“Never mind suppositions,” Lavender said, to get rid of the subject. “Tell me, Mosenberg, how is that overture of yours getting on?”
“It is nearly finished,” said the lad, with a flush of pleasure, “and I have shown it in rough to two or three good friends, and—shall I tell you?—it may be performed at the Crystal Palace. But that is a chance. And the fate of it, that is also a chance. But you—you have succeeded all at once, and brilliantly, and all the world is talking of you and yet you go away among mountains, and live in the cold and wet, and you might as well be dead.”
“What an ungrateful boy it is!” Lavender cried. “Here you have a comfortable fire, and hot brandy-and-water, and biscuits, and cigars if you wish; and you talk about people wishing to leave these things and die! Don’t you know that in half an hour’s time you will see that pony come back with a deer—a royal hart—slung across it; and won’t you be proud when MacDougall takes you out and gives you a chance of driving home such a prize? Then you will carry the horns back to London, and you will have them put up, and you will discourse to your friends of the span and the pearls of the antlers and the crockets. To-night after supper you will see the horns and the head brought into the room, and if you fancy that you yourself shot the stag, you will see that this life among the hills has its compensations.”
“It is a very cold life,” the lad said, passing his hands over the fire.
“That is because you won’t drink anything,” said Johnny Eyre, against whom no such charge could be wrought. “And don’t you know that the drinking of whisky is a provision invented by Nature to guard human beings like you and me from cold and wet? You are flying in the face of Providence if you don’t drink whisky among the Scotch hills.”
“And have you people to talk to?” said Mosenberg, looking at Lavender with a vague wonder, for he could not understand why any man could choose such a life.
“Not many.”
“What do you do on the long evenings when you are by yourself?”
“Well, it isn’t very cheerful, but it does a man good service sometimes to be alone for a time; it lets him find himself out.”
“You ought to be up in London, to hear all the praise of the people about your two pictures. Every one is talking of them; the newspapers, too. Have you seen the newspapers?”