After such a night’s amusement as I have described, gentlemen are apt to be later in the morning than they originally proposed.
Our belated travellers had intended getting back to their quarters at Harborough by eight or nine o’clock, there to make their toilets, discuss their breakfasts, and so proceed to covert methodically as usual, in time to meet Mr. Tailby’s clipping pack at Carlton Clump. It was nine, however, before either of them was stirring, and then the hospitable Trotter, who was himself going to hunt, and who came in from shepherding as rosy and fresh as if he had never seen brandy-and-water in his life, would not hear of their going away without breakfast. Altogether they did not get clear of Trotter’s Lodge much before ten o’clock, and as they drove out of the farmyard they had the mortification of seeing their entertainer mounted on his four-year-old (“Fancy riding a four-year-old after such a night!” thought Mr. Sawyer) on his way to the meet. “And we’ve got to go home and dress, and then come all this way back again,” moralised the Honourable. “I say, Sawyer, I wish I could make this beggar go as fast as we did last night,” and Crasher smiled at the recollection, as a man smiles who recalls some peaceful scene of his youth, or some good action which he will never find cause to repent.
This beggar, however, though a good farmer’s nag enough, knew quite well that it wasn’t his day for Market Harborough, and displayed great unwillingness to improve upon seven miles an hour in that direction. The chance of being in time faded away momently. Already they had overtaken several grooms with hunters; worse still, one or two early men on their hacks had overtaken them, and they had not yet struck into the high-road. At last the sound of wheels behind them caused the old horse to quicken his pace—not sufficiently so, however, to prevent the pursuing carriage from gaining on them rapidly. Mr. Sawyer looked back. Oh for a gig umbrella! It was none other than Parson Dove driving his daughter to the meet, that young lady’s very becoming costume denoting that it was her intention to join in the pleasures of the chase. Here was a predicament! To be detected by the queen of his affections, with whom he had parted at midnight, in all the correct decorum of evening costume, still in the same dress, so inappropriate at 10.30 A.M., bearing obvious tokens of having been out all night, and worse than all, with an inflamed countenance, blood-shot eyes, and a face half-eclipsed in plaister! Perdition! It was not to be thought of!
With the energy of despair he snatched the whip from the Honourable’s astonished grasp, and applied it with such good will to the old horse’s ribs, that the animal broke incontinently into a gallop, and turned into the high-road some fifty yards ahead of its pursuers, who would cross that thoroughfare directly, whereas Mr. Sawyer and its driver would follow its broad track to Harborough. “Cover me up!” exclaimed our friend to his laughing companion, as he crouched in the bottom of the carriage, under the scanty gig-apron, and devoutly hoped he had escaped recognition—“cover me up! I wouldn’t be seen in this plight by any of that family for a hundred pounds!” Nevertheless, he resolved, so to speak, to substantiate his alibi by swearing the Honourable to secrecy, and abstaining altogether for that day from the chase.
CHAPTER XXIII
DOUGHTY DEEDS
About this period there might have been—and indeed, by his intimates, there was—remarked an obvious change in the appearance, habits, and general demeanour of our friend. No longer dressed in the rough-and-ready style which had heretofore been at once his glory and his peculiarity, Mr. Sawyer now began to affect a strange refinement of costume, bordering on effeminacy. His boots were thinner and much tighter than of old; he turned his collars over his neckcloth, after the prevailing fashion, thereby imparting to his physiognomy an expression of romantic vacuity; anointed his head till it shone again; affected gloves on all occasions, and set up a ring. Altogether, his exterior was as symptomatic of his disorder as that of Benedict. Also he purchased, at a printseller’s over the way, a representation of a young person washing her feet in a stream, and purporting to be a “Highland Lassie,” but of a meretricious aspect which, it is only fair to state, is rarely to be observed amongst the Scottish mountaineers. It was one of those startling accidental likenesses to the lady of his affections, which a man must be as hard hit as Mr. Sawyer to detect. In the hunting-field, too, he adopted an ambitious style of riding, totally at variance with his previous quiet, straightforward form; and a considerable interval of bad-scenting weather enabled him to distinguish himself to his heart’s content. When hounds run best pace, horses have not wind for extraordinary exertions in the matter of fencing; and, moreover, such saltatory exploits as are out of the common way can be witnessed but by few, and those are completely engrossed in their own doings; but when the pack checks in every field, a man who chooses to single himself out by charging the ugliest bullfinches and the stiffest rails, either because he wants to attract attention or to sell his horse, has every opportunity of showing up the latter and calling down upon himself the animadversions of all true sportsmen. Our friend, with the two horses he bought from Mr. Varnish—both capital leapers—in addition to Hotspur and the grey, had no lack of material on which to flourish away in too close proximity to the chase. Charles Payne, though with a strong fellow-feeling for “keenness,” began to hate the sight of him, Mr. Tailby to dread his appearance as he would that of a black frost, and Lord Stamford to find that even his imperturbable good-humour might be exhausted at last.
What is to be expected, however, of a gentleman who has taken to repeating Montrose’s well-known lines—
“If doughty deeds my lady please,
Right soon I’ll mount my steed;