CHAPTER II “MR. JOB SLOPER”

The ancient Persians, who seem also to have been wonderful fellows to ride, had a pleasing system of deliberation, which has somewhat fallen into disuse in our modern Parliaments. According to the old historians, it was their practice to discuss all graver matters of policy when in a state of inebriety, giving their debate the advantage of being resumed and repeated next morning; also, should they inadvertently convene a meeting when sober, to reverse the process, and ascertain whether on getting drunk over it they arrived at the same result. The system was not without its merits, no doubt, one of the most prominent of which seems to have been that it entailed a double allowance of liquor. Mr. Sawyer was sufficiently a Persian to reconsider his decision of the previous night, when he woke next morning with a trifling head-ache, and a tongue more like that of a reindeer, as preserved by Fortnum and Mason, than the organ of speech and deglutition peculiar to the human subject.

He was a hard fellow enough; but no man can smoke cigars and drink hot-stopping the last thing at night, and get up in the morning without remembering that he has done so.

A plunge into his cold bath, however, a cup of warm tea, with a rasher of bacon frizzling from the fire, and well peppered, soon restored the brightness to our friend’s eye and the colour to his cheek. When he lit his cigar on his own well-cleaned door-step, and turned his face to the balmy breath of “jocund day,” under a soft November sky, dappled, and mellowed, and tinged here and there with gold by the winter sun, he felt, as he expressed it, “fit as a fiddle, and hotter upon Market Harborough than ever.”

He was a man of few words though, when he meant business, and only pausing for a moment at the Stable, and feeling the grey’s legs, which somehow always did fill after a day’s hunting, he took no living mortal into his confidence, not even the taciturn Isaac (of whom more hereafter); but started for a five-mile walk, to inspect the stables of a certain horse-coping worthy, with whom he had long been too well acquainted, and who generally had a good bit of stuff somewhere about the premises, provided only you could get hold of the right one.

Mr. Sawyer was not a man to order a horse out of the stable in the hunting season for any but the legitimate purpose of the chase. “Walking,” he said, “kept him in wind;” and off he started down a narrow lane that in summer was thick with blackberries and blooming with dog roses, and over a stile and across a fallow, and through a wood, at an honest five-mile-an-hour, heel-and-toe; every turn in the path reminding him, as he stepped along, of some feat of horsemanship or skilful shot, or other pleasing association connected with his country home. And this is one of the greatest advantages of hunting from home. After all, notwithstanding her irresistible attractions, we cannot follow Diana every day of our lives, and surely it is wiser and pleasanter to take her as we want her amongst our own woods and glades, and breezy uplands, and pleasant shady nooks, than to go all the way to Ephesus on purpose to worship with the crowd. Mixed motives, however, seem to be the springs that set in motion our human frames; and if Care sits behind the horseman on the cantle of his saddle, Ambition may also be detected clinging somewhere about his spurs.

In little more than an hour Mr. Sawyer found himself entering a dilapidated farmyard, of which three sides consisted of tumble-down sheds and out-houses; while the fourth, in somewhat better repair, denoted by its ventilating windows, latched doors, and occasional stable-buckets, that its inmates were of the equine race. Stamping up a bricked passage, on either side of which sundry plants were dying in about three inches of mould, our friend wisely entered the open door of the kitchen, preferring that easy ingress to the adjacent portal, of which a low scraper and rusty knocker seemed to point out that it was chiefly intended for visits of ceremony. Here he encountered nothing more formidable than a white cat sleeping by the fire, and a Dutch clock, with an enormous countenance, ticking drowsily in the warmest corner of the apartment.

Coughing loudly, and shuffling his feet against the sanded floor, he soon succeeded in summoning a bare-armed maid-of-all-work, with a dirty face and flaunting ribbons in her cap, who, to his inquiries whether “Mr. Sloper was at home,” answered, as maids-of-all-work invariably do, that “Master had just stepped out for a minute, but left word he would be back directly: would you please to take a seat?”

This interval, our friend, who, as he often remarked, “wasn’t born yesterday,” determined to spend in a private visit to the stables, and left the kitchen accordingly for that purpose. It is needless to observe that he had barely coasted a third of the ocean of muck which constituted the centre of the yard, ere he encountered the proprietor himself coming leisurely to greet him, with a welcome on his ruddy face and a straw in his mouth.

Mr. Sloper was a hale hearty man of some three-score years or so, who must have been very good-looking in his prime; but whose countenance, from the combined effects of good-living and hard weather, had acquired that mottled crimson tinge which, according to Dickens, is seldom observed except in underdone boiled beef and the faces of old mail coachmen and guards. It would have puzzled a physiognomist to say whether good-humour or cunning prevailed in the twinkle of his bright little blue eye; but the way in which he wore his shaved hat and stuck his hands into the pockets of his wide-skirted grey riding-coat, would have warned any observer of human nature that he was skilled in horseflesh and versed in all the secrets that lend their interest to that fascinating animal. Somehow Honesty seems to go faster on horseback than afoot.

Not that a man of Mr. Sloper’s years and weight ever got upon the backs of his purchases, save perhaps in very extreme cases, and where “the lie with circumstances” was as indispensable as “the lie direct.” No, he confined himself to dealing for them over dark-coloured glasses of brandy-and-water, puffing them unconscionably in the stable, and pretending to ignore them completely when he met his own property out-of-doors. “His eyesight,” he said, “was failing him; positively he didn’t know his own nags now, when he met them in his neighbour’s field!”

Tradition asserted, however, that Job Sloper, when a younger man, had been one of the best and boldest riders in the Old Country. The limp which affected his walk had been earned in a rattling fall over a turnpike-gate for a wager of a new hat, and Fiction herself panted in detailing his many exploits by flood and field when he first went into the trade. These had lost nothing by time and repetition, but even now, in those exceptional cases where he condescended to get into the saddle, there was no question that the old man could put them along still; for, as lusty and heavy as he’d grown, “I’m a sad cripple now, sir,” he’d say, in a mild reflective voice; “and they wants to be very quiet and gentle to me. I never had not what I call good nerve in the best of times, though I liked to see the hounds run a bit too. I was always fond of the sport, you see; and even now it does me good to watch a gent like yourself in the saddle. What I calls a reel ’orseman—as can give-an’-take, and bend his back like Old Sir ’Arry: him as kept our hounds for so long. If it ain’t taking too great a liberty, perhaps you’re related to Sir ’Arry: you puts me in mind of him so much, the way you carries your ’ands!”

The old hypocrite! Ingenuous youth was pretty sure to “stop and have a bit of lunch” after that, and after lunch was it not human nature that it should buy?