If Mr. Sawyer had kept a hunting journal (which he didn’t) he would have noted down the meet at Barkby, as one of those gorgeous spectacles, which makes an ineffaceable impression on the eye of the unpractised beholder. There appeared to be more hounds, more horses, more servants, more carriages, and altogether a larger staff and retinue attached to the establishment, than he had ever hitherto seen paraded for the purpose of killing a fox. Nevertheless, with all this show, there was no mistake about the workmanlike tendency of the turn-out. If the pack was numerous, it was also exceedingly level and in faultless condition; the huntsman and whips looked as if they must have been born and bred for the especial offices they respectively filled, and the second-horse men, notwithstanding their number, appeared to be all cut from the same pattern. As for the hunters, Mr. Sawyer would have wished no better luck than to ride the worst of them at a hundred and fifty guineas. One magnificent bay with a side-saddle, destined, no doubt, to carry a beautiful and precious burden, quite put him out of conceit with Hotspur and the grey. As for Marathon! why he would never have got on him, in such company, had not the pleasing reflection crossed his mind, that perhaps to-day he should get rid of the brute altogether.
He had ridden The Dandy very leisurely to covert, in consideration of the animal’s services before dawn, and had sent on the grey with an occasional helper from the inn, under the superintendence of The Boy, who was perched on Marathon: old Isaac, who wanted to buy some hay cheap, having given himself leave of absence for the day. The helper, with many injunctions to go steadily, was entrusted with the homeward-bound hack; and The Boy shifted to the second horse, whilst Mr. Sawyer himself bestrode the redoubtable bay. All these arrangements, with the accompanying pulling up of curb-chains and letting down of stirrup-leathers, took some little time. Before our friend was fairly mounted and under way, the hounds had gone on to draw, and he found himself nearly the last of the lengthening cavalcade. Under existing circumstances this was no great disadvantage, and the quieter he kept the bay, he thought, the better was his chance of selling him; yet he could not help wishing old Isaac had left the whole business alone. He might then have been forward with the hounds, looking out for a start on whichever horse he liked best, uninfluenced—as a man always should be, really to enjoy fox-hunting—by the sordid considerations of ￡. s. d.
Marathon was very fresh, and set his back up, squeaking in a most undignified manner, and swishing his heavy tail, till it reached his rider’s hat.
A horse galloping up from behind set him plunging with a violence that was scarcely pleasant, even to so practised a rider as our friend. He returned the greeting of the new comer—no less a personage than the Honourable Crasher, late as usual, and cantering to the front on Boadicea by Bellerophon out of Blue Light—with a preoccupied air of a man who expects every moment to be on his back.
The Honourable, slightly amused, pulled up alongside. “Halloa, Sawyer,” said he, “you’ll be hard to beat to-day: the steeple-chaser seems uncommon full of running.”
“It’s only his play,” answered Mr. Sawyer, modestly; indulging Marathon, who was preparing for another kick, with a vicious jerk of the curb. “I can’t get my old groom to give him work enough, and he’s sent me a second horse out to-day.”
This was meant to imply that the kicker was too valuable an animal for a mere hunter, and the Honourable interpreted it accordingly. As he rode alongside, he scanned the bay’s points with the critical eye of a purchaser. A horse never looks so well as when he is trotting beside you on a strip of grass, excited by the presence of hounds. If backed by a good horseman, the veriest brute, under these circumstances, makes the most of his own appearance. Marathon going within himself, playing lightly with his bit, and bringing his hind legs under his girths at every step, was a very different horse from the same Marathon extended and labouring, in a sticky ploughed field. I have already said he possessed many qualities sufficiently taking to the eye. As the Honourable examined him from his muzzle to his hocks, he could not but acknowledge that the horse looked uncommonly like a galloper. “If he can only jump,” thought Crasher, “and get pretty quick over his fences, he ought to be a rattler. I suppose I shall have to buy him.”
Meanwhile Mr. Sawyer, who, as he remarked of himself, “was not such a fool as he looked,” but on the contrary resembled those “still waters” which the German proverb says “run so deep,” conversed affably with his friend on a number of topics totally unconnected with horseflesh, or the pleasures of the hunting-field. For once in his life, he did not want to get a start, that’s the truth; and as his companion was one of those indolent, easy-going people whose fancy can be led astray without difficulty in any given direction, they were soon deep in a variety of subjects, originating no doubt with Mr. Sawyer, but to which, I am bound to say, he had never devoted much of his time or attention. They touched upon the last misadventure brought under the notice of Sir Cresswell Cresswell—discussed the agricultural prospects of the season, and on this theme it would be difficult to say which was most incapable of giving an opinion—argued on the importance of a movement for taking the duty off cigars, and lastly got involved in the interminable question of what use the Volunteers would be, in the event of an invasion, and whether or not they would be killed to a man, when their conversation was cut short by an obvious bustle and confusion about a mile ahead of them, denoting that a fox had not only been found, but gone away.
“Done to a turn!” exclaimed the Honourable, interrupting his own explanation of how he should handle skirmishers if he was a general officer, which, by the way, it was fortunate for the skirmishers he was not. “What a bore! We sha’n’t catch them in a week!” he added, turning Boadicea’s head at the fence, and starting her at score through a deep ploughed field. In a few strides he had forgotten skirmishers, and Marathon, and Mr. Sawyer, and everything in the world except that he had lost his start.
The latter, watching the line “fine by degrees and beautifully less” on the horizon, rather congratulated himself, that his chance was completely out, and that there was now no temptation for him either to exert his own energies, or draw upon the failing powers of Marathon in the pursuit of that which he felt could scarcely be called pleasure. He jogged along the lane accordingly, content enough, thinking what fun he would have on the grey, in the afternoon, with a second fox!
But a few of us can have hunted much without remarking a peculiarity connected with the chase, that occasions constant irritation and annoyance to its votaries. Have you never observed, that if you lose your chance of getting away with hounds, whether from procrastination, inattention, or the laudable objection entertained by a rational man to ride at a large fence, do what you will, you only succeed in increasing the distance between yourself and the object you wish to reach? In vain you “nick,” and “skirt,” and ride to points that you think likely to be affected by a fox running for his life; in vain you “harden your heart,” and sail away boldly over the line of gaps already established by your predecessors; you are only tiring your horse, and risking your neck in a wild-goose chase. You diverge to a distant halloo, and find it raised by a boy scaring crows. You succeed by extraordinary exertions in reaching the group of scarlet coats and bobbing hats you have been following so long, and learn that they have been “thrown out” like yourself, and the further you go, the further you are left behind; till you hate yourself, as much as your horse hates you for not having judiciously joined the band of second-horse riders, and so jogged contentedly along in ease and safety, sure to come up with the first flight at last.
On the other hand, we will suppose that you have tired your best hunter early in the day, or he had fallen lame on that weak point where everybody said he would be lame when you bought him, or you have a hundred and fifty other reasons for wishing to sneak quietly home, out of the observation of your friends. Those plaguy hounds seem to follow you as if you were the Wild Huntsman himself, and you begin to appreciate the severity of the punishment inflicted on that wicked German Baron. They draw coverts that lie on your homeward way. They find, and hunt with provoking persistency alongside the very lane up which you would fain jog in solitude, crossing it more than once under your nose. There is sure to be a fair holding scent, not good enough to enable them to run clear out of your neighbourhood and have done with it, yet sufficient to afford plenty of enjoyment to such as are with them; these have, nevertheless, leisure to observe your movements, and to wonder why you are not amongst them. They are all your own particular friends, and you know you will be called upon, next hunting morning, to answer the difficult question—“What became of you, after we left you in the road at So-and-so?” Diana seems to delight in the rule of contrary. Like the rest of her sex, she takes you up and persecutes you, when you don’t want her; and when you are most ardent and zealous in her pursuit, she rebuffs you and puts you down.
Nothing could be further from Mr. Sawyer’s wishes than to find himself, on the present occasion, in a conspicuous position with the Quorn hounds. Had he wanted to be singled out in front of all that talent and beauty, Marathon was certainly the last animal he would have chosen on which to make an appearance in such choice company; nevertheless, the force of circumstances is beyond the control even of men like Mr. Sawyer, and however averse he might be to “achieve greatness,” he found, most unwillingly, “greatness thrust upon him.” For awhile he had lost sight of everybody, and was in the act of pulling out his cigar-case to enjoy one of his Laranagas in solitude and repose, proposing to hang on the line, keeping a little down wind, and as soon as he should spy the second-horses, mount the grey, and send Marathon straight home. Crasher, he thought, would buy the horse without asking any more questions.
Scarcely, however, had he got his weed fairly under weigh, than the music of a pack of hounds broke suddenly on his ear from behind a high impervious bullfinch that sheltered one side of the grass-lane along which he was proceeding so leisurely. “Confound the brutes!” said Sawyer to himself, “here they are again!” As he opened the gate through which the track led into a sixty-acre pasture, the whole pack swept under his horse’s nose, running with sufficient energy to denote what sportsme............