Complete Works of R S Surtees

by R S Surtees

  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.

  At this juncture it occurred to Jack that there are other ways of obtaining a livelihood than by valeting, and, though valeting certainly was the easiest and pleasanter line of all, he had no objection to his early professional career, and bethought him of trying his luck in the sawdust circle once more. Accordingly he sought out Mr Crackenthorpe, the manager of Crackenthorpe’s Royal European Hippodrome, and offered his services as a general performer; but twenty years had made a striking change in Jack’s elasticity of limb. Instead of coming cleverly through the paper balloon, after throwing a somersault, he hit his head against the hoop, and sent it flying into the pit. Then, having accidentally slipped from his saddle when rehearsing the part of Billy Button the tailor, he could not regain his seat for some seconds, and was so blown with running alongside the brute and trying to pacify him, that Mr Crackenthorpe lost all patience, and left his locum tenens to bow him out at his leisure. Jack then withdrew from that line entirely, and after driving a country doctor about in his pill-box for three months, who worked him both day and night, he was next found as the odd man at Skidmore’s Livery and Bait Stables in Pont Street, Pimlico, with twelve shillings a week and a hayloft to sleep in. If Sir Bernard Burke, having exhausted the vicissitudes of families, were to turn his hand to the vicissitudes of servants, he would not find a more checkered or eventful career than that of our distinguished friend Mr Rogers.

  But it is a long lane that never has a turn, and Jack’s turn came at last. One fine summer’s afternoon in the height of a London season, when every job-master could send out double the number of vehicles he could supply, and when every caitiff with a coat to his back was elevated to the rank of a coachman, one summer’s afternoon, we say, as Jack was clattering about Skidmore’s yard in the wooden clogs of servitude, with straw bands wrapped around his ankles, our squeakey friend Mr Stotfold came rolling in in a high state of excitement, demanding first the master, then the mistress, then the ostler, then the helper, then anybody he could see. He had just bought ten couple of hounds at Tattersall’s, and didn’t know how the deuce to get them away, or what to do with them when he had got them away. And, as luck would have it, there was nobody in the yard but Rogers — Rogers attired as aforesaid— “but needs must,” says the proverb, “when a certain old gentlemen drives,” and our master had no alternative but to address himself to Jack. He told him candidly how they had knocked the hounds down to him, and how he wanted them housed.

  Now, Jack had a turn for the chase, and when with Mr Pringle at Tantivy Castle, on a visit to his late master’s noble mother, the Countess, had cultivated the acquaintance of Mr Dickey Boggledike, Lord Ladythorne’s huntsman, and knew all about boiling and feeding and kennelling, at least thought he did, and gladly volunteered his services to Mr Stotfold.

  “If Jack could only get a man to mind the yard while he was away, he would go for them himself,” he said, and a job brougham coming in at the moment, he transferred his responsibility to the driver, and, divesting himself of his sabots, put on an old puce-coloured livery vest, now worn almost black, and proceeded on his way to the Corner, inwardly hoping his employer might prove as simple as he looked.

  The hounds were in two lots of five couples each, now, however, clubbed together like a bunch of onions, pulling and striving, and straining all ways to be off they didn’t know where to, and Jack, seeing the position, summoned the intelligent bare-footed man in the old green-collared Surrey hunt coat and cap, who haunts the passage, and directing him to divide them (Jack thinking it would be better for Surrey man to be bit than him), each then seized the tow rope of five couple, and separating them proceeded up the entry, and down Grosvenor Place with his charge, amid cries from the attendant street urchins of “Talli o! talli o! A hunt! a hunt! Vere do you meet? Vere’s the stag? Have you seen my oss? Crikey O! vot a hugly man!” meaning, of course, Mr Rogers. The “hugly” man, however, had his hands too full to be able to resent the indignity, and, moreover, saw the fat boy’s large figure looming in the rear.

  “Handsome is that handsome does,” says the proverb, and the way our friend managed his hounds, and above all the skilful compliments he paid Mr Stotfold on his judgment in buying such a nice-looking lot for so little money, completely ingratiated him with our master, and made Mr Stotfold glad when Jack hinted that he wouldn’t mind giving up the capital place he then had under Mr Skidmore and coming to him. And Jack, not overrating himself — indeed, putting his services rather low, Squeakey and he quickly came to terms, and Jack left his sabots in Pont Street for the man who came after him. He then became a huntsman — huntsman to Mr Stotfold, master of stag-hounds, in which capacity the reader will now have the goodness to view him.

  He had a capital time of it, too, for his master being ignorant enough to hire him, was ignorant enough to keep him also, and a peripatetic stag-hunter like Mr Stotfold was not troubled with those too critical fields that raise or lower the fame of a huntsman, according to the sport he shows. Jack was not only huntsman but master of the horse, buying the meat for the kennel and the forage for the stables, making up in overcharge on the articles what he considered himself underpaid in the matter of wages.

  Hunting on what the swells call the scientific principle was quite beside Jack’s mark. Nevertheless he could ride — ride over almost anything, and also blow the key-bugle, and seldom or ever had he occasion to play —

  Oh where and oh where is my Highland laddie gone?

  in consequence of losing his stag. If he whiles, as he said, let the hounds have a bite of its haunch, it was to make the lobbing gentleman more agile in future, Jack being of opinion that if a hound once put his fangs well into him, the stag would take care not to let him do it again if he could help it. At least, Jack knew he wouldn’t if he were the stag.

  Such, then, was the gentleman now invited by Mrs Watkins to meet our distinguished sportsman Mr Romford, and obliterate the recollection of the Carstangs disappointment.

  XLIV. MR STOTFOLD ARRIVES AT DALBERRY LEES

  RAILWAYS ARE CAPITAL THINGS FOR long distances, but they don’t do much for short ones. It is a grand thing to fly from one end of the kingdom to another in a day, but, for anything within ten miles, there is nothing like having one’s own horse or conveyance. With them there is no hurry or confusion, ten minutes is neither here nor there, but one minute makes all the difference with a railway. It is very provoking to see a train gliding smoothly out at one end of a station as we come hurrying in at the other; yet such things do happen with parties wearing even the best regulated chronometers. But if railways do little for travellers, they do less for visitors, who are generally set down either far too early or much too late — extremes greatly to be deprecated. It is tiresome in the short winter days, when there is no alleviating turn to take round the farm or the garden, to have to consume the intervening time before dinner in the house, still worse to meet the first course leaving the dining-room, all hope of one’s coming being extinct.

  Neither of thes
e casualties, we are happy to say, awaited our friend Mr Stotfold, for, having consulted his amanuensis, Mr Tomkins, the station-master at Pickering Nook, that official chose him a train that would not only set him down in good time, but secure him a conveyance to Dalberry Lees, “It being no fun,” as Tomkins truly said, “to have to walk several miles in the dark.” This was a through train, and many of the passengers having come long distances and made themselves comfortable, were not inclined to be disturbed, certainly not to admit a stranger of our friend’s dimensions, so the usual artifices were resorted to, dummies exhibited, and babies plied at the windows, it being a well ascertained fact that there is nothing so efficacious as a babby for keeping men out of a carriage. But Loggan, the guard, always had a place in reserve for a “gent” like our friend, and now obsequiously met and led him along the line to a newly-painted carriage, in the centre compartment of which were only an elder lady and her handsome, but slightly passé, daughter, who he knew would have no objection to the introduction of such a stranger as Squire Stotfold; indeed Loggan rather thought that the two travelled for the purpose of picking up an eligible young man if they could. And the fat boy having squeezed himself in sideways, squeaking his apologies as he got himself seated, proceeded to unfold his rug and set his tongue agoing on a sort of general issue expedition — weather, crops, concerts, balls, pic-nics, the usual staple of unmarried conversation — making himself what the ladies call very agreeable, or very forward, according as they or another is the object of attention.

  But it was a short-lived triumph, for they had hardly got the full swing of conversation established ere the slackening speed of the train announced a coming stop, and it presently pulled up before the now familiar Firfield Station. Loggan’s rosy face then appeared at the carriage window, announcing to our master of stag-hounds that his railway journey was at an end. Mr Stotfold had, therefore, to tear himself away from his newly-found friends before he had even run them to their homes. With a radiant smile to each, out then he rolled, wrapper and all, and presently began squeaking for a porter— “Porter! Porter! Porter!” — attracting all eyes to the windows to see such a jolly cockatoo, all green and yellow and red, for the fat boy did not seem to think he could make himself sufficiently conspicuous. The train presently sped on, and having given up his ticket, he began squeaking for the ‘bus.