STORMY HORIZON.
The humours of a picnic have been too often described to need
repetition; suffice it to say, that the picnic in question was decidedly
a favourable specimen of its class. Of course everybody voted it to be
the summit of human felicity, to sit in an uncomfortable position upon
something never intended for a seat, beside a table-cloth spread upon
the grass, which, being elastic and uneven, caused everything that
should have remained perpendicular to assume a horizontal attitude. Of
course, when the inevitable frog hopped across the table-cloth, and,
losing its presence of mind on finding itself so unexpectedly launched
into fashionable life, sought refuge in the pigeon-pie, the ladies
screamed little picturesque screams, which were increased
twentyfold when Tom Hazlehurst fished it out with a table-spoon, and
surreptitiously immersed it in the jug of beer, which liquid he artfully
incited Mr. Crane to pour out, thereby landing the frog, decidedly
inebriated and most uncomfortably sticky, upon the elaborately
embroidered shirt-front of Horace D’Almayne. Of course the salt and the
sugar had fraternized, and the cayenne had elicited new and striking
effects by mingling indiscriminately with things in general, and
the sweets in particular; and of course all these shocking disasters
irritated the few and delighted the many, and added immensely to the
liveliness and hilarity of the party.
“Tom, you’re drinking too much champagne!” exclaimed an elderly maiden
sister of Mr. Hazlehurst, decidedly like a hippopotamus in face and
figure. “Mr. D’Almayne, may I trouble you to hand me his glass, the boy
will make himself poorly.”
Thus appealed to, D’Almayne languidly extended his arm in the necessary
direction, but the Etonian was not to be so easily despoiled of his
beverage.
“_Mille pardons_, mounseer!” he exclaimed, mimicking the affected
half-foreign accent with which the exquisite Horace usually spoke;
“_mais c’est tout à fait_--out of the question; _ne souhaitez-vous pas
que vous pouvez l’obtenir?_--don’t you wish you may get it? Equally
obliged to you, but I’d rather do my own drinking myself. Why, my dear
Aunt Betsy, how dreadfully ungrateful of you, just when I was going
to propose your health, too! Silence, gentlemen, for a toast! Come,
Governor (to his father, who, delighted with the young pickle’s ready
wit, was vainly endeavouring to preserve an appearance of majestic
disapproval), fill up; D’Almayne, my boy, no heeltaps; are you all
charged? ‘My Aunt Betsy, and the rest of her lovely sex!--hip! hip! hip!
hurrah!’” So saying, and with a knowing wink at Coverdale, who, if the
truth must be told, encouraged him in his inclination to be impertinent
to D’Almayne, Master Tom tossed down his glass of champagne amidst a
general chorus of laughter. And thus the _déjeûner_ passed off to all
appearance merrily enough; though in two, if not more, of the company a
smiling exterior hid an aching heart.
“Have you seen the rabbit warren yet, Mr. Coverdale? Do come, there are
such a lot of the beggars jumping about! I found my way there before
luncheon, and it won’t take long,” exclaimed Tom Hazlehurst, grasping
Harry’s arm imploringly.
“It strikes me I shall be considered especially rude if I again absent
myself,” was the reply.
“Who by?--the women?” inquired Tom, scornfully. “Never mind them--poor,
weak-minded, fickle things; there is nothing I consider a greater
nuisance than to have a pack of silly girls dangling about one, that
won’t leave a fellow alone; there, you needn’t toss your head and turn
up your nose about it, Emily, beneficent Nature’s done that for you
sufficiently already. Now will you come, Mr. Coverdale? there are some
black rabbits among them, such rum shavers!”
“Are there!” exclaimed Harry, eagerly. “I wonder whether I could
contrive to buy a few couples of them; I want to get some black rabbits
at the park excessively: come along, for our time is growing short, I
expect.” And as he spoke, Coverdale strode off, entirely forgetful of
the pretty Emily, with whom, on the strength of her juvenility, he had
considered he might safely allow himself to laugh and talk, and to whom
he had, therefore, been unconsciously rendering himself very agreeable.
The warren was further than he had expected it would be, and the black
rabbits were so long before they chose to show themselves, that Harry
began to grew sceptical as to their existence; even when they did
appear, a gamekeeper had to be routed out, and terms for the transfer of
ten couples to Coverdale Park agreed upon; so that by the time Tom and
his companion rejoined the pleasure-seekers, there were but few left
to rejoin. These few consisted of the old maiden aunt; a time-honoured
female friend of the same--older, uglier, still more like a
hippopotamus, and with a double portion of the vinegar of inhuman
unkindness in her nature; and, lastly, a plain young lady, the daughter
of nobody in particular, who lived with the time-honoured friend
as companion, in a state of chronic martyrdom, for which perpetual
sacrifice she received thirty pounds a-year, and permission to cry
herself to sleep every night, in misty wonderment why so sad a creature
as she was, should ever have been born into the world. Besides this
uncomfortable trio, who composed the cargo of a brougham, and were
rather a tight fit, there remained Mr. Crane and Alice, who, it seemed,
were waiting for the phaeton, which had not yet made its appearance.
“Upon my word, Miss Hazlehurst,” began the sour friend, addressing the
acidulated aunt, “this is very provoking, ma’am; it’s six o’clock, and
it’s growing cold, and it will be quite dusk before we get home; and I
really believe Miss Cornetoe was right this morning, and that we shall
have a wet night after all.”
“Shall I run down to the inn and see what causes the delay? I must go
there to get my horse,” inquired Coverdale, good naturedly.
“If you would be so kind, we really should be extremely obliged to
you,” returned Miss Hazlehurst senior, with her most gracious and least
hippopotamic smile; and thus urged, Coverdale hurried off.
In the meantime poor Alice, who by no means admired the position of
affairs, and had moreover been considerably alarmed in the morning by
Mr. Crane’s unskilful driving, whispered a pathetic appeal to her aunt
to be allowed to accompany the brougham party,--“she could sit on the
box, Wilson, the coachman, was so inconceivably respectable, and she was
almost sure it would not rain;”--but her aunt was a strong-minded woman,
and a warm advocate of the Crane alliance, and she would not hear of
such a change of plan. As soon as Coverdale arrived within sight of the
inn, he perceived the missing phaeton standing in front of the doorway,
the horses ready harnessed, and the groom seated on the driving-seat;
accordingly he made signs to him to come on, of which, for some
unaccountable reason, the man took not the slightest notice. Surprised
at this, Harry made the best of his way to the spot, and on reaching it
discovered, from the swollen, heated look of the fellow’s features, and
the stupid, obstinate expression which characterized them, that he had
been drinking to excess.
“Why the man is intoxicated!” exclaimed Coverdale, turning to the
ostler, who, with one or two hulking village lads, stood staring at the
coachman with a grin of amusement on their vacant faces; “why did not
you make him get down, and bring the carriage yourself?”
“A did troy, but a woldn’t budge a inch--a be properly drunk to be
zure!”
“Oh, he would not, eh?” inquired Coverdale; then, turning to the groom,
he continued, “Get down directly, my friend, I want particularly to
speak to you.”
To this the groom contrived to stammer out on insolent refusal,
accompanied by a recommendation to Coverdale to mind his own business,
and give orders to his own servants.
“My business just at present is to make you get down from that phaeton,”
returned Harry, his eyes flashing.
“Oh! it is, is it?--I should like to see you do it, that’s all!”
rejoined the other, with a gesture of drunken defiance.
“You shall,” was the concise reply, as, directing the ostler to stand by
the horses’ heads, Coverdale, ere the fellow was aware of his intention,
or could take measures to prevent him, sprang lightly up, forced the
reins from his uncertain grasp, twisted him suddenly round, then placing
his hands under his arms lifted him by sheer strength, and dropped him
to the ground. Having performed this feat with the neatness and celerity
of some harlequinade trick, he glanced round to see that the fellow had
fallen clear of the wheels, and taking the reins, drove off.
While this little affair had been proceeding, the sky had become
overcast, and a few large drops of rain came pattering heavily to
the ground; alarmed by these symptoms, the brougham party no sooner
perceived the phaeton approaching, than they scrambled into their
vehicle and started. As their road lay in a direction opposite to that by
which Coverdale was advancing, they were nearly out of sight by the time
he reached the spot where Alice and Mr. Crane awaited him. Jumping
down with the reins in his hand, he was explaining to the owner of the
phaeton the plight in which he had found his servant, when a faint flash
of lightning glanced across the sky, followed after an interval by
a clap of distant thunder, at which the horses, which were young and
spirited, began to prick up their ears, and evince such unmistakable
signs of alarm, that their master, fearing they were about to dash off,
ran to lay hold of their heads. Misfortune often brings about strange
associations. If any one had that morning told Alice Hazlehurst that
before the day should be over she would have appealed for protection to,
and confided in, “Arthur’s cross, disagreeable friend,” she would have
utterly disbelieved the statement--and yet so it was to be. The moment
Mr. Crane left her side, she turned to Harry exclaiming--
“Oh, Mr. Coverdale, I am so frightened! He will never be able to manage
those horses: he could scarcely hold them in this morning, and the groom
was forced to get down to them twice--he does not know how to drive one
bit!”
Poor little Alice! she was trembling from head to foot, and looked so
pretty and interesting in her alarm, that Harry felt peculiar, he didn’t
exactly know how, about it.
“I’ll speak to Mr. Crane, and persuade him to let me drive you home,”
he replied eagerly. (He would have knocked him down without the smallest
hesitation, if Alice had in the slightest degree preferred it.) “I’ve
been accustomed to horses all my life, and have not a doubt of being
able to manage these, even if the thunder should startle them; so please
don’t look so frightened.”
And as Harry said this with his very brightest, kindest smile,
Alice wondered she had never before noticed how handsome he was, and
began to think he could not be so very cross after all.
When Harry urged his request, Mr. Crane was considerably embarrassed as
to the nature of his reply. In his secret soul he was delighted to be
relieved from the danger and responsibility of driving Alice and himself
home through a thunder-storm; but, on the other hand, he could not
disguise the fact, that by allowing himself to be so relieved, he should
detract from the heroic style of character he wished Alice to impute to
him. Had it been D’Almayne instead of Coverdale who sought to become his
substitute, he would probably, at the hazard of breaking his own neck
and that of his lady-love, have refused to permit him; but he had
observed, as indeed he must have been blind if he had not done,
Harry’s marked avoidance of the young lady, and trusting to these his
mysogynistic principles he, with many excuses and much circumlocution,
agreed to Harry’s proposal that he should ride his horse, and allow him
to drive the phaeton.
“Ahem!--if the storm should come on violently,” observed the
cotton-spinner, as a second growl of thunder became audible, “I shall
wait till it has subsided; so don’t let them expect me till they see me:
getting wet always gives me cold.”
“All right, sir,” returned Harry, as he wrapped Alice carefully up in
his own Macintosh; “take care of yourself by all means--good people
are scarce. We shall see nothing more of friend Crane to-night,”
he continued, as he drove off; “the old gentleman is very decidedly
alarmed--that is, I suppose I ought not to call him an old gentleman,”
he stammered, suddenly recollecting with whom he was conversing.
“Why should you not when he is so?” returned Alice, innocently.
Harry turned his head away to conceal a smile which the _naïveté_ of the
reply had called forth, muttering to himself as he did so, “Poor Crane!”
After a few minutes’ silence, Alice began abruptly, and
apologetically,--
“I’m sure I ought to feel very much obliged to you, Mr. Coverdale--and
indeed I do; this is the second really good-natured thing you’ve done by
me to-day.”
The tone in which she spoke so completely betrayed that surprise was the
feeling uppermost in her mind, that Harry, slightly piqued, could not
help replying--
“You did not, then, give me credit for possessing the least particle of
good-nature?”
Alice smiled as she answered--
“If I had had a proper degree of faith in Arthur’s representations, I
need not have felt surprise.”
The delicate irony of this reply was not lost upon Coverdale; but he
knew that he had deserved it, and, with the ready frankness which was
one of his best characteristics, he hastened to acknowledge it.
“I certainly have done little towards practically vindicating the
character your brother’s partiality has bestowed upon me,” he said; “but
I must be allowed to plead in justification, that I am quite aware of my
own deficiencies, and told Arthur that I had been roughing it abroad
so long, that I was totally unfitted for ladies’ society. He would
not admit the excuse; but it was a full, true, and sufficient one,
nevertheless.”
As he uttered the last words, a dazzling flash of lightning appeared
almost to envelop them, followed instantaneously by a deafening peal
of thunder. Half blinded by the blaze of light, the frightened horses
stopped abruptly, then, terrified at the prolonged thunder, tried to
turn short round; foiled in this attempt by the skill and promptitude of
their driver, they began rearing and plunging in a way which threatened
every moment to overturn the phaeton. Fortunately the road happened to
be unusually wide at this point, and Harry, who never throughout the
affair in the slightest degree lost his presence of mind, deciding that
whatever might most effectually frighten the horses, would create the
impulse they would eventually obey, determined to try the effect of
a little judicious discipline. Accordingly, standing up, he began to
administer the whip to their sleek sides with an amount of strength and
determination which, from the contrast it afforded to the mild and timid
driving to which they were accustomed, so astonished the animals,
that bounding forward with a snatch which tried the soundness of their
harness, they dashed off at a furious gallop; at the same moment, a
second peal of thunder, even louder than the preceding one, increased
their alarm to such a degree, that Coverdale, despite his utmost
efforts, found it completely beyond his power to hold them in.