Mr Facey Romford's Hounds (46 page)

With a lady like Mrs Watkins, who knew no better than proclaim that her husband only hunted for conformity, and who thought to ingratiate herself with such a sportsman as our hero by sending for a bag-fox from town, it may readily be supposed that the fat-boy's establishment would be very deceptive; and it now occurred to her anxious mind, that if she could get Mr Stotfold to come to Dalberry Lees with his stag-hounds, they would not only retrieve the former disappointment, but also ingratiate themselves very considerably with Mr Romford. She thought a stag-hunt would be the very thing to tempt him with; make such a nice change from the fox-hounds; and the more she thought of it, the better she liked it. And, without consulting friend Willy, she determined to carry out the idea.

Migratory masters not being very ceremonious, though none of them had even seen the fat boy, yet Cassandra Cleopatra “Dear Sir'd” him on behalf of her father, inviting him to dine and stay all night at Dalberry Lees, and turn his stag out on the lawn the next day.

The invitation came opportunely, for somehow Squeakey, who was not often asked twice to the same place, was beginning to feel the want of society other than the Nook afforded, and he gladly instructed Tomkins, the station master—to whom (not being a good speller himself) he gave £5 for conducting his correspondence—to accept the invitation on behalf of himself, his stag, and his hounds.

And, having thus laid the foundation of another “uproar,” Miss Cassandra was presently at her desk again, on behalf of mamma, inviting her “Dear Mr Romford” to come to meet a brother master of hounds; saying it wasn't Mr Hazey, but not telling him who it was. And Romford, albeit very wary, and not at all anxious to meet any of the masters of hounds whose kennels he had laid under contribution for hounds, considered, on reflection, that none of them would be likely to visit such a muff as old Willy; and Anna Maria's charms having now somewhat paled before the effulgent light of Cassandra Cleopatra's ducats, he, too, accepted the invitation, and so made the Dalberry Lees ladies supremely happy.

T
AKING IT IN A GALLOPING
point of view, there is no doubt that the stag-hunter has a decided advantage over his brethren of the chase, whether fox-hunters or thistle-whippers, in always being sure of his game. He is like a man with his dinner in his pocket, sure of a feed wherever he is. Whether the stag-hunter's game will run or not, is another question; but the same may be said of the fox and the hare. Still, the stag-hunter never has a blank day; he is sure of seeing the animal descend, at all events, and if he won't condescend to run, the true sportsman has the same privilege that the costermonger had with his donkey “vot vouldn't go”—namely, the right of “larruping him.” To the fair sex the stag is truly invaluable; and we should think the ladies would poll twenty to one in favour of the stag over the fox. They see the actual animal that has to be hunted, instead of having to draw upon their imaginations for the idea. Then, look at the independence of the thing. While the fox-hunter's anxieties continue all the year round, aggravated by perfidious keepers, faithless friends, and are never more acute than on the particular morning of the meet, the stag-hunter turns about in his bed with the easy indifference of the sluggard, conscious that he, at all events, will be all right, and can lay his hand on his game on the instant. No trappers, no shooters, no unpunctual earth-stoppers, disturb the calm serenity of his repose. He is not afraid of the foot people molesting the cover, or of lazy sportsmen stopping short by its side. The hare-hunter may go flop, flop, flopping about the country, peering into all the bushes and tufts he comes near, without finding what he wants; but the stag-hunter has his proud beast under lock and key, and has only to shoot the bolt, give him a kick, and set him a-going.

Then there is something fine, wild, and romantic in the idea of stag-hunting, heightened by the pictures one sees of the performance,—the forest glade, the boundless moor, the impassable-looking ravines, the glassy lake, the horns, the hounds, the hubbub. It is the happy confusion of fiction with fact, the blending of the glories of the past with the tameness of the present, that tends to keep the flag of stag-hunting flying in the ascendant. Still, as with Stotfold, so with other masters, many people did not care to see the stag-hounds a second time. They like to say they have seen a stag-hunt, and having seen one are satisfied, and don't let out that things were not quite what they expected. And now for our friend Mr Stotfold.

We wish we could accommodate the sporting reader with a list of Mr Stotfold's stag-hounds; but, unfortunately, the same difficulty presents itself that we encountered at the outset of this story with regard to Mr Romford's pedigree—namely, that we did not know anything; the fact being, that Mr Stotfold did not keep any list. That, however, is in reality of little importance for his huntsman, Jack Rogers, being a liberal of the first class, did not burthen himself with much nomenclature either, and just called the majority of his hounds by any name that came first into his head, so that the Cheerful of one day might be the Careless of another, and perhaps the Countess or Caroline of a third.

Mr Stotfold generally had about five-and-twenty couple of hounds in kennel, hunting from eighteen to twenty couple, according as the exigencies of the rope and the casualties of the chase operated on their number. He did not begin with a whole pack, but bought a lot of drafts at the hammer, which were vacillating between the Indian market and the tan-yard. These came in pretty cheap—some three or four and forty shillings a couple; and a hound being a hound in Mr Stotfold's estimation, he limited himself to three guineas a couple in future—three guineas being his outside price. Of course he got some for a great deal less—for nothing, in fact, sometimes; it being common among huntsman, when they had a headstrong, skirting, babbling, incorrigible animal that they could make nothing of, to exclaim to their whips, “send him to Stotfold! send him to Stotfold!” Hence, as may be supposed, he had a very miscellaneous assortment of crooked-legged, blear-eyed, broken-coated, loose-loined, flat-sided malefactors in his possession.

Two very remarkable hounds, however, he had—namely, Wideawake and Wiseacre; not brothers, as the alliteration would lend one to suppose, for they were as dissimilar as it was possible for animals to be, but so christened respectively on account of their extraordinary powers and performances. So long as Jack Rogers, the huntsman, had either Wideawake or Wiseacre before him, he was pretty sure that the stag was before the hounds, and made himself perfectly easy about the rest of the pack. The reader can therefore do the same, and dismiss the rest as a lot of makeweight incorrigibles, possessed of almost every mental and bodily defect hounds are capable of. We will now describe the flower of the pack, in case any of our readers would like to breed from them.

Wideawake was a yellow or light tan-coloured hound, with bright hazel eyes and a very Spanish-pointer-like head and expression of countenance. Indeed Jack Rogers, who was a bit of a utilitarian, used to say he wouldn't despair of making him point still. He—the hound, that is to say—stood twenty-five inches high, with a drooping kangaroo-like back, terminating in a very abruptly-docked tail, looking, indeed, more like an Italian iron, as used in laundries, than a hound's stern. Nor were his personal defects his sole demerits. He ran mute, and being a queer, unaccountable-looking animal, was as often taken for the stag as for a hound. “Yeas, ar seed him,” the countrymen would reply to Jack's inquiry if they had seen the stag, “yeas, ar seed him; short tail and arl, a-goin' as hard as ivir he could lick.”

Wiseacre was quite a different description of animal, being of the bulldog-like order, black and white in colour; very much the sort of animal one sees chained under a carrier's cart. He was short and thick, with a big bald face, loaded shoulders, crooked legs, and flat feet. Unlike Wideawake, he was of the vociferous order; and though he did not throw his tongue prodigally, he yet did it in such a solemn sententious sort of way as always to carry conviction to the pack. He could hunt both the stag and Wideawake, and run under Wideawake's belly when he came up with him. Between the two, Jack reckoned he could catch almost anything; Wideawake making the running, and Wiseacre keeping the clamorous party on the line.

And it was a fine, cheering, invigorating sight to stand on a rising ground—Rounhay or Greenley Hill, for instance—and view the whole panorama of the chase. The noble but unantlered monarch lobbing and blobbing across country, making for all the railway stations, cabbage garths, and horse-ponds he could see, with the deficient-tailed Wideawake leading the boisterous pack by some hundred yards or so, while sedulous Wiseacre plied his nose diligently (doing a little skirting occasionally), to recall his comrades in case they overshot the joint scent of Wideawake and the stag, Jack Rogers and his plump master crashing and cramming after them. And now for a word about Rogers.

Jack Rogers, as we will now take the liberty of calling him, began life as a circus man, being attached to the then flourishing
troupe
belonging to the late Mr Nutkins, so favourably known throughout the southern counties; and Jack was great both in the saddle and the sawdust, enacting the drunken huzzar with the greatest fidelity, and throwing somersaults without stint or hesitation. Unfortunately, however, he had a difference with the clown, Mr Smearface, who, instead of visiting Jack with imaginary cuts with his whip, used to drop it into him with such a hearty goodwill as caused Jack, who was amazingly strong and an excellent boxer, to thrash him, not figuratively, but literally, within an inch of his life. To escape the consequences that seemed likely to ensue, Jack bolted to Boulogne, where he presently became boots at the “Roast Beef of Old England Hotel,” a house, we need hardly say, greatly frequented by the English. Here Jack took to learning the language, and adapting himself to the manners and customs of the country, whereby he greatly bettered his condition; for the English like to get a lesson in French for nothing, and Jack, being a sharp, clever fellow, adapted himself to their humours, calling himself Jean Rougier, getting his ears bored, wearing moustache and a good deal of bristly hair about his round, good-humoured face. At length Jack tired of “mossooing,” and returned to England at the active age of forty, just as old Father Time had shot the first tinge of grey through the aforesaid bristly jet-black hair. He then became a valet to a young gentleman of the name of Pringle—Billy Pringle—whose mother was what the servants call “a quality lady”; that is to say, a lady of rank,—to wit, the Countess of Ladythorne, wife of the Right Honourable the Earl of Ladythorne, of Tantivy Castle, in Featherbedfordshire. Here Jack—or rather Jean, for he still retained the
persiflage
of the Frenchman—did very well, having plenty of society and little to do, beyond cheating the young gentleman, who was a very easy dupe. Unfortunately for Jean, however, his master's mother, before being a countess, had filled the honourable office of a lady's maid, and was well versed in the mysteries of servitude generally, and resented Jack's premature abstraction of clothes and constant purchase of infallible recipes at his master's expense,—recipes for making boots black, recipes for making boots brown, recipes for making boots white, recipes for making boots pink, recipes for making gloves white, recipes for making gloves drab, recipes for making gloves cream-colour, and so on through the whole catalogue of cleanable, renovateable articles of attire.

And, having hired Jack for her son when she was not a countess, but a Mrs, her ladyship was very plainspoken with Jack, who, being full of beans and independence, as these sort of gentry generally are, threw up his place at once, saying it was far too “mean and confining for him,” and cast himself upon the world at large generally, little doubting that he would very soon be sought after. Somehow or other, though, Jack was out in his reckoning, and though he plied both the French and English characters assiduously, and was often apparently within an ace of being hired, yet somehow the engagement always fell through at the last moment, and the seedier Jack got, the quicker came the refusals. One gentleman to whom he offered himself as a French valet wanted an English one; another to whom he offered himself as an English one wanted a Frenchman; a third wanted a taller man, a fourth a thinner man, a fifth a younger man—all requirements that Jack could not comply with. The fact was, that though he was a dark-complexioned man, there was a certain indication about his nose that it would have been well if he could have purchased a recipe for removing. Though he always placed himself with his back to the light when under examination, yet somehow the parties generally got him coaxed round to the window before they were done with the scrutiny. And then came the thanks and the sorries, and the tantalising promises to write if they thought more of him, as if any of them ever meditated doing anything of the sort after they had once got rid of him.

There is nothing so deplorable as a seedy valet. A man had fifty times better be without any than have one of those painfully brushed glazey-clothed gentlemen, who look as if the whole concern had been bought second-hand. Jack, having in the days of his prosperity indulged in bright colours, went more rapidly downhill than the wearer of soberer garbs would have done, and at length he got so shockingly shabby that the gentlemen's gentlemen began to hesitate about passing him on to their masters when he went to look after a place. He was a very different Jack to what he used to be at the second tables when, in the full adornment of jewellery and latitude of presumption, he bullied the pages, and found scarcely anything was good enough for him. Now he was only too glad to sit down in the hall amid the general ruck of servants, and get what he could on the sly.