“I am.”
“Then you should be the very man for a fat and purblind friend who is driven to making pilgrimages on other people’s business. It is an error, sir, to be considered honest and good-tempered. How would a week’s saddle-shaking help your hunger. You have the took of a man too full of bile.”
John Gore looked into Mr. Pepys’s florid, short-sighted, and shrewdly amiable face.
“Are you going into the country?”
“Yes, like a Jew to Babylon. For of all the things I abominate, John Gore, commend me to country inns and the sloughs that bumpkins call roads. Being plump, Jack, I am piteously popular with certain officious insects, and when I consider it, I am moved by the reflection that these insects might split their affections out of curtesy to a strapping sailor.”
Mr. Pepys turned abruptly in his bustling way, dragging John Gore round by the elbow.
“We will go back by boat and dine, and after dinner a friend can refuse nothing. Take count of my inflictions, John Gore: Item one, to visit a female cousin and inquire into some business where she has been robbed and skinned by some rogue of a steward; and the woman is monstrously ugly, Jack, with not so much as a simper to make a man feel gallant. Item two, to go in person and render some private matter to Lord Montague who is resting—resting in one of his accursed country houses; it is no real business of mine, John Gore, but the kind of sottish business that a man allows himself to be saddled with because he is what people call trustworthy. Item three, to ride on to Portsmouth and poke my nose into certain unsavory messes there. This is what it means, sir, to be a man of affairs, and the most popular purse-carrier in an accursedly large family.”
John Gore laughed at Mr. Pepys’s declamatic energy, knowing him to be a man who would read a beggar a sharp lecture and then give him sixpence to drink with on the road.
“When do you start?” he asked.
“To-morrow.”