LAVERICK WELLS
We trust our opening chapters, aided by our friend Leech's pencil, will
have enabled our readers to embody such a Sponge in their mind's eye as
will assist them in following us through the course of his peregrinations.
We do not profess to have drawn such a portrait as will raise the same sort
of Sponge in the minds of all, but we trust we have given such a general
outline of style, and indication of character, as an ordinary knowledge of
the world will enable them to imagine a good, pushing, free-and-easy sort
of man, wishing to be a gentleman without knowing how.
Far more difficult is the task of conveying to our readers such information
as will enable them to form an idea of our hero's ways and means. An
accommodating world--especially the female portion of it--generally
attribute ruin to the racer, and fortune to the fox-hunter; but though Mr.
Sponge's large losses on the turf, as detailed by him to Mr. Buckram on the
occasion of their deal or 'job,' would bring him in the category of the
unfortunates; still that representation was nearly, if not altogether,
fabulous. That Mr. Sponge might have lost a trifle on the great races of
the year, we don't mean to deny, but that he lost such a sum as eighteen
hundred on the Derby, and seven on the Leger, we are in a condition to
contradict, for the best of all possible reasons, that he hadn't it to
lose. At the same time we do not mean to attribute falsehood to Mr.
Sponge--quite the contrary--it is no uncommon thing for merchants and
traders--men who 'talk in thousands,' to declare that they lost twenty
thousand by this, or forty thousand by that, simply meaning that they
didn't make it, and if Mr. Sponge, by taking the longest of the long odds
against the most wretched of the outsiders, might have won the sums he
named, he surely had a right to say he lost them when he didn't get them.
It never does to be indigenously poor, if we may use such a term, and when
a man gets to the end of his tether, he must have something or somebody to
blame rather than his own extravagance or imprudence, and if there is no
'rascally lawyer' who has bolted with his title-deeds, or fraudulent agent
who has misappropriated his funds, why then, railroads, or losses on the
turf, or joint-stock banks that have shut up at short notice, come in as
the scapegoats. Very willing hacks they are, too, railways especially, and
so frequently ridden, that it is no easy matter to discriminate between the
real and the fictitious loser.
But though we are able to contradict Mr. Sponge's losses on the turf, we
are sorry we are not able to elevate him to the riches the character of a
fox-hunter generally inspires. Still, like many men of whom the common
observation is, 'nobody knows how he lives,' Mr. Sponge always seemed well
to do in the world. There was no appearance of want about him. He always
hunted: sometimes with five horses, sometimes with four, seldom with less
than three, though at the period of our introduction he had come down to
two. Nevertheless, those two, provided he could but make them 'go,' were
well calculated to do the work of four. And hack horses, of all sorts, it
may be observed, generally do double the work of private ones; and if there
is one man in the world better calculated to get the work out of them than
another, that man most assuredly is Mr. Sponge. And this reminds us, that
we may as well state that his bargain with Buckram was a sort of jobbing
deal. He had to pay ten guineas a month for each horse, with a sort of
sliding scale of prices if he chose to buy--the price of 'Ercles' (the big
brown) being fixed at fifty, inclusive of hire at the end of the first
month, and gradually rising according to the length of time he kept him
beyond that; while, 'Multum in Parvo,' the resolute chestnut, was booked at
thirty, with the right of buying at five more, a contingency that Buckram
little expected. He, we may add, had got him for ten, and dear he thought
him when he got him home.
The world was now all before Mr. Sponge where to choose; and not being the
man to keep hack horses to look at, we must be setting him a-going.
'Leicesterscheer swells,' as Mr. Buckram would call them, with their
fourteen hunters and four hacks, will smile at the idea of a man going from
home to hunt with only a couple of 'screws,' but Mr. Sponge knew what he
was about, and didn't want any one to counsel him. He knew there were
places where a man can follow up the effect produced by a red coat in the
morning to great advantage in the evening; and if he couldn't hunt every
day in the week, as he could have wished, he felt he might fill up his time
perhaps quite as profitably in other ways. The ladies, to do them justice,
are never at all suspicious about men--on the 'nibble'--always taking it
for granted, they are 'all they could wish,' and they know each other so
well, that any cautionary hint acts rather in a man's favour than
otherwise. Moreover, hunting men, as we said before, are all supposed to be
rich, and as very few ladies are aware that a horse can't hunt every day in
the week, they just class the whole 'genus' fourteen-horse power men,
ten-horse power men, five-horse power men, two-horse power men, together,
and tying them in a bunch, label it '_very rich_,' and proceed to take
measures accordingly.
Let us now visit one of the 'strongholds' of fox and fortune-hunting.
A sudden turn of a long, gently rising, but hitherto uninteresting road,
brings the posting traveller suddenly upon the rich, well-wooded,
beautifully undulating vale of Fordingford, whose fine green pastures are
brightened with occasional gleams of a meandering river, flowing through
the centre of the vale. In the far distance, looking as though close upon
the blue hills, though in reality several miles apart, sundry spires and
taller buildings are seen rising above the grey mists towards which a
straight, undeviating, matter-of-fact line of railway passing up the right
of the vale, directs the eye. This is the famed Laverick Wells, the
resort, as indeed all watering-places are, according to newspaper accounts,
of
'Knights and dames,
And all that wealth and lofty lineage claim.'
At the period of which we write, however, 'Laverick Wells' was in great
feather--it had never known such times. Every house, every lodging, every
hole and corner was full, and the great hotels, which more resemble
Lancashire cotton-mills than English hostelries, were sending away
applicants in the most offhand, indifferent way.
The Laverick Wells hounds had formerly been under the management of the
well-known Mr. Thomas Slocdolager, a hard-riding, hard-bitten, hold-harding
sort of sportsman, whose whole soul was in the thing, and who would have
ridden over his best friend in the ardour of the chase.
[Illustration: MR. THOMAS SLOCDOLAGER, LATE MASTER OF THE LAVERICK WELLS
HOUNDS]
In some countries such a creature may be considered an acquisition, and so
long as he reigned at the Wells, people made the best they could of him,
though it was painfully apparent to the livery-stable keepers, and others,
who had the best interest of the place at heart, that such a red-faced,
gloveless, drab-breeched, mahogany-booted buffer, who would throw off at
the right time, and who resolutely set his great stubbly-cheeked face
against all show meets and social intercourse in the field, was not exactly
the man for a civilized place. Whether time might have enlightened Mr.
Slocdolager as to the fact, that continuous killing of foxes, after
fatiguingly long runs, was not the way to the hearts of the Laverick Wells
sportsmen, is unknown, for on attempting to realize as fine a subscription
as ever appeared upon paper, it melted so in the process of collection,
that what was realized was hardly worth his acceptance; saying so, in his
usual blunt way, that if he hunted a country at his own expense he would
hunt one that wasn't encumbered with fools, he just stamped his little
wardrobe into a pair of old black saddle-bags, and rode out of town without
saying 'tar, tar,' good-bye, carding, or P.P.C.-ing anybody.
This was at the end of a season, a circumstance that considerably mitigated
the inconvenience so abrupt a departure might have occasioned, and as one
of the great beauties of Laverick Wells is, that it is just as much in
vogue in summer as in winter, the inhabitants consoled themselves with the
old aphorism, that there is as 'good fish in the sea as ever came out of
it,' and cast about in search of some one to supply his place at as small
cost to themselves as possible. In a place so replete with money and the
enterprise of youth, little difficulty was anticipated, especially when the
old bait of 'a name' being all that was wanted, 'an ample subscription,' to
defray all expenses figuring in the background, was held out.