BESS OF THE WOODS
I
Richard Jeffray thrust back his chair from Sir Peter Hardacre’s dining-table, and stood stiff and ill at ease, like a man but half sure of his own dignity. The Dutch clock had struck three, and the winter sunlight was still flooding through the tall windows upon the polished floor. A log-fire blazed on the irons; decanters and glasses glistened on the table about a great china punch-bowl covered with green dragons and blue mandarins.
It was early in the afternoon, and yet Parson Jessel’s great wig was flapping forward with an unsaintly tilt over the pastor’s left eye. Sir Peter, a fat and tuberose-nosed aristocrat, in a blue coat and a brocaded waistcoat, sprawled in his arm-chair at the end of the table, his paunch abutting against the board, his full-bottomed wig flowing in slovenly profusion about his blotchy face. On the far side of the table, with his back to the fire, sat Mr. Lot Hardacre, a heavy-shouldered gentleman in a scarlet hunting-coat and buckskin breeches, whose culture was half that of a jockey, half that of a card-sharper. A long clay pipe drooped from the angle of Mr. Lot Hardacre’s mouth, and his coarse, chapped hands were stuffed into the pockets of his breeches.
Richard Jeffray bowed to these three gentlemen as though he was not wholly at his ease. Sir Peter Hardacre’s ungainly torpor suggested that he had fed largely and too well.
“You will pardon me, Sir Peter,” he said, with a glance at Mr. Lot’s sodden and impudent face, “the days are short, and I must be in the saddle. You will make excuses for me to the ladies.”
The baronet puffed out his lips and elevated his eyebrows sleepily. Parson Jessel had already begun to snore. Mr. Lancelot alone appeared to retain the sparklings of intelligence in his protuberant blue eyes. He removed his pipe from his mouth, and winked at Richard Jeffray with an air of benignant patronage.
“Sister Jilian’s above, cousin,” he said, “strumming on the harpsichord. We’re coarse devils, Dick, eh? Jil is a gentle creature, and don’t swear—at least, not often.”
The baronet, bulging like a Silenus, nodded his head, and fumbling for his snuff-box spilled half the contents over his waistcoat.
“Going, Dick?” he quavered. “Gad, boy, it’s damned early; we shall be with the ladies in the turn of a box. Sit down, lad. Son Lot will tell ’ee how he won fifty guineas from that card-clipping Captain Carteret last week—sapped the soldier fairly. Egad, Lot has marrow in him. Parson, pass the punch.”