Let us now take a look at the homeward bound party.
It was lucky for Billy that the night was dark and the road rough with newly laid whinstones, for both Sir Moses and Cuddy opened upon him most volubly and vehemently as soon as ever they got off the uneven pavement, with no end of inquiries about Jack and his antecedents. If he could ride? If he had ever seen him ride? If he had ever ridden a steeplechase? Where he got him? How long he had had him?
To most of which questions, Billy replied with his usual monosyllabic drawling, “yarses,” amid jolts, and grinds, and gratings, and doms from Sir Moses, and cusses from Cuddy, easing his conscience with regard to Jack’s service, by saying that he had had him “some time.” Some time! What a fine elastic period that is. We’d back a lawyer to make it cover a century or a season. Very little definite information, however, did they extract from Billy with regard to Jack for the best of all reasons, that Billy didn’t know anything. Both Cuddy and Sir Moses interpreted his ignorance differently, and wished he mightn’t know more than was good for them. And so in the midst of roughs and smooths, and jolts and jumps, and examinings, and cross-examinings, and re-examinings, they at length reached Pangburn Park Lodges, and were presently at home.
“Breakfast at eight!” said Sir Moses to Bankhead, as he alighted from the carriage.
“Breakfast at eight, Pringle!” repeated he, and seizing a flat candlestick from the half-drunken footman in the passage, he hurried up-stairs, blowing his beak with great vigour to drown any appeal to him about a horse.
He little knew how unlikely our young friend was to trouble him in that way.
CHAPTER XLII.
MR. GEORDEY GALLON.
CUDDY Flintoff did not awake at all comfortable the next morning, and he distinctly traced the old copyhead of “Familiarity breeds contempt,” in the hieroglyphic pattern of his old chintz bed-hangings. He couldn’t think how he could ever be so foolish as to lay himself open to such a catastrophe; it was just the wine being in and the wit being out, coupled with the fact of the man being a Frenchman, that led him away—and he most devoutly wished he was well out of the scrape. Suppose Monsieur was a top sawyer! Suppose he was a regular steeple-chaser! Suppose he was a second Beecher in disguise! It didn’t follow because he was a Frenchman that he couldn’t ride. Altogether Mr. Flintoff repented. It wasn’t nice amusement, steeple-chasing he thought, and the quicksilver of youth had departed from him; getting called Bareacres, too, was derogatory, and what no English servant would have done, if even he had called him Bushy Heath.