Fin was quite right. They had not gone above a couple of hundred yards
down the lane, with Mr Mervyn between them, swinging his empty soup
tin, when they became aware of a loud whistling, as of some one
practising a polka. Then it would cease for a few moments, and directly
after begin again.
"There's somebody," said Fin; and then, turning a sharp corner, they
came suddenly on Mr Frank Pratt, perched in a sitting posture on the
top of a huge, round lith of granite, with his back to them, and his
little legs stretching out almost at right angles. He was in his
threatened tweeds, a natty little deerstalker's hat was cocked on one
side of his head; in one hand he held a stick, and in the other a large
pipe, from which he drew refreshment between the strains of the polka he
tried to whistle.
Mr Frank Pratt was evidently enjoying the beauty of the place after his
own particular fashion; for, being a short man, he had a natural love
for elevated places. As a boy, he had delighted in climbing trees, and
sitting in the highest fork that would bear him, eating cakes or
munching apples; as a man, cakes and apples had given way to extremely
black pipes, in company with which he alternately visited the top of the
Monument, the Duke of York's column, and the golden gallery of Saint
Paul's, where he regretted that the cost was eighteen-pence to go any
higher. In these places, where it was strictly forbidden, he indulged
in surreptitious smokes, from which his friends deduced the proposition
that if not the cakes, probably the apples had been stolen.
The tail stone then being handy, Mr Pratt was enjoying himself, when he
suddenly became aware of steps behind, and hopped down in a most
ungraceful fashion to stare with astonishment so blank, that by the time
he had raised his hat Fin had gone by with her chin raised in the air,
and a very disdainful look upon her countenance, and her sister, with a
slightly heightened colour, had plunged into conversation with Mr
Mervyn.
Pratt stood half paralysed for a few moments, watching the party, until
a turn in the lane hid them from sight, and then he refilled and lit his
pipe, from which the burning weed had fallen.
"It's a mistake," he said at last, between tremendous puffs at his pipe.
"It's impossible. I don't believe it. One might call it a
hallucination, only that the beardless female face is so similar in one
woman to another that a man easily makes a mistake. Those cannot be the
same girls that we saw at the steeplechase--it isn't possible; but there
is a resemblance, certainly; and, treating the thing philosophically, I
should say here we have the real explanation of what is looked upon as
infidelity in the male being."
A few puffs from the pipe, and then Mr Pratt reclimbed to his perch
upon the stone.
"I'll carry that out, and then write it down as a position worthy of
argument. Yes, to be sure. Here it is. A man falls in love--say, for
the sake of argument, at first sight, with a pretty girl, quite unknown
to him before, upon a racecourse. Symptoms: a feeling of sympathetic
attraction; a throbbing of the pulses; and the heart beating bob and go
one. Say he gets to know the girl; is engaged to her; and is then
separated by three or four hundred miles."
A few more puffs, and sundry nods of the head, and then Mr Pratt went
on.
"He there encounters another girl, whose face and general appearance are
so much like the face and general appearance of girl number one, that
his secondary influences--to wit, heart, pulses, and sympathies
generally--immediately give signals; love ensues, and he declares and is
accepted by girl number two, while girl number one says he is
unfaithful. The man is not unfaithful; it is simply an arrangement of
Nature, and he can't help himself. Infidelity, then, is the same thing
in a state of change. Moral: Nature has no business to make women so
much alike."
Mr Pratt got down once more from his perch, and began to stroll up the
lane, to encounter Trevor at the end of a few minutes.
"Did you meet any one?" was the inquiry.
"Yes," said Pratt, "a gentleman and two ladies."
"Well?"
"Well?"
"Did you not know them?"
"Ah!" said Pratt, "then you, too, noticed the similarity of feature, did
you?"
"Similarity?"
"Yes; wonderfully like the ladies we met at the steeplechase, were they
not?"
Richard Trevor looked hard in his friend's face for a moment, and then
they walked on side by side; for at a turn of the lane they met the
young keeper, who had so suddenly changed the aspect of the encounter on
the course.
"Ah, Humphrey!" said Trevor, "I'm glad I've met you. I'll have a walk
round the preserves."
The young keeper touched his hat, changed the double gun from one
shoulder of his well-worn velveteen coat to the other, whistled to a
setter, and led the way to a stone stile.
"Another curious case of similarity of feature," said Trevor, laughing.
"Well, no--I'll give in now," said Pratt; "but I say, Dick, old fellow,
ought coincidences like this to occur out of novels?"
"Never mind that," said Trevor, "the keeper here, who used to be my
playmate as a boy, was as much astonished as I was--weren't you,
Humphrey?"
"Well, sir," said the young man, "when I see you th' other morning, I
couldn't believe my eyes like, that the gentleman who'd pummelled that
fellow was the one I'd come up to London to meet. I saw you, too, sir,"
he said, touching his hat to Pratt.
"Yes, my man," said Pratt, "and felt my toe. I'm sorry to find you did,
for you've blown up one of the most beautiful propositions I ever made
in my life."
"Well, now then," said Trevor, "I'll see about matters with you, Lloyd;
but, by the way, you had better be Humphrey, on account of your father."
"Yes, sir; Humphrey, please, sir," said the young man.
"Well, now then, as we go on," said Trevor, "if it don't bore you,
Pratt, we'll have a talk about farm matters."
"Won't bore me," said Pratt; "I'm going in for the country gentleman
while I stay."
"Well, then, Humphrey, how are the crops!"
"Well, sir," said Humphrey. "Ah, Juno! what are you sniffing after
there?" This to the young dog, which seemed to have been born with a
mission to push its head up rabbit burrows too small for the passage.
"Well, sir, begging your pardon, but that dog's took more looking after
than e'er a one I ever had."
"All right, go on," said Trevor, following the man across a broad,
rock-sided ditch, with a little brook at the bottom.
"Well, sir," said the keeper, "the corn is--"
"Here, I say, hold hard a minute! This isn't Pall Mall, Trevor,"
shouted Pratt. "How the deuce am I to get over that place?"
"Jump, man," cried Trevor, laughing and looking back. "That's nothing
to some of our ditches."
Pratt looked at the ditch, then down at his little legs, and then blew
out his cheeks.
"Risk it," he said, laconically; and, stepping back a few yards, he took
a run, jumped, came short, and had to scramble up the bank, a little
disarranged, but smiling and triumphant. "All right," he said, "go on."
"Corn is, on the whole, a fair crop, sir," said Humphrey.
"And barley?"
"Plenty of that too, sir. But I've a deal of trouble with trespassers,
sir."
"How's that?" said Trevor, looking round at the bright, rugged hill and
dale, with trees all aglow with the touch of autumn's hand.
"You see, sir, it's the new people," said the keeper.
"What new people?"
"The old gentleman as bought Tolcarne, sir."
"Well, what of him?" said Trevor, rather anxiously.
"Well, sir, he's a magistrate and a Sir, and a great City of London man,
and he wants to be quite the squire. The very first thing he does is to
get two men to work on the estate, and who does he get but that Dick
Darley and Sam Kelynack; and a nice pair they are, as you may know,
sir."
"Seeing that I've been away for years, Humphrey, I don't know," said
Trevor.
"Well, sir, they was both turned out of their last places--one for a bit
o' poaching, and the other for being always on the drink. They know I
don't like 'em--both of 'em," said Humphrey, with the veins swelling in
his white forehead; "and no sooner do they get took on, than they begin
to worry me."
"How?" said Trevor, smiling.
"Trespassing on my land, sir--I mean yours, sir, begging your pardon,
sir. They will do it, too, sir. You see, there's a bit of land at the
corner where Penreife runs right into the Tolcarne estate--sort of
tongue o' land, sir--and to save going round, they make a path right
across there, sir, over our bit of pasture."
"Put up a fence, Humphrey," said Trevor.
"I do, sir, and bush it, and set up rails; but they knocks 'em down, and
tramples all over the place. Sir Hampton's got an idea that he's a
right to that bit, as his land comes nigh surrounding it, and that makes
'em so sarcy."
"Well, we must see to it," said Trevor. "I want to be good friends with
all my neighbours."
"Then you've cut out your work," said Pratt, drily.
"You won't be with Sir Hampton, sir, you may reckon on that," said
Humphrey. "Lady Rea is a kind, pleasant lady enough, and the young
ladies is very nice, sir, and he's been civil enough to me; but he
upsets everybody nearly--him and his sister."
"Never mind about that," said Trevor, checking him. "I wish to be on
good terms with my neighbours, and if there be any trespass--any
annoyance from Sir Hampton's people--tell me quietly, and I will lay the
matter before their master."
"Or we might get up a good action for trespass," said Pratt. "But, by
the way," he said, stopping short, and sticking one finger on his
forehead, "is this Sir Hampton the chuffy old gentleman we saw at the
steeplechase?"
"Yes, sir; and as told me I might get up on the box-seat. That was him,
you know, as that blackguard prodded with his stick."
"Phew!" whistled Pratt. "I say, Dick," he whispered, "the old chap did
not see us under the best of auspices."
"No; it's rather vexing," was the reply.
They walked on from dense copse to meadow, through goodly fields of
grain, and down in deep little vales, with steep sides covered with
fern, bramble, and stunted pollard oaks.
"Poor youth!" said Pratt, and stopped to mop his forehead. "How
low-spirited you must feel to be the owner of such a place. It's
lovely. Nature's made it very beautiful; but no wonder--see what
practice she has had."