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Market Harborough
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[Illustration: “‘It’s open I think,’ remarked the Honourable.”]
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Market Harborough
and
Inside the Bar
By
G. J. Whyte-Melville
Author of “Sarchedon,” “Cerise,” “Black but Comely,” etc.
Illustrated by John Charlton
London
Ward, Lock & Co., Limited
New York and Melbourne
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CONTENTS
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CHAP. PAGE
I. One of the “Old Sort” 9
II. “Mr. Job Sloper” 18
III. “Your Handwriting, Sir” 22
IV. Marching Orders 29
V. “Boots and Saddles” 36
VI. Hazy Weather 46
VII. A Leicestershire Lark 51
VIII. A Dove of the Same 59
IX. Four o’Clock, Stables 65
X. “Hail! Smiling Morn!” 72
XI. “A Merry Go-rounder” 80
XII. “Dead for a Ducat” 87
XIII. “After Dark” 97
XIV. “Before the Dawn” 106
XV. Taking a Hint 111
XVI. Riding to Sell 116
XVII. “Tempted to Buy” 126
XVIII. The Dove-cote 134
XIX. “The Boot on the Other Leg” 143
XX. Deeper and Deeper 148
XXI. The Magnum Bonum 154
XXII. A Wet Night 159
XXIII. Doughty Deeds 169
XXIV. The Ball 173
XXV. The Race 182
XXVI. The Match 188
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_INSIDE THE BAR._
CHAP. PAGE
I. “The Genius Loci” 193
II. Tips, the Horse-breaker 207
III. Mr. Naggett 221
IV. Tom Turnbull 234
V. Old Ike, the Earth-stopper 247
VI. Miss Merlin 259
VII. Miss Merlin 272
VIII. Young Plumtree 286
IX. In the Trap 299
X. The Old Squire 312
XI. The Soakington Field-Day 325
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MARKET HARBOROUGH
OR,
_How Mr. Sawyer went to the Shires_
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CHAPTER I
ONE OF THE “OLD SORT”
MOST men have a sunny spot to which they look back in their existence,
as most have an impossible future, to attain which all their energies
are exerted, and their resources employed. The difference between these
visionary scenes is this, that they _think_ a good deal of the latter,
but _talk_ a good deal of the former.
With some fellows the golden age seems to have been passed at Eton, with
others at the Universities. Here a quiet, mild clergyman gloats over the
roistering days he spent as a Cornet in the Hussars; there an obese old
gentleman prates of the fascinations of London, and his own successes as
a slim young dandy about town. Everybody believes he liked that rosy
past better than he did. Just as we fancy that the hounds never run
nowadays as they used, when we had lungs to holloa and nerves to ride;
and that even if they could go the same pace hunters are not now to be
got of the stamp of our old chestnut horse, concerning whose
performances we think no shame to lie, year by year, with increasing
audacity; there is nobody left to contradict us, and why should we not?
Now, Mr. Sawyer, too, will descend into the vale of years, with a
landmark on which to fix his failing eyes, an era which shall serve as a
date for his reminiscence, and a starting-point for his after-dinner
yarns. This shall be the season when Mr. Sawyer went to the Shires. It
is not yet very long ago. Perhaps it may be well to relate a few of his
adventures and doings in those localities ere they lapse into the realms
of fiction under the romantic colouring with which he will himself begin
to paint them, when their actual freshness has worn off.
Touching Mr. Sawyer’s early history, I have collected but few
particulars, not enjoying the advantage of that gentleman’s acquaintance
till he had arrived at years of maturity. I gather, however, that he
matriculated at Oxford, and was rusticated from that pleasant University
for some breach of college discipline, sufficiently venial in itself,
but imbued with a scarlet tinge in the eyes of the authorities. I have
heard that he rode an Ayrshire bull across Peckwater in broad daylight,
having previously attired himself in a red coat, with leathers, &c.,
complete, and clad the patient animal in a full suit of academicals.
Also that he endeavoured to mollify his judges by apostrophising the
partner of his trespass, in the words Horace puts into the mouth of
Europa,
“Si quis infamem mihi nunc juvencum;”
and so on to the end of the stanza. As, although Mr. Sawyer’s fluency in
all Saxon expletives is undeniable, I never heard him make use of any
language but his own, I confess to my mind this story bears upon the
face of it the stamp of improbability, and that perversion of the truth
from which Oxonian annals are not entirely free.
It is a good old fashion to commence a narrative by a personal
description of its hero; such as you would see in the _Hue and Cry_, or
the advertisements for that missing gentleman in the _Times_ who has
never been found yet, and whose humble costume of half-boots, tweed
trousers, and an olive surtout, with a bunch of keys and three-halfpence
in the pockets, denotes neither affluence nor display. Upon this
principle let me endeavour to bring before the mind’s eye of my readers
the outward semblance of my worthy friend, John Standish Sawyer, a man
of mark, forsooth, in his own parish, “and justice of peace in his
county, simple though he stand here.”
Mr. Sawyer is a well-built, able-bodied personage, standing five feet
eight in the worsted stockings he usually affects, with a frame
admirably calculated to resist fatigue, to perform feats of strength
rather than agility, and to put on beef: the last tendency he keeps down
with constant and severe exercise, so that the twelve stone which he
swings into his saddle is seldom exceeded by a pound. “As long as I ride
thirteen stone,” quoth Mr. Sawyer to his intimates after dinner, “no man
alive can take the shine out of me over a country. Mason! Mason’s all
very well for a _spurt_! but where is he at the end of two hours and
forty minutes, through woodlands, in deep clay? Answer me that! and pass
the bottle.”
Our friend’s admirers term his person square: his enemies, and he has a
few, call it “clumsy:” certainly his hands and feet are large, his limbs
robust, but not well-turned; and though it would make him very angry to
hear me, I confess his is not my _beau idéal_ of the figure for a
horseman. Nevertheless, he has an honest English face, round and rosy,
light-grey eyes, such as usually belong to an energetic and persevering
temperament, with thin sandy hair, and a good deal of stiff red whisker.
Altogether, he looks like a man you would rather drink with than fight
with, any day. Perhaps, if very fastidious, you might prefer letting him
alone, to doing either. Of his costume, I shall only say that it
partakes on everyday occasions of the _decidedly_ sporting, with a
slight tendency towards the _slang_. Its details are those of a dress in
which the owner is ready to get on horseback at a moment’s notice; nay,
in which he is qualified, without further preparation, to ride four
miles straight-on-end, over a stiff country; so enduring are its
materials, and so suggestive of equestrian exercise is its general fit.
Also, on Sundays, as on week-days, in town or country, he delights in a
“five to two” sort of hat, with a flat brim and backward set, which
denote indisputable knowledge of horseflesh, and a sagacity that almost
amounts to dishonesty.
Not that Mr. Sawyer ever bets; far from it. He elbows his way indeed
into the ring, and criticises the two-year-olds as they walk jauntily
down to the starting-post, as if he speculated like the Leviathan, and
owned a _string_ like Sir Joseph Hawley’s; but all this is simply _ex
officio_. Wherever horses are concerned, Mr. Sawyer deems it incumbent
on him to make a demonstration, and he goes to Tattersall’s as regularly
on the Sunday afternoons in the summer, as you and I do to dinner. Like
the Roman Emperor, the horse is his high-priest, and the object of his
idolatry.
I am afraid hunting is going downhill. I do not mean to say that there
is not an ever-increasing supply of ambitious gentlemen who order coats
from Poole, boots from Bartley, and horses from Mason, to display the
same wherever they think they are most likely to be admired; but I think
there are few specimens left of the old hunting sort, who devoted
themselves exclusively to their favourite pursuit, and could not even
bear to hear it mentioned with anything like levity or disrespect; men
whose only claim to social distinction was that they _hunted_, who
looked upon their red coat as a passport to all the society they cared
to have, and who divided the whole community, in their own minds, into
two classes—“men who hunt,” and “men who don’t.”
In these days people have so many irons in the fire! Look at even the
_first_ flight, with a crack pack of hounds; ten to one amongst the
half-a-dozen who compose it you will find a soldier, a statesman, a
poet, a painter, or a Master in Chancery, whilst “maddening in the rear”
through the gates come a posse of authors, actors, amateurs, artists, of
every description, till you think of Juvenal’s stinging lines, and his
Protean Greek, who was
“Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes,
Augur, schœnobates, medicus, magus,” &c.,
and vote a fox-hunter the conglomeration of all these different
accomplishments.
But Mr. Sawyer did not trouble himself much about Juvenal or his
opinions. Finding his classical career a failure, and, what was more
disappointing, his anticipated season with Mr. Drake cut short in
consequence of his misadventure with the bull, he gave up the little
reading which he had been compelled to take in hand, and confined his
studies exclusively to _Bell’s Life_, _The Field_, with its questions
and answers to correspondents, suggestive alike of inventive ingenuity
as of exhaustive research, and the _Sporting Magazine_. The fact is,
what with hunting three and four times a week, talking of it the
remaining days, and thinking of it all the seven, with constant visits
to the stable and a perpetual feud with his blacksmith, Mr. Sawyer’s
mind was completely filled with as much as that receptacle could be
thought capable of containing.
My hero, like the champions of the Round Table, is perhaps seen to the
greatest advantage on horseback. Let me introduce him to my reader,
riding like a knight through the wilds of Lyonnesse, up a deep muddy
lane, as he returns from hunting in the dull November twilight.
“Capital bit of stuff,” says Mr. Sawyer, knocking off the ashes of his
cigar with his dogskin-clad finger, and apostrophising his “mount,” a
very little grey horse, with an arched neck and light mouth, and a tail
set on high on his quarters. “Capital bit of stuff,” he repeats,
dangling his feet out of the stirrups; “as game as a pebble, and as neat
as a pin.” “Two hundred—two hundred and fifty! You’re worth two hundred
and fifty, every shilling of it” (he had bought him of a fishmonger for
forty pounds and a broken-winded pony). “Worth as much as any horse
_can_ be to carry thirteen stone. Hang it; you’d _fetch_ all the money
at Tattersall’s if any of _the customers_ could only have seen you go
to-day!”
Then Mr. Sawyer placed his feet in the stirrups, and fell to thinking of
his day’s sport.
They had really had a good run—a fine, wild, old-fashioned fox-hunting
sort of run—from two hundred acres of woodland, down a couple of miles
of bottomless ravine, and away over deep stiff ploughs and frequent
straggling fences, till they reached the far-stretching Downs. Here
their fox had made his point good up-wind, and the pace even of those
square-headed, deep-ribbed, heavy-timbered hounds had been liberal
enough to satisfy the most exacting. Mr. Sawyer remembered, with a glow
of pride, how, when they descended into the low country once more, he
had led the field, and jumped an awkward stile, into a lane, to the
admiration of all beholders. He could _ride_, to give him his due; and,
moreover, he knew what hounds were doing, and was familiar with the
country. Therefore he had slipped away with them, when the pack, after
three or four turns round the huge woodland, had forced their fox into
the open; therefore he had kept on the down-wind side of the ravine
aforesaid, and therefore he had been fortunate enough to see the fox
handsomely run into, in an old double hedgerow, after an hour and forty
minutes, during which he had unquestionably “gone best” from end to end.
The huntsman said so—a wary ancient, who, never showing in front at any
period, or running the slightest risks in the way of pace or fencing,
had a huntsman’s peculiar knack of turning up when he was wanted,
particularly towards the finish. The doctor said so—an old rival, whose
high character for riding entitled him to be generous; and the
fishmonger, previous possessor of the grey, loudly affirmed, with many
oaths which it is unnecessary to repeat, that “Muster Sawyer always was
a hout-and-houter, and had gone audacious!” Contrary to custom, none of
the rest of the field had been near enough to give an opinion, though
excuses as usual were rife for non-appearance. To judge from his own
account, no man ever misses a run, save by a concatenation of
circumstances totally unprecedented. Besides every normal casualty, he
would always seem to have been baffled throughout by an opposing fiend
of remarkable perseverance and diabolical ingenuity.
As the sun went down in a deep crimson segment, like the glow of a ruby,
or the danger-signal on a railway, Mr. Sawyer lit a fresh cigar, and
began to ponder on the merits of his own riding and the capabilities of
his stud. As the daylight waned, and the grey ash of his “choice
Laranaga” (seven-and-forty shillings the pound) grew longer and longer,
he began to think so much talent was quite wasted in “the
provinces”—that he was capable of better things than “showing the way”
to the half-dozen of red-coats and couple of farmers who constituted his
usual “gallery”—that he was too good for the Old Country, as its
sportsmen affectionately designate that picturesque locality in which
they follow the chase—and that he was bound to do himself and the little
grey horse justice by visiting the wide pastures, the prairie-like
grazing-ground of the crack countries; to use his own vernacular, that
he ought to “cut the whole concern for a season, and have a turn at the
Shires.” His cogitations took some such form as the following:—“Here am
I, still on the sunny side of forty—in the prime of my life, of my
pluck, of my strength, and—ahem!—of my appearance—none so dusty neither,
on horseback, whatever Miss Mexico may think, with her olive skin and
her stuck-up airs. After all, I don’t know that I’d have had her, though
she _was_ a thirty-thousand pounder! I don’t like ’em touched with the
tar-brush. I’m all for the thorough-bred ones—women, as well as horses.
Well, here I am, wasting my life in these deserted ploughs. Even if we
do get a run, such as we had to-day, I have no one to talk to about it.
The Grange is a crafty crib enough, and I’m as comfortable there as a
bachelor need to be; but I can’t go home, night after night, to bolt my
dinner by myself, smoke by myself to digest it, and go to bed at ten
o’clock, because I’m so bored with John Sawyer, and it’s the only way to
get rid of him. No, hang it! I’ll emigrate; I’ll go and _hibernate_ in
the grass. I’ll make Isaac a stud-groom; I’ll buy a couple more nags,
the right sort too—show those dandified chaps how to _ride_, and perhaps
sell the lot for a hatful of money at the end of the season, and have
all my fun for nothing.” Deluded man! how feasible the latter project
sounds—how difficult to realise!
The idea once having taken possession of our friend’s mind, soon found
itself cramped for room in that somewhat circumscribed area. All
dinner-time he was absent and preoccupied; even Scotch broth, a
beef-steak pudding, a damson tart, and toasted cheese, did not tend to
settle him. Two of the Laranagas were converted into smoke and ashes
before he could come to anything like a definite conclusion. Though a
temperate man habitually (for the sake of his nerves), he rang for the
old brandy labelled V.O.P., and mixed himself a real stiff one, with
boiling water and one lump of sugar. I have my suspicions that his final
decision was partly its result. The great difficulty was where to go. A
man of limited acquaintance and reserved manners has at least this
advantage—that all parts of England are equally attractive as regards
society. Then he had hunted too much to believe newspaper accounts of
sport, so that looking up the old files of _Bell’s Life_ assisted him no
whit to a conclusion; also being of an inquiring turn of mind, wherever
fox-hunting was concerned, he had amassed such a quantity of information
concerning the “flying countries,” that it took him a considerable time
and another glass of brandy-and-water to digest and classify his facts.
Altogether it was a complicated and puzzling question. First he thought
of Leamington and the Warwickshire North and South, with regular
attendance on the Atherstone and one field-day per week with the
Pytchley; but many considerations combined to render the Spa ineligible
as his head-quarters. In the first place, the evening gaieties made his
hair stand on end. Since his rejection by Miss Mexico, Sawyer was no
dancing man; and indeed even in the first flush of his courtship he was
seen to less advantage in a white neckcloth than a blue bird’s-eye. Some
men’s hands and feet are not made to fit boots and gloves as constructed
by our neighbour the fiery Gaul, and for such it is wise to abstain from
“the mazy,” and to rest their hopes of success on other and more
sterling qualities than the vapid demeanour and cool assurance which
triumph in a ball-room. Then, with all his fondness for the applause of
his fellow-creatures, he did not quite fancy making _one_ of that crowd
of irregular-horse who appear on a Wednesday at Crick or Misterton, to
the unspeakable dismay of the Pytchley _lady_ pack, who, if there is
anything _like_ a scent, scour away from them as if for their very
lives; and although it is doubtless a high compliment that two hundred
gentlemen in scarlet should patronise the same establishment, Mr. Sawyer
thought that as far as _he_ was concerned, the number might as well stop
at one hundred and ninety-nine.
I believe, however, that the dread of those wide and fathomless rivers
which are constantly jumped, in Warwickshire, by at least _one_
amphibious sportsman out of a daring field, and of which the width from
bank to bank, according to the newspapers, is seldom less than
seven-and-twenty or more than seven-and-thirty feet, was what
principally terrified our friend. Accustomed to a leading championship
at home, he shrank from such aquatic rivalry, and resolved that, with
all its fascinations, Warwickshire at least should not have the benefit
of his patronage.
Once, after a steaming gulp of the stimulating fluid, the idea of Melton
flashed across his mind, but it was dismissed as soon as entertained.
“I’m not such a fool as I look,” quoth Mr. Sawyer; “and I don’t mean to
keep eight hunters and a couple of hacks to meet a set of fellows every
day, who won’t condescend to notice me unless I do as they do. Whist and
dry champagne, and off to London at the first appearance of frost; ride
like a butcher all day, risking twice as much neck as I do here, and
then come out ‘quite the lady’ at dinner-time, and choke in a white tie,
acting the part of a walking gentleman all the evening. No! Melton won’t
suit my book at any price. Besides, I’d never sell my horses there; they
order their hunters down from London just as they do their ’baccy’ and
their breeches.” So the idea of Melton was dismissed; and a vision of
Oakham, or Uppingham, or even Billesdon rose in its stead. He could not
quite get those tempting pastures, with their sunny slopes and flying
fences, out of his head. The same objection, however, applied to the
last-mentioned places that drove him from home, viz. the want of
society. That deficiency seemed to threaten him wherever he set up his
staff. At Wansford he would be as solitary as in the Old Country; also
he would be further from High Leicestershire than he liked. The same
drawback was attached to Lutterworth, and Rugby, and Northampton. It was
not till the third glass that the inspiration seized him. Dashing the
end of his cigar under the grate, he rose from his easy-chair, stuck his
hands in his pockets and his back to the waning fire, stamped thrice on
the hearth-rug, like a necromancer summoning his familiar, and exclaimed
aloud, “The very place! I wonder I never thought of it before. Strike me
ugly, if I won’t go to Market Harborough!”
Then he finished his brandy-and-water at a gulp, lit his candle, and
tumbled up to bed, where he dreamed he was riding a rocking-horse over
the Skeffington Lordship, with no one in the same field with him but the
late Mr. William Scott, the vehemence of whose language was in exact
proportion to the strength of the beverage which had constituted his own
night-cap.
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