At length, by our joint efforts, the basket was extricated and placed upon its—what shall I say?—on its right end, in the landing. The pretty maid smoothed her hair and adjusted her collar, somewhat creased by her exertions. I made an effort to recover the usual dignity of my demeanour, conscious that I was, to a certain extent, in a false position, yet resolved to make the best of it.
“Thank you,” said I, somewhat bashfully, as well as breathlessly.
“Thank you, sir,” said Justine; laughing, I thought, rather roguishly.
“Dear! how you’ve rumpled your collar,” I observed, with perfect innocence. Justine glanced reproachfully in my face, as she smoothed the collar down with a remarkably pretty hand, and, tilting the offending basket on the bannisters, paused for a space, as if to “get her wind” before proceeding any further. In a few minutes the process would be accomplished, and Justine would take wing and fly away. I should never have such an opportunity again—at least not for a considerable period. The basket, in all probability, contained articles of wearing apparel, either going to or coming from the wash. Without being a family man, I was aware such an occurrence did not usually take place more than once a week. I should have another seven days to wait before so favourable an opportunity would arise again. Stimulated by this reflection I accosted Justine with considerable energy. I am not sure that I did not take her by the hand.
“Can I speak a word with you, mademoiselle?” said I, in trembling tones. I do not know why I called her Mademoiselle, except that I was flurried and eager, and inclined to be supremely polite.
“Not now, sir,” replied Justine, sinking her voice, to my great alarm, incontinently to a whisper. “Some other time, Mr. Softly” (she had got my name already): “not now, sir, pray. I hear somebody coming!”
“It’s only a question or two I want to ask,” I urged, as soothingly and reassuringly as I could; for, in truth, had there been fifty “somebodies coming,” there was nothing to be alarmed at. “Something you can tell me about—about your mistress.” I bounced it out, thinking it better we should understand each other at once.
“Oh!” replied Justine, this time in a perfectly audible voice. “And what may you please to want to know, Mr. Softly, about my lady?”
“I want to know everything about her,” said I; slipping, at the same time, a little profile of her Majesty, raised in gold, into Justine’s hand, which delicate compliment was acknowledged by the least perceptible squeeze. “When did she arrive? When is she going away again? Where did she come from? Where does she live when she is at home? Is she young or middle-aged? Of course she’s very beautiful, or she couldn’t afford to take about with her such a pretty maid as you!”
The latter clause of my sentence I considered, not without reason, a master-stroke of diplomacy, and I strove to enhance its effect by again possessing myself of Justine’s hand; a man?uvre she neutralised by placing both her own in her apron-pockets, leaving the basket to take care of itself.
“Why, ain’t you a hunting gentleman?” asked she, in her turn, somewhat inconsequently, as I thought. “I made sure you was a hunting gentleman, by your broken bones; and I thought every hunting gentleman knew my lady. She’s just come from the Castle—my lady. She’ll stay here exactly as long as suits her fancy, and not a moment longer. Bless you, Mr. Softly, we might never stir a foot from here this side of Easter; and we might be off, bag and baggage, first thing to-morrow morning. She’s a quiet lady, mine: a quieter lady than Miss Merlin I never wish to dress and do for; but when she says a thing, she means it, Mr. Softly, and horses couldn’t draw her the way she hasn’t a mind to go.”
“And is she so very beautiful?” I inquired, determined to know the worst of this Amazon at once. Justine looked up from under her long eyelashes (she was a very pretty girl—this Justine), and shook her head, and smiled.
“That depends upon taste, Mr. Softly,” replied she, shooting such a glance at me the while, as I have no doubt had often done irreparable injury amongst her adorers.
“Some gentlemen doesn’t admire such a pale grave lady with dark eyes and hair. She’s a slight figure, too, has Miss Merlin; and, for as tall as she is, her waist is as small as mine. For goodness’ sake, Mr. Softly, here’s the waiter coming along the passage!” and without giving me any more information as to the size of Miss Merlin’s waist, or further opportunity of measuring her own, Justine darted up the staircase, and was soon lost in the sacred retreat of her mistress’s apartment.
I am no busy-body, I humbly trust and believe. It is not my way ever to inquire into the affairs of other people; and when any obliging friend wishes to make me the depository of some secret which is growing too heavy for his own shoulders, I invariably beg that he will keep it to himself. There is no such false position, as to be told an awful mystery under oath of inviolable silence, which you feel sure has been administered with the same injunctions to some half-dozen others besides yourself. One of these lets it out; perhaps all six of them make it their everyday conversation; and you, the only trustworthy person of the lot, sustain all the blame of having divulged a circumstance which you have kept silent as the grave, or even forgotten altogether. I need not, therefore, say that it is not my custom to waylay waiting-maids, nor to set every engine in my power in motion to discover the antecedents of such ladies as may happen to occupy the same hostelry with myself. But there was something about this new arrival that interested and excited me in spite of my better judgment. It was like being in the same house with a ghost. A man may not like ghosts, or he may disbelieve in them, or, worse still, he may have an invincible terror of these apparitions; and although he laughs and jeers at such matters by a crowded fireside on a Christmas eve, he may quail and shudder in his cold sheets at the dead of night, when he lies awake, thinking of all the horrors he has ever heard and read; fancying, as people will fancy in the dark, that he hears sighs at the door, footsteps in the passage, and something moving softly and stealthily about the room. But whether he be a courageous infidel, or a superstitious believer in the possibility of apparitions, only tell him there is a phantom belonging to the establishment, and the man becomes restless and uncomfortable forthwith. You will find him poking about the attics and offices by day and night. When you are snoring healthily in your first sleep, he will be shivering in his dressing-gown, to discover the spirit or the impostor; and it is probable that in his character of detective he will alarm more of the inhabitants of the mansion in a week than the old established and considerate ghost itself has done in a century.
Well, Miss Merlin was rapidly becoming my ghost. I felt a morbid desire to find out all about her. I could not rest in ignorance of the appearance, the character, and the antecedents of a lady who in her own person involved such interesting contradictions as this mysterious dame—tall, pale, and slight; with a waist as small as Justine’s, and that was certainly an extremely taper one; with a will of iron (not that there was anything unusual in THAT), and four such horses as I never saw together in one stable before. Then she was a devoted student; for had not Miss Lushington taxed her with read, read, reading all day long? Probably she was blue; possibly she might be an authoress, and I adore intellectual women! I can never see why ignorance is supposed by some men to be such an attraction in the other sex. The Tree of Knowledge is not necessarily the Tree of Evil; and, for my part, I think the more they know the better. What can be more graceful than a woman’s way of imparting her information?—the deprecating air with which she produces it, as it were, under protest, and the charming humility with which she accepts her victory when she has beaten you in argument, and swamped you with rhetoric? Oh! if Miss Merlin should turn out literary, it would be all over with me! In the meantime, how was I to find out something definite about her, before I committed myself in a personal interview?
As I revolved this question in my mind, I bethought me of a club acquaintance of mine—indeed I think I may almost call him a friend—whose speciality it is to know all about everybody who floats on the surface of society, not only in London, where he resides, but also in the different counties of England, and most of the fashionable watering-places abroad. Where and how he acquires his information is to me a matter of the darkest mystery, inasmuch as I never entered “The Hat and Umbrella” in my life, without finding him making use of that commodious club; and I have been informed by other members, that with the exception of Christmas-Day—a festival which, in his dislike of congratulations, I am giving to understand he always spends in bed—he may be seen seven times a week in his accustomed arm-chair during the afternoon, and at his accustomed table when the dining-hour arrives. However, he is a man of universal information, a walking edition of “Who’s Who?” in any year of the century. And to Quizby accordingly I resolved to write, begging him at his earliest convenience to give me all the particulars he could about Miss Merlin, stating also that we were occupying the same hotel, but wording by communication with the delicacy imperatively demanded by such topics. I hope none of my friends may ever have cause to say, but that “Softly is a confoundedly guarded fellow about women, you know!”
Pending my friend’s reply, it may easily be believed that I waited with no small anxiety and impatience, none the less that the fact of my being under the same roof with Miss Merlin gave me no more access to her society, no more information regarding her movements, than if we had been on different continents. The very first morning after her arrival she was off to hunt before I was out of bed, and returned so quietly as to frustrate my insidious intentions of waylaying her in the passage. Justine too, either taken to task by her mistress, or on some definite calculations of her own, avoided my presence altogether, and never gave me an opportunity of exchanging a syllable with her. Miss Lushington, whom I boldly confronted in her own dominions, was obviously on her high horse, and ill at ease. There could be no question but that, notwithstanding her simple and retiring habits, in accordance with the strict seclusion in which she lived, Miss Merlin’s arrival had completely altered the tone and destroyed the cordiality of the whole establishment.
True to his post, my letter must have found Quizby at the “Hat and Umbrella,” for within eight-and-forty hours of its dispatch, I received his answer; written of course on Club paper, and sealed with our handsome Club seal—a beautiful device formed of the domestic insignia from which we take our name. I opened it eagerly, and after a few commonplace lines of inquiry and gossip, I arrived, so to speak, at the marrow of its contents.
“You could not have applied, my dear Softly,” said my correspondent, “to any man in London better qualified to give you the information you require. Not only have I known Miss Merlin almost from childhood, but it was my lot in early life, when the heart is fresh and the feelings susceptible, to be by no means insensible to her charms. You ask me whether she is good-looking; and this, did I not know your extreme diffidence and scrupulous delicacy of feeling, would seem a strange question from one who is under the same roof with its object. Beauty is a matter of opinion. I need scarcely say that many years ago I thought her ‘beautiful exceedingly.’ She was then a tall pale girl, with the most thorough-bred head and neck you ever saw, with the grace and elasticity of a nymph, combined with the dignity of an empress. So haughty a young woman it has never been my fate to come across. She had full dark eyes, and very silky dark hair; regular features of the severe classical type, and the sad mournful expression, that had a great effect on me at that period. I need not be ashamed to confess it, whilst I remained an eleven-stone man I was romantic; but, like many others, increasing weight has brought with it, I trust, increasing wisdom, and I have not the slightest doubt myself that adipose matter conduces vastly to a proper equilibrium of the mind. I thought otherwise once, and Miss Merlin’s dark eyes would have led me to follow her to the end of the world—nay, even over those ghastly fences, which then, as now, it seemed to be her greatest delight to ‘negotiate,’ as I think you hunting men call it in your extraordinary vernacular. She had a wonderfully graceful figure too, as a young thing, and the narrowest, most flexible hands and feet you ever beheld. I have waltzed with her many a time—moi qui vous parle; and to think of the delicious swing with which she went down a room to the strains of Jullien and K?nig, the musical wonders of our day, almost makes me feel as if I could waltz again. When she bridled her taper neck, and put one little foot forward from beneath her draperies, she looked like a filly just going to start for the Oaks.
“I have been thus particular in describing her, because they tell me she is very much aged and altered now; so that, whenever you do see her, you can judge for yourself of the difference between the Miss Merlin of to-day, and the damsel of a good many years ago, who made such an example of your old friend.
“But I never had a chance with her—never! She was a singular girl, not the least like most of her own age and sex. Her mother was dead; and she lived and kept house for her father, an old clergyman of eccentric habits and extraordinary learning. Being an only child, she was accustomed to have her own way from the first; and as her father never interfered in the household arrangements, and indeed seldom came out of his study upon any provocation, she had the whole management of the establishment, and conducted it with the decision and prudence of a woman of forty. To this I partly attribute her extraordinary self-reliance and self-control. She was attached to her father, and studied with him several hours a day. At the period when we used to dance together, I think Miss Merlin was as thorough a Greek scholar as any University don I know. She was a proficient in several modern languages, and my own impression is that mathematics and algebra were as completely at her fingers’-ends, as worsted-work and crochet-knitting are to the generality of her sex. Studying hard at the Parsonage, her only relaxation was to hunt. I have already said she did exactly what she pleased; and her father, though a clergyman, was a rich man, and though a rich man a liberal one. Consequently Miss Fanny, as she was called then, was allowed to keep a couple of horses for her own use, and very good ones she took care they should be. At eighteen there was not a sportsman with the X.Y.Z. that cared to follow Fanny Merlin in a quick thing over the Vale, where the fences were largest, and the Swimley twisted and twined about, like the silver lace on a green volunteer uniform, never less than eighteen feet from bank to bank. I always hated hunting, I honestly acknowledge it; but oh! the duckings I have had in that accursed Swimley, following the flutter of her riding-habit, that I would have followed, if necessary, across the Styx. The girl never looked back either, which was sufficiently provoking. No; she rode on, always in the same calm business-like manner, perfectly quiet, and perfectly straight. She cured me of following her, though, after a time; for I found it safer and easier to skirt a little, with the generality of the other sportsmen, so as to come in somewhere at the finish, and take my chance of riding with her part of the way home.
“It was hard that such devotion as mine should not have met with better success. You, my dear Softly, who are fond of that uncomfortable diversion which men call hunting, can scarcely appreciate what I had to undergo; but when I tell you that in addition to unintermitting agitation of mind, I suffered from constant abrasion of body, you will pity, though you cannot sympathise with, my distress. Apprehension, amounting to actual funk, is a disagreeable sensation enough; but to be partially flayed alive, and that on portions of the person called into daily use by a man of sedentary habits, amounts to a cruel and unbearable infliction. I wonder whether she ever pitied me! I am inclined to think she scarcely thought about me at all.
“At one time, however, our acquaintance seemed likely to ripen into intimacy; and it happened that at the same period a detachment from a regiment of Hussars was quartered in our neighbourhood. The Captain hunted of course, so did the Lieutenant; and two harder riders never dirtied their coats with the X.Y.Z., nor washed them, when dirty, in the Swimley brook. Also they danced, dined, drank, and flirted, as is the custom of their kind. But the Cornet was an exception to the rule. Strange anomaly! a Cornet of Hussars, who seldom, when off duty, got upon a horse; who did not waltz or give conundrums, or squeeze young ladies’ hands; who retired from mess early, not to smoke nor play whist, nor get into scrapes, but to practise on the pianoforte; whose general appearance was sedate and steady, though, to do him justice, he was a good-looking fellow enough, in a manly Anglo-Saxon style, and, in short, whose whole character and habits appeared more those of a travelling tutor than a dissipated young officer of Dragoons.
“And yet Miss Merlin fell in love with Cornet Brown. Where they met, has always been to me a mystery; and when they did meet, I cannot conceive what they found to talk about, for they had not two ideas in common. He did not even read; for, with all his quiet habits, the Cornet was as ignorant upon most topics of general information, as if he had been the fastest and idlest of his kind. His sole passion was music, and Miss Merlin did not know a note. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him—over head—such a fall as she never had in her life before, even in the Vale. She gave up hunting; she parted with her horses; she altered her whole habits and disposition and appearance, as a woman will, to identify herself the more with the man she loves. A good many of us in that part of the country had entered for the race; but we saw it was all up now—Brown in a canter, and the rest nowhere.
“The Cornet, too, seemed fond of her, in his own undemonstrative way. When not practising the pianoforte in his barrack-room, he was generally to be found at the Rectory; and as he never interfered with old Merlin, who indeed hardly knew him by sight, he would have suited him as well for a son-in-law as anybody else. The thing seemed to go on swimmingly, his brother-officers laughed at him, and we all thought the Cornet and Fanny Merlin were engaged.
“But this deserving young officer had an elder brother, whose views in some peculiar points it did by no means suit that his junior should commit matrimony, and the elder Brown appeared ere long upon the scene of action. He came down to stay at the barracks, where he made himself so agreeable to the Hussars, that they seriously proposed to him that he should make interest at the Horse Guards for the transfer of his brother’s commission to himself. He didn’t know a note of music—the elder Brown; but he talked, and he drank, and he smoked, and he rode, and, in short, was as jolly a fellow as ever kept a mess-table in a roar. Also, he made a slight acquaintance with Miss Merlin—not, I am bound to state, with any ulterior views; for he had a wife and promising little family of his own. He was a man of energy, you see—this gentleman—and when he meant a thing, why he went and did it without delay.
“There are secrets, I am told, in all families—a fact that makes me additionally grateful that I have got none: I mean, neither family nor secrets. What arguments were used by the elder Brown in his conferences with the younger, whether he urged him by threats or plied him with entreaties, we shall never know. It is sufficient to state that he gained his point, as such men usually do, and prevailed upon the less energetic Cornet to give up Miss Merlin. Men vary much in the force of character, and I hope I know what is the wisest and the most discreet course to take in most affairs of life; but when I was his age, before I would have given up such a girl as Fanny Merlin, in consideration of any amount of threatening, reasoning, or expediency, I would have seen fifty elder brothers consigned to that place where they would have had an opportunity of comparing notes with Dives on their terrestrial prosperity.
“The Cornet, however, gave way, and wrote a most affecting letter to his ladye-love, in which he assured her of his eternal attachment and regard, vowing that ‘imperious necessity would alone have induced him to forego her affection, and that although, at his brother’s injunctions, he must leave that part of the country, and they would probably not meet again, yet he could never forget her, and should always look back on their acquaintance as the happiest period of his life. In conclusion, he implored her to send him some keepsake, however trifling, that he might take with him into his banishment—anything that was her gift would be prized and valued till death,’ etc. etc.
“Miss Merlin was not a young lady to make parade of a sorrow, however engrossing. She said nothing, and the most curious observer could not have discovered from her impassive face that she had sustained so cruel a wound, for she loved the Cornet very dearly, as the sequel proved; but she complied with her weak-minded swain’s request, and sent him by return of post the most appropriate present she could think of—namely, ‘a pair of leading-strings and a child’s go-cart’! Brown the elder positively roared with delight when he heard of this quiet and bitter sarcasm. But the Cornet took it very much to heart; I do not think he had seen his own conduct in its true light before.
“Soon after this, old Merlin died, and there was a lawsuit instituted by his next of kin to deprive his daughter of her inheritance. The general report in the country went that Fanny Merlin was ruined, and would have to go for a governess. The Cornet was not a bad fellow after all. In defiance of his brother, he came back forthwith from the North of England, and endeavoured to renew his proposals. Of course, with such a girl as Miss Merlin, this was a forlorn hope, and equally of course the young officer became more attached to her than ever, and would have broken the leading-strings and dashed the go-cart all to pieces this time; but he never once set eyes on her whilst he remained in the neighbourhood, and retired at last in a perfect fever of fury and disappointment. Whether this contre-temps, or the accumulating pressure of many unpaid bills, chiefly for grand pianofortes, and other musical instruments, was the cause, I know not; but the following year Cornet Brown exchanged into a regiment serving in India, and the same paper which furnished the gazette of his appointment, also announced the judicial decision that restored Miss Merlin to affluence and prosperity.
“She gave up her hunting, though, for a time, and practised music incessantly. I have heard that in a wonderfully short period she attained a proficiency in that science, which is not usually acquired under a lifetime.
“Meanwhile the Cornet, alternating his military duties in India with a great many tiffins and a vast quantity of brandy pawnee, was invalided home in a very dangerous state of illness. The sea-voyage failed in his case to produce its usual good effect, and he arrived at Marseilles a dying man. How she heard of it, I have not the slightest idea; but Miss Merlin never was like other girls; she possessed an energy and force of will extremely rare in her sex, fortunately for ours. She started off, at a moment’s notice, without taking even a maid, and crossed France in the utmost haste, to reach her old lover, and bring him home. She had forgiven him his weakness and vacillation, had forgotten all about the leading-strings and the go-cart, now that she heard he was dying.
“I am not a sentimental man, as you know, and have little sympathy to spare for those afflictions of the heart, which, in my opinion, sink into insignificance when compared with a derangement of the stomach; but it has always struck me that Miss Merlin’s was a melancholy story. When she arrived at Marseilles the Cornet had been buried eight-and-forty hours. She stood by his grave on the hill above the town, with the blue southern sky overhead, and the blue Mediterranean at her feet. I think, strong and self-reliant as she was, she had as much sorrow then for her portion as she could bear.
“She remained abroad a twelvemonth, I know, for I made it my business at the time to ascertain; but what she did with herself, during that period, I have never been able to find out. Some said she had gone on into Syria, others that she was in Egypt. Archer thought he saw a person very like her eating sandwiches at Jerusalem. Aimwell is almost sure he recognised her in male attire at the First Cataract; there was a very general report prevalent that she had gone into a convent for a year on trial; but didn’t like it, which I can easily imagine, and so came away again. Be this as it may, she turned up again after a time in the X. Y. Z. country, hunting more furiously than before, riding harder, speaking less, and looking graver than she had ever done; but as the Rectory was now inhabited by a fresh incumbent, and she had no settled place of residence, she did not remain very long in the neighbourhood of her youthful home.
“Since then, and it is a long time ago, she has travelled about the country, far more independently than most bachelors. In the summer she retires to some obscure town, either in the Highlands of Scotland, or on the sea-side, where she takes a quiet lodging, and devotes the time to study. In the winter she moves her horses about, to hunt with different packs of hounds, giving the Soakington country the preference, partly on account of the strong friendship which has sprung up between herself and the Earl. In fact, a room is always kept ready for her at Castle-Cropper, and she has arranged the library for the proprietor, and re-hung all the pictures in more favourable lights. So independent is she, however, in her habits, that she often prefers to remain at the Haycock, where, if you are not afraid, you may, perhaps, have an opportunity of becoming acquainted with her. I have now told you all I can about your mysterious visitor, and consign you, not without a shudder, to your fate. If she only retains half the attractions she had at eighteen, you’re a gone ’coon, Softly; and mind this—it’s a game like the pitch-and-toss we used to play at school, ‘Heads she wins, tails you lose!’ I have warned you. Adieu! Liberavi animam meam.
“P.S.—A pianoforte is no use. She has never played a note since the Cornet died.”
I appeal to any impartial man, whether such a communication as the above was not adding fuel to fire. I read and re-read it with an interest that increased on each fresh perusal. I resolved that, come what might, it should not be my fault if another sun went down without my obtaining at least a sight of the fair subject of Quizby’s memoir. I called up, in my mind’s eye, my correspondent himself. His jolly fat face, with the little eye, that twinkled pleasantly over a ready joke as over a slice from the haunch or a bubbling bumper of Bordeaux. I reflected on his imperturbable character, his consistent philosophy, cynical, perhaps, in language, but jovial, and thoroughly epicurean in practice; and the more I thought, the more I wondered, the more I longed to witness with my own eyes the peerless attractions that could have knocked my steady friend, so to speak, off his equilibrium. To-morrow morning then, I resolved, I would see Miss Merlin, or die in the attempt.
Eagerly I scanned the hunting-card for the week. To-morrow the hounds were to meet at the kennels. Castle Cropper was but ten miles from Soakington. She could not possibly start before nine. I desired my servant to call me at eight, and retired to rest, in that frame of mind which prompts a man to shave over-night, that he may be in time, and makes him wake every half-hour lest he should over-sleep himself after all at the last.
I suppose no man sleeps the sounder for a broken collar-bone, even when it is getting well. Determined to be up in time, even if I lay awake for the purpose, I spent what invalids call a bad night. I heard more than one of the small hours strike from a certain loud-ticking clock in the kitchen, that, strangely enough, was never audible in the day. At last, however, I fell into a deep sleep, from which I woke with a start, to hear my servant arranging my dressing-things and pouring cold water into my tub. The morning was as dark as only a hunting morning can be, and a drizzling rain, glazing the chimney-pots and tiles, of which I had a commanding view from my bedroom window, by no means enhanced the temptation of leaving a warm bed. I jumped out, nevertheless, with an effort, shaved, washed, and dressed with considerable energy and rapidity, writhing into my coat in my crippled state, by a series of gymnastics similar to those with which a “navvie” struggles into his fustian jacket. The clock struck nine as I completed my preparations. I had already heard the wheels of a carriage grinding round from the stableyard to the front-door of the inn, whilst a certain bustle in the passages, with much opening and banging of doors, denoted an arrival or a departure. There was no time to lose, if I would waylay Miss Merlin as she went downstairs. I brushed up my whiskers for the last time, and emerged from my bedroom. As I put my foot in the passage, a rush of cold air from below, apprised me that the hall-door must be standing wide-open, and I ran down in a tumult of hurry and agitation, lest I should be too late after all.
As I reached the lobby, there was a fly standing at the inn-door. An incoherent waiter, with a dirty napkin under his arm, and flourishing a Japan tea-tray wildly in his hands, was gazing vacantly at space; Miss Lushington’s head peered darkly out from amidst her lemon-nets; an ostler, with one eye, held the carriage-door; and into that carriage, with her back to me, was entering the graceful figure of a lady in a riding-habit; a taper little foot, in the neatest of boots and—what shall I call them?—leg-sleeves? receding from the top-step, being the only feature, if I may be allowed the expression, distinguishable amongst that dark mass of folds and draperies.
There was a fatality about it! The thing was obviously in the hands of Destiny. The door shut-to with a bang. A pretty little gloved hand drew up the window, and the fly drove off with Miss Merlin inside, on the road to Castle Cropper.
Some men are the favourites of Fortune! others, the butts and targets of Fate. I endeavour at all times to bear my reverses with a sulky equanimity. I retired accordingly, to derive what consolation I could from an elaborate and protracted breakfast by a good fire, and then proceeded into the bar to smoke.
In these ingenious days one cannot but be struck with the many devices that exist for the discovery of character. One man finds you out by your handwriting; another by the tone of your voice; a third judges exclusively from the shape of your hat; and I have met an extremely far-seeing foreigner who professed to learn, not your fortune, as the gipsies do, but your tastes and disposition, from the lines on the palm of your hand. I think I should myself be inclined to judge of a man’s style by the sort of carriage he drives. This tendency—superstition—call it what you will, prompts me to take rather a careful survey of such vehicles as I come across, and therefore it was that, observing a strange dog-cart in the inn-yard as I traversed its stones, with an unlighted cigar in my mouth, I paused to examine more minutely the unfamiliar equipage.
So slang a turn-out it has not been my fortune to meet with, before or since. Imagine a very high box, narrowing considerably towards the top, on which, judging by the cushions and hand-rail, it is fair to conclude the driver is supposed to sit, perched on a pair of extremely tall wheels, painted red, and picked out with a staring yellow. Imagine the shafts of this contrivance, perfectly straight, and of great strength and substance, nearly on a level with the withers of the unfortunate animal that has to draw it. Imagine the old machine, wickered, and lacquered, and glazed, and polished to the most dazzling pitch of brilliancy, attached to the person of a well-bred, crop-eared, vicious-looking bay mare, herself wearing as little harness as is compatible with the fact of her being fastened to anything at all, and that little of the colour and appearance of untanned leather. Add to these, a tall whip with a yellow crop, long enough to drive four-in-hand, a pair of enormous lamps, and a white bull-terrier coiled on the foot-rug, licking his lips, with a bloodthirsty expression of countenance, and winking hideously with his ominous and ill-looking eyes.
The proprietor of such “a trap,” as he would probably call it, could not fail to be a study in himself. Loud accents from within smote on my ear as I approached the bar. The shrill tones of Miss Lushington’s voice predominated, and I gathered from this that she had recovered her good-humour, which for the last few days had been most indubitably on the wane. Entering the sanctum, I stood for a few seconds behind the wooden screen—which I have already mentioned, and which admits of a new-comer, himself unseen, reconnoitring the occupants of the place—to survey the visitor whose arrival seemed so acceptable to the presiding goddess. I had ample time to take a good look at him; for, whilst he discussed a glass of sherry and a bitter (a glass of sherry and a bitter—and it was not yet eleven o’clock!), both talker and listener were so engrossed with the former’s jokes and conversation that I had entered completely unobserved. He was a stout young man of some five-and-twenty summers, with a whiskerless face, and a ruddy complexion, not yet destroyed, though obviously impaired, by his habits of life. His cheek, still healthy in colour, was mottled here and there, as if the vessels near the surface were kept habitually too full, and he already began to show that slight puffiness under the eyes, as if he had put his neckcloth on too tight, which is the certain symptom of a digestion impaired by the too liberal use of stimulants. Not that his neckcloth was too tight—far from it. Save a scarlet knot halfway down his throat, secured by a horse-shoe pin, there was nothing to be seen of the customary wisp of ribbon which has now replaced that obsolete article of apparel, so concealed was it by the fall of a turned-down shirt collar, extremely well starched and of a singularly varied and gaudy pattern, not unlike the papering of a room. His hat, which he had not thought it necessary to lay aside, was of the “pork-pie” order, immortalised by Leech—a head-dress extremely trying to a countenance already divested by Nature of any particular expression, and which, like many other graceful eccentricities, looks as ill upon a man as it is becoming to a woman. Coat and waistcoat, I need hardly observe, were of a checked pattern, to which, for richness of hue and diversity of colours, the rainbow of heaven is a mere pale and feeble transparency. Beneath the latter, knickerbockers of course! formed apparently from some woollen fabric, designed by the inventor for a horse-cloth, and combining great strength of wear-and-tear, with an unassuming and neutral tint. Scarlet hose, imparting fulness to the calf, and general contour to the leg (in this instance much required, the limbs themselves being of too massive an order for elegance), sprang from the voluminous superfluities above, and a pair of exceedingly stout half-boots, much strapped and pieced, and, as it were, tattooed like the mocassins of a Red Indian, completed this choice and becoming costume. When I add that a double curb-chain of gold, sustaining a dozen trinkets, ornamented the wearer’s stomach, and a short pipe, blackened by unintermitting smoking, graced his mouth, I have done all I can to convey a representation of the gentleman whom I now found making himself agreeable to Miss Lushington in the bar, and whom I had no hesitation in setting down in my own mind as the proprietor of the dog-cart in the yard.
He was sitting, when I entered, not at, but on the table, by the side of his sherry and bitters. Volumes of smoke, latakia, and something stronger, I could swear by the fragrance (and here I may remark, in parenthesis, that if the London tobacconists kept up the exorbitant price of cigars, as they have lately done, nobody will smoke anything but a short pipe very soon), curled upward from his mouth, and I was just too late for some irresistible witticism which had convulsed Miss Lushington with laughter. Indeed, that lady’s fair hand was applied to her lips, as if to conceal or repress her hilarity, when I entered. An Oriental woman’s idea of modesty is to cover her mouth; and, indeed, to keep that organ shut, as much as possible, is no bad custom for the sex to adopt. But why ladies of Miss Lushington’s social standing should habitually express intense amusement by the same gesture, I cannot take upon me to explain. When the teeth are black and the hands white there may be reason for it; but Miss Lushington could not fairly be accused of either of these specialities.
“Softly! How goes it?” exclaimed the new-comer, removing his pipe from his mouth, and rolling off the table, and on to his legs, with a coachmanlike action extremely difficult to acquire. “Give us your flipper, old boy! Ah! I forgot you’d had your wing broken. Never mind; might have been worse. Won’t your liquor up? Now, Miss L., look alive! those sparklers of yours were made for use as well as ornament. What’s our friend’s variety? An invalid ought to be taken care of, you know. Draught three times a day, and the mixture as before.”
Greeting my voluble acquaintance, whom I now recognised as young Mr. Plumtree, of The Ashes, but of whom my previous knowledge did by no means warrant such a familiarity as he was kind enough to display, with a more stately and reserved demeanour than usual I lit my cigar, and proceeded, in self-defence, to envelop my person in its fumes.
Without being a stickler for the more ceremonious forms of politeness, or an advocate for the stilted dignity of the old school, I do not quite relish the tendency of certain individuals to be so “gallows familiar,” as a poor good-for-nothing friend of mine used to call it; nor do I see that a man has a right to call me “Softly,” with no handle prefixed, the third time he has ever met me in his life, “Gaudent pr?nomine molles auricul?,” quoth Horace; and he understood human nature, if anybody did. Besides, I knew enough of the gentleman now occupying the bar, to have no great wish to cultivate his further intimacy.
I had avoided him hitherto as much as possible. It seemed to be part of the bad luck of the day that I should be thrown into his society now. To have failed by thirty seconds in seeing Miss Merlin in the morning, and find myself the boon companion of young Plumtree at noon, was surely a combination of untoward circumstances which that individual himself would have called “hard lines.”
As I smoked my cigar, rather sulkily, and watched my aversion making the agreeable to Miss Lushington—a process at which, to do him justice, he appeared singularly skilful,—I recalled in my mind all I knew of his antecedents, and could not help congratulating myself, the while, that he was no son of mine.
Young James Plumtree, then—or “Jovial Jem,” as he was called by his familiars—was the only son of John Plumtree, of The Ashes, a most respectable, and, I believe, unimpeachable country gentleman, living in the vicinity of Soakington. I have always understood that the father was a man of grave and particularly gentlemanlike demeanour, and, although an excellent sportsman, extremely averse to anything approaching slang. It was, therefore, perfectly natural that his son should turn out one of the “loudest” and most uproarious rattles of his day.
The boy had an excellent education, too—at eight, a private tutor, who could never keep him out of the stable, and into the pockets of whose sad-coloured garments his pupil was continually putting white-mice and such abnormal vermin—nay, on one occasion, this long-suffering Mentor discovered a ferret in the tail of his coat, and an eel in the crown of his hat; at twelve, transferred to Eton, where he was placed as low as he possibly could be, and, notwithstanding repeated floggings, and constant wiggings from “my tutor,” persevered in the study of natural history with an ardour that could by no means be brought to harmonise with the rules of that elegant college. Corporal punishment is—or at least, in young Plumtree’s day, used to be—inflicted for the following misdemeanours, of which he was habitually found guilty, viz.: Entertaining fighting-dogs, at an outlay of a shilling per week, and making use of the same in their combative capacity; associating, both in and out of bounds, with cads and such low persons, with aggressive views on personal property in the form of hares, pheasants, etc., at Stoke, Burnham, Thames Ditton, and elsewhere; keeping singing-birds in a bureau that ought to have been devoted to school-books, and white-mice in the lower drawers of the same, along with clean linen; also, and this partiality for ferrets was one of the boy’s most remarkable characteristics, taking a female of that species into three-o’clock school, and producing her, so to speak, in open court; finally, never, under any circumstances, knowing one word of his lesson.
When Plumtree left college, the head master, who, like many other head masters, had rather a weakness for a pickle in his heart, took him kindly by the hand, and recommended him, with perfect single-mindedness, to devote his energies to the habits of beasts and birds, and the study of comparative anatomy, “the only mental labour, Plumtree,” added the don, with extreme kindness, “for which you seem either qualified or inclined.”
A lad of such tastes was pretty sure to be sent to one of the universities: and after an interval of a delicious twelvewmonth at home, during which period of relaxation the young ’squire not only destroyed every rat in every barn within a day’s ride of The Ashes, but also made acquaintance with every tap of beer, and struck up a friendship with every blackguard, within the same distance, this promising acolyte was entered at Brazen-Nose, and went up to keep his terms at Alma Mater, and acquire whatever knowledge was most adapted to his intellectual hunger, at that repository of learning.
Here, it is needless to observe, he rowed a great deal, smoked a great deal, drank an enormous quantity of beer, and read not the least in the world. He acquired, however, considerable proficiency in the difficult art of driving a tandem, and could conceal boots and breeches under loose pantaloons, when attending chapel on a hunting morning, more dexterously than any undergraduate of his year.
He kept the drag, too, for one season, but found his mode of life too dissipated to admit of the nerve requisite for that amusement. These dare-devil young gentlemen, you see, go out for the express purpose of breaking each other’s necks. They ride, of course, directly at the leading hound; but that quadruped, generally an old stager, and stimulated by a red-herring steeped in aniseed, gives them plenty to do before they can catch him. It is a point of honour, I am given to understand, to turn away from nothing; and the man who can get through his horse quickest, is esteemed to have won the laurels of the day. It is scarcely possible to imagine an education more calculated to make a horseman, and spoil a sportsman, than the Oxford drag.
When Plumtree renounced the mastership of this dashing establishment, he devoted himself exclusively to driving, and became, if possible, more beery than before. For lectures he cherished an unaccountable aversion, nor was it likely that the wit and learning of the schools would prove very tempting to a man whose heart was habitually in the cellars.
Well, of course, it came to a finish at last; and Jovial Jem was rusticated; “Rusticated, by the Hookey!” to use his own remarkable words, “and recommended not to come up again. Well out of it, too, in my opinion: and as to another round, why if I do, I do; but if I do, I’m—!”
Old Plumtree was grievously disappointed, of course. By the way, I know very few cases in which sons do not disappoint their fathers. I suppose it would be difficult to persuade the latter that the former are not exclusively in fault. Old Squaretoes lays down a course of conduct for his child, totally irrespective of the feelings, inclination, and disposition of the latter. Then, if young Squaretoes don’t fit the groove, and slide easily down the metal, he is undutiful, disobedient, ungrateful, everything that the Prodigal Son was, before he came to eating husks amongst the swine. If young S. turn out “slow,” ten to one but old S., in suicidal folly, wishes he “had a spice more devil in him.” If he be fast, the governor shakes in his shoes, foreseeing debts, bills, acceptances, renewals, and eventual penury. If he make a figure in the world on his own wings, taking warning by Icarus, and scorning to use the paternal pinions, his father is often jealous of his success. If, on the contrary, he remain in secure and humble obscurity, then the cry is, “Why, the lad has no spirit in him! Look at what I should have done at his age, and with his advantages!” Good masters make good servants. Unselfish and considerate fathers, more than people are aware of, make attached and dutiful sons.
So Jovial Jem came home, and took up his abode at The Ashes, completely upsetting the regularity of that establishment, where, in his absence, everything went on like clockwork. For his own sake, Mr. Plumtree senior gave his son a couple of rooms, shut off from the rest of the mansion by double doors of baize, through which the fumes of latakia could not possibly penetrate, and ordered the domestics to serve their young master with breakfast and dinner at his own hours, when required, in his own apartments. By this arrangement, the heir was wonderfully little in his father’s way; and unless the pair happened to meet on a summer’s morning, when the old one was going to his hay-field, fresh and rosy, and the young one returning from a junketing, pale and exhausted, father and son often did not see each other for weeks. Consequently, they got on admirably. Young Plumtree swore “The Governor was a dear old bird; crotchety of course, but a regular brick nevertheless;” and old Plumtree, who always took a solemn pinch of snuff before he delivered himself of a remark, was fond of stating, very slowly and distinctly, that “Young men won’t settle at once. Can’t expect it, sir—can’t expect it! But the lad’s got something in him. If we could only get at it, sir! if we could only get at it!”
“I heard of your downer, old ’un,” this agreeable young gentleman observed with great cordiality, transferring his attention from Miss Lushington to myself. “Wasn’t out myself that day; couldn’t raise a prad, or I’d have seen you picked up, and dissected, and all that. First day I can get away from home, says I, I’ll just tool over and visit the mutilated sportsman. Thought you’d be dull, you know, with nobody but Miss Lushington, though she’s pleasant company too when she’s got her stockings on right-side-in.”
“Come, that’s a good one,” observed the lady alluded to thus familiarly, with a meaning glance. “As if you didn’t know of our late arrival! Oh, you’re a deep one, Mr. Plumtree, you are!”
The young gentleman blushed, a real honest shame-faced blush, such as I did not believe could have been raised, after six years of Eton and two of Oxford, to save a man’s life. “Get out!” said he, chivalrously ignoring the cause of his confusion. “None of your chaff, Miss L. Ain’t I always ready to help a lame dog over a stile? Wouldn’t I drive a hundred miles in a butcher’s cart without springs, to succour a mutilated friend? Ain’t I pitiful, and tender, and soft-hearted? Come, you know I am.”
“Indeed I know nothing of the kind,” replied the lady, bridling and tossing her head. It was Miss Lushington’s plan, you see, always to give her admirer what she called a “set-down” the moment they passed an imaginary line of her own demarcation; so she proceeded, speaking very distinctly, and with her lips set tight—
“If you’ve driven all this way only to talk nonsense to me, Mr. Plumtree, you’ve wasted your time sadly. But you’ll never make me believe that. I know what I know; and others might know it too, if so be as you was to take and rile me more than I think pleasant. And you’re too late, after all,” added Miss L. viciously. “She was in the fly an hour before you drove into the yard: why, bless you! she’s at the top of the hunt by this time, and no more chance of coming up with her than if she was the wind.”
Without pausing to consider what peculiar position in the chase Miss Lushington intended to convey by her expression of the “top of the hunt,” I shot a glance at Young Plumtree, who seemed, I thought, to quail considerably under the volubility he had provoked. Indeed, strange to say, he appeared completely “shut up,” and at a loss for a reply. A horrible suspicion darted across me, lighting up, as such fancies do, the previous darkness with a dazzling and momentary brilliance. Could this unwelcome and unhappy young man be under the influence of a hopeless attachment for Miss Merlin,—one of those unaccountable infatuations of which we read in novels, but which, fortunately for the general comfort of society, we so seldom meet with in real life?
And yet, why not? To be sure, judging from Quizby’s letter and his frank acknowledgment of an attachment to her in his youth, the lady must have arrived by this time at middle age, and Plumtree was a mere boy (for, after all, a man of five-and-twenty is little more than a boy), actually shaving for whiskers, top-dressing with balm of Columbia, and raising an abundant crop of pimples as the result. A woman too, after she arrives at a certain point of maturity, say five-and-thirty, remains for an incredible period at that attractive stage of her charms. She has lost indeed the bright freshness of youth; but if she has been really handsome, she has gained in exchange a certain depth of colouring and intensity of expression, which are equally efficient weapons of offence.
Then, while the passing years blunt her darts scarcely perceptibly, every day adds to her experience and dexterity in their use. A coquette of twenty years’ standing is like an old ma?tre d’armes of the Empire, cool, wary, dauntless, and skilful; rusé in the art of destruction, and taught by a hundred combats to take every advantage, and never to throw a chance away. I have often thought, notwithstanding the dancing exploit, a man would have been safer with Herodias’s daughter than with Herodias herself.
Then a young man, if he once suffers himself to be captivated by a woman considerably his senior, becomes rather childish, not to say imbecile, in the process. He goes into leading-strings forthwith, and there is no folly or extravagance of which he is incapable. Shall I ever forget what a fool young Larkspur made of himself about old Lady Foxglove, who might have been his mother, and looked as if she had been his wet-nurse? Nor can I cease to regret the fate of my poor friend Capon, who left college to run away with Mrs. Mallard the actress, at a period when that lady had become too aged and infirm for genteel comedy parts at any of the theatres royal, and of whom I last heard at a French watering-place, living in cheap lodgings at the head of a grown-up family not his own, nor indeed, unless scandal be more scandalous than usual, the issue of the talented Mr. Mallard deceased.
I looked at young Plumtree with a kind of loathing pity. I thought of what his deplorable state would be, when all the pleasures of his present existence should have palled upon him in the pursuit of the unattainable; when ’baccy should have lost its soothing properties, and there should be no more charm in beer; when dogs might “delight to bark and bite,” and Plumtree, quantum mutatus, would care not which half-stifled champion was dragged gurgling and snarling “across the line;” when the three-pound terrier, eating its own weight a dozen times over in rats, would no longer excite his garrulous plaudits as he hung half muzzy over the pit; and to shoot pigeons for a fat pig, or see a man trundling a wheelbarrow backwards, and picking up stones with his mouth, would be equally tasteless and insipid; nay, when counting out the game-cock himself, prone on the square-cut turf, but of mettle invincible, from the top of the clean-cut comb to the points of his steel spurs, would be considered simply a dull but cruel pastime, and like Othello’s in his fancied degradation, Plumtree’s “occupation would be gone.”
All unconscious of my forebodings, their confiding object pulled a square and heavily-sealed note from what I believe Mr. Poole terms the “opossum pocket” of his shooting-jacket, and handed it to me with the mock dignity of an ambassador presenting his credentials, winking demurely on Miss Lushington the while.
“Can you read?” inquired the facetious envoy. “If so, there’s a bit of blotting from the old folks at home. I told the governor that as you weren’t fit to do much ‘scraping,’ I’d best bring it over, and take back the answer by word of mouth. But you’ll come, won’t you? It’s a crafty crib enough, The Ashes, and you’ll get your health there as well as here for a day or so. I can’t say much for the biting, but there’s some lining with a green seal to it, that will set your collar-bone for you, make your hair curl tight up to the roots, and bring you down to-morrow morning, as fresh as a bull-calf, and as hearty as a buck.”
There was no resisting such inducements as these, and indeed the letter of Mr. Plumtree senior, though extremely pompous and ceremonious, was hospitable, considerate, and kind. Though almost a stranger, he hoped that I would excuse our short acquaintance, and dine with him at The Ashes, adding, that as I ought not to expose myself to cold from the night-air, he trusted that I would take a bed.
Although such a creature of habit that I would far rather have remained in solitary state at the Haycock, I felt it would have been more than churlish to refuse so hospitable an invitation, the only drawback to which was the necessity I foresaw of driving over in “the trap” with young Plumtree. I would have given a good deal to be permitted to order a post-chaise and pair, and go over comfortably, with all the windows up; but it is of no use to struggle with destiny; I saw what was before me, and resolved to confront my fate like a man.
“You’ll go with me, Softly, of course!” observed young Plumtree, otherwise “Jovial Jem,” just as I expected. “There’s a Waterborough ’bus runs right by our lodge-gate: your servant can come over with your traps. Get a greatcoat on, there’s a good fellow, and we’ll start immediately, if not before. A short drain of brandy neat, Miss Lushington, if you please. Look alive, you adorable angel, ministering spirit, I may say. Time’s short, you know, roads woolly, and whipcord scarce.”
“But are you sure you can take me?” I interposed, with expostulatory eagerness. “Yours is a smallish carriage, if that was it I saw just now in the yard” (how devoutedly I wished it was not!). “I fear I shall inconvenience you; and, by the by, where is your servant to sit?” I added, grasping vaguely at the last chance of a reprieve.
“Servant?” said the Jovial, drinking off his brandy at a gulp, “didn’t bring one; don’t want a ‘shoot’ when I’m driving Crafty Kate. There’s only one gate to open if we go the short way, and it opens from us; so I catch it, you know, on the shaft, and there’s no trouble in getting out. Once the apron’s buttoned, never move till the end of the stage, that’s my principle. Wet t’other eye? Thank you, Miss Lushington. Here’s your health! Now, young man, tell the ostler to get the trap round to the front-door; when I drive a gemman, I likes to take him up like a gemman.”
“But if the harness wants altering, or anything?” I urged feebly. “In my crippled state, you know, I can’t get out. Don’t you think, now?—though, of course, I should like the drive very much—don’t you really think it would be better if I were to find my own way over, and you might take a man from here to open the gates and that, who could come back in my return chaise?”
“Not a bit of it!” replied the Jovial. “What’s the use of that? I know the mare, and the mare knows me. You won’t have to get out, never fear. Come, though you’ve got a queer wing, there’s nothing amiss with your pipes. Look here, there’s a yard of tin in that basket. You’ll play all the way, and I’ll drive. Take her in a hole shorter, Ben. Here’s a game! hooray!”
By this time “the Jovial’s” high conveyance—well might he called it a trap—was at the door; Crafty Kate wincing, and lifting and swishing her tail, as if nothing would give her greater pleasure than to knock the whole thing, red wheels, lamps, paint, varnish, and lacquering, all to pieces forthwith. I could not get out of it now, do what I would. Recalling in my own mind every frightful accident I ever remembered to have read, or heard of, that had occurred on wheels, and no whit reassured by an appalling fact I had always considered established, viz. that more long coachmen had been killed out of gigs, than had died any other death, I went upstairs to give my servant directions as to the clothes he should pack up, to wrap myself in a warm greatcoat, and to put another cigar in my mouth, that haply might conceal the involuntary trepidation of my nerves.
How comfortable my sitting-room looked as I left it! It was a cold raw day, and the fire burnt up so cheerily; the easy-chair spread its arms invitingly to receive me in its familiar embrace; there was the newspaper carefully unfolded and spread out on the table, with the last Quarterly uncut, by its side. An amusing novel, of which I had got halfway into the second volume, seemed to entreat me not to leave it unfinished, and two or three letters requiring early answers were lying with their seals opened in mute appeal. All this comfort I was about to exchange for a muddy drive, a drizzling rain, the conversation of a man I did not care about, and worse still, the probable vagaries of Crafty Kate. I confess I have no great confidence in a thorough-bred mare, that swishes her tail a good deal in harness. I thought Miss Lushington, even, looked somewhat pitifully on me, as one about to venture in a dangerous undertaking unawares. Nevertheless I mounted the trap, not without difficulty, was carefully buttoned in by the one-eyed ostler, and felt myself launched forth on stormy seas, with Jovial Jem for a pilot.
On leaving the door it became painfully apparent that Crafty Kate was in a condition of excitement, not to say insubordination, which boded untoward results. Passing between the lines of dilapidated houses that constitute the little village of Soakington, she piaffed and curvetted, and tucked her head in, and hoisted her great angular quarters, in a manner calculated to excite the admiration of all beholders—limited in the present instance to a lame duck, and two boys playing truant from school; but when we emerged on the smooth expanse of the Waterborough road, stimulated by the love of approbation, or urged by a morbid anxiety to get home, the mare took the bit in her teeth, and very nearly made a bolt of it. I confess I clung to the rail that ran round the seat, thankful even for that frail support, and notwithstanding the slight hold it afforded me, narrowly escaped being dashed out, as we turned with fearful rapidity, and entirely on one wheel, like a skater doing the outside edge, up a lane diverging at right angles from the thoroughfare along which we had been bowling at such a pace.
It was evident, however, by Crafty Kate’s demeanour, that this was not the way home. She stopped dead short, stuck her forelegs out, and began nodding her head in that ominous manner, which denotes a determination to fight to the last. “Sit tight, Softly!” exclaimed the Jovial, with a fiendish laugh, as though this had been part of a programme devised for my special entertainment. “Sit tight! whilst I give my lady a taste of the silk!” and without further parley he pulled the whip from its bucket, and commenced a course of punishment on the mare’s sides, which produced no further result than that of causing her to back faster and faster towards the ditch; the tall red wheels hovered on its very brink, when a bright idea flashed across the charioteer’s mind. “Give us a blast of the tin, Softly,” said he, continuing, nevertheless, a vigorous application of the whipcord, “and let us see if your blasting is not more musical than mine!”
I am no performer, I candidly admit, on a trumpet of any description; but a desperate crisis demands a desperate remedy, and seizing the long coach-horn I performed such a solo upon it as has probably never been heard before, or since. “The Jovial” left off flagellating, and laughed till he cried. The mare laid her ears down into her poll, tucked her tail close to her quarters, and went off at score. Completely blown by my exertions, we had gone nearly a mile ere I returned the horn to its case, and found breath to speak.
“But is this the shortest way to The Ashes?” said I, striving by the aid of a “Vesuvian” to relight my cigar, which had gone out in the panic. “I thought we kept straight along the high-road to the turnpike, and then took the first turning to the——”
“O, bother The Ashes;” returned my mercurial companion. “We shall get there quite soon enough. Besides, the governor never shows till feeding-time; busy about the farm you know, mud-larking as I call it. No! no! if you want to see some fun, I’ll show you a game. We’ll just trot down to Joe Lambswool’s, at the World’s End, about two miles further on, and if you do care for sport, I can promise you a real treat. He’s going to pull down the old barn to-day; hasn’t been touched, I dare say, for two hundred years. Talk of rats! why, it’s swarming with them, as big as pole-cats pretty nigh, and twice as savage. He’s got a dawg as I want to see tried, quite a little ’un, what you would call a toy-dawg, you know; but they tell me he’ll tackle to anything alive, and knows how to kill a cat. If I like him I’ll buy him; and we’ll give old Brimstone a treat into the bargain,” added my amiable entertainer, looking back at the bull-terrier, who was toiling behind us, bespattered with mud, his tail lowered, his tongue out, and a villanous expression of sullenness and ferocity stamped on his round massive head.
“I should like it excessively,” I replied, with an inward shudder, belying, most uncomfortably, my unqualified expressions of delight, and the Jovial, turning on me a look of astonished approval, made a queer noise through his teeth, that started Crafty Kate incontinently into a canter.
“Well! I’m in for it now!” was my mental soliloquy, as we went whirling past the dripping trees and hedges with increasing rapidity. “How could I ever be induced to blunder into such a trap as this? A wet day; a dangerous drive; a pot-house gathering, and an afternoon spent in a tumble-down barn, full of draughts I make no doubt, and by no means water-tight; watching for rats, animals of which I have the greatest horror, and circumventing the same by means of ferrets—creatures if possible more disgusting to me than their prey—all because I hadn’t nerve to say ‘No.’ And not a chance now of seeing Miss Merlin when she comes home from hunting! Softly! this is a day’s penance. You must get through it as you best can!”
A rescue, however, when I least expected it, was proposed for me by a kind fortune, to snatch me from the ratting part of my discomforts. The lane down which we were bowling, though of considerable length, was not that proverbial one in which there is no turning. On reaching an angle by a sign-post, the Jovial pulled up, with great animation displayed on his broad white face.
“I can hear ’em running in Tangler’s Copse, as plain as can be,” said he, putting up his hand in the air, and cocking his head on one side to listen. Tangler’s Copse, be it observed, was a straggling woodland in the Castle-Cropper country, from which it was always difficult, and generally impossible, to force a fox into the open. “Listen, Softly!” he continued, with increasing excitement; “I’m blessed if that isn’t the horn! See, Kate hears it too.”
I am not gifted with extraordinary fineness of ear, particularly when well wrapped up on a rainy day; so I turned down the collar of my greatcoat, and took off my shawl-handkerchief to listen. There was no doubt we were in the vicinity of hounds; I could hear them distinctly, running as it seemed with a good scent, and cheered by occasional blasts on the horn.
The drizzling rain struck cold on my bare cheek. Kate’s head was up, her ears erect, her nostrils dilated, and she trembled in every limb.
“Bother the rats for to-day!” exclaimed my mercurial charioteer. “What say you, Softly? Let’s go hunting instead. The mare can jump like fun, and the trap can go anywhere. Open the gate, there’s a good chap! In the next field but one there’s a bridle-road takes us right away to Tangler’s Copse.”
I descended from the tall conveyance to do his bidding, dirtying my gloves, wetting my feet, and daubing my coat with mud in the process; but there is a condition of the human mind, at which it ceases to be a free agent, and I had arrived at that negative state, when we quitted the turnpike-road. Once more climbing with difficulty to my seat, I found myself bumping over the ridge-and-furrow of a large grass-field, and, straining my eyes to find an egress, became aware that it was the Jovial’s intention to drive through a sort of gap in the fence, where the ditch had been partially filled up. It was now time to protest, which I did loudly and energetically; but my objections were too late. “Sit tight, Softly! Gently, Kate!” exclaimed Plumtree in a breath; and with a bump, a jerk, and a most astounding bang against the splash-board, we were safe over, and careering along the next field.
I was glad to see a gate led out of this enclosure. I would have climbed up and down those red wheels, fifty times, rather than repeat the process we had just now accomplished.
Crafty Kate, shamelessly belying the first half of her name, seemed to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, swinging along at a very respectable pace, with her ears cocked, her head and tail both up, and an obvious determination to join the chase with as little delay as possible. The vehicle sprang and jerked, and swung from side to side; the wheels bespattered us from head to foot with mud: the splash-board alone prevented us from shooting out, over the mare’s back. No one who has ever tried it will wish to repeat the uncomfortable diversion of galloping in a gig.
Fortunately the rain began to cease, the clouds cleared away, and a burst of winter sunshine enabled us to see as far as the flatness of the country would allow.
The Jovial pulled up short, not without considerable difficulty. “They’re away, by all that’s lucky,” exclaimed he, shifting his reins into his whip-hand, that he might give me a congratulatory slap on the back, which knocked all the breath out of my body. “Never knew a fox to leave Tangler’s Copse before, and bearing right down upon us too, or I’m a Scotchman! There’s the fox, by jingo! Hold your tongue, Softly!”
The injunction was quite unnecessary, for I am not one of the halloaing tribe. Moreover, my handkerchief was pulled up to my nose, and I did not myself see the cause of my companion’s excitement. He was right, however; presently two or three couple of hounds straggled into the field adjoining that in which we were stationed, ran to and fro along the hedge-side, put their noses down, threw their tongues, and followed by the whole pack, streamed across the pasture on the line of their prey.
It was great fun, and a new sensation, to watch the progress of the field, as one sat an unoccupied spectator, perched in a thing like a tea-tray on a pair of tall red wheels. I can quite understand the pleasure an old gentleman has, who rides quietly out on his cob, to see them “find and go away.”
A couple of simultaneous crashes in the fence announced the arrival in the same field with the hounds of the Earl himself, and a hard-riding gentleman with moustaches, a visitor at the castle. Fifty yards or so to their right again, and somewhat nearer the pack, a beautiful grey horse, having been quietly trotted up the hard pathway that led to it, landed in artistic form over a hog-backed stile with a foot-board, ridden by an elegant figure in a lady’s habit, of whom it was impossible at that distance to recognise the face. Happening, however, to glance at my companion’s countenance (who caught his breath by the way, during this performance), and observing it to become a deep crimson, my surmises that the daring Amazon was none other than Miss Merlin were to a certain extent corroborated.
Then came a bay, and a brown, and a chestnut, the latter falling at his fence, but inflicting no damage on his rider, who never let go the bridle, but was up and at it again without delay. These were followed by another bay, who refused to jump, and a dark-coated gentleman on a roan, whose heart failed him at the last stride, and who faded ignominiously away from that moment. The huntsman and first whip must have come a different line altogether, for we saw their velvet caps bobbing up and down in the distance, but could not otherwise have identified them.
The Jovial, however, was now waxing visibly impatient. “Dash it!” said he, “we may as well see the finish. I’m game, Softly, if you are. Come along, Kate!” And without waiting for the consent, which as a partner in the firm I think I was entitled to withhold, he laid the rein on the mare’s back, and we were once more jolting and bumping across the fields in search of some dubious and unfrequented bridle-road.
My friend was a good pilot. I must do him the justice to admit that quality. He seemed to know every gate and lane in the country, also to possess an intuitive knowledge of the run of a fox, with a staunch predilection for keeping down wind. I did not despair of coming up with the chase once more, and truth to tell I was not without hopes that to-day my curiosity might be satisfied with a view of Miss Merlin.
“The Jovial,” on the other hand, had become preoccupied and restless. No longer dispensing his quaint sallies and florid parables in my ear, he gave his whole attention to Crafty Kate, an arrangement to which I should have been the last person on earth to object; and although he drove that game and resolute animal with merciless rapidity, it was in a style considerably less random than before. Perhaps the influence of the brandy had died out; perhaps he felt the depression that always succeeds the excitement of seeing hounds, when it has evaporated. Perhaps he was thinking of his dinner, perhaps of the rat-catching he had missed, perhaps of Miss Merlin. We drove on for at least two miles without speaking.
In justice to my friend’s humanity, I am bound to observe that we had long ago taken pity on Brimstone, and hoisted him into the cart, where he lay coiled up under my legs, sniffing them ominously from time to time, as if only deterred by considerations of the merest politeness from taking a bite out of them at the most sensitive place. I dreaded lest a jolt severer than common should be construed by this amiable animal into a personal insult to himself.
To any one who has ever tried the delusive pastime of following hounds at a distance, with any expectation of coming up with them, I may leave the task of imagining our repeated disappointments and the labour, like that of Sisyphus, undergone by Crafty Kate. The persevering sportsman will have no difficulty in understanding how we drove from field-road to cross-road, and from cross-road to highway; how the little indistinct figures and black hats, dotting and bobbing behind the hedges, were now on our right, now on our left, anon almost within hail, and then hopelessly and provokingly ahead; how we saw the hounds themselves entering Cropley Pastures, and, thinking to nick in upon them at Whitethorns, found they had taken an unexpected turn to Swillingford mill; in short, how surely, as must always be the case in a good run, the further we went, the farther we were left behind, till our hopes, being suddenly raised by a butcher in a tax-cart, who had met them not half-a-mile from where we then were, and thought they must have “got him in a drain,” to be as suddenly dashed into ruins again by a farmer’s lad at the spot indicated, who vowed they had been gone twenty minutes, and “were running like fire,” we gave it up in despair, and turned Crafty Kate’s head, soberly and sadly, on her homeward way. A mouthful of gruel at a road-side public-house for the mare, and a small measure of hot ale, with a glass of gin, a spoonful of brown sugar, and a dash of spice in it, called by the different titles of “lambs’ wool,” “dog’s nose,” and “purl,” but of superlative merit after a three hours’ drive in the wet, restored us all, except Brimstone, to something of our earlier energy. I was glad, I confess, to have got through the drive without an accident, and looked forward to a warm house and a comfortable dressing-room, where my servant, I hoped, had already arrived with my things, more cheerfully than I should have conceived possible in the morning, when I anticipated my enforced visit to The Ashes with considerable distaste. The Jovial, too, having apparently drowned his unpleasant reflections, whatever they might be, in the hot mixture, came out once more in his normal character, accepting one of my cigars with facetious condescension, and sticking it in the extreme corner of his mouth, from which he never once removed it till he had smoked it down to the very stump.
“Mare’s about told out, Softly,” said he, as we drove somewhat soberly through the very gate he had spoken of in the morning, opening it by the dangerous process of running the shaft against its bars, and fending it off from the wheel with his left hand. “Hard day for the Crafty: those field-roads are so blessed deep. Never mind; another half-mile will see us. I don’t think you know my sisters: remarkable young women, and accomplished, ’specially Jane. I am prepared now to back Jane against any other girl in England, weight for age of course, to do five things—work cross stitch, whistle jigs, do the outside edge backwards, speak German, and make a sparrow pudding. My money is ready at The Ashes, Waterborough, this identical house of call we’re coming to, that it’s too dark for you to see. Catch hold, while I jump out and ring the bell.”
The flood of warm light that shone out upon us from the hall was indeed a pleasant contrast to the dark cold afternoon, which had already changed again for the worse. As I divested myself of my wraps, with the assistance of a staid elderly servant, young Plumtree welcomed me quite courteously to his father’s house, diverging, however, immediately afterwards, into the kind of jesting slang which was most familiar to him.
“You’re wet,” he observed, laying his hand on my coat, through which the rain had indeed penetrated. “Perhaps you’d like to go and dress at once. Indeed, we dine in less than an hour. Shall I show you your room? Will you have anything before dinner?—glass of sherry?—biscuit?—crust of bread and a pickle? No? then step this way, if you please. Here’s your room; things laid out—hot water laid on. There’s the bell; you ring for what you want, and the servants will bring you what they have!”
Behold me, then, like a man in a dream, dressing comfortably for dinner, in a strange house, of which I did not know the proprietor, nor, indeed, one of the inmates, except the harum-scarum young gentleman who had introduced me. In justice to myself, I made an elaborate toilet—white tie, black suit, thin boots—everything rigorously correct. There is no costume, in my opinion, which so marks the distinction of classes, as the plain dinner-dress of an English gentleman; and, indeed, I once heard that very invidious title defined as “a man who had got evening clothes.” Passing down to the drawing-room—an apartment I had no difficulty in finding, for the door was open, and a lamp shone brilliantly from it into the hall—I had leisure to observe the articles of furniture in the passages, and to remark on the idiosyncrasy which prompts all country gentlemen alike to ornament the insides of their houses with stuffed animals in glass cases. The Ashes was rich in specimens of this description. All kinds of birds flourished their beaks at the visitors on the stairs. A gigantic pike, like a miniature shark, grinned at him over the chimney-piece, and a hideous otter snarled at him from under the umbrella-stand in the hall. A portrait, which I concluded to be that of Mr. Plumtree senior, also adorned this crowded vestibule. I studied it by the light of my chamber-candlestick, not entirely, I fear, without spilling some wax on the floor during the process, in pardonable curiosity as to the exterior of the gentleman with whom I was about to dine. The picture was in all probability more valuable from its resemblance to the original, than from any intrinsic merit of its own as a work of art. It represented a florid personage, in the prime of life, attired in a bright-blue coat, and yellow waistcoat, on both which articles of apparel the artist had bestowed a liberal amount of colour, sitting by a pillar of porphyry, under a crimson curtain, “with a distant view of the changing sea.” His face, devoid of any outward expression, denoted that rapt state of thought peculiar, I am informed, to the highest order of intellects, and he seemed equally unmoved by the magnificence of the scenery, the gorgeousness of the curtain which overhung him, or the splendour of a heavy watch-chain and seals that rested massively against his nankeen stomach. On a table at his elbow stood a large book and a snuff-box, whilst his hand rested carelessly on the head of a black retriever dog. “If old Plumtree is like that,” was my mental observation, “he must present as great a contrast to the Jovial as was ever afforded in the inconvenient relationship of father and son.” I did not speak aloud, fortunately; for this conclusion brought me into the drawing-room, which, having dressed early, I expected I should have had to myself: it was not so, however. On entering that apartment—a pretty, well-furnished, long, low room, with some excellent prints and a grand pianoforte—I was somewhat discomfited to find it already occupied by two young ladies, dressed, as far as my confusion permitted me to observe, precisely alike, sitting in precisely the same attitude, and engaged over similar pieces of crochet-work. I bowed very awkwardly, and walked up to the fire, with the startling intelligence that it was “a cold evening,” a proposition neither of the ladies seemed in a position to confute. This masterly man?uvre, however, gave me an opportunity of studying both their faces, and I am bound to admit that the one predominating idea present to my mind, during a perusal of their features, was, “How shall I ever know one from the other, when their brother comes down, and formally introduces us?” Each of them was a rather tall, rather large young lady, with hands and feet to correspond. Each of them had a certain regularity of features, totally devoid of any expression whatsoever, that might have laid claim to good looks, had it not been nullified by the absence of colouring and want of tone in their rather large, rather flat faces. If either of them had unfortunately taken to drinking, she would have been a bad likeness of her brother the Jovial. That I longed ardently for the conclusion of that gentleman’s toilet is no matter of surprise, the conversation between the Misses Plumtree and myself being driven, so to speak, at a funereal rate, and in the longest possible stages. I gathered, however, from a certain decision of tone in their few and disjointed remarks, that there was no mother Plumtree, and that the vestals now before me were the presiding goddesses of the place.
At length, to my great relief, I heard a door open on the staircase, and a manly step approaching, which I feared, even while I listened, was too ponderous for that of my friend. The young ladies made a rustling kind of movement, as if to bespeak my attention. A deep voice in the hall was heard to say, “Dinner directly!” and the portly form of mine host walked into the drawing-room, with outstretched hand, and that welcome on his lips with which an Englishman always receives a guest into his castle, whether that metaphorical building be really a ducal residence, a squire’s hall, or a day-labourer’s cottage.
Old Mr. Plumtree was a great improvement on his son, as well as his picture. Although of the plainest and most unsophisticated of squires, he was obviously a high-bred gentleman; and his old-fashioned attire—for he had not discarded the blue coat, yellow waistcoat, and white stockings of his younger days—was perfectly in keeping with his fresh old face, round and rosy as a winter-apple: his fine bald head and stately figure, deep of chest, stout of limb, and somewhat protuberant of stomach.
“I am glad James found ye at home, Mr. Softly,” said he, “and doubly glad he persuaded ye to come over and eat your mutton with us here. My daughters, Mr. Softly—Rebecca and Jane.” Both ladies again got up, and we bowed and curtsied once more to one another; whilst I still remained as much in ignorance as ever as to which was Rebecca and which was Jane. “You got here before six,” continued my host, evidently bent on making me feel myself at home. “Our roads are not the best travelling in the dark, but I conclude you don’t make much account of roads. Broke your collar-bone at a fence? and a large one too, I’ll be bound. I was a sportsman myself, Mr. Softly. I recollect in the year——”
“Dinner is on the table, sir!” announced the respectable-looking servant, interrupting his master’s reminiscences at this juncture; and with a nod to me to take Miss Plumtree, which I acknowledged by diving at the nearest lady, whom I afterwards found out to be the younger sister, we filed off in great state for the dining-room, the Jovial joining the procession in the hall, and whispering in my ear, as he passed my chair, “Don’t be afraid of the Madeira, it’s been twice round the Cape; and if he talks about breeding hounds, mind you say ‘Yes’ to the governor!”
With the carte du pays thus spread before me, I unfolded my napkin, and went at an excellent clear soup with the utmost confidence.
The dinner passed off far more pleasantly than I should have imagined possible. Drawn out by their brother, and gradually losing their awe of myself as a stranger, both Rebecca and Jane found something to say, and voices wherewith to say it. Well-brought-up girls in our English society are all shy (though not half so reserved as foreign young ladies of the same age), or at all events, are taught that it is right to appear so; but we must never forget that it is as natural for a woman to talk as for a duck to swim. Let them alone a little: don’t hurry them at first. If your host gives you good champagne, as in these anti-tariff days he is very likely to do, press them to have a glass. Turn the conversation upon some individual, the more notorious the better, of their own sex; but be careful to state that you cannot see what there is to admire in her yourself, and then begin resignedly at your cutlet. Take my word for it, the talking will be done for you, till gloves and handkerchiefs have to be recovered, and the ladies spread their pinions and sail away to the drawing-room.
The Jovial was also a host in himself. The presence of his sisters toned down his slang a trifle, while it enhanced his liveliness. He gave a vivid and laughable description of our day’s hunting, performed in the gig, but rather hesitated and showed some little confusion when describing our first view of the hounds.
“Who was with them?” asked his father; the old man’s eye kindling, as he filled a glass of ruby port, and offered me my choice between that and a tempting-looking claret decanter. “Who was going well? The Earl, I’ll pound it! Castle-Cropper will be with ’em, let it be ever so good for pace; and Will Hawke, I suppose; and who else?”
“The person that seemed to me to be going best,” I here interposed, filling my glass, “was a lady on a grey horse; a Miss Merlin, I believe, who is staying at the inn at Soakington. A most extraordinary horsewoman!”
The Jovial blushed, though he hid his confusion in a great gulp of Madeira. Rebecca and Jane interchanged looks of considerable meaning, and the former (I think) took up the running.
“How very unfeminine!” said she, turning round to me. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Softly? I’m sure gentlemen must wish ladies anywhere else, when they come out hunting. I think it oughtn’t to be allowed; and this Miss Merlin, you know, rides just like a man.”
“Don’t believe her!” exclaimed the Jovial, in his turn. “I’ve seen her out with our hounds many a time, but never on anything but a side-saddle, in my life.”
Rebecca blushed in her turn. “How can you, James?” said she. “Of course I didn’t mean that. But you’re so infatuated about Miss Merlin, you think she can’t do wrong. And what there is to admire in her, I can’t see, for my part.”
“Why, she does ride beautifully, you know,” put in Jane, apologetically; at least, I suppose it was Jane, as she seemed more tolerant of manly exercises than her sister, and was altogether of a livelier and more attractive style. I couldn’t help thinking, even then, I would give something to see her doing the outside edge backwards.
“Well, but that’s a man’s accomplishment,” replied her sister. “I was speaking more of her good looks. Come, Mr. Softly; give us your honest opinion. Do you think her so very wonderfully beautiful?”
This was obviously a back-hander at James, who, having by this time tackled well to the Madeira, bore it with the utmost philosophy.
I was obliged to confess that, although living in the same hotel, I had never seen her, not thinking it necessary to add my opinion of Justine, nor to dwell on the circumstances under which I had made that sweet little woman’s acquaintance.
“Never seen her!” repeated both ladies in tones of the utmost surprise; but while Rebecca’s emphasis denoted simple astonishment, I was concerned to detect in that of Jane a covert reproach and contempt. What must a young lady of her gifts and acquirements have thought of so recreant a knight as myself? They are all alike, you see—these ladies; repudiating very judiciously, as an established principle, too great diffidence in our sex, and readier far to forgive us when erring in the opposite extreme. The Bissextile, or Leap-year, does not come often enough to allow their taking the initiative as a regular thing; so a backward swain is like a jibbing horse—the very worst description of animal you can drive, either for single or double harness, light or heavy draught.
“And what do you think of our hounds, Mr. Softly?” said old Plumtree, now putting in a word, as he sent the bottles round a second time; a signal for the young ladies to depart, and for me to open the door to let them out—a man?uvre I accomplished with the best grace I could muster, and an uncomfortable conviction that they might, and probably would talk me over, not without critical disapproval, immediately they were settled in the drawing-room.
As we took our seats round the fire, which sparkled pleasantly amongst the glasses and decanters on the little round table, my host repeated his question, adding, whilst his son almost imperceptibly elevated his eyebrows, “Don’t you think now, as a sportsman, that we’re all inclined to breed hounds a little too fast?”
This was obviously old Plumtree’s crotchet, and I resigned myself to my fate.
“You must get pretty quick after a fox some part of the day, if you’ve a mind to kill him,” I replied; because I had heard a huntsman once say something of the same kind. And Jem likewise put in his oar with the remark, that “slow hounds, in these days, would never get from under the horses’ feet”—an observation received by his father with that silent contempt which a man would consider extremely rude to a stranger, but which, nevertheless, he does not scruple to betray towards those who have the advantage of belonging to his own family.
“Oh! I grant you that,” said the old gentleman. “A fox is a speedy animal himself, and it stands to reason that if you are to catch him, you must some time or another go faster than he does. But haste is not always speed. A man may be in a devil of a hurry, and yet slip two paces backwards for every one he advances. The same process that kills a hare will kill a fox. The keeping constantly at him, not the bustling him along best pace for ten or fifteen minutes. Now, your hounds of the present day are always flashing over the scent into the next field. Either you waste a deal of valuable time by having to try back; or if your huntsman is as wild as his hounds, he gallops forward blowing his horn, makes a wild cast, and loses him altogether. Either way you destroy your own object, which I take to be the enjoyment of riding in a gallop with hounds that are running with their noses down, and the enjoyment of hunting by seeing the sagacity of a close-working pack, persevering through difficulties, and rewarded with a kill.
“I’m an old fogey, I grant you, Mr. Softly. If I do ever go out to look at the hounds, it’s on a pony; and I can no more see, the way ‘Jem’ there goes, than I can fly; but let me tell you, I could have beat his head off, and given him two stone of weight into the bargain, when I was his age. It’s not that I want hounds to stay behind with me, that makes me say they’re bred too fast nowadays: far from it. I like you young fellows to enjoy yourselves, and have brushing gallops, and comb your whiskers well out in the bullfinches, and sew up your horses and come home, and drink ‘fox-hunting.’ Ring the bell, Jem; we’ll have another bottle of that claret. I think I know what riding is, if I haven’t forgotten it. You see that dark-brown horse over the fire-place? That’s a good likeness, Mr. Softly; and that was the best horse I ever had in my life.”
Raising my eyes in obedience to my host’s behests, they rested on a picture enclosed in a most gorgeous frame, representing a brown horse with rather a long back and wonderfully short legs; his tail reduced to the smallest dimensions, and his ears, so to speak, at full cock. This animal, in the highest possible condition, and with every muscle standing out from its body to a rigid degree of tension, was depicted in the centre of a flowery mead, over-shadowed by large trees in their densest summer foliage, gazing fixedly at a red-brick mansion, on the further side of a sheet of water which had by no means found its own level, but was represented in the abnormal condition of covering the side of a slope. I gazed with admiration not unmixed with astonishment. Delighted with the obvious impression, my host went on:—
“I don’t think I ever had one that could go on like ‘Supple-Jack.’ I called him Supple-Jack, Mr. Softly, on account of his breed. He was by Bamboo, that horse,—was out of a mare they called Twisting Jane; and no pace was too good, no day too long for him. We didn’t think so much of jumping in my day as they do now; at least, we didn’t talk about it so large; but you might lay the rein on Supple-Jack’s neck, and trot him up to any gate in this country, and he’d take you safely over it. Why, Jem there will tell you, when he was a boy, he’s seen the old horse, when he was past twenty, jump the gate backwards and forwards, into the paddock by the little orchard, only to come and be fed. Jump, indeed! they couldn’t go far without knowing how to jump, in my day.
“Well, sir, you talk of runs; why, I rode that horse the famous Topley day, with these very hounds, when we found in Topley Banks, immediately after the long frost, and killed our fox on the lawn at Mount Pleasant, eight miles as the crow flies, in thirty-four minutes. Talk of pace, sir! you can’t beat that in these flying days. I never got a pull at my horse from first to last; and, barring a bit of a scramble at the Sludge, where the banks were rotten from the sudden thaw, he never put a foot wrong. Zounds, sir! I don’t believe he ever changed his leg. The late Earl and myself got away together from the Banks, close to the hounds. He was a good man across country, but he couldn’t ride like his son. There were a dozen more close behind us, but they never got near enough to speak; and the Earl and I went sailing on, side by side, over the Sloppington Lordship, and all along by Soakington Pastures, not far from where you’re staying now, Mr. Softly, till we got within sight of Tangler’s Copse, where you were to-day. That and the prospect of a nasty overgrown bullfinch, with only one place in it, made up uncommon strong, tempted the Earl a little out of his line, and I never saw him again. Supple-Jack and I had it all to ourselves after that, and he carried me over the ha-ha, on to the lawn at Mount Pleasant, just as the hounds rolled their fox over, under the drawing-room window. There was a large party staying in the house (your poor mother was one of them, Jem), and they all thought the frost was not sufficiently out of the ground to hunt, and so had remained at home.
“‘Where do you hail from?’ said old Squire Gayman, the proprietor, who had served under Nelson.
“‘From Topley Banks!’ I answered, taking the fox from the hounds, and putting him across the branch of a tree in the shrubbery, whilst I kept a sharp look-out for the Earl and the huntsman, and the whips and the rest of the field.
“‘Why, it’s scarcely gone eleven?’ said the Squire, looking at his watch; ‘you haven’t wasted much time this morning. When did they put the hounds in?’
“‘At half-past ten to a minute,’ I replied, ‘and we found and came away directly. But I haven’t kept much of a dead reckoning since, and they never checked nor hovered once to give me a chance of looking at my watch.’
“‘And how did the ground ride?’ said two or three in a breath.
“‘Faith! you must ask Supple-Jack that question,’ was my answer; ‘for indeed I hadn’t much time to inquire.’
“Now, the flashiest hounds alive couldn’t have done such a distance as that, in a shorter time. And mark you, Mr. Softly, we had no tearing along, heads up and sterns down, and hounds tailing for a mile because they were all racing with each other. Far from it; they kept well together, and threw their tongues merrily enough every now and then, when they were ‘smeusing’ through a fence, or shaking themselves dry after a plunge into the Sludge; but they kept always driving on. That was what did it. No hesitation, no uncertainty, no getting their heads up, and looking about for assistance. There was nobody to interfere with them if they had wanted it, for the huntsman was a mile behind, and dropping further and further astern every yard they went, and the Earl had left his horn at home, and had little breath to spare besides.
“They ran their fox unassisted, and they killed him unassisted; but then, you observe, these hounds had been trained for many a long season to put down their noses and hunt; and it’s my opinion that they used to run so fast for the very reason that they were what superficial people call slow.”
The old gentleman here filled his glass, and took a good solemn gulp at the dry port, before proceeding to the demonstration of the proposition he had laid down. “Jovial Jem” and myself followed his example, the latter giving me to understand, by the expression of his countenance, that the governor was now mounted on his hobby, and had better not be interrupted in the process of riding it to a standstill.
“It’s all nonsense about hounds carrying such a head,” said the Squire. “It may look very fine to see them charging in line, like a squadron of dragoons, or a flock of sheep when they’ve been turned by a dog; but what’s the consequence? If they once get ten yards over the scent, it’s all up. Jealous and flashy, each tries to get ahead of his comrade; and the further they go the further they get from their fox, till they’re forced to stop and stare about them like a pack of fools, and have recourse to their huntsman after all. Then, what a pretty business they make of it! To my thinking, it’s enough to disgust any man with hunting, to see hounds cast, except of course under very peculiar circumstances—such as ground stained with stock, sudden storm coming on when a fox is sinking, or what not. It’s no pleasure to me, nor to you either, I should suppose, to see them tearing along at the heels of their huntsman’s horse, neither knowing nor caring apparently where they go, so long as they can keep out of reach of the whipper-in, who is flogging and shouting behind them. Then they don’t half run, after all, even if they should be so lucky as to get on the line of their fox again. He is mobbed to death, in all probability, rather than fairly killed; and half the hounds don’t seem to care about eating him when they’ve got him, instead of raging and tearing like so many wolves, as they do when they know they’ve caught him for themselves. No, sir; give me a good line-hunting pack that stick close to their work, though perhaps they do make a little noise over it. If the leaders should chance to over-run the scent a bit, why the others take it up, and there is no perceptible delay. I have seen these Castle-Cropper hounds hunt through sheep or oxen, just as steadily, though not quite so fast, perhaps, as if they were running in a good scenting woodland. The present Earl, though, is breeding them too fast. I always tell him so. He’s breeding them too fast. And I think Will Hawke is of the same opinion as myself.”
“You consider Will an excellent huntsman, do you not?” I hazarded as a safe remark.
“He ought to be,” replied my host, filling himself another bumper of port. “He was regularly bred for it, and entered to it, if ever man was. When he was a little chap, not three feet high, he used to help his father, who was feeder at the kennels. And I remember well the dowager Countess telling me that he knew the name of every hound in the pack long before he could answer one of the questions at her Sunday school. He used to ride the horses, too, at exercise; and being a smart little fellow, soon picked up all that was to be learned in the stable and elsewhere. One day, when he was quite a lad, and the hounds met at the kennel, as they often did, the first-whip was suddenly taken ill, and unable to get upon his horse; the other man was forty miles away, getting back some young hounds from walk. Will petitioned sorely to be put on a steady nag, and allowed to take the invalid’s place; and, as he was the only person who knew the hounds by name, he was permitted to do so. We were all amused at the excitement and ambitious airs of the young neophyte, who bustled about the rides of the covert, and “sang out” to any transgressing hound in most approved form. Old Craner, who was huntsman then, was perfectly delighted with the quickness and sagacity of the young one. At last we crossed the Swimley with a cold scent, and the hounds took to running on the opposite side of the river. Craner, who was an old man, besides having an excellent situation, and not caring to risk it, voted this all wrong, and expressed a wish to stop them. Young Hawke had swum his horse halfway across before the words were out of his senior’s mouth; and although he did not stop them, the young rascal!—for the scent improved immensely, and they took to running forthwith,—he elected himself into the post of huntsman for the occasion, and killed his fox in masterly style after a good hunting run. He was made second whip at the first opportunity, and has been in the establishment ever since. It’s a good many years ago that I’m speaking of, Mr. Softly; and the present Earl thinks he’s getting slow; but I’ll back old Will to find his fox, and hunt his fox, and kill his fox, as handsomely as any of the young ones still.”
“They all say he overdoes the letting-alone system,” observed the Jovial, with a sly glance at me. “I’ve seen him lose more than one fox on a bad-scenting day, because he wouldn’t go to a holloa, not even if it was given by Tom Crow himself, whom he ought to be able to depend upon.”
“And how many have you known him kill by that same letting-alone system, Master Flash?” exclaimed old Plumtree with the usual impatience manifested by the senior when a son is so injudicious as to differ from his father. “That’s the way with you young chaps, that think you know all about it, and the whole time you haven’t even the wisdom to know that you don’t know! Will Hawke’s hounds will stoop to a colder scent than any hounds in England, simply because he lets ’em alone; and they take no more notice of a holloa than if it were a boy scaring crows. As for Tom, the first-whip, he’s a conceited, ignorant chap, to my thinking; always ‘clapping forward,’ as he calls it, and dodging about, instead of minding his business. If I had my way with Tom, I’d sew his mouth up, take his whip from him, and put him on a horse with three legs. He’d be a precious sight more useful than he is now. At any rate, he couldn’t do so much mischief. I never thought much of Tom; never liked his voice—never liked his riding—never liked his boots and breeches.”
“He’s a neat fellow enough, too,” I interfered, rather inclined to take up the cudgels for my friend Tom, who had opened sundry gates for me, and shown other signs of civility on my behalf, the first day I was out.
“Newmarket, sir; Newmarket!” said the old squire. “Bad school, bad scholars. You can see it in the way he sits upon his horse; though he’s got good hands, I’ll allow, and can gallop them fairly enough. The present Earl picked him out of a trainer’s stable, to ride second-horse, and he did it so badly, always larking over the fences in front, instead of trotting on soberly behind, that he got him out of that at any price; and, it’s my belief, only made him first-whip because he’d nowhere else to put him, and didn’t like to turn him adrift, being a sober respectable man enough.
“But he’s not my idea of a whipper-in, though I may be wrong. Everything is so changed since my day, and every man who wears a red coat now seems to think he knows as much as King Solomon (with a withering glance at Jem, who was buzzing the bottle of Madeira). This Tom Crow is always going on to get a view, and putting his ugly face everywhere it ought not to be, under the idea that he is helping to kill the fox. That is all he has a notion of—to kill the fox. Now old Hawke, though he’s as fond of blood as any huntsman alive, and far too much given to digging, in my opinion, is all for catching him fairly, or else not catching him at all.
“What’s the use of a view? If a man believes his hounds (and if he don’t, he’d better hang ’em and retire himself into private life as a market-gardener), he knows their game is before them, when he hears them throw their tongues, just as certainly as if he’d viewed it fifty times. And, ten to one, long before you see the fox, the fox sees you, and he’s headed back again. I wish I’d a pound for every good run I’ve seen spoilt in that way. No, no! I never want to clap eyes on him till I’ve got him in my hand. I know all about him, then; and so do the hounds. Will you have any more wine, Softly? or shall we join the ladies?”
Half a glass of rich brown sherry, than which nothing sobers a man more rapidly, or settles his stomach more comfortably after an over-dose of claret: a stretch of the legs, an arrangement of the neckcloth, and I felt myself ready to confront Jane and Rebecca once more, perhaps with a somewhat keener sense of their merits than I had entertained before dinner. On entering the drawing-room, a dead silence prevailed between the two; I concluded therefore that the topic which they seemed thus suddenly to have dropped must have been one that would not bear ventilation (to use the Parliamentary slang of the present day) before the gentlemen. Perhaps, indeed, it may have referred to the general character of their visitor. I would have given something to know whether they thought me most knave or fool.
A well-timed observation from their father put me at last au fait as to the identity of each lady; and when papa said, “Rebecca, won’t you give us some music?” and the one next whom I did not chance to have taken my seat replied, “Very well, papa. What will you have?” it became evident to me that, having devoted myself before, and at dinner, to the elder lady, it was now the younger sister’s turn to have her share of my attentions.
Rebecca played skilfully, and accompanied herself, in a small voice, with a tolerably correct attention to time; chiefly delighting, I observed, in simple ballads of a touching and pathetic tendency, such as “Annie,” “Willie, we have missed you,” and a very tearful song about a person of the name of “Margaret.”
Pending these melodies, Jane, whom I now discovered to be a lady of a certain force of character and an inquiring turn of mind, “put me through my facings,” if I may use the expression, on a variety of subjects, concerning most of which it has since occurred to me I must have betrayed remarkable ignorance. When you have been out in the cold all day, then enjoyed a good dinner, and a good deal of it, washed down by copious libations of excellent wine, in a warm room, I believe, if you are blessed with a healthy constitution, drowsiness is the inevitable result. Then, suppose yourself placed in a very comfortable arm-chair, opposite a blazing fire, with the hum of quiet voices and the tones of a pianoforte falling soothingly on your ear, and you can exactly imagine my position.
I am aware of having confessed truthfully enough to my fair inquisitor, that I could neither play cricket, billiards, nor rackets; that I did not care a great deal for shooting: should be likely to upset if I ventured to drive four horses; and had never had a pair of skates on in my life. I feel sure, at the same time, that I sustained the contempt she could not but entertain for me with wonderful equanimity, and that I further sank my intellectual powers to a level with my physical incapacity, by an avowal of my inability to read a word of German. But Jane was not to be thus choked off: she was one of those energetic young ladies who, in their zeal to be doing, must needs have as many strings to their bow as Ph?bus could count upon his lyre. She collected autographs, she discovered character from handwriting, she pestered all her friends for their old postage-stamps; though what she did with them, or what anybody does with them, even when the amount rises to a million, is to me a profound mystery. Amongst other inquisitorial objects, she possessed a wonderful book, in which the sufferer was requested to place on record his opinions on sundry matters to which in all probability he had never before given a thought;—such as his favourite authors in prose and verse, the characters he most admired in modern and ancient history, his pet preacher, and the names he should prefer to give his sons and daughters, if he had any: all topics on which it is obvious none but a man of profound forethought and reflection can be expected to have made up his mind. I have a distinct recollection of skipping all these questions till I came to the important one that required to know my favourite food, and falling asleep then and there in an abortive attempt to write the word “plum-pudding.”
Jem’s mellow voice, joining his sister’s in one of the Negro melodies, awoke me in a state of great penitence and confusion. I was pleased to observe, however, that I was not the only culprit, for old Plumtree, with his head sunk into his voluminous white waistcoat, was accompanying his children with a grand chorus of snores. But the vacant chair next my own inflicted a tacit reproach that spoke whole pages of sarcasm; and I felt it an inexpressible relief when, voting it too late for whist, hand-candles were rung for, and the ladies betook themselves to bed, followed, after a brief interval, by the three gentlemen.
The Jovial, of course, went to smoke. Nobody now-a-days seems able to go to bed without that narcotic; but I declined his invitation to accompany him, and laid my weary head as soon as I possibly could upon my pillow.
Determined to have nothing more to do with Crafty Kate, I had taken the precaution of telling my servant to order a chaise to be ready for me at an early hour the following morning; and when I discovered that it had been freezing hard in the night, and the ground was one sheet of ice, I felt I had no reason to repent of my precaution.
We assembled at breakfast at the early hour of nine; the Jovial coming down in a shooting suit of marvellous fabrication and device, avowing his intention of going out “to look for ducks,” a pastime in which I cannot but think I was wise to decline joining him. The squire was off to his farm the instant he had swallowed his breakfast, not, however, without giving me a pressing and hospitable invitation to remain with him another day. This I felt compelled to refuse. I longed to be back at my quiet lodging once more; and, like all men who have not room for a great many ideas at a time, felt that I had now got hold of one which took entire possession of me. This was neither more nor less than a morbid desire to see Miss Merlin.
I do not think either Rebecca or Jane regretted my departure. I am not a ladies’ man—I know it; nor can I bring myself greatly to regret that failure in my character. But they took leave of me with cordiality and politeness, Jane even offering to lend me a book, of which we had been talking, to read in the post-chaise.
As I drew up the windows and drove away from the door, I could not sufficiently congratulate myself that I was not in that tall dog-cart, at the mercy of “Jovial Jem” and “Crafty Kate.”
On my arrival at the Haycock, my first inquiry was for Miss Merlin. “She was gone to Castle-Cropper,” the waiter said. “Maid and things followed her yesterday. Gone to stay, sir? Yes, sir. Didn’t know for how long; but the groom rather thought as she wouldn’t be back under a fortnight.”
A fortnight’s frost tempted me to leave my comfortable quarters at the Haycock, and the delights of Miss Lushington’s society, for the metropolis. Somehow hunting men never do keep away from London in the frost, and I had an excellent excuse in wanting the best advice about my arm. “The fracture had united very satisfactorily.” said the great authority before whom I stripped, paying me at the same time an agreeable compliment on my vigorous state of health, and the development of my muscular system. By the time I had visited the different theatres, and read all the back numbers of my favourite magazines, at “The Hat and Umbrella,” I was as sound again as ever I had been in my life. Nor did I forget, when once more frequenting my comfortable club, to cross-examine Quizby at great length on the subject which was still uppermost in my thoughts. His answers only made me the more anxious to see Miss Merlin: and I never greeted a thaw with greater delight than that which set in, just as I was beginning to get tired of London, and summoned me back to Soakington once more. At the railway station it was obvious that the hunting community, like those migratory birds which periodically leave the frozen regions of the north for warmer climes, was on the wing. Umbrellas and sticks, strapped together in bundles, discovered the white crook of the hunting-whip between their handles; there was a great demand at the bookstall for the Sporting Magazine and the Field newspaper; whilst half the hats hung up in the first-class carriage betrayed, by a little ring of wire just under the brim, that it was their natural destiny to be crushed in bullfinches, knocked off by branches, possibly flattened and crumpled up by the projection of their enthusiastic wearers head-foremost to the earth.
Arrived at Soakington, the first person I met was Miss Merlin’s dapper groom. These domestics come out in a thaw, as we see flies begin to swarm the first sunny day in spring. “The country,” he said, in answer to my inquiries, “would ride perfectly well by to-morrow. Indeed, the frost was pretty nigh out of the ground now. His lady? Oh she was quite well, he believed; leastways he might say as he knowed she was, for he’d been over for orders to-day—hadn’t been back an hour. Where? Oh! at the Castle, to be sure, where she’d a-been stopping now a goodish spell. Would she be out to-morrow? Why, in course she would, if she were alive. Did I know that the hounds were to meet at the Haycock? A-purpose to draw Soakington Gorse—that’s the new gorse as my lord made down by Willow Waterless. Sure of a run to-morrow, if you could be sure of anything on this mortal earth!”
Vindicating his character as a philosopher, by this profound reflection, my friend withdrew into the privacy of his own stable, and I betook myself to mine; there, having expressed a qualified approval of my stud’s general appearance, I decided to ride “Tipple Cider,” as being the best of them, and then retired to my apartments, to order dinner and prepare for the morrow.
I was a little disappointed, I confess, to discover that the bird was flown. I fully expected Miss Merlin would ere this have returned to her quarters at the Haycock. Also, I was a little tired with my journey and the late racketing in London. I am a quiet man, and I call supper after the play the height of dissipation. So I went early to bed, looking forward with keen excitement to the morrow.
The morning broke delightfully, promising one of those soft, fragrant days of which I have never seen the counterpart in any climate but our own, and which, alas! are rare even here. A calm, grey winter’s day in England, with a faint southern breeze, and occasional gleams of sunshine descending on the distance, in perpendicular floods of gold, has always seemed to me the very perfection of weather.
The hounds were to meet at half-past ten. I was dressed and at breakfast a full hour before. To me, as to all bachelors, this is a very important meal. I like to enjoy it comfortably, in my dressing-gown and slippers, before placing myself in the confinement of boots and breeches. I like to prop up the Morning Post, or the last Quarterly, or one of the magazines, against my coffee-pot, and feed my mind alternately with my body. Now a mouthful of ham, then a prophecy of Argus (pretty sure to be right) on the next great race; or a bite of toast, and a sentence on the Cotton question; or chip my egg and break the ice of a new story in Fraser, at one and the same time, washing the whole thing down with a draught of such coffee as no servant but my own, I verily believe, is capable of concocting.
I have seen some men breakfast, and that in apparent resignation, with a button-hook in one hand and a fork in the other, a wife calling to them in the passage, children running in and out of the room, the gardener waiting for orders at the door, and their hack snorting and pawing on the gravel in front. I suppose “the back,” as the adage says, “is made for the burden.” I am not ungrateful, when I reflect on sundry burdens that have not been made for my back.
At length, dressed, booted, and spurred, I made my way downstairs into the bar, where I found Miss Lushington, in a costume of surprising magnificence far surpassing any of her previous dresses, in a high flow of spirits, and up to her very ear-rings in the business of her office. Notwithstanding all she had on hand, however, she did not fail to greet me with cordial politeness; and here I must do Miss Lushington the justice to observe, that whatever might be the calls on her attention, and however numerous the circle of her admirers, offering the accustomed incense of flattery not unmixed with chaff, she had always a word and a smile to spare for the humblest and most bashful individual who entered the magic ring. “Dear heart! Mr. Softly,” said she, “it does me good to see you in your red coat again. But you’ll surely remember what an escape you’ve had. You’ll take warning, and not be so venturesome for the future.”
I was not above feeling a sense of gratification at this allusion to my supposed recklessness, though I detected something like a smile on Mr. Naggett’s rosy face, whilst it was uttered.
Yes, there was Mr. Naggett, in full bloom, armed and accoutred for the chase; sipping a fragrant concoction of gin-and-cloves moreover, as a further preparation. His horse, a large mealy chestnut, was being led up and down the yard. I saw it through the bar-window, and thought I never liked the look of an animal much less. All that art could accomplish had, however, been done, to set off its natural unsightliness. It was decorated with a new saddle and bridle, breast-plate, nose-band, and martingale complete. It was accoutred, moreover, with a gaudy saddle-cloth, rather too large, and a boot on every leg but one.
The owner, too, was got-up in an alarming manner, and as he would have said himself, “regardless of expense.” Mr. Naggett’s coat was blue, with the brightest of buttons, bearing some raised device, in which a crown-imperial predominated. Mr. Naggett’s waistcoat was scarlet, bound with yellow braid: and his cream-coloured neckcloth was secured by a red cornelian pin. A low-crowned hat, white cloth breeches, and high Napoleon boots, faultless in polish, but spoiled by a pair of thin racing spurs, very badly put on, completed Mr. Naggett’s resplendent costume. The man himself seemed in the highest possible spirits; but I thought I could detect a slight tremor of the hand, despite his morning stimulant—that tremor which a horse is so apt in discovering, particularly when he is ridden at water.
“Nice morning, sir,” said Mr. Naggett. He pronounced it marning; but this peculiarity I have observed amongst ultra sporting characters. “Hope I see you all right again, sir. You’ll want both hands to-day—heels too, or I’m mistaken. Looks like a hunting marning, don’t it, sir? And there’s a fox lies here in Soakington Gorse, as will give us a ‘buster,’ I know. Got your ‘riding boots’ on to-day, sir, I dare say.”
I was somewhat nettled at his tone, three parts jesting, and not above a quarter respectful; and I replied, wishing to return sarcasm with sarcasm—
“I shall follow you, Mr. Naggett, if I want to be well with them.”
Such delicate thrusts were completely thrown away upon my friend’s proof-armour of self-conceit.
“You might do worse, sir,” said he, in perfect good faith. “I’m riding a real good one to-day. Go as fast as he likes, he can; and jump! He’d jump a town, if you’d put him at it! I know whose fault it will be if we get thrown out to-day. Your health, Miss Lushington. What, Ike! be the hounds come already?”
The latter question was addressed to my old acquaintance, the earth-stopper, who with many a low salaam, and a gentlemanlike air of excusing himself, which he had acquired in his palmy days with “The Flamers,” and never completely shaken off, now sidled into the Bar.
“They’re not half-a-mile behind,” said the old man; and then turned to me, with a “Beg your pardon, sir,” as if to apologise that he had addressed the other first. I accepted the implied compliment; and could do no less in return than ask the veteran “What would he have to drink?”
“A little gin, if you please, sir,” replied old Ike, passing the back of his hand across his mouth. And I saw his wasted features glow and his eyes brighten, as the liquid fire descended to those regions which people who are no anatomists call the “cockles of the heart.” He was still a wonderfully tough old specimen, this earth-stopper. Last night he had been his rounds on a shaggy white pony that looked like the ghost of a horse in the dim moonlight; and to-day, having already walked half-a-dozen miles or so before breakfast, he would follow the hounds for several hours on foot, and be ready again for his work by nightfall.
I saw the old man’s face brighten once more, as the door opened, and Tom Turnbull walked into the bar—not to drink anything, as I soon ascertained, but to inquire if a parcel had been left for his “Missis.” By the way, I should much like to have my curiosity satisfied as to what these parcels for farmer’s wives contain, that are continually left at houses of call. They are invariably small, limp, and a good deal crushed, wrapped in the softest of paper, and tied with the most tangled of string.
Mr. Turnbull looked the picture of a sportsman—low-crowned hat, pepper-and-salt coat, Bedford cord breeches, and brown-topped boots, thick leather gloves, and a blue bird’s-eye neckcloth. “How goes it, Tom?” exclaimed a voice I recognised. “Fine dry morning, this. Won’t you liquor up?”
“Never take anything before I go hunting, thank ye, sir,” replied Tom, turning round his rosy healthy face and clear eye, presenting a marked contrast to the dissipated looks of “Jovial Jem,” for it was none other who now addressed him. The Jovial had been in London, too, during the frost, and, judging by his appearance, had been engaged in a process which he termed “keeping the game alive,” but which was likely to be rapid destruction to the sportsman. He looked as if he had been partially drunk for a fortnight and was hardly sober now, as indeed probably was the case. He was attired, nevertheless, in the most fashionable hunting costume—long scarlet coat with large sleeves, white waistcoat with an infinity of pockets, blue-satin neckcloth and turned-down collar, well-cleaned leathers and top-boots, heavy workmanlike spurs as bright as silver, and a velvet hunting-cap. A cigar in his mouth of course, and, despite a certain nervous anxiety of manner, a merry leer in his eye, or it would not have been “The Jovial.” He had driven Crafty Kate over from The Ashes, and was about to ride a steady seasoned hunter that his father had given him on Christmas-day. “Look alive!” observed this well-dressed sportsman when he had greeted me, as he considered, with sufficient politeness, by slapping me on the back, and calling me “old one.” “The Earl leaves the Green to a minute, and it’s ten-thirty now”—words which caused an immediate bustle in the bar and emptying thereof, nobody but Mr. Naggett having the politeness to wish Miss Lushington “Good-bye.”
Soakington-Green, as it was called—an open space of verdure, generally too wet for cricket, and seldom boasting anything more lively than a worn-out pair of stocks and a few lean geese—was all alive when we mounted our horses and rode across its level surface. True to his character for punctuality, the Earl was already moving off, and I did but catch a glimpse of his long back and tall aristocratic figure as he jogged along amongst his hounds, in earnest conclave with Will Hawke. The pack were gathered round their huntsman’s horse, looking, as they always did, bright as pictures. Glossy in their coats, full of muscle, ribs just visible, and plenty of covering upon their backs, they stepped daintily along, with their sterns well up, and that sagacious quick-witted ready-for-anything expression which is characteristic of the fox-hound. A party of gentlemanlike-looking men from the Castle, admirably mounted, followed close upon the hounds; but my eye sought in vain amongst the troop for the well-known form in its close-fitting riding-habit, which was beginning to take up far too much of my attention. The tinge of disappointment I experienced was, however, rapidly cured by a conversation I happened to overhear between young Plumtree and a double-distilled dandy from the Castle, riding a conspicuous white horse.
The “Jovial,” whose shattered nerves could not brook suspense as well as mine, addressing the elaborate exquisite by the familiar abbreviation of “Pop” (his real name was Popham Algernon Adolphus Evergreen, so it did come shorter to call him “Pop”), asked him point-blank, “What they had done with the rest of the party?” to which “Pop” after a vague stare, and an effort to remember where he was, replied, “Party?—Oh!—Aw!—Yes. Some of the fellows were late, and went on at once to the Gorse. Emperor won’t like it (meaning the Earl); but daren’t blow up, because The Slasher’s gone on with ’em.”
“The Slasher?” exclaimed Plumtree, turning very red and forgetting in his indignation to be either slang or cool, “Who the devil do you call The Slasher?”
“Pop” gathered his wits together once more, and replied imperturbably, “Oh, The Slasher, you know—that Miss Merlin, you know. It’s a name Bight gave her, you know. I’m sure I don’t know why; but he’s a devilish clever fellow, Bight, so they say. It wouldn’t be a bad name for a horse, would it?”
“Pop” relapsing into a brown study at this juncture, it was impossible to get anything more satisfactory out of that priceless piece of porcelain-ware; and the “Jovial,” blowing off his indignation in clouds of cigar-smoke, trotted on to have a look at the hounds, young Evergreen running his eye over myself and horse with a supercilious stare that, in my opinion, did no credit to his good manners. A leading duchess, however, in London, had stated her opinion that “Lady Evergreen’s boy was the best-dressed and the most impudent young one of his year;” so “Pop” was very much the fashion in consequence.
A little wide of the hounds, in order to do no mischief, and a little clear of the horses, lest the four-year-old should prove too handy with his heels, I observe my former acquaintance Tips, the rough-rider, in the full glory of his profession. He had so completely singled himself out from the crowd, that he could not but attract attention. Rather neater in his dress than when I had seen him last, and with a clean white neckcloth of clerical proportions, Mr. Tips sat down in the saddle as no man but a professional horse-breaker ever does sit—an attitude only to be acquired by the habit of keeping constantly on his guard against the agreeable varieties of rearing, kicking, plunging, turning round, and lying down, adopted by a thoroughly refractory pupil when his “dander” is up. Tips, prepared for any or all of these vagaries at a moment’s notice, kept his knees well forward, his feet home in the stirrups, his hands apart, holding the reins rather long, for he likes, he says, “to give them plenty of rope” when they begin throwing their heads about, and his short sturdy cutting whip ready in his right.
To-day, however, these precautionary measures seemed merely to arise from the force of habit, as the animal he was riding—a lengthy good-looking brown, on short legs, with long low shoulders, a long coat, a long head, and a long tail—looked as docile and good-tempered a four-year-old as ever was crossed, and played with its rusty bit, attached, as a horse-breaker’s bit always is, to the most insecure-looking and weather-beaten of bridles, with a good-humoured cheerfulness calculated to inspire the utmost confidence in its rider.
“You’ve got a pleasanter mount than usual to-day, Mr. Tips,” I remarked, coming alongside of him; whereat the four-year-old tucked its long tail in, and gave a playful kick or two, snorting the while in pure gaiety of heart. “Are you going to make a hunter of him, or have you only brought him out for exercise?”
Mr. Tips dived towards his fully-occupied hands with his head, as the nearest approach he could afford towards touching his hat.
“Never seen hounds till to-day, sir,” he replied. “Sweet young horse he is, sir, as ever looked through a bridle; a kind animal, too, both in the stable and out; as mild as a milch cow, and as handy as a ladies’-maid.”
Just then the object of our joint praises, startled, pardonably enough, by a tinker’s caravan that had taken up a conspicuous position on the Green, shied violently away from the alarming object, and did not recover its equanimity without a succession of bounds and plunges, such as would have unseated most men ignominiously, but which produced no perceptible effect on the demeanour of the experienced Tips, his affability only becoming, if possible, more conspicuous than before.
Lost in admiration of my companion’s skill—for I confess to a great weakness for real finished horsemanship such as in my own person I have never yet been able to acquire—and taken up with the movements of the young horse and the conversation of its rider, I had not remarked that we had let the hounds slip on so far ahead as to find ourselves a long way behind the whole moving cavalcade, proceeding leisurely towards the gorse. An exclamation from Mr. Tips roused me to the true state of affairs.
“Best shog on a little, sir,” said he, with a sparkle of excitement in his eye. “Blessed if they haven’t reached the covert already! and are putting in. There’s a short cut; this way, Mr. Softly, if you’ll be so good as follow me.”
With these words, Tips thrust open an awkward hand-gate, the young one pushing it with his chest, as I felt convinced at the time, far more handily than Tipple Cider would have done, and entered a low swampy pasture patched with rushes, and stretching right away to the further end of the gorse from that where the hounds were put in. Shutting my eyes to the great probability there was of our heading the fox, and resolving to shut my ears to the expostulations that would too surely accompany such a catastrophe, I followed my leader along the pasture, rather in a state of nervous trepidation, in no measure soothed by the view I now obtained of the assembled field, amongst whom I had no difficulty in recognising the well-known riding-habit.
Tips sitting down in the saddle, put the four-year-old into a lurching awkward kind of gallop, and I followed him at a venture, Tipple Cider raking and snatching at his bridle in disagreeable exuberance of spirits, as if he were rather short of work.
There was a low rail at the extremity of the pasture, fortifying what had once been a gap into the covert itself, a shelter I was most anxious to reach before the eagle-eye of the Earl could spy me out in so untoward a position. I had already made up my mind for a considerable détour which would bring me to a friendly hand-gate (I hate the foolish practice of jumping when hounds are not running), when I saw Tips charge this said rail with the utmost coolness; the four-year-old resenting such an unnecessary demonstration, by turning short round, and kicking out violently at the offending timber.
“Give us a lead, Mr. Softly, if it isn’t taking too great a liberty,” said Tips, as quietly as if this cool request were the most natural thing in the world; adding, as a clinching argument, “You’ve on a hunter, I know.”
The rail, though not high, was strong and ugly. There was a nasty deep blind ditch on the taking-off side, and nothing but gorse-bushes to land in. I did not seem to care much about entering the covert at this point; but whilst I was deliberating the matter in my own mind, and Tipple Cider was doing all he could to get at the rail, tail first or anyhow, a horn resounded from the opposite side of the covert; the music of the hounds running, which had greeted us ever since we got within ear-shot, suddenly ceased: though I could see nothing of them, I could distinctly hear the rush of horses galloping up the adjacent pasture. It was evident they had gone away; and equally incontestable that we had lost our start. Tips blazed up into excitement at once; he made no more ado, but caught the four-year-old short by the head, rammed both spurs in, and, notwithstanding an abortive kick or two, forced him over the rail, striking it hard with fore and hind legs. Tipple Cider, fired with emulation, took the bit in his teeth, and had me over it, clear and clean, before I was aware. The next instant, leaping and plunging through the gorse-bushes, I was following Tips at the best pace I could muster, to get after the hounds.
My blood rose with the motion, my horse dropped to his bit, my pilot chose an easy, though devious path; if everything had gone right, I think at that moment I could have ridden fairly and boldly enough.
As we rounded the slight acclivity on which the gorse was planted, a beautiful panorama was spread out before us. Already two fields ahead, the hounds were running hard, evidently with a capital scent, followed at different intervals by the scattering field, all fresh as fire, and every man taking the place to which he felt his skill and daring entitled him. Nearest ourselves I recognised Mr. Naggett, striding away on the mealy chestnut with a great display of enthusiasm and hard riding, his feet stuck out, his elbows up to his ears, and his blue coat-tails flying in the wind. He was diverging, nevertheless, slightly from the line of chase, and making vigorously for the gate, which old Ike, whose active feet had already taken him there, was hurriedly unfastening. Two or three dark coats and the second whip seemed also inclined to avail themselves of this convenient egress; the body of the field, however, were charging the fence boldly (a fair hedge and ditch), making for the places that had been leaped by their leaders in the first flight. I saw Plumtree jump it on his steady hunter; but I observed by the way in which he pulled the old horse out of his stride, upsetting the equanimity even of that experienced animal, that his nerves were by no means up to the mark. The Earl and Will Hawke, a hundred yards or so ahead of these, were close to the hounds. “Pop,” too, on the white horse, had got a capital start, and was blazing away as if he had a second horse in every field, and a spare neck in his pocket. Rather in front of him, and alongside the hounds, rode the dauntless Miss Merlin, sailing away on “Lady-Killer.” I recognised his long swish-tail even at that distance; taking everything as it came in his stride, and diverging neither to right nor left.
Even at the pace I was going, my heart beat faster at the sight. If such were wanting, this was indeed an additional inducement to catch them at any price. I caught hold of Tipple Cider’s head, and for a few resolute minutes I do believe the deluded animal thought he had got a regular “out-and-outer” on his back.
The hounds bent somewhat to the right. Tips, who had an eye like a hawk, perceived it in a moment; and turning round on the saddle, good-naturedly motioned me to follow him. By diverging a little, we got upon a succession of sound headlands, with fair easy fences; the hounds kept turning towards us, and we began to overhaul them rapidly. Excited as I was, I could not but admire the masterly manner in which the rough-rider handled the young one at his leaps. We were getting on gloriously. The first flight, including Miss Merlin, although a couple of fields distant, were scarcely nearer the hounds than ourselves. I rejoiced to think that I should drop amongst them, as it were, from the clouds, and assume my place in the front rank.
A momentary hesitation, another down-wind turn of the hounds, and there was but one fence between ourselves and the pack. My leader charged it resolutely; I prepared to follow him. It was an ugly place—a downhill gallop at it, a high straggling fence, sedgy banks, and something that was more of a watercourse than a ditch running on the far side. Tips was as eager as a glutton, but the young one’s heart failed him the last stride; and, although his rider had him in such a grasp that he could not refuse, the powder was out of him, and he jumped short, dropping his hind legs, and rolling into the next field. Tips was hardly clear of his horse before he was on him again; and I do not believe he lost half-a-dozen strides by the fall. Why did I not follow? My heart failed me. I thought it would be rash to go where another horse had fallen, though I had seen exactly how it happened; and Tipple Cider was shaking his head, as much as to say, “Why won’t you let me have a drive?” So I went to look for another place.
That sentence explains everything. Need I say how, the further I rode along the fence, the deeper and wider it became? Need I confess that I was eventually compelled to creep ignominiously through a gap in a green lane, the disappointed Tipple Cider grinding my leg against a tree and crushing my hat amongst its branches, in his disgust; or that I proceeded along this convenient alley as far as it lasted with renewed hopes, dashed by a bitter sense of vexation and shame? A stern chase is a long chase, by land as well as by sea; and there is no process, in my opinion, so utterly disheartening as that of trying to catch hounds in a run.
Sometimes I heard their notes, borne by the westerly breeze in tantalising harmony on my longing ears. Sometimes I caught sight of a few scattered riders in the distance, a lot of cattle herded together in a corner, or a flock of sheep formed up in military line, and not yet recovered from their panic. I rode on like a man in a dream; minutes seemed to lengthen themselves into hours, and I was surprised to find my horse so fresh after such prolonged exertions. At last, rounding the corner of the well-known Tangler’s Copse, and speculating vaguely how I should ever cross the Sludge, supposing the chase to be still forward in the same direction, I caught a view of the whole assemblage, not a quarter of a mile off, on the opposite side of the brook. It was obvious they had killed their fox, after a capital run. Horses were being led about, men on foot were standing in groups, some were in the act of remounting—it was probable that the run had been over some little time. Distinct against the sky stood out Miss Merlin’s graceful figure, leaning forward to caress the redoubtable Lady-Killer, who had carried her so well. In close attendance, I made out the white hunter of the exquisite “Pop.” I should think that poor beast must have had enough of it.
I was deliberating in my own mind whether I should not be fool enough to ride at the Sludge in cold blood, when my motions were decided for me by a general break-up of the distant party; Miss Merlin and her attendant cavaliers taking the direct road for the castle. It was evident she did not at present mean to return to the Haycock. Moodily and dejectedly, I too took my homeward way. I was disgusted with myself—disgusted with hunting—disgusted with life. I should have liked to know what the hounds had done, too; but I felt I could not have brooked the good-humoured curiosity of Mr. Tips, nor the self-sufficient pity of Mr. Naggett, who would be sure to swear he had gone better than he really did.
Espying these two sportsmen at a turn in the road gradually overtaking me, I set spurs to Tipple Cider, and rattled back to the Haycock as fast as I could trot. Arrived there, I found the dapper groom in marching order, getting out his horses for a journey. He had received orders that morning to move them on to Melton; and I have never set eyes on Miss Merlin from that day to this.
The End