CHAPTER XXIII.—ADVICE GRATIS.
Harry could not give up shooting, Harry would not give up shooting, and Harry did not give up shooting. On the contrary, he could, would, and did shoot every day, and all day long, except on Sundays, throughout September and October; at least, there were so few exceptions that they only proved the rule. Alice did not like it at all; at first she was very miserable. One day Harry found her crying, and being considerably surprised and greatly concerned at the unaccountable discovery, did not rest until he had ascertained the cause, when he was particularly shocked, and blamed himself so much, that he refrained from shooting for two whole days, and really would have striven to reform his conduct, only that, unfortunately, an invitation arrived to join a grand battue at a certain Colonel Crossman’s. This, in his then frame of mind, he would have refused; but there being a Mrs. Crossman in the case, Alice was included in the invitation, and they were begged to stay three or four days; which, as the Popem Park preserves were the best stocked of any in the county, was an offer not lightly to be rejected. Thus, unfortunately, they went—we say unfortunately, because Colonel Crossman was, taken as a whole, a jovial, hot-tempered, selfish brute; and his wife a quick-witted, worldly-minded, selfish fool. They did very well together, because, as he usually lived out of the house, and she in it, and both did exactly as they liked, when they liked, their faults seldom clashed; if such a collision did take place, there was an awful tumult, in which brutality had his way for the minute, and paid for it in minor miseries which folly indicted upon him for the next fortnight. And yet this amiable couple had a kind of theoretical and useless affection for each other, which was engendered partly by habit, and partly by a deep and essentially vulgar reverence for appearances, which, together with going to church once on Sunday, stood them in the stead of religion and of morality. Thus were they bad counsellors for our young married couple. On the first morning of her visit, Alice was standing at the drawing-room window, watching the figures of her husband and Colonel Crossman striding through a turnip field about a quarter of a mile distant, when Mrs. Crossman joined her.
“Ah! there they go,” she observed, in a vinegar-and-water voice; “we shall see no more of them till seven o’clock, depend upon it.”
“Does Colonel Crossman never return to luncheon?” inquired Alice timidly, for she stood slightly in awe of the female soldier beside her.
“Return to luncheon!” was the astonished reply, delivered in much such a tone as might have been anticipated if Alice had inquired whether the gallant colonel usually made his mid-day meal upon red-hot ploughshares; “come home to luncheon! not he. He wouldn’t do such a thing to save my life, I believe; certainly not if the scent was lying well. Why, Mr. Coverdale does not spoil you in that way to be sure, does he? The colonel told me he was a thorough sportsman.”
“So he is,” returned Alice with a sigh, which escaped her involuntarily.
“Ah! no woman with a heart should ever marry a sportsman,” rejoined Mrs. Crossman, with rather more vinegar and less water in her tone than before. “Out all day, from the first of September till the breeding season comes round again; then the moment they’ve finished dinner and their bottle of port-wine, asleep they go, and only wake to stamp and swear with the cramp, and drop off again, till they tumble upstairs to bed, and are no comfort to anybody. You are a young wife yet, my dear, and your husband’s hardly grown tired of you, perhaps, but wait another month or two and you’ll see—men are all alike!”
There was just enough applicability to her own case in this tirade to make Alice feel rather angry and thoroughly uncomfortable; but the idea of comparing Harry with Colonel Crossman was too bad, and anger predominated as she replied, “Mr. Coverdale is not quite so selfish as you imagine, my dear madam; certainly he left me a good deal alone when the shooting season first began, but as soon as he was aware how dull and lonely I felt, he gave up shooting for, for—”
“Half a day?” inquired Mrs. Crossman, sarcastically.