent in the heart of the Buyuk-Sahar.
I have often thought that in the eye of no other animal is there so reflective an expression, as in that of a horse. There is a depth of honesty and goodness in that full shining glance, that vouches for the intrinsic worth of his character—that seems to denote courage, generosity, gratitude, all the nobler qualities which man would fain arrogate to himself, and a sensitive disposition, which is hurt, rather than angered, by an injury. When irritated, nay even maddened, by ill-usage, how soon he is soothed and appeased by a little judicious kindness! How he appreciates approbation! How willing he is to expend his force, his energies, his very life, for the sake of a kind word, or a well-timed caress from the hand he is so proud to obey! It seems to me that his is the brute nature which most resembles that of the best and bravest of the human race—true, loving, and courageous; writhing under injury, but giving all, freely and generously still; springing to the kind word or gesture, and always ready at the call of the voice he loves; game to the back-bone, and staunch to the last drop of his blood. This may seem a far-fetched parallel, and my reader may smile at me for a hot-brained enthusiast; but I love a good horse from my heart, and that’s the truth!
Nevertheless, although the grey’s head and neck may have seemed to argue an Eastern origin, the size and power of his lengthy frame were as far removed as possible from the attenuated proportions, the spare lean quarters of the indigenous Arab. He looked like getting through deep ground, and shooting well into the next field, whatever might be the size or nature of the fence that opposed his progress. I thought, on such a horse as that, there was no obstacle should stop me in the Soakington country; and I felt a momentary disgust while I compared his noble beauty with the more plebeian appearance of Tipple Cider and Apple-Jack.
“He looks a right good one,” said I, “and as fit to go as a man can get him. What is his name?”
“We call him the ‘King of Diamonds,’” replied the groom, modestly accepting, and passing over, my compliment to his own skill, as implied in approval of the horse’s condition. “Next to him is ‘Prince Charming;’ and the chestnut mare’s name is ‘Beller Donner;’ and the bay in the far stall, he’s ‘Lady-Killer;’ that’s all our stud, sir,” he added, touching his hat. “We don’t keep any hack; they’re no use to us, hacks ain’t.”
“I suppose the grey’s the best of them,” I observed, reverting to the beautiful animal who was now being covered up once more.
“Neatest fencer of the lot,” answered the man, “and they can all go middling straight for that matter; but the Prince, he pounded of ’em all that heavy day last week in the Vale; and Beller Donner, she was the only one as got over the Bumperley Brook, down by Heel Tappington, last Thursday was a fortnight. Ah! we beat ’em all that day, we did. If it hadn’t been for a man hoeing turnips, we have had to take the fox from the hounds ourselves. We did go owdacious, to be sure! ‘The Beller,’ as I calls her, had had pretty nigh enough, I can tell you, sir. But when we do get a start, of a fine scenting morning, I’ll tell you what it is, sir—we takes no denial, and we stands for no repairs!”
Amused with the manner in which my new friend seemed to identify himself with his proprietor, I proceeded to question him further about the horses, eliciting from him their various qualifications and merits, to which he was obviously willing to do ample justice.
“You see, sir,” said he, “we rides ’em all alike; that’s where it is. We doesn’t go picking a horse for this here country, and a horse for that there; but we brings ’em out each in their turn, as regular as clockwork. Wery particular, we are; and when they are out, go they must, or we’ll know the reason why. We haven’t had Prince Charming, now, so long as the others; and the first day we rode him he seemed unaccountably shifty at large places; uneasy like, and prevaricating, and wanting to go anywhere but where we put him. Now some folks would have said, ‘This horse won’t suit at no price,’ and been dashed a little, as was natural, and so perhaps sent him back again and lost of him altogether. But that’s not our way, that isn’t. We just laid him alongside of the hounds as soon as ever they began to run, sat down upon him, catched a good hold of his head, and sailed him at his places so as he might go in or over, which he pleased; but he must do one or the t’other. The Prince seemed to take it all at once like. When we gets off him, we just gives a quiet little smile—we never laughs; and, says we, ‘I know’d he could gallop and go on, and now I’ve found out he can jump. I think we’ll keep him, John,’ says we,—My name’s John, sir,” (with a touch of his hat,)—“‘so put him in along with the others;’ and up we goes to a cup-o’ tea, and a book till bed-time.”
“That’s the way to make a hunter!” I exclaimed enthusiastically; for I confess I felt my blood stir at John’s description; “and to ride in that form, no doubt you require the very best, such as you seem to have got here.”
“We doesn’t grudge price, you see, sir,” answered John confidentially. “When we hears of what we think likely to suit, at Tattersall’s or elsewhere, we comes down with the money at once: two hundred, three hundred—no matter what, so long as they are real good ones. Now there’s Lady-Killer, (Here! Tom, take and strip that bay horse,) we bought him at The Corner, with never a character, for two hundred and fifty guineas. Know’d nothing at all about him, except that we’d seen him out, and seen him gallop. Well, Mason would have had him if we hadn’t. First day as we rode him, and first fence as we put him at, blessed if it wasn’t the park pales, up in Deersley Chase. My Lord’s hounds, they found their fox like winking, and away right over the park and amongst the fallow-deer, as if they was tied to him. What a scent there was, to be sure! Never checked nor hovered, nor seemed to take no notice of the riot; but away, with their heads up-wind, as straight and as even as the crop of my whip. Well, there was an awful scrimmage, to be sure: such a rush among the fast ones! and we was a-going slap in front of the whole on ’em, with our hands down, I can tell you. It is a pleasure to see us, sir. Three-quarters-of-a-mile of grass had just got the horses into their swing, when the hounds came to the park pales, and over, like a stream of water across a mill-dam. No time to think about it. While two or three of the tail hounds were falling back from the top, the others were rising the opposite hill, running alarming. It was a regular case of ‘jump, or else go home.’ Some of the gentlemen pulls up, and some goes shying away to look for a gate; and one—a young gent he was, from college—takes and rides at it; but his horse turns round and kicks. So there was plenty of room, you see, for anybody who wanted to go and try. We catches hold of the bay horse, very steady and determined, and we rides him at it, so that he could not have refused, if it had been ever so. I don’t think, myself, he knowed anything about timber, for he just took it with his knees, and turned completely over on the top of us. ‘Killed! by jingo!’ says my Lord, turning as white as ashes, for he had waited to see us have a drive at it afore he galloped away to the gate. ‘Worth a dozen dead ones yet, my Lord!’ says we, jumping into the saddle again as light as a feather, and away after the hounds. So from that time we called the bay horse ‘Lady-Killer,’ although I never knowed him touch a rail since, and now he’s as safe a timber-jumper as we’ve got in the stable!”
“Your master must have extraordinary nerve,” said I, somewhat aghast, I must confess, at this stirring narrative of escape and daring. “There are few men who would care to ride for a certain fall over so dangerous a fence, let hounds run as hard as they will.”
The man stared. “Men!” he repeated, “Master! I ain’t got no master: it’s my lady as I’m a talkin’ of—Miss Merlin: her that came two hours ago in a po’ chay. The prettiest rider in England, let who will be the other. Master, indeed! I should like to know the man who can see the way she goes. There’s a many of ’em that’s tried it; but bless you, she takes no more notice, but just cuts ’em down, and hangs ’em up to dry.”
It was now my turn to be surprised. I confess I had never contemplated such a possibility as this; and now it flashed upon me all at once, as these things generally do. The owner of such high-bred cattle, the reckless equestrian, to whom wood and water formed but the mere items of a pleasurable excitement, was doubtless also the mistress of the fascinating Justine. I could picture to myself the sort of person likely to combine those dashing possessions. I imagined a lady of gaudy exterior, such as I remember to have met formerly out hunting in the vicinity of London, and masculine, not to say free-and-easy manners, with a bold eye, a dab of rouge, false plaits skilfully disposed, and a loud voice, enforcing a corresponding style of language, garnished with strong expressions. I could conceive that such a dame would never be content to sit down to dinner alone at the Haycock, after the excitement of a day’s hunting, particularly as she seemed to render that amusement as thrilling a one as possible, but that she would naturally make acquaintance with its sole inmate, bid him join her quiet little repast, a pint of sherry, and a bottle of champagne between the two, and what would become of me then? Perhaps, ere twelve hours had elapsed, we might be drinking the palest brandy-and-water together, while I smoked my virgin weed, and she indulged in a coquettish little cigarette. Of course she smoked. It is the fast thing for a woman to do in these days, and most of us know what a pace they can go when they like. I saw it all, in my mind’s eye—the little shyness at first, the gradual warming from acquaintance into friendship, and from friendship to intimacy; my own misgivings, struggles, subjugation, and eventual discomfiture.
I am not ashamed to confess my weakness. Any woman, who thinks it worth her while, can put her foot upon my neck. It is for this reason that I fight shy of the sex, that I am considered a bear and a bore by the majority of my female acquaintances, and that my pretty cousins call me The Woman-hater. There are certain allurements I cannot resist, certain encroachments I cannot withstand. I see the net, and walk into it open-eyed. Other men can emerge scathless from the ordeal of Christmas games and Twelfth-night festivities; can play at blind-man’s-buff without finding their mental vision dazzled and darkened by the game; can hunt the slipper or the ring, round and round the charmed circle, nor find the charm too potent for their peace of mind; nay, can even take a base advantage of the pendent mistletoe, with a forehead of brass, a check of marble, and a lip of stone. I envy them their insensibility, their moral courage, and their physical daring; but for my own part I think it wiser to leave these “little games” alone. Need I say I am a bachelor? Need I say I came to the Haycock in order to enjoy my favourite pastime, unmolested by the presence of the dominant sex? Even Miss Lushington I had considered an unnecessary addition to the establishment, a snare to be avoided and an enemy to be defied: but I had been somewhat reassured by the mild and motherly interest that lady took in my welfare, and the impartiality with which she shed her attractions on all alike. But now, if I was to be exposed to the insidious attacks of this mounted Delilah, beset by Miss Merlin, not only in the free intercourse of the hunting-field, but also when “taking mine ease in mine inn,” why I had better retire in disorder at once, and obviate the possibility of battle and defeat alike, by a tumultuous flight.
Revolving these weighty matters in my mind, I retraced my steps into the Haycock, and ordered a glass of sherry and a biscuit in the bar.
Miss Lushington filled out my liquor to the brim without a word, slamming down before me at the same time that biscuit, peculiar to the British hostelry, of which, to judge by its flavour, the ingredients are soda and sawdust, with a dash of gravel. I munched in silence for awhile, observing cautiously the clouds that gathered on the barmaid’s brow. At last I ventured an observation.
“A fresh arrival, I understand, Miss Lushington. The Haycock will be getting quite gay now, I presume.”
Miss Lushington’s only reply was a toss of her black head. “Do you expect any more visitors?” I proceeded, like a timid bather trying his depth. “This will be somewhat lonely for a lady all by herself, when she isn’t out hunting, I should say.”
Miss Lushington’s bright eyes flashed. “Ladies are very different in their tastes,” said she, laying a withering stress of sarcasm on this general and incontestable position. “Some women, Mr. Softly” (I have omitted to mention that my address is Cyrus Softly, Esq., Hat and Umbrella Club, London)—“some women seem to me more like men than women. In course every one to her liking. For my part, I say nothing; but this I will say: for a lady to come down to a out-o’-the-way corner like this—no friends, no followers; nothing but that highty-tighty maid (and if ever I catch her put her saucy face inside my bar, I’ll give her a piece of my mind, see if I don’t,) and hunt, hunt, hunt, day after day, and when it’s a frost or what not, read, read, read, from morning till night, and never out of a riding-habit, or else a plain dark gownd with no more trimming than on the back of my ’and” (Miss Lushington, when excited, had a habit of catching her breath, and in so doing let go a certain number of aspirates, and added a few elegant superfluities of language). “Why, I say it isn’t natural, and if it isn’t natural, there must be something in it, don’t you think so, Mr. Softly? And to see a maid dressed out like that flaunting miss, in flounces and fal-lals, with a velvet net to her ’air, and hear-rings like any lady of the land! In course it ain’t my place to make remarks, Mr. Softly; but you can’t prevent my thinking it a pity and a shame, not if you was to hang me alive for it the very next minute, there!”
Foreseeing no advantageous result from a continuance of the discussion with Miss Lushington, and surmising also that the strong opinion she had formed of the new arrivals was partly owing to Justine’s attractions, I left the barmaid in her own department, placing her hand to her side for “occasional spasms,” and catching her breath loudly at intervals, as is the habit of the sex when stimulated by any unusual excitement, and proceeded up the staircase and along the dark passage that led to my dormitory, pondering deeply on all that I had heard and seen.
My curiosity—more, my interest, was strongly aroused. Miss Merlin was evidently no common character. Brave, reserved, studious, and simple in her attire, she must be a lusus natur?, a flower like the aloe, blooming but once in a century; and here she was at Soakington;—how to obtain an introduction was the difficulty. Had I been sound again, nothing, I thought, could be easier: a large fence out hunting; an appropriate compliment to her horse, and implied flattering of herself; a gate opened at the right moment, and then a bow out-of-doors, which could not but ripen to a familiar greeting within. After that, it would be all plain-sailing. When I got thus far, I was perfectly astonished at myself. “Softly,” said I, “is it possible—you, who have been a shy man and a diffident all your life; who have never been willing to burn your fingers at the shrine of Cupid, much less scorch yourself up, body and bones and all; you, who have had warnings innumerable among your friends, and beacons untold in your own family—can you be such an ass? Did not your cousin Harry, helping a comparative stranger to put on her goloshes at a picnic, become involved in a series of dilemmas which came eventually under the notice of Sir Cresswell Cresswell, in reviewing whose decision a weekly paper was good enough to remark that the co-respondent, meaning Cousin Harry, had behaved with the blackest villainy throughout? Was not your brother John, accidentally offering an unknown damsel his umbrella in the street, compelled by an Amazonian mother to marry her within six weeks? Has not the Amazonion taken up her abode with him for life, and has not Mrs. John Softly borne twins to her lord on two successive occasions? Are these hideous examples insufficient, and must you in your own person furnish another deplorable instance of the inevitable result when—
“‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’?”
“Let it alone,” cried Caution. “But may I not at least take a look at my danger?” whispered Curiosity. “Better bandage your eyes,” answered Caution. “Perhaps she is not good-looking after all,” urged Curiosity. “Don’t go near her for your life!” threatened Cau. “I’ll be d—d if I don’t!” thundered Q.
This was the end of the argument, and I arrived at it precisely as I reached a turn of the staircase that led to my bedroom. Justine was at this instant coming down with a basket in her arms far too wide for the narrow landing: the corner was exceedingly dark and inconvenient. In common humanity I could not but stop to assist her. Not very self-possessed at the best of times, I am afraid my efforts were of the clumsiest. Between us, we got the basket in the angle of the two walls. I was inside of it, and could not possibly get out: Justine could not very well leave me imprisoned. She laughed a good deal, and blushed and pulled as hard as she could. I, too, pushed vigorously, but it struck me Justine was remarkably pretty, and that of all places in the world this was the most whimsical for a conversation with a strange young woman of lively manners and prepossessing exterior.