CHAPTER VIII YOUNG PLUMTREE

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.