As he was plunged into reverie, and as the widow was silent, conversation was not resumed until the coach stopped for dinner.
‘We stop here half-an-hour, gentlemen,’ said the guard. ‘Mrs. Burnet,’ he continued, to the widow, ‘let me hand you out.’
They entered the parlour of the inn. The Duke, who was ignorant of the etiquette of the road, did not proceed to the discharge of his duties, as the youngest guest, with all the promptness desired by his fellow-travellers.
‘Now, sir,’ said an outside, ‘I will thank you for a slice of that mutton, and will join you, if you have no objection in a bottle of sherry.’
‘What you please, sir. May I have the pleasure of helping you, ma’am?’
After dinner the Duke took advantage of a vacant outside place.
Tom Rawlins was the model of a guard. Young, robust, and gay, he had a letter, a word, or a wink for all he met. All seasons were the same to him; night or day he was ever awake, and ever alive to all the interest of the road; now joining in conversation with a passenger, shrewd, sensible, and respectful; now exchanging a little elegant badinage with the coachman; now bowing to a pretty girl; now quizzing a passer-by; he was off and on his seat in an instant, and, in the whiff of his cigar, would lock a wheel, or unlock a passenger.
From him the young Duke learned that his fellow-inside was Mr. Duncan Macmorrogh, senior, a writer at Edinburgh, and, of course, the father of the first man of the day. Tom Rawlins could not tell his Grace as much about the principal writer in ‘The Screw and Lever Review’ as we can; for Tom was no patron of our periodical literature, farther than a police report in the Publican’s Journal. Young Duncan Macmorrogh was a limb of the law, who had just brought himself into notice by a series of articles in ‘The Screw and Lever,’ in which he had subjected the universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he rather patronised; but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved them to be the most useless of existences. Duncan Macmorrogh informed us that we were quite wrong in supposing ourselves to be the miracle of creation. On the contrary, he avowed that already there were various pieces of machinery of far more importance than man; and he had no doubt, in time, that a superior race would arise, got by a steam-engine on a spinning-jenny.
The other ‘inside’ was the widow of a former curate of a Northumbrian village. Some friend had obtained for her only child a clerkship in a public office, and for some time this idol of her heart had gone on prospering; but unfortunately, of late, Charles Burnet had got into a bad set, was now involved in a terrible scrape, and, as Tom Rawlins feared, must lose his situation and go to ruin.
‘She was half distracted when she heard it first, poor creature! I have known her all my life, sir. Many the kind word and glass of ale I have had at her house, and that’s what makes me feel for her, you see. I do what I can to make the journey easy to her, for it is a pull at her years. God bless her! there is not a better body in this world; that I will, say for her. When I was a boy, I used to be the playfellow in a manner with Charley Burnet: a gay lad, sir, as ever you’d wish to see in a summer’s day, and the devil among the girls always, and that’s been the ruin of him; and as open-a-hearted fellow as ever lived. D——me! I’d walk to the land’s end to save him, if it were only for his mother’s sake, to say nothing of himself.’