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 abo............