"What is it, my lad?" he said, looking down upon the pot-boy, and at the same time stooping his head as if with a full impression that his ears at their actual height could hear nothing that proceeded from a point so much below as the deformed youth's mouth.
Instantly a small high-pitched but very musical voice replied, "I'll come for your boots early to-morrow, Sir, and tell you all about it."
"Can't you tell me now?" asked the young gentleman, "I am going into the stable to see my horse, and you can say your say there, my man."
"I daren't," answered the pot-boy, "there's Tim the Ostler, and Jack Millman's groom, and Long Billy, the Taunton post-boy, all about. I'll come to-morrow and fetch your boots."
At the same moment the landlord's voice exclaiming in sharp tones, "Dicky! Dicky Lamb!--what the devil are you so long about?" was heard, and the pot-boy ran off as fast as his long thin legs would carry him.
"Well this affair promises some amusement," said Ned Hayward, when they had again reached the little parlour, which in his good-humoured easy way he now looked upon as common to them both. "Upon my word I am obliged to these highwaymen, or whatever the scoundrels may be, for giving me something fresh to think of. Although at good Sir John Slingsby's I shall have fishing enough, I dare say, yet one cannot fish all day and every day, and sometimes one gets desperately bored in an old country-house, unless fate strikes out something not quite in the common way to occupy one."
"Did you ever try falling in love?" asked Beauchamp, with a quiet smile, as he glanced his eyes over the fine form and handsome features of his companion, "it is an excellent pastime, I am told."
"No!" answered Ned Hayward quickly and straightforwardly; "I never did, and never shall. I am too poor, Mr. Beauchamp, to marry in my own class of society, and maintain my wife in the state which that class implies. I am too honest to make love without intending to marry; too wise I trust to fall in love where nothing could be the result but unhappiness to myself if not to another also." He spake these few sentences very seriously; but then, resuming at once his gay rattling manner, he went on: "Oh, I have drilled myself capitally, I assure you. At twenty I was like a raw recruit, bungling at every step; found myself saying all manner of sweet things to every pretty face I met; felt my heart beating whenever, under the pretty face, I thought I discovered something that would last longer. But I saw so much of love in a cottage and its results, that, after calculating well what a woman brought up in good society would have to sacrifice who married a man with 600l. a-year, I voted it unfair to ask her, and made up my mind to my conduct. As soon as ever I find that I wish to dance with any dear girl twice in a night, and fall into reveries when I think of her, and feel a sort of warm blood at my fingers' ends when my hand touches hers, I am off like a hair-trigger, for if a man is bound to act with honour to other men, who can make him if he does not willingly, he is ten times more strongly bound to do so towards women, who can neither defend nor avenge themselves."
With a sudden impulse Beauchamp held out his hand to him, and shook his heartily, and that grasp seemed to say, "I know you now to the heart. We are friends."
Ned Hayward was a little surprised at this enthusiastic burst of Mr. Beauchamp for he had set him down for what is generally called a very gentlemanlike person, which means, in the common parlance of the world, a man who has either used up every thing like warm feeling, or has never possessed it, and who, not being troubled with any emotions, suffers polite manners and conventional habits to rule him in and out. With his usual rapid way of jumping at conclusions--which he often found very convenient, though to say the truth he sometimes jumped over the right ones--he said to himself at once, "Well, this is really a good fellow, I do believe, and a man of some heart and soul."