[324]
]CHAPTER XV
By the time that arrangements were fully completed, Lord Hexham and the Banneret family had become quite intimate, and in a sense confidential. He had dined with them at the Cecil, where Australian friends were asked to meet him in a quiet way. He was a sociable personage, and the more he saw of his successors at Hexham Hall the more he liked them. Between cultured men of the world there is a certain freemasonry, which deprives social intercourse of all gêne and awkwardness, no matter to what country they belong.
With Mrs. Banneret and her girls his Lordship was much impressed, feeling, as he told her truly, as if he had known them for years. He saw how she sympathised with him; the hard necessity for the eviction—so to speak—of this noble family, after their long and close connection with their ancient home, appealed to her tender heart. Underneath his affectedly frivolous treatment of the subject she divined, with a woman’s intuitive perception, that there was, could not but be, a sore feeling—rising at times to remorse—at the thought [325] ]that, by his own neglect and indolent mental drift, he had forfeited the heritage of his race. To the family change of circumstances she never referred, but he was aware that it was in her thoughts. In her calm, undemonstrative way she conveyed the idea of regret in the abstract, as inseparable from such an exodus. And in his heart he honoured her for the unspoken sympathy.
When the Earl departed for the United Service Club in London, he wrote, thanking Mrs. Banneret and her husband for their hospitable kindness, and, for which he was even more grateful, their delicate consideration for a ruined man—conscious only too keenly of his own shortcomings and inefficient stewardship.
The merry month of May passed with credit, having provided, for once in a way, appropriate weather, including a decent average of sunshine. The midsummer month arrived in all the glory of that delicious time, of roses and lilies, with all vernal triumphs. And now, in the second week of June—flushed June—came to pass a wondrous equine exhibition, the carnival of coach and harness perfection, unapproachable for form and fashion in any other land under the sun—the meeting of the Four-in-Hand Club! What an ecstasy of excitement and admiration possessed these young people when, at the Magazine in Hyde Park, twenty coaches, utterly perfect in their appointments, lined up.
First in order was Colonel Sir Alfred Somerset’s team of chestnuts—not the famous one of three piebalds and a skewbald, so well known, so [326] ]much admired, in days gone by. Next, the regimental team of the Coldstream Guards—the grey team of last year, driven by Sir Pleydell Bouverie; Mr. Hope Morley’s bays, a miracle of matching and stepping together; Colonel Frank Shuttleworth’s black browns; Lord Newlands’ favourite team of dark browns. Then comes another, at which the girls exclaimed, as original and striking—Captain Valentine’s two chestnuts, a roan and a bay; Sir Henry Ewart’s fine chestnuts, with Mr. Albert Brassey’s well-known bays. Mr. Banneret recognised the tall figure of Lord Loch, driving the Grenadier Guards’ bay team.
The horses, of course, commended themselves to the Australian family by their size, power, action, and perfect matching, except, of course, in the cases of intentional chequers of colour. Their lofty crests, their high action, the wonderful finish of harness, coach, livery, servants, and appointments generally, they admitted to transcend anything within their experience. Then the perfect ‘form’ of the drivers, gloved, hatted, ‘frockered,’ and generally turned out à merveille, unapproachable, unequalled in Christendom, or elsewhere.
‘They can’t help carrying themselves well,’ said Eric, ‘with bearing-reins; their heads braced up to the same angle—driven on the bar, too. Not much chance of their pulling unreasonably or getting away with the driver—full of corn and rest as they undoubtedly are. It’s a lovely sight for people who understand horses.’
‘All the same,’ contended paterfamilias, ‘they [327] ]are rather heavy for any work except this show business, and would be none the worse for a blood-cross. With stages of twenty or twenty-five miles and back, our Australian teams would be easily in the lead; none the worse for it either, on the following day. But these horses are not expected to do real work.’
‘Oh, it’s idle to depreciate these turn-outs,’ said Hermione. ‘Nothing in the world can be finer! How I should like to be on the box-seat of that coach with the lovely chestnuts—Captain Quintin Dick’s, aren’t they? And going on to Hurlingham afterwards? We must have a look at the polo there, some fine day. Do we know any one there in that behalf? as I heard a lawyer say in father’s Court, one day.’