Was it with the same intention of “astonishing” Tom Dill that Conyers bestowed such unusual attention upon his dress? At his first visit to the “Fisherman's Home” he had worn the homely shooting-jacket and felt hat which, however comfortable and conventional, do not always redound to the advantage of the wearer, or, if they do, it is by something, perhaps, in the contrast presented to his ordinary appearance, and the impression ingeniously insinuated that he is one so unmistakably a gentleman, no travesty of costume can efface the stamp.
It was in this garb Polly had seen him, and if Polly Dill had been a duchess it was in some such garb she would have been accustomed to see her brother or her cousin some six out of every seven mornings of the week; but Polly was not a duchess: she was the daughter of a village doctor, and might, not impossibly, have acquired a very erroneous estimate of his real pretensions from having beheld him thus attired. It was, therefore, entirely by a consideration for her ignorance of the world and its ways that he determined to enlighten her.
At the time of which I am writing, the dress of the British army was a favorite study with that Prince whose taste, however questionable, never exposed him to censure on grounds of over-simplicity and plainness. As the Colonel of the regiment Conyers belonged to, he had bestowed upon his own especial corps an unusual degree of splendor in equipment, and amongst other extravagances had given them an almost boundless liberty of combining different details of dress. Availing himself of this privilege, our young Lieutenant invented a costume which, however unmilitary and irregular, was not deficient in becomingness. Under a plain blue jacket very sparingly braided he wore the rich scarlet waistcoat, all slashed with gold, they had introduced at their mess. A simple foraging-cap and overalls, seamed with a thin gold line, made up a dress that might have passed for the easy costume of the barrack-yard, while, in reality, it was eminently suited to set off the wearer.
Am I to confess that he looked at himself in the glass with very considerable satisfaction, and muttered, as he turned away, “Yes, Miss Polly, this is in better style than that Quakerish drab livery you saw me last in, and I have little doubt that you 'll think so!”
“Is this our best harness, Holt?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right!”
CHAPTER XXIV. CONYERS MAKES A MORNING CALL
When Conyers, to the astonishment and wonder of an admiring village public, drove his seventeen-hand-high roan into the market square of Inistioge, he learned that all of the doctor's family were from home except Mrs. Dill. Indeed, he saw the respectable lady at the window with a book in her hand, from which not all the noise and clatter of his arrival for one moment diverted her. Though not especially anxious to attract her attention, he was half piqued at her show of indifference. A dog-cart by Adams and a thoroughbred like Boanerges were, after all, worth a glance at. Little did he know what a competitor be had in that much-thumbed old volume, whose quaintly told miseries were to her as her own sorrows. Could he have assembled underneath that window all the glories of a Derby Day, Mr. Richardson's “Clarissa” would have beaten the field. While he occupied himself in dexterously tapping the flies from his horse with the fine extremity of his whip, and thus necessitating that amount of impatience which made the spirited animal stamp and champ his bit, the old lady read on undisturbed.