“All the creatures
Made for Heaven’s honours, have their ends, and good ones,
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women.”
February had begun, the frost and snow had disappeared. There were soft breathings of spring in the breezes that blew over the broad grassy downs beyond the Roman encampment, and the sportsmen of the neighbourhood were rejoicing in open weather and lengthening daylight; but Juliet Baldwin was still at Medlow Court, and the heart of Harrington Dalbrook was heavy as he set out in the pleasant morning for some distant meet; and it was heavier as he rode home in the evening, after a day’s sport which had shown him only too distinctly that the black horse was not so young as he had been. He hugged himself with the delusion that those indications of advancing years which were but too obvious towards the close of a trying day across a heavy country, would vanish after a week’s rest, and that the horse would show no signs of staleness at Tattersall’s, where he must inevitably be sold before the end of the month, his owner seeing no other way of meeting the bill that had been given in exchange for a beast whose name should have been, not Mahmud, but White Elephant.
Harrington’s sole motive for buying a hunter—or, rather, his sole excuse for being trapped into the purchase—was the expectation of being able to ride to hounds in Miss Baldwin’s company. She had said to him “You ought to hunt,” and he had straightway hunted, just as, if she had told him to balloon, he would have ballooned. And now Juliet Baldwin was following the hounds in another county while he was in Dorsetshire plodding along dreary roads to inaccessible meets at places which would seem to have been chosen with a special study of everybody’s inconvenience. The whole business was fraught with bitterness. He had never loved hunting for its own sake—had never possessed the single-mindedness of the genuine sportsman, who cares not for weather or country, or companionship, or hunger or thirst, so long as there is a fox at the beginning of the day and blood at the end.
Juliet was out with the hounds three days a week. She wrote rapturous accounts of forty minutes here, and an hour there; and every run which she described was apparently the quickest thing that had ever been known in that country. She let her lover know en passant that she had been greatly admired, and that her horsemanship had been talked about. Her letters were very affectionate, but they testified also to a self-love that amounted to adoration. Her frocks, her horses—provided, as the young ravens are fed, by a kindly Providence in the shape of casual acquaintance—her breaks at billiards, her waltzing, were all dilated upon with a charming frankness.
“It seems rather foolish to write all this egotistical twaddle,” she apologized, “but you complain if I send you a short letter, and there is literally nothing to tell here—at least nothing about any one you know, or that would have the faintest interest for you—so I am obliged to scribble about my frocks and my little social triumphs.”
This was kindly meant, no doubt, but it stung him to be reminded that his friends were not her friends, that Belgravia is not further from Islington than her people were from his people.
In one of her letters she wrote casually:—
“Why don’t you put Mahmud into a horse-box and come over for a day with these hounds. It would be capital fun. There is a dear little rustic inn where you and your horse can put up—and Lady B. would ask you to dinner as a matter of course. I dare say your highly respectable hair will stand on end at some of our ways—but that won’t matter. I am sure you would enjoy an evening or two at Medlow. Think about it, like a dear boy.”