Evan stole a glance at his companion.
“Besides,” the other continued, with an inflexion of grandeur, “for a man accustomed to his hunters, it is, you will confess, unpleasant—I speak hypothetically—to be reduced to his legs to that extent that it strikes him shrewdly he will run them into stumps.”
The stranger laughed.
The fair lady of the night illumined his face, like one who recognized a subject. Evan thought he knew the voice. A curious struggle therein between native facetiousness and an attempt at dignity, appeared to Evan not unfamiliar; and the egregious failure of ambition and triumph of the instinct, helped him to join the stranger in his mirth.
“Jack Raikes?” he said: “surely?”
“The man!” it was answered to him. “But you? and near our old school—Viscount Harrington? These marvels occur, you see—we meet again by night.”
Evan, with little gratification at the meeting, fell into their former comradeship; tickled by a recollection of his old schoolfellow’s India-rubber mind.
Mr. Raikes stood about a head under him. He had extremely mobile features; thick, flexible eyebrows; a loose, voluble mouth; a ridiculous figure on a dandified foot. He represented to you one who was rehearsing a part he wished to act before the world, and was not aware that he took the world into his confidence.
How he had come there his elastic tongue explained in tropes and puns and lines of dramatic verse. His patrimony spent, he at once believed himself an actor, and he was hissed off the stage of a provincial theatre.
“Ruined, the last ignominy endured, I fled from the gay vistas of the Bench—for they live who would thither lead me! and determined, the day before the yesterday—what think’st thou? why to go boldly, and offer myself as Adlatus to blessed old Cudford! Yes! a little Latin is all that remains to me, and I resolved, like the man I am, to turn, hic, hac, hoc, into bread and cheese, and beer: Impute nought foreign to me, in the matter of pride.”