I agreed that he was going a bit queer. Dixon had seen in a moment what I had failed to notice in twelve miles. My feeling of importance diminished. I followed the two of them into the loose-box. Dixon’s lantern at once discovered an overreach on the heel of one of Harkaway’s front feet. No reference was made to my having failed to notice it; and as we said, it was a clean cut, which was much better than a bruise. When asked whether it had been a good day, I replied “Topping,” but Dixon seemed in no hurry to hear about it, and he went out to get the gruel. I stood silent while the old horse drank it eagerly—Dixon remarking with satisfaction that he’d “suck the bottom out of the bucket if he wasn’t careful.”
Unable to restrain myself any longer, I blurted out my news: “They ran slap across the vale for about twenty-five minutes; a five-mile point without a check. It must have been seven or eight miles as they ran!”
Dixon, who was already busy brushing the dried mud off Harkaway’s legs, straightened himself with a whistle. “Did you see it all right?”
“The whole way; there were only ten up at the finish.”
“Did they kill him?”
“No, he got into a rabbit-hole just outside Cranfield Park. The Master said it was no good trying to get him out as it was such a big place.” Dixon looked puzzled.
“That’s funny,” he remarked. “They told me at the ‘Bull’ last night that he’s a great one for terriers and digging out foxes. A lot of the subscribers complain about it. They say he’s never happy unless he’s got his head down a rabbit-hole!”
With a knowing air I told him that Mr. Gaffikin had said it was a drag.
“By Jingo! If it was a drag they must have gone like blazes!” I asserted that they did go like blazes.
“You must have jumped some big places.”
There was a note of surprise in his voice which made me feel that I had been doing more than was expected of me. Could it be possible, I wondered, that Dixon was actually proud of his pupil? And, indeed, there must have been a note of jubilation in his voice when, as he bent down to brush the mud off Harkaway’s hocks, he asked; “Did Mr. Gaffikin see him jumping?”
“Yes. I foll—I was close to him all the way.”
Perhaps it was just as well that Harkaway, munching away at his feed, was unable to lift his long-suffering face and say what he thought about my horsemanship! Looking back at that half-lit stable from the detachment of today, I can almost believe that, after I had gone indoors to my boiled eggs, Dixon and the old horse had a confidential chat, like the old friends that they were. Anyhow, the horse and his groom understood one another quite as well as the groom understood his master.
Aunt Evelyn did her best to come up to the scratch while I was talking big at the dinner-table. But the wonderful performances of Harkaway and myself during our exciting half-hour in the Potford Vale were beyond her powers of response, and her well-meant but inadequate interjections caused my narrative to lose a lot of its sporting significance. Anxiety for my safety overshadowed her enthusiasm, and when I was telling her how we jumped a brook (it was only a flooded ditch, really), she uttered an ill-timed warning against getting wet when I was hot, which nearly caused my narrative to dry up altogether.
Faithful Miriam made things no better by exclaiming, as she handed me a plate with two banana fritters on it, “You’ll break your neck, sir, if you go out with them hounds much oftener!”
What was the good of trying to make them understand about a hunt like that, I thought, as I blundered up the dark stairs to the schoolroom to dash off a highly coloured account of my day for Stephen Colwood. He, at any rate, was an audience after my own heart, and the only one I had, except Dixon, whose appreciation of my exploits was less fanciful and high-flown. Writing to Stephen I was at once away in a world of make-believe; and the letter, no doubt, was a good example of what he used to call my “well-known sprightly insouciance.”
Poor Stephen was living in lodgings in London, and could only get home for a hunt on Saturdays. A wealthy neighbour had promised Parson Colwood an opening for his son if he could qualify as a chartered accountant, and this nauseating task occupied him five days a week. So my visualization of Stephen, exiled in a foggy street in Pimlico, made it doubly easy for me to scribble my lively account of a day which now seemed so delightfully adventurous.
Stephen’s reply was a telegram asking me to stay at the Rectory for as long as I liked, and this was followed by a letter in which he announced that he’d got a month’s holiday. “If your old nag’s still lame I can get you some top-hole hirelings from Downfield for thirty-five bob a day, and I’ve ordered the Guv’nor to offer up prayers next Sunday forbidding the Almighty to send any frost to Sussex.”
Aunt Evelyn considered this almost blasphemous; but she thought my visit to Hoadley Rectory an excellent idea, for Stephen was quite one of her favourites, and of the Rev. Colwood (whom she had met at a diocesan garden party) she had the highest possible opinion. “Such a fine face! And Mrs. Colwood seemed a real fellow creature—quite one of one’s own sort,” she exclaimed, adding, “D’you mind holding his hind-legs, dear?” for she was preoccupied at the moment in combing the matted hair out of one of her Persian cats.
V
At the Rectory
I
Stopping at every station, a local train conveyed me sedately into Sussex. Local and sedate, likewise,
