“My dear fellow,” said Gould, “you could not do that unless your want of skill were catching. I should be glad if I could put you up to a wrinkle or two.”
“On those terms, then, I shall be very glad to come.”
“That is all right.”
What a happy stroke for Gould! he had come to call Crawley “my dear fellow” already.
The idea of his new friend putting him up to a “wrinkle or two” rather tickled Crawley. Gould was so poor a performer at cricket, fives, lawn-tennis, football everything which required a ready hand, a quick eye, and firm nerves—that Crawley could not imagine his beating him even with the advantage of previous knowledge. Yet he had not exaggerated his own deficiencies. Bring his gun, indeed! The only gun he had to bring was a single-barrelled muzzle-loader which had belonged to his father. With this he had shot water-rats, sparrows, and, on one occasion when they were very numerous, fieldfares; but not flying—he had never attempted that. No; he had stalked his small bird till he got within thirty yards of the bough where it was perched, and taken a steady pot-shot. As for riding, when a very little boy during his father’s lifetime he had had a pony; and two or three times since, when staying at watering-places in the summer, he had mounted a hired hack. So that his ideas of sport were gathered entirely from books and pictures, to which, when they treated of that subject, he was devotedly attached. What happy hours he had spent poring over Jorrock’s Hunts, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and the works of the Old Shekarry! When he went to a picture-gallery he was listless until he came upon some representation of moving adventure by flood or field, and then the rest of the party could hardly drag him away. He had a little collection of coloured prints in his room at home, gathered at various times, and highly esteemed by him, which conveyed a somewhat exaggerated idea of equine powers. For in one a horse was clearing a stream about the width of the Thames at Reading, and in another an animal of probably the same breed was flying a solid stone wall quite ten feet high. Now he was to have a little taste of these often-dreamed-of joys, and the idea absorbed his thoughts and made him restless at night.
To do him justice, he did not think about it on first meeting his mother and sisters when he went home; but on the second day of his return the invitation and all it promised came back to him, and he broached the matter to Mrs Crawley at breakfast-time. “Please, Mother, I have had an invitation to spend a week with a school-fellow after Christmas.”
“Oh, and who is he?” asked Mrs Crawley.
“A chap named Gould; they are awfully rich people—just the sort I ought to know, you know. They live in Suffolk at a place called Nugget Towers.”
“And what sort of boy is he? Because, of course, Vincent, we must ask him here in the summer in return.”
“Well, he is always very civil to me, and I don’t know any harm of him; but he is not good at games and that, and not much fun to talk to—so I have never been quite so thick with him as he wished. That makes it all the more civil of him. He must have talked about me at home, for his mother sent the invitation.”