Now, it appeared, this pleasing vision must go the way of many others.
The August sunlight illumined Mr. Gunning’s folly, and his bulging portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a passion can pack; when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had been his confederate in the purchase of the mare.
“What did the vet say, Brennan?” said Mr. Gunning, with the brevity of ill humour.
Mr. Brennan paused before replying, a pause laden with the promise of evil tidings. His short silvery hair glistened respectably in the sunshine: he had preserved unblemished from some earlier phase of his career the air of a family coachman out of place. It veiled, though it could not conceal, the dissolute twinkle in his eye as he replied:—
“He said sir, if it wasn’t that she was something out of condition, he’d recommend you to send her out to the lions at the Zoo!”
The specimen of veterinary humour had hardly the success that had been hoped for it. Rupert Gunning’s face was so remarkably void of appreciation that Mr. Brennan abruptly relapsed into gloom.
“He said he’d only be wasting his time with her, sir; he might as well go stitch a bog-hole as them wounds the window gave her; the tendon of the near fore is the same as in two halves with it, let alone the shoulder, that’s worse again with her pitching out on the point of it.”
“Was that all he had to say?” demanded the mare’s owner.
“Well, beyond those remarks he passed about the Zoo, I should say it was, sir,” admitted Mr. Brennan.
There was another pause, during which Rupert asked himself what the devil he was to do with the mare, and Mr. Brennan, thoroughly aware that he was doing so, decorously thumbed the brim of his hat.