“Don’t you call this a very ugly country?” Silverbridge asked as soon as he arrived. Now it is the case that the traveller who travels into Argyllshire, Perthshire, and Inverness, expects to find lovely scenery; and it was also true that the country through which they had passed for the last twenty miles had been not only bleak and barren, but uninteresting and ugly. It was all rough open moorland, never rising into mountains, and graced by no running streams, by no forest scenery, almost by no foliage. The lodge itself did indeed stand close upon a little river, and was reached by a bridge that crossed it; but there was nothing pretty either in the river or the bridge. It was a placid black little streamlet, which in that portion of its course was hurried by no steepness, had no broken rocks in its bed, no trees on its low banks, and played none of those gambols which make running water beautiful. The bridge was a simple low construction with a low parapet, carrying an ordinary roadway up to the hall door. The lodge itself was as ugly as a house could be, white, of two stories, with the door in the middle and windows on each side, with a slate roof, and without a tree near it. It was in the middle of the shooting, and did not create a town around itself as do sumptuous mansions, to the great detriment of that seclusion which is favourable to game. “Look at Killancodlem,” Dobbes had been heard to say—“a very fine house for ladies to flirt in; but if you find a deer within six miles of it I will eat him first and shoot him afterwards.” There was a Spartan simplicity about Crummie-Toddie which pleased the Spartan mind of Reginald Dobbes.
“Ugly, do you call it?”
“Infernally ugly,” said Lord Gerald.
“What did you expect to find? A big hotel, and a lot of cockneys? If you come after grouse, you must come to what the grouse thinks pretty.”
“Nevertheless, it is ugly,” said Silverbridge, who did not choose to be “sat upon.” “I have been at shootings in Scotland before, and sometimes they are not ugly. This I call beastly.” Whereupon Reginald Dobbes turned upon his heel and walked away.
“Can you shoot?” he said afterwards to Lord Gerald.
“I can fire off a gun, if you mean that,” said Gerald.
“You have never shot much?”
“Not what you call very much. I’m not so old as you are, you know. Everything must have a beginning.” Mr. Dobbes wished “the beginning” might have taken place elsewhere; but there had been some truth in the remark.
“What on earth made you tell him crammers like that?” asked Silverbridge, as the brothers sat together afterwards smoking on the wall of the bridge.
“Because he made an ass of himself; asking me whether I could shoot.”
On the next morning they started at seven. Dobbes had determined to be cross, because, as he thought, the young men would certainly keep him waiting; and was cross because by their punctuality they robbed him of any just cause for offence. During the morning on the moor they were hardly ever near enough each other for much conversation, and very little was said. According to arrangement made they returned to the house for lunch, it being their purpose not to go far from home till their numbers were complete. As they came over the bridge and put down their guns near the door, Mr. Dobbes spoke the first good-humoured word they had heard from his lips. “Why did you tell me such an infernal—, I would say lie, only perhaps you mightn’t like it?”
“I told you no lie,” said Gerald.
“You’ve only missed two birds all the morning, and you have shot forty-two. That’s uncommonly good sport.”
“What have you done?”
“Only forty,” and Mr. Dobbes seemed for the moment to be gratified by his own inferiority. “You are a deuced sight better than your brother.”
“Gerald’s about the best shot I know,” said Silverbridge.
“Why didn’t he tell?”
“Because you were angry when we said the place was ugly.”
“I see all about it,” said Dobbes. “Nevertheless when a fellow comes to shoot he shouldn’t complain because a place isn’t pretty. What you want is a decent house as near as you can have it to your ground. If there is anything in Scotland to beat Crummie-Toddie I don’t know where to find it. Shooting is shooting you know, and touring is touring.”
Upon that he took very kindly to Lord Gerald, who, even after the arrival of the other men, was second only in skill to Dobbes himself. With Nidderdale, who was an old companion, he got on very well. Nidderdale ate and drank too much, and refused to be driven beyond a certain amount of labour, but was in other respects obedient and knew what he was about. Popplecourt was disagreeable, but he was a fairly good shot and understood what was expected of him. Silverbridge was so good-humoured, that even his manifest faults—shooting carelessly, lying in bed and wanting his dinner—were, if not forgiven, at least endured. But Tregear was an abomination. He could shoot well enough and was active, and when he was at the work seemed to like it;—but he would stay away whole days by himself, and when spoken to would answer in a manner which seemed to Dobbes to be flat mutiny. “We are not doing it for our bread,” said Tregear.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“There’s no duty in killing a certain number of these animals.” They had been driving deer on the day before and were to continue the
