CHAPTER X THE OLD SQUIRE

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.”