Erymanth, far too real a gentleman to be shocked at a man's eating when he was hungry, was quite insensible of the by-play until Harold, reduced to extremity at sight of one delicate shaving of turkey's breast, burst out, 'I say, Richardson, I must have some food. Cut me its leg, please, at once!'
'Harry,' faintly groaned Eustace, while Lord Erymanth observed, 'Ah! there is no such receipt for an appetite as shooting in the snow. I remember when a turkey's leg would have been nothing to me, after being out duck- shooting in Kalydon Bog. Have you been there to-day? There would be good sport.'
'No,' said Harold, contented at last with the great leg, which seemed in the same proportion to him as a chicken's to other men. 'I have been getting sheep out of the snow.'
I elicited from him that he had, in making his way to Erymanth, heard the barking of a dog, and found that a shepherd and his flock had taken refuge in a hollow of the moor, which had partly protected them from the snow, but whence they could not escape. The shepherd, a drover who did not know the locality, had tried with morning light to find his way to help, but, spent and exhausted, would soon have perished, had not Harold been attracted by the dog. After dragging him to the nearest farm, Harold left the man to be restored by food and fire, while performing his own commission at the castle, and then returned to spend the remainder of the daylight hours in helping to extricate the sheep, and convey them to the farmyard, so that only five had been lost.
'An excellent, not to say a noble, manner of spending a winter's day,' quoth the earl.
'I am a sheep farmer myself,' was the reply.
Lord Erymanth really wanted to draw him out, and began to ask about Australian stock-farming, but Harold's slowness of speech left Eustace to reply to everything, and when once the rage of hunger was appeased, the harangues in a warm room after twenty miles' walk in the snow, and the carrying some hundreds of sheep one by one in his arms, produced certain nods and snores which were no favourable contrast with Eustace's rapt attention.
For, honestly, Eustace thought these speeches the finest things he had ever heard, and though he seldom presumed to understand them, he listened earnestly, and even imitated them in a sort of disjointed way. Now Lord Erymanth, if one could manage to follow him, was always coherent. His sentences would parse, and went on uniform principles--namely, the repeating every phrase in finer words, with all possible qualifications; whereas Eustace never accomplished more than catching up some sonorous period; but as his manners were at their best when he was overawed, and nine months in England had so far improved his taste that he did not once refer to his presentation at Government House, he made such an excellent impression that Lord Erymanth announced that he was going to give a ball to introduce his niece, Miss Tracy, on her seventeenth birthday, in January, and invited us all thereto.
Eustace's ecstacy was unbounded. He tried to wake Harold to share it, but only produced some murmurs about half-inch bullets: only when the 'Good-night' came did Harold rouse up, and then, of course, he was wide awake; and while Eustace was escorting the distinguished guest to his apartment, we stood over the hall fire, enjoying his delight, and the prospect of his being righted with the county.
'And you will have your friends again, Lucy,' added Harold.
'Yes, I don't suppose Lady Diana will hold out against him. He will prepare the way.'
'And,' said Eustace, coming downstairs, 'it is absolutely necessary that you go and be measured for a dress suit, Harry.'
'I will certainly never get into this again,' he said, with a thwarted sigh; 'it's all I can do to help splitting it down the back. You must get it off as you got it on.'
'Not here!' entreated Eustace, alarmed at his gesture. 'Remember the servant. Oh Harold, if you could but be more the gentleman! Why cannot you take example by me, instead of overthrowing all the advantageous impressions that such--such a service has created? I really think there's nothing he would not do for me. Don't you think so, Lucy?'
'Could he do anything for Prometesky?' asked Harold.
'He could, more than anyone,' I said; 'but I don't know if he would.'
'I'll see about that.'
'Now, Harold,' cried Eustace in dismay, 'don't spoil everything by offending him. Just suppose he should not send us the invitation!'
'No great harm done.'
Eustace was incoherent in his wrath and horror, and Harold, too much used to his childish selfishness to feel the annoyance, answered, 'I am not you.'
'But if you offend him?'
'Never fear, Eu, I'll take care you don't fare the worse.'
And as he lighted his candle he added to poor Eustace's discomfiture by the shocking utterance under his beard:
'You are welcome to him for me, if you can stand such an old bore.'
CHAPTER VI. OGDEN'S BUILDINGS.
When I came downstairs the next morning, I found Lord Erymanth at the hall window, watching the advance of a great waggon of coal which had stuck fast in the snow half way up the hill on which the house stood. Harold, a much more comfortable figure in his natural costume than he had been when made up by Eustace, was truly putting his shoulder to the wheel, with a great lever, so that every effort aided the struggling horses, and brought the whole nearer to its destination.
'A grand exhibition of strength,' said his lordship, as the waggon was at last over its difficulties, and Harold disappeared with it into the back-yard; 'a magnificent physical development. I never before saw extraordinary height with proportionate size and strength.'
I asked if he had ever seen anyone as tall.
'I have seen one or two men who looked equally tall, but they stooped and were not well-proportioned, whereas your nephew has a wonderfully fine natural carriage. What is his measure?' he added, turning to Eustace.
'Well, really, my lord, I cannot tell; mine is six feet two and five- sixteenths, and I much prefer it to anything so out of the way as his, poor fellow.'
The danger that he would go on to repeat his tailor's verdict 'that it was distinguished without being excessive,' was averted by Harold's entrance, and Dora interrupted the greetings by the query to her cousin, how high he really stood; but he could not tell, and when she unfraternally pressed to know whether it was not nice to be so much taller than Eustace, he replied, 'Not on board ship,' and then he gave the intelligence that it seemed about to thaw.
Lord Erymanth said that if so, he should try to make his way to Mycening, and he then paid his renewed compliments on the freedom of the calendar at the Quarter Sessions from the usual proportion of evils at Mycening. He understood that Mr. Alison was making most praiseworthy efforts to impede the fatal habits of intoxication that were only too prevalent.
'I shall close five beer-houses at Christmas,' said Eustace. 'I look on it as my duty, as landlord and man of property.'
'Quite right. I am glad you see the matter in its right light. Beer-shops were a well-meaning experiment started some twenty years ago. I well remember the debate,
Harold tried with all his might to listen, though I saw his chest heave with many a suppressed yawn, and his hand under his beard, tweaking it hard; but substance could be sifted out of what Lord Erymanth said, for he had real experience, and his own parish was in admirable order.
Where there was no power of expulsion, as he said, there would always be some degraded beings whose sole amusement was intoxication; but good dwelling-houses capable of being made cheerful, gardens, innocent recreations, and instruction had, he could testify from experience, no small effect in preventing such habits from being formed in the younger population, backed, as he was sure (good old man) that he need not tell his young friends, by an active and efficient clergyman, who would place the motives for good conduct on the truest and highest footing, without which all reformation would only be surface work. I was glad Harold should hear this from the lips of a layman, but I am afraid he shirked it as a bit of prosing, and went back to the cottages.
'They are in a shameful state,' he said.
