“Oh, novels!—I don’t read any except the yellow kind. I say how d’ye dress the part? Is it a long coat and a white tie? or what is it? I don’t know nothing about it,” said Johnson, falling in his anxiety into the dialect of his kind.
“In the evening,” said Eddy, “all gentlemen dress alike, except when they’re parsons. Johnson of St. Chad’s is not a parson. Probably in the day time he wears an easy coat, and smokes a pipe. But we’d better leave that. You only want your evening things—I suppose they’re decently cut—and a flower in your coat; but mind you have not a bouquet like a coachman at a drawing-room.”
“I think I know enough for that,” said the novice; “but you’d better get me one of those dashed novels if I’m to learn up the part.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes towards the moor; great visions filled the mind of Johnson. “I say,” he resumed after a while, “couldn’t you get me asked for the shooting one day? The young fellow aint much of a swell, whatever the rest of them may be; and I should like to shoulder a gun on a real moor, just for once in a way. It’s a thing to have done. The Governor would like it too. ‘My son’s up shooting in Scotland,’ he’d tell everybody, ‘with some of his smart friends.’”
“He can say it all the same, whether or not,” said Eddy.
“That’s true; but it feels much nicer when there’s something in it. I say—I don’t mind standing a sovereign to the gamekeeper, if you’ll manage that. I’d give a sovereign any day to have some birds to send up to town with that heather stuff round ‘em, and a label, ‘From A. Johnson, Esquire.’”
“You had better give the sovereign to me,” said Eddy, “if I am to take the trouble of it. Well, I’ll try—and you’ll have to get up that part too, Johnson, the don on the moors.”
“Oh, I aint frightened for that. Do they ask you to shoot at the Cumbraes—that’s the Duke’s place?” said Johnson, with greater and greater visions of delight rising before his eyes.
“They don’t ask me, but they might ask you,” cried Eddy, with a peal of laughter. “‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ When once you get to know a Duke, all the rest follows like clockwork.”
“That was what I thought,” Johnson said modestly. He marched on by Eddy’s side for some time over the heather. Then he paused, and looked his companion in the face. “Mind,” he said, “I don’t say as I shan’t like all this very much, and if I get on, I shall never forget as it was you as launched me, Master Eddy. But that’s not to interfere with business: you’ll have to keep to your day and square your account, or else the Governor will be down upon you, and there’s not a little thing in the whole affair as won’t be brought to the light of day.”