Mr. Beresford looked at the address of the letter, and frowned slightly. It was a small note, pink paper, with a couchant dog and an utterly illegible monogram on the seal, and the superscription was written in a long scrawly hand. There was an odour of patchouli, too, about it which roused Beresford's ire, and he muttered as he opened it, "Confounded stuff! Who on earth is she copying now, with her scents and crests and humbug? I thought she'd more sense than that!" And he ran his eye over the note. It was very short.
"Dear Charley,--What has become of you? Why do you never come near The Den? It is nearly three weeks since you were here. I'm off to Scarborough on Tuesday; a lot of my pupils are there and want me, so I can carry on my little game of money-making, get some fresh air, and perhaps pick up some fresh nags to sell before the hunting season, all 'under vun hat,' as Tom Orme fasechous--facesh (I don't know how to spell it)--says. Come up and dine to-night at seven. There are two or three good fellows coming, and I want to talk to you and to look at your old phiz again, and see how much older you've grown during your absence, and how much balder; for, you know, you're growing bald, Charley, and that will be awful hard lines to such a swell as you. Seven sharp, mind.
"Always yours,
"K. M.
"P.S. Charley, if you don't come, I shall think you've grown proud; and it'll be a great shame, and I shall never speak to you again.
"K.M."
Now lest, after a perusal of this letter, any one should think ill of its writer, I take leave to announce at once that Kate Mellon was a virtuous woman; pure in heart, though any thing but simple; without fear, but not without as much reproach as could possibly be heaped upon her by all of her own sex who envied her good looks, her high spirits, and her success. There are, I take it, plenty of novels in which one can read the doings, either openly described or broadly hinted at, of the daughters of Shame under many a pretty alias; and it is because one of these aliases describes the calling of which Kate Mellon was the most successful follower, that I am so desirous of clearing her good name, and immediately vindicating her position with my readers. Kate Mellon was a horsebreaker, a bonâ-fide horsebreaker; one who curbed colts, and "took it out of" kickers and rearers, and taught wild Irish horses and four-year-olds fresh from Yorkshire spinneys to curvet and caper prettily in the Park. She taught riding, too; and half the Amazons in the Row owed their tightness of seat and lightness of hand to her judicious training. She hunted occasionally with the Queen's hounds and with the Pytchley, and no one rode straighter or with more nonchalance than she. Give her a lead, that was all she wanted; and when she got it, as she invariably did from the boldest horseman in the field, she would settle herself in her saddle, left hand well down, right hand jauntily on her hip, and fly over timber, water, no matter what, like a bird. In social life her great pride was that there "was no nonsense" about her; she was not more civil to the great ladies who sent their horses to her establishment to be broke, and who would occasionally come up and inspect the process, than she was to the stable-helpers' wives and children, who all worshipped her for her openhanded generosity. Tommy Orme who was popularly supposed to be a hundred and fifty years old, but who lived with the youth of the Household Brigade and the Foreign Office and the coryphées, and who knew every body remarkable in any one way, never was tired of telling how Kate, teaching the Dowager Lady Wylminster to drive a pair of spirited dun ponies, had, in the grand lady's idea, intrenched upon her prerogative, and was told that she was a presuming person, and desired to remember her place.
"Person, indeed!" said Kate; "person yourself, ma'am! My place isn't by you after that, and now get the duns home the best way you can;" with which she sprang from the low phaeton, struck off across the fields, and left the wretched representative of aristocracy "with a couple of plunging brutes that soon spilt the old woman into the hedge, broke the trap all to pieces, and rushed away home with the splinter-bar at their heels--give you my word!" as Tommy used to narrate it.
Her manner with men was perfectly frank and open, equally devoid of reticence or coquetry. She called them all by their Christian names if they were commoners, by their titles if they were lords. She answered at once when addressed as "Kitty," or "Old Lady," or "Stunner;" by all of which appellations she was known. She would lay her whip lightly across the shoulders of any particular friend as a token of recognition at the meet; would smoke a cigarette on her way home after the kill; and always carried sherry and sandwiches in a silver combination of flask and box. Her grammar was shaky, and her aspirate occasionally misplaced; she never read any thing but Bell's Life and books on farriery, and she laughed a loud, ringing, resonant shout; but her speech was always free from bad words, and no man ever tried a double entendre or a blasphemy twice in her presence. Living the odd strange life she did, defiant of all society's prejudices, it was yet strange that even London slander had left her unassailed. They did say that she was very much taken by Bob Mayo's sabre-scar when he returned from the Crimea, and that Barker, the steeple-chase rider, half gentleman, half jock, was engaged to her; but nothing came of either of these two reports. Early in her London career, very soon after she came to town, and when men were first beginning to inquire who was the dashing horsewoman who rode such splendid cattle with such pluck and skill, De Blague, the Queen's messenger, assumed to know all about her, and at Limmer's, one night, threw out certain hints by no means uncomplimentary to himself, and eked out with many nods and winks; but two days after that, as De Blague, with two other Foreign-Office men, was leaning over the rails in the Row, Miss Mellon rode up, and denouncing him as a "bragging hound," slashed him with her by no means light riding-whip severely over the head and shoulders. After that day no one cared to say much against Kate Mellon.
Who was she, and where did she come from? that no one positively knew. When The Den at Ealing (she so christened it; it was called Myrtle Farm before) was to let, the neighbours thought the landlord would stand out of his rent for many years. The house was a little, long, one-storied building, cut up into small rooms; old, dilapidated, and damp. The stables were rotting with decay; the barns untiled and tumbling down; the twenty or thirty acres of land attached were swampy and unproductive. The place stood untenanted for half a year. Then, one morning, an old gentleman arrived in a four-wheeled cab, went all over the premises, had an interview with the proprietor, announced himself as Mr. Powker, of the firm of Powker and Beak, of Lincoln's Inn, and within a fortnight the lease was assigned to Miss Kate Mellon, spinster. The house was papered and painted, and put in order; the stables were entirely altered and renovated, and fitted with enamel mangers, and tesselated pavements, and bronze devices for holding the pillar-reins, and all the newest equine upholstery; some of the barns were converted into carriage-houses, and one of the largest into a tan-strewn riding-school; the land was thoroughly drained and laid out in paddocks, where there were tan-rides and all kinds of jumps, and an artificial brook, and every thing for a horse's proper tuition. Miss Mellon did not receive visits from the neighbouring gentry, principally lawyers and merchants, who went regularly to business, and always stared hard at her when their wives were not with them; nor did she attend the parish-church; but she gave largely to all the parochial charities, and in the winter had a private soup-kitchen of her own. I believe that occasionally gin was dispensed in small glasses to the soup-recipients; but all was done under the superintendence of Freeman, the staid stud-groom, who had followed her from Yorkshire, where she said "her people" lived. But she never said any thing more about them; and you would as soon have got a comic song out of an oyster as a word from Freeman. And she prospered wonderfully. She had to make large additions to the stables, and to build rooms for an increased force of grooms; and even then there were always half a score of horses waiting on her list for admission, either for training or cure. She made money rapidly, and kept it: no better woman of business ever breathed; in a big ledger she scrawled her own accounts, and, as she boasted, could always tell to a farthing "how she stood." With all this she was generous and hospitable; paid her grooms good wages, and gave frequent dinner-parties to her friends,--dinner-parties which scandalised her solemnly pompous neighbours, who would look aghast at the flashing lamps of the carriages dashing up the little carriage-drive to fetch away the company at the small hours, or would listen from beneath their virtuous bedclothes to the shouts of mirth and snatches of melody which came booming over the hushed fields.