“A fine upstanding chestnut; I’m sure you’ll admire him?”
“Yes, yes, but whose?”
“Whose?” echoed Juliet, as if she scarcely understood the word. “Oh,”—with a sudden flash of intelligence,—“you mean whose property is he? As if that mattered! He belongs to Major Swanwick.”
“Good night!” said Harrington; and he went off to take leave of Lady Burdenshaw, who was sitting in the capacious ingle nook, with a circle of men about her telling her anecdotes in Parisian French, and from whom every now and then there burst peals of jovial laughter.
“At my age one understands everything, and one may hear everything,” said her Ladyship.
Harrington went back to the “Medlow Arms” more depressed than he had felt during any period of his courtship. Instinct had warned him of the dangers that must lurk in such a house as Medlow Court for such a girl as Juliet Baldwin; but neither instinct nor imagination had prepared him for the horrible reality. To see the woman who was to be his wife smoking cigarettes, playing shilling pool, and bandying doubtful jokes with men who had obviously the very poorest opinion of the opposite sex, was an agony which he had never thought to suffer; and for the first time since his engagement he asked himself whether it would not have been better to have trusted his future happiness to the most insipid and colourless of the girls with whom he played tennis than to this magnificent specimen of emancipated smartness. The image of Juliet sprawling over the billiard-table, with her eyes on fire and her shoulders half out of her gown as she took a difficult “life,” pursued him like a bacchanalian nightmare all through his troubled snatches of sleep. The stony straw mattress and lumpy feather bed would not have been conducive to slumber under the happiest circumstances, but for a mind disturbed by care they were a bed of torture. He rose at seven, unrefreshed, heavy-hearted, detesting chanticleer, cloudy skies, and all the old-fashioned fuss about a hunting morning, and wishing himself in his comfortable room in the good old house in Cornhill, where he had ample space and all things needful to a luxurious toilet. He got himself dressed somehow. He was in the saddle at nine o’clock, after a breakfast for which he had no appetite.
It was a long, dreary ride to the little roadside inn at which the hounds met, and Harrington being particularly punctual, had to jog along companionless till the last mile, when Major Swanwick and another man from Medlow overtook him and regaled him with their talk for the rest of the way.
“I think I know that black horse,” said the Major, who looked provokingly well in his red coat, chimney pot, and cream-coloured tops, thereby making Harrington ashamed of his neat dark grey coat, Bedford cords, and bowler hat. “Wasn’t he in Baldwin’s stud nine years ago?”
“I bought him off Sir Henry Baldwin.”
“Thought so. Good hand at selling a horse, Baldwin! However, I suppose there’s some work in the black horse yet.”