“But, sir,” he added, “why do they bump on the outside of a horse, when they might sit and grow fat in a buggy? There’s Tim, sir, my boy Tim, is growing quite thin and haggard; he says riding don’t agree with him. I’m afraid he won’t do much with Drummer to-day.”
A straight race, on a dead level, lacks features of varied brilliancy. Peter Skerrett had arranged that the field should start alternately from either end, that all might see alphas and omegas. Thus the proud and numerous start and the disarrayed and disappointed finishes might be viewed by all spectators. All might share the breathless sympathies of doubts and enthusiasms for the winner.
Peter Skerrett, too busy to think of poor Arabella, who, in her bower, was thinking much of him and sighing as she thought how unworthy she had been in her long education of vanities and follies; Peter now brought forward his rank of equestrians. The sea was still, and hardly rustled as it crept along the sands, unterrifying to horse or man; yet the air was cool and the sun not too ardent to be repelled by a parasol.
As the line formed, the ladies chose their champion men and bet gloves recklessly on them; the gentlemen chose champion horses, with a view also to riders, and bet reckfully.
It appeared that Tim Budlong was—bluntly—drunk, and Drummer lost his backers. There was a murmur of sympathy as Dunstan rode up on Pallid; sympathy admiring for this pair, a best of the animal and a best of the man, and sympathy pitiful for the man of a soul that must bear the anxiety and perhaps the sorrow that all knew of. A noble fellow and a generous the common suffrage made him, already distinguished for bold ability and frank disdain of cowardice and paltering. When experience had made him a little more indulgent to the limping progress and feeble vision and awkward drill of mankind, rank and file, he would be a great popular leader. So thought the Nestors, feeling themselves fired by the fervours of this young Achilles.
Belden had overdone his costume, as such men often do. It was urgent with him to look young; he achieved only a gaudy autumnal bloom. Knockknees, malgré that ungainly quality of his legs, was an imposing, masculine style of horse. As he passed, stopping to speak intimately to Mrs. De Flournoy, several of the intuitionless women envied that person and several men called him “lucky dog.”
Blinders was not a lady’s man. His horse was, however, one of the favourites. Very few men but Blinders would have ventured to mount, or even approach, such a rascal brute. Nosegay knew that his master was invincible, but he wished to inform him that they were a pair of invincibles; accordingly, despising the two snaffles, the one in hand, the other around the rider’s waist for steady drag, Nosegay would fling his head about and then move on without reference to requests that he tarry or stand at ease.
“That there ’oss’ll overrun ’isself,” said Figgins to Mr. Waddy’s Bowery Boy, with whom he had bets on Pallid, money up. “’E’ll make a four-mile ’eat hout of hevery mile ’eat.”
“Gaaz, Johnny Bull!” returned the Bowery. “Thar ain’t no hoss in a hide as kin git away from Mr. Blinders. It caan’t be did. He’s one er the bohoys, he is.”
Bob O’Link’s horse was a mare. The sentimental fellow had named her Lalla Rookh. She was a delicate beauty, but it was quite evident that her master would not give himself the trouble to win.