But the life of an English country gentleman leaves little to be desired!
In the morning he has the chase, or the shooting party, complete in their kind, and both varied according to the character of the game. In the evening he sits down to a dinner, as Lucullian as French cooks can make it, in the company of men and women the most accomplished upon earth.
In the summer there are excursions, picnics, “garden parties”; and of late years the grand croquet and tennis gatherings—all ending in the same desirable dinner, with sometimes a dance in the drawing-room, to the family music of the piano; on rarer occasions, to the more inspiriting strains of a military band, brought from the nearest barracks, or the headquarters of volunteers, yeomanry, or militia.
In all this there is neither noise nor confusion; but the most perfect quiet and decorum. It could not be otherwise in a society composed of the flower of England’s people—its nobility and squirearchy—equal in the social scale—alike spending their life in the cultivation of its graces.
It was not strange that Captain Maynard—a man with but few great friends, and lost to some of these through his republican proclivities—should feel slightly elated on receiving an imitation to a dinner as described.
A further clause in the note told him, he would be expected to stay a few days at the house of his host, and take part in the partridge-shooting that had but lately commenced.
The invitation was all the more acceptable coming from Sir George Vernon, of Vernon Hall, near Sevenoaks, Kent.
Maynard had not seen the British baronet since that day when the British flag, flung around his shoulders, saved him from being shot. By the conditions required to get him clear of his Parisian scrape, he had to return instanter to England, in the metropolis of which he had ever since been residing.
Not in idleness. Revolutions at an end, he had flung aside his sword, and taken to the pen. During the summer he had produced a romance, and placed it in the hands of a publisher. He was expecting it soon to appear.
He had lately written to Sir George—on hearing that the latter had got back to his own country—a letter expressing grateful thanks for the protection that had been extended to him.