At last, breaking the silence with considerable impatience, I said:
"Really, Master, there is very little excuse for your silence! Surely you have something to say to me, something to tell me; you have had an experience since we talked to each other that I have never had: you have been near Death."
JOWETT (not in any way put out): "I felt no rapture, no bliss." (Suddenly looking at me and taking my hand.) "My dear child, you must believe in God in spite of what the clergy say."
CHAPTER III
FAST AND FURIOUS HUNTING IN LEICESTERSHIRE—COUNTRY HOUSE PARTY AND A NEW ADMIRER—FRIENDSHIP WITH LORD AND LADY MANNERS
My friendship with Lord and Lady Manners, [Footnote: Avon Tyrrell,
Christchurch, Hants. Lady Manners was a Miss Fane.] of Avon
Tyrrell, probably made more difference to the course of my life
than anything that had happened in it.
Riding was what I knew and cared most about; and I dreamt of High Leicestershire. I had hunted in Cheshire, where you killed three foxes a day and found yourself either clattering among cottages and clothes-lines, or blocked by carriages and crowds; I knew the stiff plough and fine horses of Yorkshire and the rotten grass in the Bicester; I had struggled over the large fences and small enclosures of the Grafton and been a heroine in the select fields and large becks with the Burton; and the Beaufort had seen the dawn of my fox-hunting; but Melton was a name which brought the Hon. Crasher before me and opened a vista on my future of all that was fast, furious and fashionable.
When I was told that I was going to sit next to the Master of the
Quorn at dinner, my excitement knew no bounds.
Gordon Cunard—whose brother Bache owned the famous hounds in Market Harborough—had insisted on my joining him at a country- house party given for a ball. On getting the invitation I had refused, as I hardly knew our hostess—the pretty Mrs. Farnham— but after receiving a spirited telegram from my new admirer—one of the best men to hounds in Leicestershire—I changed my mind. In consequence of this decision a double event took place. I fell in love with Peter Flower—a brother of the late Lord Battersea—and formed an attachment with a couple whose devotion and goodness to me for more than twenty years encouraged and embellished my glorious youth.
Lord Manners, or "Hoppy," as we called him, was one of the few men I ever met whom the word "single-minded" described. His sense of honour was only equalled by his sense of humour; and a more original, tender, truthful, uncynical, real being never existed. He was a fine sportsman and had won the Grand Military when he was in the Grenadiers, riding one of his own hunters; he was also the second gentleman in England to win the Grand National in 1882, on a thoroughbred called Seaman, who was by no means every one's horse. For other people he cared nothing. "Decidement je n'aime pas les autres," he would have said, to quote my son-in-law, Antoine Bibesco.