Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at last,—
‘Oh, I have seen such a sight!—but I will tell you how it all was. After I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me—you know my antipathy to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste—and after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and show me “sixty head of red-deer all together;” and as he spoke he looked quite proud of his words. “I was lucky,” he said, “to come just then, for the stags had all just got their heads again.” At which speech I wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a walk as I shall never take again. Behold these trousers—behold these hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather. But I saw them.’
‘A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?’
‘Worth Saint Chrysostom’s seven years’ nakedness on all-fours! And so I told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds—but I can’t describe them. I have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, and the rush! That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat; and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes of mine.’
‘“Ain’t you well, sir?” said he. “You needn’t be afeard; it’s only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked.”
‘I don’t know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.’
‘Claude, well-beloved,’ said I, ‘will you ever speak contemptuously of sportsmen any more?’
‘“Do manus,” I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour-grinder, footboy?’
‘You will then be very near to a very great poet,’ quoth I, ‘and one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.’
‘I begin to guess your meaning,’ answered Claude.