Mr. James Conyers, then, after the manner of mankind, vented his spleen upon the only person who came in his way, and was glad to be able to despatch the “Softy” upon an unpleasant errand, and make his attendant as uncomfortable as he was himself.
“My head rocks as if I was on board a steam-packet,” he muttered, as he lay alone in his little bedroom, “and my hand shakes so that I can’t hold my pipe steady while I fill it. I’m in a nice state to have to talk to her. As if it wasn’t as much as I can do at the best of times to be a match for her.”
He flung aside his pipe half filled, and turned his head wearily upon the pillow. The hot sun and the buzz of the insects tormented him. There was a big bluebottle fly blundering and wheeling about amongst the folds of the dimity bed-curtains; a fly which seemed the very genius of delirium tremens; but the trainer was too ill to do more than swear at his purple-winged tormentor.
He was awakened from a half-doze by the treble voice of a small stable-boy in the room below. He called out angrily for the lad to come up and state his business. His business was a message from Mr. John Mellish, who wished to see the trainer immediately.
“Mr. Mellish,” muttered James Conyers to himself. “Tell your master I’m too ill to stir, but that I’ll wait upon him in the evening,” he said to the boy. “You can see I’m ill, if you’ve got any eyes, and you can say that you found me in bed.”
The lad departed with these instructions, and Mr. Conyers returned to his own thoughts, which appeared to be by no means agreeable to him.
To drink spirituous liquors and play all-fours in the sanded taproom of a sporting public is no doubt a very delicious occupation, and would be altogether Elysian and unobjectionable if one could always be drinking spirits and playing all-fours. But as the finest picture ever painted by Raphael or Rubens is but a dead blank of canvas upon the reverse, so there is generally a disagreeable other side to all the pleasures of earth, and a certain reaction after card-playing and brandy-drinking which is more than equivalent in misery to the pleasures which have preceded it. Mr. Conyers, tossing his hot head from side to side upon a pillow which seemed even hotter, took a very different view of life to that which he had expounded to his boon companions only the night before in the taproom of the Lion and Lamb, Doncaster.
“I should liked to have stopped over the Leger,” he muttered, “for I meant to make a hatful of money out of the Conjuror; for if what they say at Richmond is anything like truth, he’s safe to win. But there’s no going against my lady when her mind’s made up. It’s take it or leave it—yes or no—and be quick about it.”
Mr. Conyers garnished his speech with two or three expletives common enough amongst the men with whom he had lived, but not to be recorded here; and, closing his eyes, fell into a doze; a half-waking, half-sleeping torpidity; in which he felt as if his head had become a ton-weight of iron, and was dragging him backwards through the pillow into a bottomless abyss.
While the trainer lay in this comfortless semi-slumber Stephen Hargraves walked slowly and sulkily through the wood on his way to the invisible fence, from which point he meant to reconnoitre the premises.
The irregular façade of the old house fronted him across the smooth breadth of lawn, dotted and broken by parti-coloured flowerbeds; by rustic clumps of gnarled oak supporting mighty clusters of vivid scarlet geraniums, all aflame in the sunshine; by trellised arches laden with trailing roses of every varying shade, from palest blush to deepest crimson; by groups of evergreens, whose every leaf was rich in beauty and luxuriance, whose every tangled garland would have made a worthy chaplet for a king.
The “Softy,” in the semidarkness of his soul, had some glimmer of that light which was altogether
