The baronet, bulging like a Silenus, nodded his head, and fumbling for his snuff-box spilled half the contents over his waistcoat.
“Going, Dick?” he quavered. “Gad, boy, it’s damned early; we shall be with the ladies in the turn of a box. Sit down, lad. Son Lot will tell ’ee how he won fifty guineas from that card-clipping Captain Carteret last week—sapped the soldier fairly. Egad, Lot has marrow in him. Parson, pass the punch.”
A loud snore from the ecclesiastic and a thick laugh from Mr. Lancelot betrayed how fate had dealt with the fuddled shepherd of the Hardacre souls. Sir Peter thrust out his lower lip, and swore.
“Damme,” he said, “what a dull dog it is! Dick, lad, I’ll match his sermons against the heaviest brew in Sussex. Kick him, Lot; kick his shins, boy; the bowl ain’t empty yet.”
The interlude was opportune. Richard Jeffray bowed once more to the baronet, mumbled an excuse, and leaving Mr. Lot to the breaking of the cleric’s shins and slumber, stepped nimbly towards the door. Sir Peter gazed after him with an expression of fat and over-fed pity. “The lad was a nice lad, but, damn it, he couldn’t drink, and, God help him, he wouldn’t swear!” The baronet shook his wig and took snuff with some asperity. Meanwhile, Mr. Lot was amusing himself by holding the bowl of his pipe under the parson’s nose. Richard, as he closed the door, heard a mighty and portentous sneeze herald the awakening of that saintly soul.
Richard Jeffray rode out through Hardacre Park with a look of melancholy reflection on his face. He turned, when he had ridden two hundred yards or more, and gazed back at the old house, with its stately red turrets and high gables clear-cut against the thin blue of a winter sky. A great beechwood rose on the slope of the hill behind the place, while around it lay the terraced walks and trim lawns of the garden. Closely clipped hollies and yews rose above the still water of the moat. The warm, red brick, mellow in the slanting light of the sun, the ivied buttresses, the lichened stone, seemed to tone rarely with the purple gloom of the wood beyond. And this betowered, tall-chimneyed, hundred-windowed house, this rare casket memorable with all the stateliness of a stately past, held for its jewels a bevy of boozing, fox-hunting bullies whose oaths and lewd badinage seemed fit only for a tavern.