Things then were otherwise, the fox was unkenneled, or the stag unharbored at daybreak, and killed if the scent lay well, sooner or later, before sunset—runs were reckoned by hours, hounds picked for their staunchness not their fleetness, horses bought not for their speed but for their stoutness, and the longest, steadiest last rider, not the most daring or the foremost won the palm of the chase, were it brush or antler, when the game fox was run into, or the gallant stag turned to bay.
The gentlemen, who were gathered on the broad, bare brow of the one-tree hill, were in all, twelve or thirteen in number, all at first sight men of gentle blood and generous education, although as there ever is, ever must be in every company, whether of men or of inferior animals, there was one to whom every eye, even of the unknown stranger or the ignorant peasant, would have naturally turned as evidently and undoubtedly the superior of the party, both in birth and breeding; he mingled nevertheless with the rest on the most perfect terms not of equality only, but of intimate familiar intercourse and friendship. No terms of ceremonial, no titles of rank or territorial influence, but simple Christian names passed between those gay and joyous youths; nor was there any thing in the habit of the wearers, or the mounting of the riders, to indicate the slightest difference in their positions of social well-being and well-doing. One youth, however, who answered to the name of Gerald, and sometimes to the patrimonial Howard, was so far the handsomer both in form and feature, the statelier in stature, the gracefuller in gesture, the manlier in bearing, the firmer and easier of seat and hand on his hunter, that any one would have been prompt to say almost at a glance, there is the man of all this gentle and generous group, whom, if war wakes its clangor in the land, if external perils threaten its coasts, or internal troubles shake its state, foreign war or domestic strife will alike find the foremost, whether in his seat with the senate, or in his saddle on the field, wielding with equal force and skill the stateman’s, scholar’s, soldier’s eye, tongue, sword—all honored him, indeed, and he deserved that all should honor him.
I have omitted, not forgotten or neglected, to mention as first and fairest of that fair company, a bevy of half a dozen fair and graceful girls—not like the gentlemen, all of one caste, but as was evident, not so much from the difference of their grace and beauty—though in these also there was a difference—as from the relative difference of position which they maintained, four remaining somewhat in the rear of the other two, and not mingling unless first addressed in the conversation, and from some distinction in the costliness and material of their attire.
A mounted chamberlain, with four or five grooms, who stood still farther aloof, in the rear of the ladies in waiting, and two or three glittering pages standing a-foot among the latter, in full tide of gallantry and flirtation, their coursers held by the grooms in attendance, made up the party. From which must always be excepted the huntsman, the verdurer, and eight or ten yeomen prickers, in laced green jerkins, with round velvet caps, like those worn by the whippers-in of the present day, and huge French-horns over their left shoulders, who were seen from time to time appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in the glades and dingles of the hill-side covert, and heard now rating the untimely and fallacious challenge of some wayward and willful puppy, now cheering the earnest and trusty whimper of some redoubted veteran of the pack, as he half-opened on a scent of yester-even.
The hounds had been in the coppice above an hour, and two-thirds of its length had already been drawn blank—the gentlemen were beginning to exchange anxious and wistful glances, and two or three had already consulted more than once or twice their ponderous, old-fashioned repeaters—and now the elder, shorter and fairer of the two damsels, giving the whip lightly to her chestnut palfry, cantered up to the side of Gerald Howard, followed by her companion, whose dark redundance of half-disheveled nut-brown tresses fell down from beneath a velvet cap, with a long drooping plume, on each side of a face of the most exquisite oval, with a high brow, long, jet-black eyelashes, showing in cold relief against her pure, colorless cheeks, for her eyes were downcast, and an expression of the highest intellect, which is ever found in woman mingled with all a woman’s tenderness and softness. She was something above the middle height, with a figure of rare slenderness and symmetry, exquisitely rounded, and sat her horse at once most femininely and most firmly, without the least indication of manliness in her seat or demeanor, yet with a certain of-at-homeness in her position and posture, that showed she could ride as well, perhaps as boldly, as the best man among them.
“Ah! Gerald, Gerald,” said the elder girl, laughingly, as she tapped him on the arm with the silver-butt of her riding-whip, “is this your faith to fair ladies, and especially to this fairest Kate, that you deluded us from our soft beds at this untimely hour, with promise to unharbor us a stag of ten within so many minutes, all for the pleasure of our eyes, and the delectation of our hearts, and here have we been sitting on this lone hill-side two hours and upward, to the great craving of our appetites and the faintness of our hearts, yearning—as the queen’s good Puritans would have it—after creature comforts—out on you! out on you, for a false knight, as I believe not, for my part, that there is one horn or hoof from the east to the west on the hill-side—no, not from the ‘throstle’s nest’ to the ‘thorny brae.’ ”
“Ah! sister mine, art so incredulous—but I will wager you or ere the Talbots reach that great gray stone, with the birch boughs waving over it like the plumes, as our bright Kate would say, of a dead warrior’s helmet over his cold brow, we will have a stag a-foot—ay, and a stag of ten.” And instantly raising his voice to a quicker and clearer note—“See now!” he cried, “see now!” as a superb, dark-colored animal, not lower than a yearling colt at the forehand, leaped with a bound as agile as if he was aided by wings, on the cope-stone of the dry stone wall which bounded the hither side of the hill coppice, with vast, branching antlers tossed as if in defiance, and a swan-like neck swollen with pride and anger. He stood there an instant, self-poised, self-balanced, “like the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill”—uttered a hoarse, belling cry, peculiar to the animal in his season, and then sailing forth in a long, easy curve, alighted on the springy turf, whose enameled surface he scarce dinted, and then swept up the gentle slope almost toward the admiring group on the brow, but in a diagonally curved line that would carry him in the long run to the south-west of them, at the distance of perhaps a hundred yards.
“Tayho! Tayho!” burst in a clear and cheery shout from the excited lips of Gerald Howard.
And instantly from every part of the hill-side from east to west, from the throstle’s nest to the “thorny brae,” from ten well-blown French-horns burst the wild call Tarà-tarà—tara-tantara-ra—tara-tantara-tantara—ra—ra—rah—“Gone away—gone away—gone away—away—away!” and the fierce rally of the mighty Talbots broke into tongue at once through the whole breadth and length of the oak coppice, as they came pouring up the hills, making the heather bend and the coppice crash before them like those famed Spartan hounds of Hercules and Cadmus,
“When in the woods of Crete they bayed the bear—