“Indeed I know nothing of the kind,” replied the lady, bridling and tossing her head. It was Miss Lushington’s plan, you see, always to give her admirer what she called a “set-down” the moment they passed an imaginary line of her own demarcation; so she proceeded, speaking very distinctly, and with her lips set tight—
“If you’ve driven all this way only to talk nonsense to me, Mr. Plumtree, you’ve wasted your time sadly. But you’ll never make me believe that. I know what I know; and others might know it too, if so be as you was to take and rile me more than I think pleasant. And you’re too late, after all,” added Miss L. viciously. “She was in the fly an hour before you drove into the yard: why, bless you! she’s at the top of the hunt by this time, and no more chance of coming up with her than if she was the wind.”
Without pausing to consider what peculiar position in the chase Miss Lushington intended to convey by her expression of the “top of the hunt,” I shot a glance at Young Plumtree, who seemed, I thought, to quail considerably under the volubility he had provoked. Indeed, strange to say, he appeared completely “shut up,” and at a loss for a reply. A horrible suspicion darted across me, lighting up, as such fancies do, the previous darkness with a dazzling and momentary brilliance. Could this unwelcome and unhappy young man be under the influence of a hopeless attachment for Miss Merlin,—one of those unaccountable infatuations of which we read in novels, but which, fortunately for the general comfort of society, we so seldom meet with in real life?
And yet, why not? To be sure, judging from Quizby’s letter and his frank acknowledgment of an attachment to her in his youth, the lady must have arrived by this time at middle age, and Plumtree was a mere boy (for, after all, a man of five-and-twenty is little more than a boy), actually shaving for whiskers, top-dressing with balm of Columbia, and raising an abundant crop of pimples as the result. A woman too, after she arrives at a certain point of maturity, say five-and-thirty, remains for an incredible period at that attractive stage of her charms. She has lost indeed the bright freshness of youth; but if she has been really handsome, she has gained in exchange a certain depth of colouring and intensity of expression, which are equally efficient weapons of offence.
Then, while the passing years blunt her darts scarcely perceptibly, every day adds to her experience and dexterity in their use. A coquette of twenty years’ standing is like an old maître d’armes of the Empire, cool, wary, dauntless, and skilful; rusé in the art of destruction, and taught by a hundred combats to take every advantage, and never to throw a chance away. I have often thought, notwithstanding the dancing exploit, a man would have been safer with Herodias’s daughter than with Herodias herself.
Then a young man, if he once suffers himself to be captivated by a woman considerably his senior, becomes rather childish, not to say imbecile, in the process. He goes into leading-strings forthwith, and there is no folly or extravagance of which he is incapable. Shall I ever forget what a fool young Larkspur made of himself about old Lady Foxglove, who might have been his mother, and looked as if she had been his wet-nurse? Nor can I cease to regret the fate of my poor friend Capon, who left college to run away with Mrs. Mallard the actress, at a period when that lady had become too aged and infirm for genteel comedy parts at any of the theatres royal, and of whom I last heard at a French watering-place, living in cheap lodgings at the head of a grown-up family not his own, nor indeed, unless scandal be more scandalous than usual, the issue of the talented Mr. Mallard deceased.
I looked at young Plumtree with a kind of loathing pity. I thought of what his deplorable state would be, when all the pleasures of his present existence should have palled upon him in the pursuit of the unattainable; when ’baccy should have lost its soothing properties, and there should be no more charm in beer; when dogs might “delight to bark and bite,” and Plumtree, quantum mutatus, would care not which half-stifled champion was dragged gurgling and snarling “across the line;” when the three-pound terrier, eating its own weight a dozen times over in rats, would no longer excite his garrulous plaudits as he hung half muzzy over the pit; and to shoot pigeons for a fat pig, or see a man trundling a wheelbarrow backwards, and picking up stones with his mouth, would be equally tasteless and insipid; nay, when counting out the game-cock himself, prone on the square-cut turf, but of mettle invincible, from the top of the clean-cut comb to the points of his steel spurs, would be considered simply a dull but cruel pastime, and like Othello’s in his fancied degradation, Plumtree’s “occupation would be gone.”
All unconscious of my forebodings, their confiding object pulled a square and heavily-sealed note from what I believe Mr. Poole terms the “opossum pocket” of his shooting-jacket, and handed it to me with the mock dignity of an ambassador presenting his credentials, winking demurely on Miss Lushington the while.
“Can you read?” inquired the facetious envoy. “If so, there’s a bit of blotting from the old folks at home. I told the governor that as you weren’t fit to do much ‘scraping,’ I’d best bring it over, and take back the answer by word of mouth. But you’ll come, won’t you? It’s a crafty crib enough, The Ashes, and you’ll get your health there as well as here for a day or so. I can’t say much for the biting, but there’s some lining with a green seal to it, that will set your collar-bone for you, make your hair curl tight up to the roots, and bring you down to-morrow morning, as fresh as a bull-calf, and as hearty as a buck.”
There was no resisting such inducements as these, and indeed the letter of Mr. Plumtree senior, though extremely pompous and ceremonious, was hospitable, considerate, and kind. Though almost a stranger, he hoped that I would excuse our short acquaintance, and dine with him at The Ashes, adding, that as I ought not to expose myself to cold from the night-air, he trusted that I would take a bed.