Ravenshoe

by Henry Kingsley

"How near the end we are getting, and yet so much to come! Never mind. We will tell it all naturally and straightforwardly, and then there will be nothing to offend you."

By-and-bye it became necessary that Charles should have air and exercise. His arm was well. Every splinter had been taken out of it, and he must lie on the sofa no longer.

So he was driven out through pleasant places, through the budding spring, in one of Lord Hainault's carriages. All the meadows had been bush-harrowed and rolled long ago, and now the orchises and fritillaries were beginning to make the grass look purple. Lady Hainault had a low carriage and a pair of small cobs, and this was given up to Charles; Lady Hainault's first coachman declined to drive her ladyship out in the daytime, for fear that the second coachman (a meritorious young man of forty) should frighten Charles by a reckless and inexperienced way of driving.

Consequently Lady Hainault went a buying flannel petticoats and that sort of thing, for the poor people in Casterton and Henley, driven by her second coachman; and Charles was trundled all over the country by the first coachman, in a low carriage with a pair of cobs. But Lady Hainault was as well pleased with the arrangement as the old coachman himself, and so it is no business of ours. For the curious thing was, that no one who ever knew Charles would have hesitated for an instant in giving up to him his or her bed, or dinner, or carriage, or any other thing in this world. For people are great fools, you know.

Perhaps the reason of it was, that every one who made Charles's acquaintance, knew by instinct that he would have cut off his right hand to serve them. I don't know why it was. But there is the fact.

Sometimes Lady Ascot would go with him and sometimes William. And one day, when William was with him, they were bowling quietly along a by-road on the opposite side of the water from Henley. And in a secret place, they came on a wicked old gentleman, breaking the laws of his country, and catching perch in close time, out of a punt, with a chair, and a stone bottle, and a fisherman from Maidenhead, who shall be nameless, but who must consider himself cautioned.

The Rajah of Ahmednuggur lives close by there; and he was reading the Times, when Charles asked the coachman to pull up, that he might see the sport. The Rajah's attention was caught by seeing the carriage stopped; and he looked through a double-barrelled opera-glass, and not only saw Charles and William in the carriage, but saw, through the osiers, the hoary old profligate with his paternoster pulling the perch out as fast as he could put his line in. Fired by a virtuous indignation (I wish every gentleman on the Thames would do likewise), he ran in his breeches and slippers down the lawn, and began blowing up like Old Gooseberry.

The old gentleman who was fishing looked at the rajah's redbrick house, and said, "If my face was as ugly as that house, I would wear a green veil;" but he ordered the fisherman to take up the rypecks, and he floated away down stream.

And as Charles and William drove along, Charles said, "My dear boy, there could not be any harm in catching a few roach. I should so like to go about among pleasant places in a punt once more."