“Oh, I’ll send him in my dog-cart if that’s all,” exclaimed Sir Moses, again waxing generous.
“That ‘ll do! That ‘ll do!” replied Cuddy, appealing triumphantly to the brandy. Then as the out-door guests began to depart, and the in-door ones to wind up their watches and ask about breakfast, Cuddy took advantage of one of Sir Moses’ momentary absences in the entrance hall to walk off to bed with the remainder of the bottle of brandy, observing, as he hurried away, that he was “apt to have spasms in the night”; and Sir Moses, thinking he was well rid of him at the price, went through the ceremony of asking the “remanets” if they would take any more, and being unanimously answered in the negative, he lit the bedroom candles, turned off the modérateurs, and left the room to darkness and to Bankhead.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
GOING TO COVER WITH THE HOUNDS.
HOW different a place generally proves to what we anticipate, and how difficult it is to recall our expectations after we have once seen it, unless we have made a memorandum beforehand. How different again a place looks in the morning to what we have conjectured over-night. What we have taken for towers perhaps have proved to be trees, and the large lake in front a mere floating mist.
Pangbum Park had that loose rakish air peculiar to rented places, which carry a sort of visible contest between landlord and tenant on the face of everything. A sort of “it’s you to do it, not me” look. It showed a sad want of paint and maintenance generally. Sir Moses wasn’t the man to do anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, “Dom’d if he was,” so inside and outside were pretty much alike.
Our friend Billy Pringle was not a man of much observation in rural matters, though he understood the cut of a coat, the tie of a watch-ribbon cravat, or the fit of a collar thoroughly. We are sorry to say he had not slept very well, having taken too much brandy for conformity’s sake, added to which his bed was hard and knotty, and the finely drawn bolsters and pillows all piled together, were hardly sufficient to raise his throbbing temples. As he lay tossing and turning about, thinking now of Clara Yammerton’s beautiful blue eyes and exquisitely rounded figure, now of Flora’s bright hair, or Harriet’s graceful form, the dread Monsieur entered his shabbily furnished bed-room, with, “Sare, I have de pleasure to bring you your pink to-day,” at once banishing the beauties and recalling the over-night’s conversation, the frightful fences, the yawning ditches, the bottomless brooks, with the unanimous declaration that the man who could ride over Hit-im and Hold-im-shire could ride over any country in the world. And Billy really thought if he could get over the horrors of that day he would retire from the purgatorial pleasures of the chace altogether.