[Original Size]
“Elope, hounds! elope!” cried Dicky, getting his horse short by the head, and spurring him into a brisk trot. “Elope, hounds! elope!” repeated he, setting off on a speculative cast, for he saw it was no time for dallying.
And now,
“From cloud to cloud the rending lightnings rage;
Till in the furious elemental war
Dissolved, the whole precipitated mass,
Unbroken floods and solid torrents pour.”
Luckily for Dicky, an unusually vivid flash of lightning so lit up the landscape as to show the clump of large elms at the entrance to Rockbeer; and taking his bearings, he went swish swash, squirt spurt, swish swash, squirt spurt, through the spongy, half land, half water moor, at as good a trot as he could raise. The lately ardent, pressing hounds follow on in long-drawn file, looking anything but large or formidable. The frightened horses tucked in their tails, and looked fifty per cent. worse for the suppression. The hard, driving rain beats downways, and sideways, and frontways, and backways—all ways at once. The horses know not which way to duck, to evade the storm. In less than a minute Miss de Glancey is as drenched as if she had taken a shower-bath. The smart hat and feathers are annihilated; the dubious frizette falls out, down comes the hair; the bella-donna-inspired radiance of her eyes is quenched; the Crinoline and wadding dissolve like ice before the fire; and ere the love-cured Earl lifts her off her horse at the Punch-bowl at Rockbeer, she has no more shape or figure than an icicle. Indeed she very much resembles one, for the cold sleet, freezing as it fell, has encrusted her in a rich coat of ice lace, causing her saturated garments to cling to her with the utmost pertinacity. A more complete wreck of a belle was, perhaps, never seen.
“What an object!” inwardly ejaculated she, as Mrs. Hetherington, the landlady, brought a snivelling mould candle into the cheerless, fireless little inn-parlour, and she caught a glimpse of herself in the—at best—most unbecoming mirror. What would she have given to have turned back!
And as his lordship hurried up stairs in his water-logged boots, he said to himself, with a nervous swing of his arm, “I was right!—women have no business out hunting.” And the Binks chance improved amazingly.