CHAPTER III MR. NAGGETT

As Tips took his departure, with a respectful inclination to myself, and a most polite bow to Miss Lushington, I observed that lady to adjust her shining locks, as it were mechanically, in obvious expectation of accustomed homage; and indeed ere I had sufficiently admired the attitude in which she performed this graceful movement, a fresh arrival swaggered into the bar, in as different a manner as possible from the modest entrance of his predecessor, Mr. Tips.

This gentleman, or perhaps the abbreviation gent would convey more distinctly the exterior of the individual thus designated—this gent, then, was a personage of dashing appearance, dressed in the style which the present age denominates “loud,” and which presents, as far as the wearer’s ingenuity will admit, a combination of extreme splendour, with a decided tendency to the sports of the field. I have remarked such a peculiarity of costume in several individuals, less distinguished for their general good sense and respectability than for a strong and somewhat perverted inclination in favour of dog-fighting, pigeon-shooting, excessive trotting against time, the pitting of game-fowl in deadly conflict armed with artificial spurs, and even the patronage of those human combats in which such profound secrecy is always preserved, and to witness which it is indispensable to be possessed of that mysterious passport termed by Bell’s Life “the office.”

Mr. Naggett, then, the well-known sporting butcher of the adjacent town of Waterborough, was turned out from top to toe exactly as a well-known sporting butcher ought to be. When he removed his low-crowned, close-shaved hat, and disclosed his abundance of crisp, short-curling flaxen hair, surmounting an extremely ruddy face with bright-blue eyes, good features, and the whitest of teeth, I could easily imagine that the respectful admiration of so well-looking an individual was an acceptable compliment even to Miss L. His fawn-coloured whiskers, of which he possessed a great abundance, were trained carefully to the very corners of his mouth, from which they descended in those seductive semicircles that are seen to their highest advantage in the commercial-room. Scorning the delusion of moustaches, Mr. Naggett rested a stronger claim to admiration on the brilliancy of his blue-satin neckcloth which, worn without shirt-collar, and ornamented by an enormous pin modelled to represent the head of the Champion of England in massive mosaic gold, irresistibly attracted the eye of the beholder, while it dazzled alike his fancy and his judgment. From the buttons of his waistcoat, scarlet cloth with a binding of gold thread, not unlike those of Lord M——’s footmen, or indeed of the gallant officers on the staff of the British army, depended a massive watch-chain in the form of a curb, life-size, if I may use the expression, and hung with many ornaments, of which a death’s head as big as a walnut, and a strike-a-light box, were perhaps the smallest and least conspicuous. Mr. Naggett’s coat was light-blue, very much off his person, and very short in the tails; his trousers were of drab, considerably tighter than is customary in these days of easy fitting; and his Wellington boots were thick, clumsy, and badly cleaned. He wore rings, but no gloves, and his hands were hardly so well washed as might have been desired.

Such was the man who now swaggered, with a good deal of noisy assumption, into the bar. Removing his hat with easy familiarity to Miss Lushington, he nodded a patronising “Servant, sir,” to myself, and then producing what he was pleased to call “a weed” from a leathern case the size of a portmanteau, proceeded to smoke, and drink the port-wine negus that had been kept hot for him, with a great appearance of comfort and gratification. The man had an air of rude health and bodily vigour about him, that was especially provoking to a cripple like myself. Though short and fleshy, his figure was round-made and strong, whilst the clearness of his eye and the colour in his cheek denoted an unimpaired digestion, and a circulation, to which languor, blue devils, and dyspepsia were unknown. There are some people in whose constitutions brandy-and-water and cigars seem to assimilate with the vital functions, and turn to health and strength. “They go all at once,” says the valetudinarian, and this may be true enough; nevertheless, I have seen many of these enviable bons-vivants go for a very long time.

Notwithstanding the freedom of his manners, his brilliant attire and sporting exterior, I did not much admire Mr. Naggett. These instincts, prejudices—call them what you will—of likes and dislikes are oftener right than we suppose; and when I came to learn the antecedents of the sporting butcher, as in such a gossiping place as Soakington I was not long in doing, I was even less prepossessed in his favour than at first.

Mr. Naggett had begun life as the only son of a respectable tenant-farmer in the neighbourhood of Soakington. As a boy at a forty-pound school, he had distinguished himself less in mathematics, classics, and the use of the globes, than in such games of skill or chance as enabled him to get the better of his companions, to the increasing of his own stores in marbles, pocket-money, and what not. He smoked a short pipe in the playground, ate lollypops during school-hours, and smuggled shrub into the dormitory. When the master had him up for any of these offences, he was notorious for arguing the point, and comported himself on all disputed questions of discipline, like that troublesome mutineer who is called in the army and navy “a lawyer.” Unlike this individual, however, he took his punishment without wincing, and this Spartan quality made amends in the opinion of his schoolfellows for a good many shady tricks and unenviable qualities. The lad could use his fists too, an accomplishment he had learnt from an old poaching labourer who worked on his father’s farm; and although he took care never to match himself with any boy whom he could not conquer pretty easily, his prowess in this line gained him immunity for a good many little peccadilloes and infringements of the schoolboy’s code of honour, which is exceedingly stringent as far as it goes.

When young Naggett’s education was supposed to be completed, and he came home to live with his father as a lad of sixteen, there was not probably a more finished young blackguard to be found within a circle of fifty miles. The old man tried hard to make him work, but it was hopeless; whilst at races, fairs, village feasts, anything in the shape of a junketing, he was safe to attend and safe to get into mischief. Then he always kept two or three greyhounds, much to the disgust of the Earl of Castle-Cropper, his father’s landlord; and though he generally had a pretty good nag of the old man’s to ride when he chose, he never won the Earl’s respect by any display of daring in the field. Young Naggett’s heart was not in the right place to ride well over a country, and although he liked the excitement and display of hunting, it was not for the sake of the sport that he attended at the covert-side.

His father died the year his son came of age, and the just old Earl, though much against the grain, on his usual principle let the latter continue the farm. Then began a career of extravagance that necessarily ran itself out in a brief space of time. Late breakfasts, silver forks, six-o’clock dinners, port, sherry, and punch till all the hours of the night, with three or four riding-horses in the stable, and a box of cigars always open in the hall, made Apple-tree Farm the most popular resort in the neighbourhood for every “good-for-nothing” in the country-side. This style of living went on for eighteen months. Then came a bad harvest, the failure of a county bank, and a sale at the farm, with Richard Naggett’s name amongst the list of bankrupts, and a loss to the Earl of Castle-Cropper of more than he cared to think about. Nevertheless, his old landlord never quite turned his back on his tenant, and therefore we may fairly suppose that, beyond reckless imprudence, there was nothing tangible against the latter, and that in the main, and when confronted with a Waterborough lawyer, he acted what is called “on the square.”

After this crisis, young Naggett was not much heard of, for some time. There was indeed an ugly poaching story in which the Earl was supposed to have dealt very leniently with the offender in consideration of certain old associations, and which, if possible, increased that nobleman’s popularity, to the detriment of the culprit he had screened; and there was likewise a very disagreeable show-up on Waterborough race-course in regard to a horse called Cat’s Cradle, who was entered, weighted, and described wrong for the Tally-ho Stakes, and then most indubitably pulled by young Naggett, riding as a tenant-farmer, without occupying one foot of land. There is a horse-pond at the end of the course, and it was only the good-nature of some of the townspeople, and the excitement created at the same moment by the detection of a maladroit pickpocket, that saved the adventurous jockey from involuntary immersion therein.

The next that was heard of our friend was his occupation of a stool as a copying clerk in an attorney’s office, and from that stool he dated his subsequent rise in life. At first it was a gloomy change for the young farmer and sportsman, to sit at a desk copying law parchments, accustomed as he had hitherto been to the free open air and out-of-door pursuits, which, notwithstanding his occasional dissipations, had constituted his everyday life. Old Nobbler, too, was a pretty tight hand, and although he hugely respected the astute qualities of his pupil, that very good opinion made him look pretty sharply after him, and keep him very close to his work. Nevertheless Old Nobbler was not a bad fellow on the whole; and as he generally had a good horse in his stable, and was getting too short-winded to ride much himself, he would occasionally give his new pupil a mount with the hounds, enjoining him, somewhat unnecessarily, not to rush into needless danger, and if he should see any gentleman rather sweet upon the nag, why not to disappoint him, if he could help it.

Few men were better qualified to ride a horse to sell than Dick Naggett. He had good hands, great caution, and an instinctive knowledge of a customer. His excessive regard for his own neck ensured him from getting into needless difficulties; and as he was never forward in a run, but always conspicuous at a check, his horse obtained a reputation for stoutness and safety, which he had not earned by going fairly over a country in the line of hounds. There is a great art in riding hunters for sale, quite different from the straightforward science. It is not the boldest and most conspicuous horsemen who can obtain the longest prices for the animals that carry him so brilliantly; the world is very suspicious. Men have an unaccountable objection to buying a horse they know anything about. Besides which, the hunter that has been ridden fairly, however good he may be, must occasionally have been seen in difficulties. It is impossible to cross a severe line of fences, at a good pace, and in the front rank, without an occasional mishap. A second Lottery may find an unexpected trap on the further side of a fence, which no exertion can clear, and another Eclipse might be blown in deep ground, if rattled along close to a pack of high-bred fox-hounds on a good scenting morning; then, when it comes to a question of buying, the purchaser is good-naturedly warned by half-a-dozen officious friends, each of whom has probably something of his own in the stall that he wants to get rid of, and that he thinks would suit him better. One considers the intended purchase very much over-rated; another saw him refuse some rails in a corner; a third heard he was down at the thick fence coming out of the wood; and a fourth has been informed that he was in difficulties when they killed their fox, and could not have gone on another half-mile. Like C?sar’s wife, a hunter must be above suspicion; so the alarmed purchaser goes and buys a soft bay horse from a dealer, of which mediocre animal nobody knows either good or evil—a beast that nobody has ever yet liked well enough either to “show him up,” or to give him a chance of putting his rider down. But a wary salesman knows better than to keep a good place when he has got it. Whilst his horse is fresh he flourishes away over a few fences, the larger the better, for all England to look on and admire, knowing quite well that, in the hurry and confusion of a run, he can decline when he pleases, and turn up again at the first check in a conspicuous position, as if he had been in front the whole time. The very few that could tell anything about it have probably been so much occupied, and so full of their own performances, that they do not know whether he was in their neighbourhood or not; whilst the general public in the hunting-field, like the general public everywhere else, are quite satisfied, if he is only loud enough and positive enough, to take a man’s assurances about himself on trust.

Now, Dick Naggett could do the selling business, especially the talking part of it, to admiration. Turning out in extremely neat attire, and with some article of dress, either coat, neckcloth, or hat, peculiarly conspicuous, he could not be overlooked, and whilst careful never to ask his horse to do more than the animal could handsomely accomplish, he at the same time gave a customer such glowing descriptions of its prowess, that he sold more than one very moderate hunter of Old Nobbler’s for about twice its value, and three times what the lawyer had given for it.

On these emergencies, too, Dick thought proper to affect the townsman, and sink the agriculturist altogether—a propensity which elicited on one occasion from Lord Castle-Cropper the only joke that reserved nobleman was ever known to perpetrate. Dick was holding forth, as usual at the covert-side, on the merits of the horse he was riding, and the silent Earl emerging from the recesses of Deepdale Wood, which had just been drawn blank, and followed by old Potiphar, a solemn badger-pied hound, not entirely unlike his Lordship in the face, paused to listen to the conversation.

“I’m only asking a hundred and seventy for him,” said Dick; “he’s the cheapest horse out to-day. I’ll appeal to my Lord if he isn’t.”

Lord Castle-Cropper ran his eye over the animal. “I could have bought him this time last year for that money exactly,” replied he, “barring the hundred.”

“Oh! but all stock has risen since then,” retorted Dick, loud and unabashed, “cent. per cent. I should say—sheep, cows, poultry, guinea-pigs, and fancy rabbits!”

The silent Earl was one of those provoking people who, always sticking to facts, always seem to have them, so to speak, at their fingers’ ends.

“I can only tell you, Mr. Naggett,” said his Lordship, “that I am glad to take now two-thirds of the price I paid six months back for all kinds of stock. I am a farmer myself, as perhaps you know.”

Dick was impudence personified. “Then you use us townspeople precious hard, my Lord,” said he. “A nice price you farmers make us pay for our mutton.”

“I think you lawyers make us pay a good deal dearer for the skins,” retorted his Lordship; and although he never moved a muscle of his own countenance, the bystanders raised such a shout of laughter as made old Potiphar erect his ears and bristles, thinking a fox must have been viewed away, and as shut up Dick Naggett for the next ten minutes at least, after which he recovered completely, and sold his horse for a trifle less than he asked, before the day was out.

Now, Old Nobbler had a daughter, like Shylock, and Jephthah, and Virginius, and many other doting old gentlemen. Of course he was very fond of the girl, and she did with him pretty much as she liked. Well, “’tis an old tale and often told;” it was not likely that Barbara Nobbler, in all the flush of eighteen summers, could abide constantly under the same roof with Dick Naggett, and remain insensible to his attractions. The lady was a swarthy bouncing brunette, cherry-lipped, bright-eyed, heavy-handed, and with a foot and ankle of the mill-post order, such as seldom belong to a good mover. Nevertheless, she was a healthy, vigorous girl, with a quick temper, and a good heart. It was natural that she should plunge at once chin-deep in love with rosy, trim, curly-headed, flaxen-haired Dick Naggett. Old Nobbler would not hear of the match, shut Barbara up in her room, and turned Dick off the stool in the office, and worse than that, out of the pig-skin in the saddle-room. There was a dreadful blow-up in the house. The father had a fit of the gout; the daughter was seen dissolved in tears; and the lover, looking trimmer, rosier, and saucier than ever, was observed to take tea, two days running, with Mrs. Furbelow, the dressmaker, a widow of a certain calibre, over the way.

Flirtations, however, in all classes of life, may have been carried on so far that it is better for all parties that they should not be interrupted. Old Nobbler, a man not without legal experience, was prevailed on to listen to reason, and an early wedding was the result, which placed Mr. Naggett’s head once more above water, and indeed put him in immediate possession of a little capital, with the prospective reversion of a little more.

It was in consequence of this windfall that Mr. Naggett embarked on the very flourishing business that he had conducted for some years, at the period when I made his acquaintance,—a business that, somehow or another, led him into all sorts of places where you would have supposed there was neither time nor opportunity for the purchase and sale of meat. It conducted him to Epsom annually, at the Metropolitan Spring Meeting, and required his punctual return, for the Derby and Oaks. It released him from Ascot, probably in consequence of the hot weather, and swarms of flies prevalent in the month of June, but imperatively demanded his attendance in Yorkshire, and twice or thrice within a reasonable distance of Cambridge during the autumn months. In its prosecution he was compelled, at great personal risk and inconvenience, to take an expensive ticket by the very identical train that bore the invincible Tom Sayers down the line to battle with his gallant antagonist; and in order to do it thorough justice, he has often been detained from his own home till the small hours of the morning, and compelled to return fragrant with the combined odours of alcohol and tobacco; nor does it appear that this mysterious business can remain established on a secure basis, apart from the assistance of those agreeable stimulants.

Why it should necessitate, as it seems to do, the proprietorship of a half-bred stallion, three pointers, an Angola cat, the smallest terrier, and the largest mastiff I ever saw, one cockatoo, and a dozen Cochin-China fowls is more than I can take upon me to expound. Probably Mrs. Naggett knows; for she has repeatedly demanded, not without high words, an explanation of its mysterious intricacies.

I should not say, from all I have heard, that Mr. Naggett is a domestic man. The habitual wearing of top-boots, combined with fancy waistcoats, I believe to be inimical to the fireside qualities. Although there are two or three Naggetts, with dark eyes like their mother, and flaxen curls like their father, to be seen playing at hide-and-seek amongst the grove of dead pigs and sheep that pervade the premises, and Mr. N. seems to notice and be fond of the urchins, yet loud altercations are often to be heard in his private residence behind the slaughter-house, and Mrs. N.’s dark eyes are not always undimmed by tears. Fame, however, whose hundred tongues are no less ubiquitous at Waterborough than elsewhere, does not scruple to intimate that the butcher’s lady is quite able to “hold her own;” and the gossips have been heard to affirm, with dark and threatening glances at their own liege lords the while, that “though she has been so put upon, poor dear, she can give him as good as he brings, and quite right too.” The inference is obvious, the moral doubtless not without its effect.

It was not in my nature to fraternise very cordially with a gentleman of Mr. Naggett’s superior qualities. I am bound, nevertheless, to admit, that his advances towards myself were cordial, not to say familiar in the extreme. The undisguised admiration, however, with which Miss Lushington regarded his every movement, and the terms of intimacy on which he obviously stood with that decorous lady, may have prejudiced me somewhat against him. There is a class of men, however, I have often observed, and I say it in justice to Miss Lushington, with whom the genus Barmaid seems to possess some mysterious affinity. As Eastern poets feign that there is a certain bird to which the tree involuntarily bends its branches, and the flower opens its petals, so I am convinced there is a description of individual who is looked on with peculiar favour by actresses, barmaids, hostesses, and other ladies whose avocations bring them much into the presence of a discerning public. These favourites of her sex are generally remarkable for exuberance of spirits, command of language, a vivid freshness of complexion, and general freedom of manner. They are loud in assumption, and great on all topics of political or public interest; also prone to plunge into quarrels, from which they invariably extricate themselves without recourse to ulterior measures. His female admirers, in describing such a one, generally sum up their catalogue of his merits by vowing that he is “very free in company, and quite the gentleman.”

Mr. Naggett, stirring the fire with his boot, and winking facetiously on Miss Lushington, as he drank her health in his hot negus, and asked her whether she had ordered her wedding-bonnet yet, obligingly remarked, that “it was a cold night, and he was sorry to see my arm in a sling;” also “that he had heard of my accident, and hoped it wouldn’t be long before I over-got it,” with which friendly wish, expressed in a compound verb, he finished his negus, and ordered some more, calling Miss L. “my dear,” unblushingly, to my excessive disgust. He then drew his chair to the fire, expressed his astonishment that Tips had gone to “perch,” as he called it, and proceeded to make himself agreeable.

“A nasty fall, sir, yours must have been, as I understand,” said he, “and it’s well as it wasn’t worse. You’ve a nice-ish team standing here, but you’ll excuse me, sir, they’re not exactly the class of horse for a gentleman like you to ride. I’ve been fond of horses all my life, from a boy, I may say, and I’m forty years of age now: forty years of age, though perhaps you wouldn’t think it, and in that time I’ve learned to keep my eyes open. Now, sir, you don’t ride so very light, I’ll be bound to say.”

I am a little touchy about my weight, I confess. I believe most men are, the heavy ones liking to be thought lighter and the light ones heavier than they really are. “I ride thirteen stone,” I replied. “Thirteen stone, to a pound; I weigh every day of my life, and I haven’t varied since I was five-and-twenty.”

“Thirteen stone! indeed, sir!” replied Mr. Naggett, running his eye, as I thought, in a very free-and-easy manner over my proportions. “Well, I shouldn’t have thought it. But you’re thick, sir; thick and a little fleshy. Now, your nags is hardly thirteen-stoners, sir—not in a country like this; I’m sure you must agree with me?”

Speechless with indignation, I seized the poker and split—not Mr. Naggett’s head, but a burning coal in the very centre of the grate, without farther reply. This coolest of butchers proceeded unhesitatingly:—

“It’s a pity to see a gentleman undermounted, specially in a country like this: so dangerous too! Why, sir, all the worst falls as I’ve known take place down here in our Soakington district, have been entirely owing to gentlemen riding horses below their weight. There was Squire Overend, only last season, got a little thorough-bred weed he called Happy Joe, as he swore nothing could touch. No more they couldn’t when the ground was light; but look what happened. There came a splash of wet, and the ground up to our girths, just as we’ve got it now, and likely to have it for the next six months; and Happy Joe, he turns a complete somersault over a stile the Squire puts him at, and falls on to his rider with a squelch, breaking the cantle of his own saddle into shivers, and inflicting such severe internal injuries on Squire Overend, that he has never been out hunting since, and all from obstinacy—sheer obstinacy, I call it; for I told the Squire myself how it would be, from the first.”

Somewhat discouraged, I admit, by the ghastly catastrophe of Mr. Overend, I began to think it was just possible that Apple-Jack might not be so good as he looked, and that perhaps it might be wise to purchase a horse or two more accustomed to the country, and with a little more power.

Mr. Naggett, who never took his clear blue eyes off my face, seemed to read my thoughts intuitively, and proceeded with more than usual volubility:—

“There’s a friend of mine, sir, got a horse, that I should say was just about your mark, and would carry you as I can see you like to be carried. I had him in price all last season myself, but money couldn’t buy him then; for my friend he was an out-and-out sporting chap, and could ride too! But he’s been and got married since, and gone to live in Drury Lane for good and all; so he’s no more use for a hunter now, than a cow has for a side-pocket, or a pig for a frilled-shirt. What a horse he is, to be sure!—dark-brown, tan muzzle, not a speck of white about him; up to fourteen stone; by Ratcatcher, out of Sly Puss by Mousetrap, and Mousetrap, you remember, was by Grimalkin, and the sire of Whittington, Cat’s-cradle and a many good ones. I know all about him, and have done since he was a foal. My friend he bought him off of the farmer that bred him.”

“Why, Ratcatcher has been covering at the Castle for years,” I replied, rather congratulating myself upon having Mr. Naggett “out;” “and Sly Puss never belonged to anybody but the Earl!”

“Well, sir,” retorted he, “and that’s exactly the farmer I mean. A very respectable farmer I call him too, and one that farms his own land, which is more than can be said for a good many of them. Talk of jumping, I wish you could only see this nag jump!”

There is something about the discussion of horseflesh in front of a big fire, with a cigar in his mouth, that disposes a man unaccountably to buy. Knowing I couldn’t hunt for six weeks, what did I want with another horse?

“Why should I not?” I rashly inquired. “I might look at him, at any rate. Where is he to be seen?”

“Well, sir, he’s at my place now,” replied Mr. Naggett, adding, with an air of charming frankness. “The fact is, I’ve got him to keep for my friend, who is a cousin of my wife’s, and I’ve got the riding of him for his corn. If it wasn’t that my business won’t allow me to hunt as much as I should like, I’d buy him myself, particularly considering the price.”

“What does he ask?” I inquired, walking as it were open-eyed into the pitfall prepared for me.

Mr. Naggett looked me over from top to toe, as if I had been a prize ox. Probably he was making a mental computation of my soft-headedness. I am afraid I looked very much like a fool, for he replied boldly—

“One hundred and twenty sovereigns; take him as he stands; no questions asked; and dirt-cheap at the money.”

“How old is he?” was naturally my next inquiry. “Is he quiet to ride?” I added; “and thoroughly temperate with hounds? Also, is he fit to go at present? and does your wife’s cousin warrant him sound?”

“Come up and see him, sir! Come up and see him!” was the only reply Mr. Naggett could be brought to give. “My business will take me away all to-morrow and the next day; but say Saturday, sir. You know my little place. Any time on Saturday I shall be at your service, and the horse too. Ride him, lark him, have him galloped, see him jump! If you can get him into a difficulty, I’ll give him to you—at least my wife’s cousin will. You may take my word for it, that if once you lay your leg over him, he’ll never go out of your stable again!”

And Mr. Naggett, suddenly remembering a very particular engagement, vanished incontinently, after wishing me an exceedingly civil “good-night.”