"If I can get there by two," thought the young officer, "I may catch her before she leaves. It's just my luck to have tumbled into this d——d thing, when I wanted to be elsewhere!"
Thus, you see, does one man undervalue privileges which another perhaps esteems the height of human felicity. Of all Thackeray's keen touches, there are none keener than that in which Lord Steyne says, "Everybody wants what they haven't got. 'Gad, I dined with the King yesterday, and we'd boiled mutton and turnips!"
"We're late, Frank," said young Lord Kilgarron. "Jump into my brougham. It will get us there quicker than a cab. Battledore House, Tom. Drive like blazes!" The last to a smart lad in livery, who obeyed this injunction to the letter, as Lord Kilgarron leaped lightly in after his friend, and banged to the door.
"I must go," added his lordship. "She's my aunt, you know. What's the use of an aunt, Frank? I get very little good out of mine. Now a grandmother's a decent kind of relationship. Mine gave me the very mare we're driving—half-sister to Termagant. She's a rum 'un, I can tell you!"
"A fast one, I see," remarked Frank, with much composure, considering they were now whirling past the lamps at a gallop.
"Is it fast?" demanded his companion, exultingly. "Wouldn't she have won the Garrison Cup at the Curragh last year, as sure as ever she was saddled, only the fools ran the race at a walk, and never began at all till the finish!"
Lord Kilgarron was a thorough Irishman, devoted to sport, reckless of danger, and possessing the knack, indigenous to his countrymen, of hitting off graphic description by a happy blunder.
"She can go," he added, "and she can stay. That mare, sir, would gallop for a week. Faith, an' she's running off now!"
She was, indeed! The Termagant blood, roused by contradiction and an injudicious pull at that side of her mouth which had not been rendered callous in training, rose to boiling pitch. Irritation, resentment, and fear of subsequent punishment, combined to madden her. A frantic rise at her collar, a plunge, a lift of her shapely quarters, that only the strongest of kicking-straps prevented from dissevering the whole connection, and the mare was fairly out of her driver's hands, and swinging down Piccadilly with a brougham and two dandies behind her, almost as fast as she ever swept across the Curragh of Kildare.
"This is too good to last long," observed Frank, as, shaving a lamp-post, they slued across the street, almost into the panels of a stationary cab, causing its driver to swear hideously in the vulgar tone. "But it is the only chance of being in time!"