“Why, you seem to know him very well,” rejoined Major Brush, smiling (as well he might) at the query: “I thought you seemed very thick, and were going to give him your custom.”
Mr. Sawyer had not the heart to repudiate the soft impeachment. He liked to be “very thick” with a peer, and to have the credit of “giving him his custom” as a visitor and intimate.
“Yes,” he said, “I am; but, somehow, I cannot, for the life of me, remember his title. I’ve no ‘Debrett’ at Harborough; and I’ve such a bad memory for names. Lord—Lord—what the deuce is it? Some Irish peerage, if I remember right?”
Major Brush fairly burst out laughing. “No more a lord than you are, Sawyer,” said he, “though, I grant you, he ought to be a Duke. I thought everybody knew Mr. Varnish, the horsedealer!” And the Major went off at score again, thinking what a capital story he had got against Sawyer for that day at dinner, and a good many days after. A joke, you see, lasts a long time in the hunting season, when the supply is by no means equal to the demand.
And Mr. Sawyer turned his horse’s head out of the crowd, feeling a little humiliated, and not a little disgusted. The five guineas for the cigars stuck horribly in his throat. However, he and Mr. Varnish, as will presently be shown, had by no means closed accounts yet.
But where are the low spirits, blue devils, or uncomfortable reflections that can hold their own for an instant against the cheering sound of “Gone away!”? Three notes on the huntsman’s horn, five or six couple of hounds streaming noiselessly across a field, the rest more clamorous, leaping and dashing through the gorse, a rush of horsemen towards the point at which the fox has broken; and the man who is really fond of hunting has not the vestige of an idea to spare for anything else in the world.
John Standish Sawyer could ride “above a bit.” Even in a strange country, and with hounds running “like smoke,” he was not a man to shrink from taking his own line; and scarcely valuing the grey, perhaps, according to its deserts, he had no scruple in risking that good little animal at whatever came in his way.
A quick turn to the five couple of leading hounds, that he spied racing down the side of a hedgerow, and the happy negotiation of a very nasty place, with a stake in it that would certainly have impaled a more costly nag, placed our friend on terms with the pack. A fine grass country lay spread out before him. The fox, evidently a good one, bore straight across the middle of the fields. The hounds, without forcing any extraordinary pace, appeared well settled to the scent, and not inclined to flash over it a yard. A large fence and a little brook had combined to afford them more room than usual. Everything seemed to look uncommonly like a run; and the Honourable Crasher, shooting by our friend, on Confidence, whom he rode with a shamefully loose rein, observed that “It was all right; and he shouldn’t wonder if they were going to have a gallop.”
Mr. Sawyer laid hold of the grey, and determined to assume a place in the front rank—of which the occupants would have been equally at home in the rows of stalls nearest the orchestra at the Opera. There was more than one lady riding as he never saw lady ride before—perfectly straight; turning aside from no obstacle; jumping a gate with extreme cordiality, if it should be locked; and taking it all in the earnest, yet off-hand, graceful manner, with which a woman sets about doing what she likes best. The Meltonians, stride for stride, and fence for fence, were sailing away with perfect ease, looking as if they were scarcely out of a canter; yet, do what he would—and it must be owned he was very hard upon the grey—Mr. Sawyer could not, for the life of him, decrease the distance between himself and these leading horsemen.
The Honourable Crasher, having got Confidence amongst some very intricate fences on the right, though a little wider than he liked of the hounds, was disporting himself therein with considerable gratification. Struggles and the Reverend Dove (to-day without the daughter) were forward with the flyers, though the former was already beginning to calculate on a check.