“Certainly, certainly,” replied the other, in the most off-hand, good-humoured way possible. “You shall have them from my man. I’ll write to him to-night. How much shall I order? You can’t get anything like them at the money: they only stand us in _five guineas a pound_!”
Mr. Sawyer modestly opined “one pound would be quite sufficient for the present;” but he felt as if he had just lost a large double tooth. Without being stingy, it was not the custom in the Old Country thus to throw money away. He fell back upon Brush, sucking at the costly tobacco with considerable vehemence.
“Who is he?” said he, nodding towards the rider of the five-year-old, then cantering on ahead, and sitting well down in the saddle, as he prepared to “lark” over a large fence, to the admiration of the field, instead of defiling through the hand-gate.
“Why, you seem to know him very well,” rejoined Major Brush, smiling (as well he might) at the query: “I thought you seemed very thick, and were going to give him your custom.”
Mr. Sawyer had not the heart to repudiate the soft impeachment. He liked to be “very thick” with a peer, and to have the credit of “giving him his custom” as a visitor and intimate.
“Yes,” he said, “I am; but, somehow, I cannot, for the life of me, remember his title. I’ve no ‘Debrett’ at Harborough; and I’ve such a bad memory for names. Lord—Lord—what the deuce is it? Some Irish peerage, if I remember right?”
Major Brush fairly burst out laughing. “No more a lord than _you_ are, Sawyer,” said he, “though, I grant you, he _ought_ to be a Duke. I thought everybody knew Mr. Varnish, the horsedealer!” And the Major went off at score again, thinking what a capital story he had got against Sawyer for that day at dinner, and a good many days after. A joke, you see, lasts a long time in the hunting season, when the supply is by no means equal to the demand.
And Mr. Sawyer turned his horse’s head out of the crowd, feeling a little humiliated, and not a little disgusted. The five guineas for the cigars stuck horribly in his throat. However, he and Mr. Varnish, as will presently be shown, had by no means closed accounts yet.
But where are the low spirits, blue devils, or uncomfortable reflections that can hold their own for an instant against the cheering sound of “Gone away!”? Three notes on the huntsman’s horn, five or six couple of hounds streaming noiselessly across a field, the rest more clamorous, leaping and dashing through the gorse, a rush of horsemen towards the point at which the fox has broken; and the man who is really fond of hunting has not the vestige of an idea to spare for anything else in the world.