We need scarcely say that Mr. Pringle’s ride home with him was not of a very agreeable character: indeed, the Baronet had seldom been seen to be so put out of his way, and the mare came in for frequent salutations with the whip—latitudinally, longitudinally, and horizontally, over the head and ears, accompanied by cutting commentaries on Flintoff’s utter uselessness and inability to do anything but drink.
He “never saw such a man—domd if ever he did,” and he whipped the mare again in confirmation of the opinion.
Nor did matters mend on arriving at home; for here Mr. Mordecai Nathan met him in the entrance hall, with a very doleful face, to announce that Henerey Brown & Co., who had long been coddling up their horses, had that morning succeeded in sloping with them and their stock to Halterley Fair, and selling them in open market, leaving a note hanging to the key in the house-door, saying that they had gone to Horseterhaylia where Sir Moses needn’t trouble to follow them.
“Ond dom it!” shrieked the Baronet, jumping up in the air like a stricken deer; “ond dom it! I’m robbed! I’m robbed! I’m ruined! I’m ruined!” and tottering to an arm-chair, he sank, overpowered with the blow. Henerey Brown & Co. had indeed been too many for him. After a long course of retrograding husbandry, they seemed all at once to have turned over a new leaf, if not in the tillage way, at all events in that still better way for the land, the cattle line,—store stock, with some symptoms of beef on their bones, and sheep with whole fleeces, going on all-fours depastured the fields, making Mordecai Nathan think it was all the fruits of his superior management. Alaek a-day! They belonged to a friend of Lawyer Hindmarch’s, who thought Henerey Brown & Co. might as well eat all off the land ere they left. And so they ate it as bare as a board.
“Ond dom it, how came you to let them escape?” now demanded the Baronet, wringing his hands in despair; “ond dom it, how came you to let them escape?” continued he, throwing himself back in the chair.
“Why really, Sir Moses, I was perfectly deceived; I thought they were beginning to do better, for though they were back with their ploughing, they seemed to be turning their attention to stock, and I was in hopes that in time they would pull round.”
“Pull round!” ejaculated the Baronet; “pull round! They’ll flatten me I know with their pulling;” and thereupon he kicked out both legs before him as if he was done with them altogether.
His seat being in the line of the door, a rude draught now caught his shoulder, which making him think it was no use sitting there to take cold and the rheumatism, he suddenly bounced up, and telling Nathan to stay where he was, he ran up stairs, and quickly changed his fine satiney, velvetey, holiday garments, for a suit of dingy old tweeds, that looked desperately in want of the washing-tub. Then surmounting the whole with a drab wide-awake, he clutched a knotty dog-whip, and set off on foot with his agent to the scene of disaster, rehearsing the licking he would give Henerey with the whip if he caught him, as he went.
Away he strode, as if he was walking a match, down Dolly’s Close, over the stile, into Farmer Hayford’s fields, and away by the back of the lodges, through Orwell Plantation and Lowestoff End, into the Rushworth and Mayland Road.
Doblington farm-house then stood on the rising ground before him. It was indeed a wretched, dilapidated, woe-begone-looking place; bad enough when enlivened with the presence of cattle and the other concomitants of a farm; but now, with only a poor white pigeon, that Henerey Brown & Co., as if in bitter irony, had left behind them, it looked the very picture of misery and poverty-stricken desolation.