Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/421

 408 him secret. I know it for a fact. I plied my rustic friends every night. ‘Eat you yer victuals, and drink yer beer, and none o’ yer pryin’s and peerin’s among we!’ That’s my rebuff from farmer Broadmead. And that old boy knows more than he will tell. I saw his cunning old eye cock. Be silent, Harrington. Let discretion be the seal of thy luck.”

“You can reckon on my silence,” said Evan. “I believe in no such folly. Men don’t do these things.”

“Ha!” went Mr. Raikes, contemptuously.

Of the two he was the foolishest fellow; but quacks have cured incomprehensible maladies, and foolish fellows have an instinct for eccentric actions.

Telling Jack to finish the wine, Evan rose to go.

“Did you order the horse to be fed?”

“Did I order the feeding of the horse?” said Jack, rising and yawning. “No, I forgot him. Who can think of horses now?”

“Poor brute!” muttered Evan, and went out to see to him.

“Poor brute, indeed!” echoed Mr. Raikes, indignantly; for to have leisure to pity an animal, one must, according to his ideas, be on a lofty elevation of luck, and Evan’s concealment of his exultation was a piece of hypocrisy that offended him.

“Poor brute! yes; we’re all poor brutes to him now. His coolness is disgusting! And look at me! No hat!”

Mr. Raikes surveyed his garments—thought of his refit, and the shining new hat, flew to the heiress awaiting him, and was soon drawn into pleasanter sensations.

The ostler fortunately had required no instructions to give the horse a good feed of corn. Evan mounted and rode out of the yard to where Jack was standing, bare-headed, in his old posture against the pillar, of which the shade had rounded, and the evening sun shone full on him over a black cloud. He now looked calmly gay.

“I’m laughing at the agricultural Broadmead,” he said: ‘None o’ yer pryin’s and peerin’s!’ There is no middle grade in rustic respect. You’re their lord, or you’re their equal. So it is. Though I believe he thought me more than mortal. He thought my powers of amusing prodigious. ‘Dang ’un, he do maak a chap laugh!’ Well, Harrington, that sort of homage isn’t much, I admit.”

“Eh? where are you now?” said Evan.

“Merely reflecting that these rustics are acute in their way,” Jack pursued. “I’m not sure I shan’t feel a touch of regret "

Mr. Raikes rubbed his forehead like one perplexed by self-contemplation.

“I fancy,” said Evan, trying to be shrewd, “you’re a man to be always regretting the day you’ve left behind you.”

Too deep in himself to answer, if indeed he did not despise his friend’s little penetrative insight, Mr. Raikes silently accepted his last instructions about the presentation of the letter to Messrs. Grist, and even condescended to be quiet while the behaviour he was bound to adopt as tutor to a young lady was outlined for him by his companion.

“Even so,” he assented, abstractedly. “As you observe. Just as you observe. Exactly. The poets are not such fools as you take them to be, Harrington!”

Evan knitted a puzzled brow at Jack, beneath him.

Jack pursued: “There’s something in a pastoral life, after all.”

“Pastoral!” muttered Evan. “I was speaking of you at Beckley, and hope when you’re there you won’t make me regret my introduction of you. Keep your mind on old Cudford’s mutton-bone.”

“I perfectly understood you,” said Jack. “I’m presumed to be in luck. Ingratitude is not my fault—I’m afraid ambition is!”

These remarks appeared to Evan utterly random and distraught, and he grew impatient.

It was perhaps unphilosophical to be so, but who can comprehend the flights of an imaginative mind built upon a mercurial temperament? In rapidity it rivals any force in nature, and weird is the accuracy with which, when it once has an heiress in view, however great the distance separating them, it will hit that rifle-mark dead in the centre. The head whirls describing it. Nothing in Eastern romance eclipsed the marvels that were possible in the brain of John Raikes. And he, moreover, had just been drinking port, and had seen his dream of a miracle verified.

When, therefore, Mr. Raikes, with a kindly forlorn smile, full of wistful regret, turned his finger towards the Green Dragon, and said: “Depend upon it, Harrington, there’s many a large landed proprietor envies the man who lives at his ease in a comfortable old inn like that!” it was as the wind that blew to Evan; not a luminous revelation of character; and he gave Jack a curt good-bye.

Whither, with his blood warmed by the wine, and his foot upon one fulfilled miracle, had Mr. John Raikes shot? What did he regret? Perhaps it was his nature to cling to anything he was relinquishing, and he accused his invitation to Beckley Court, and the young heiress there, as the cause of it. Now that he had to move, he may have desired to stay; and the wish to stay may have forced him to think that nothing but a great luck could expel from such easy quarters. Magnify these and consecutive considerations immensely, and you approach to a view of the mind of Raikes.

But he looked sad, and Evan was sorry for him, and thinking that he had been rather sharp at parting, turned halfway down the street to wave his hand, and lo, John Raikes was circling both arms in air madly: he had undergone a fresh change; for now that they were separated, Mr. Raikes no longer compared their diverse lucks, but joined both in one intoxicating cordial draught; and the last sight of him showed him marching up and down in front of the inn, quick step, with inflated cheeks, and his two fists in the form of a trumpet at his mouth, blowing jubilee.