There is no sign of movement, however, except where the hounds are working through tangled growth of sedge and brier with ceaseless waving of their “rush-grown tails,” as Somerville phrases it, and for a while no whimper is heard. Impetuous spirits are beginning to be a little dashed by the dread that this brake may for once be blank; then a light challenge is heard from a bitch that never lies, and the huntsman answers with a cheer. To that sound every hound flies eagerly, and the chorus of their music clangs like a carillon. Another brief pause, while hearts beat high, hats are thrust tightly down, horses are pressed up to their bits, and the squadrons stand in severed ranks like cavalry waiting for the bugle to sound a charge.
Now there rises at the far corner, clear and shrill, a “Gone away!” that electrifies everybody. Hounds are out in a twinkling as their huntsman dashes forward with a spirit-stirring “Hoic, holloa,” and a few short, sharp blasts of his horn. Then the headlong rush of a hundred horsemen sweeps like a thundering mountain torrent down the slope. In that glowing stream a few dark habits flutter, and all the first flight men and women charge a blackthorn fence abreast. By this time the pack is half a field ahead, rising with ferocious dash, and skimming like a flock of wild doves over the grass. Three or four men are down in the ditch, more than one loose horse is sailing along in gay career, rejoicing to be free, and the boldest riders have to harden their hearts as they face a ragged bullfinch with a broad grip towards them, and a stiff ox-rail a yard or two on the far side. Some take a strong feel of their bridles and pull back into a hand gallop, hoping by a double effort to negotiate the obstacle cleverly; others send their horses out at steeplechase pace, riding for an almost certain fall, but trusting that by sheer impetus they may be able to clear the timber or smash it. There is a sharp crunching of thorn twigs, a repeated rapping of hoofs on the timber, a loud crash as one gallant horse breasts the rail, shivers it into atoms, staggers, and recovering himself, goes on again in hot pursuit; the dull thuds of some heavy falls, and then all who are left of the line that swept so proudly down hill at the outset speed on, a shattered section of their former strength, but with two dainty habits still proudly holding their places in the first flight.
The road-riding division has been swiftly scattered in all directions. One column is galloping hard towards some well-known coverts five miles off. Regardless of the fact that our fox would have to travel dead up wind every yard of the way to reach there, these skirters place confidence in their pilot, who boldly asserts his knowledge of the hunted one’s point, because he has taken “that very line twice before.” It is strange how some men, who might go straight enough across country if left to their own devices, will often follow the lead of a rank impostor of this order simply because he can ride like a demon after dinner “across the walnuts and the wine,” and is always taken at his own valuation until found out. Nobody ever saw him perform the daring feats he has been credited with, but many have followed him mile after mile on the “’ard ’igh road,” and kept the secret carefully to themselves, lest in exposing him they should have to confess how they also rode the run. Not that one exposure would abash him much, for he has always a variety of excuses ready to explain why he failed to get through the crowd at the start, or took a wrong turn at a critical point, and so had to make up his lost ground by a short cut. Resplendent in garb of closest conformity with conventional ideas—a single-breasted coat, long in the waist and with square-cut, ample skirts, beneath which are just visible the faultless folds of breeches that fit like skin about his knees; boots without a wrinkle or a blemish in the brilliancy of their enamel; delicately tinted tops that are not the fraction of an inch too long or too short for Fashion’s fastidious eye; a cravat which quaint old Jack Parker would say “must have been starched and ironed on him,” and a gardenia in his button-hole—this youth is, from the crown of his polished silk hat to the buckle of his silver spurs, the perfection of scrupulous neatness, and the ideal presentment of a Meltonian sportsman; but his riding to hounds is a melancholy delusion. Conspicuous by the obtrusive correctness of his “get up,” he is the centre of much misplaced admiration among the fair at every meet; and, equally conspicuous now as he heads the torrent that rolls down a lane, he is the subject of misplaced confidence also.
Once thrown into the wake of such a pilot and fairly committed to a road, while Leicestershire hounds are flying like swallows over the grass four fields away—
“Not a nose to the ground, not a stern in the air,”
even you, bold rider, know how next to impossible is the chance of getting to them again. Like a stout swimmer caught in a rapid, from which all struggles to escape are vain, you can only float on with the foaming current, deafened by its din, paralyzed by its force, and hurl anathemas at the unconscious head of that weak being whose example led you to plunge into mid-stream. If he had shown the white feather palpably you would never have followed him; but it is the boastful funker’s characteristic that he never gives you cause to suspect the fear that is in him. He looked up to the last stride like going at that bullfinch, but just then the hounds seemed to swing round a little. He saw this, and in a second was shaping his swift course for the nearest gate; you hesitated, thinking he must surely know the country best, and, having hesitated, were lost.
Let me not be misunderstood. I condemn no man merely because he shirks a big jump, for not all of us have the nerve or the confidence, the horsemanship or the quick, resolute judgment to hold our own with hounds when they are racing hard over a strongly-fenced country. Such gifts in combination are not vouchsafed to one in every hundred, even among those who hunt with the Quorn, and he who frankly admits that nothing would tempt him to put his horse at any obstacle more formidable than a sheep hurdle may be a sportsman to the backbone, worthy of our highest respect; but Leicestershire is not quite the country for him. Only a man’s assumption of courage and attempts to cloak his cowardice make him and the action ridiculous. Nor would I for a moment hint, as John Warde once did, the fastidiousness which marks Meltonians in matters of hunting costume is a sign of effeminate weakness. A perfectly dressed man is never out of place except in the ruck; and to do the most foppish youths justice, it must be said that funking is not their characteristic fault. Digby Collins, one of the quietest, boldest, and best riders to hounds in his day that any “provincial” country, or the shires for that matter, could boast, summed up the exquisite’s character in brief when he said: “Your true hunting dandy would as soon think of omitting those minutiæ and obvious sacrifices to the Graces as he would of turning aside from a nasty place for fear of soiling them; and if he can carry his splendors well to the front for forty minutes from Ranksboro’ Gorse or the Coplow, nor fear to smirch them in the muddy waters of the Whissendine, who shall blame him?”
There are half a dozen of this type holding their own now in the first flight, from whose doings our thoughts have been for a few brief moments turned aside. Dandies they are in every detail, scrupulous even as to the correct length and width of the bow above their boots, and fond of personal adornment as the bewitching maiden whose white-vested habit has flashed past them once or twice, and whose presence has nerved them to all that man dare do. The wiry huntsman, full of dash and fire for all his fifty years, rides straight as he rode it from Waterloo Gorse nearly a quarter of a century ago; and the master, hoping to shake off the incubus of exuberant youth, puts his horse at the stiffest timber, where nothing but fine nerve in a crisis can save him from a crushing fall. But neither these nor the hounds, turn which way they will, can get half a field away from those half-dozen dandies who charge an oxen as their soldier forefathers did a line of infantry, and count fifteen rapturous minutes with the Quorn as worth a cycle of slow hunting in Clayshire.
As the line of chase bends down wind a little, and the bitches can no longer drive at topmost speed, they are in danger of being overridden. One youth, more reckless than the rest, lands over a double almost on top of the pack. The master’s reprimand is muttered in D minor, but he looks unutterable language, against which the thickest hide should not be armor-proof. The offending youth, however, speeds on with unruffled composure, his imperturbability reminding one of another thrusting pursuer in a distant hunt whose propensity for pressing hounds off a line the M. F. H. ironically rebuked by requesting him to take particular care not to jump on one of them, as it was a special favorite. Not a jot abashed, the youth replied: “I have a shocking bad memory for hounds, and I am afraid he will have to take his chance with the others.”
If our fox had held on up-wind he could not have stood before hounds another mile at the pace they drove over those first ten meadows. But now the line bends with a sharper curve from the easterly breeze, and the speed slackens somewhat, but only just enough to let the second flight up as we find our faces set straight at the brook that never fails to thin a Leicestershire field. We can already see the willow trees that mark its course. One ragged thorn fence and two furlongs of furrowed water-meadow lie between us and the yawning channel. That fence does not look forbidding; but ride at it carefully, for old gaps unmended mean that there is some other obstacle beyond. It may be broad, it may be deep, and the branches droop as if over a ditch, but you cannot afford to chance anything now. A crumpler here would take half the remaining breath out of steeds already sorely pressed, and you will want it all for a bigger effort presently. That warning came not a minute too soon. The old horse pricks his ears, but his rush had best be restrained. Sloping ground on the far side tells of a deep drop, and the horse that goes fast at that will want ready hands controlled by iron nerves to save him as he lands. There goes one! With just a turn too much speed put on at sight of a broad ditch and rotten banks, he spanned the chasm, but that drop was more than wearied forelegs could stand as they struck the steep slope. A falter, a peck, a heavy thud, and the rider executes a somersault two yards clear of the prostrate steed. Now watch how a workman deals with the obstacle. He seems to go at it just as fast, but by a firm, light feel of the mouth he has collected his horse for a supreme effort. The impetus is just enough and no more; the distance has been measured to a nicety; the hunter, well bred and high mettled, leaps “from the hand” without a pause, lands lightly as a bird, and like a bird skims on again.