“I really must have a chat with Colonel Hesmon about it. By the way, the dear old boy’s asked us both to lunch tomorrow.”
This led to a rhapsody about that absolutely top-hole performer Jerry, who had been given him by the Colonel after he’d won the Heavyweight Race. My Harkaway, on the other hand, was more a subject for solicitude, and I reluctantly confessed that he didn’t seem up to my weight. It was a thousand pities, said Stephen, that I couldn’t have bought that six-year-old of young Lewison’s. “Given him for his twenty-first birthday by his uncle, who’d forked out £170 for him. But young Lewison couldn’t ride a hair of the horse, though he was a nailing fine ‘lepper’ and a rare good sort to look at. They sent him up to Tatts last week and he went for £90, according to the paper. Gosh, what a bit of luck for the cove who got him so cheap!”
My appetite for horseflesh was stimulated by this anecdote, but I wondered what Mr. Pennett would say if I wrote and told him that I’d bought another ninety pounds’ worth! For Mr. Pennett still refused to allow me more than £450 of my £600. The balance, he said, must be “invested for a rainy day.”
Stephen’s visionary contemplations of “being stationed at the Curragh and riding at Punchestown Races” were interrupted by our arrival at the Rectory. I had stayed there more than once in the summer, so I received a surly but not unfriendly salute from Abel, the grim little old groom with iron-grey whiskers who led our conveyance soberly away to the stable-yard. This groom was an old-fashioned coachman, and he had never been heard to utter a sentence of more than six words. His usual reply, when asked about the health of one of the horses, was either, “Well enough” or “Not over-bright.” Stephen now reminded him (quite unnecessarily, and probably not for the first time) that two of the horses would be going out hunting on Monday. Abel grunted, “Got ’em both shod this afternoon,” and disappeared round the corner of the shrubbery with the buggy.
There was only one thing against him, said Stephen, and that was that he hadn’t a ghost of an idea how to trim their tails, which were always an absolute disgrace. “I’ve told him again and again to pull the hair out,” he remarked, “but he goes on just the same, cutting them with scissors, and the result is that they come out at the opening meet with tails like chrysanthemums!”
From this it may be inferred that there were many things in the Rectory stable which fell short of Stephen’s ideal. He and his brothers were always trying to bring “the old guv’nor” into line with what they believed to be the Melton Mowbray standard of smartness. There was also the question of persuading him to buy a motorcar. But Parson Colwood was a Sussex man by birth and he valued his native provincialism more than the distant splendours of the Shires toward which his offspring turned their unsophisticated eyes. The Rectory, as I knew it then, had the charm of something untouched by modernity.
The Rev. Harry Colwood, as I remember him, was a composite portrait of Charles Kingsley and Matthew Arnold. This fanciful resemblance has no connection with literature, toward which Mr. Colwood’s disposition was respectful but tepid. My mental semi-association of him with Arnold is probably due to the fact that he had been in the Rugby eleven somewhere in the ’sixties. And I have, indeed, heard him speak of Arnold’s poem, “Rugby Chapel.” But the Kingsley affinity was more clearly recognizable. Like Kingsley, Mr. Colwood loved riding, shooting, and fishing, and believed that such sports were congruous with the Christian creed which he unobtrusively accepted and lived up to. It is questionable, however, whether he would have agreed with Kingsley’s Christian Socialism. One of his maxims was “Don’t marry for money but marry where money is,” and he had carried this into effect by marrying, when he was over forty, a sensible Scotch lady with a fortune of £1,500 a year, thereby enabling his three sons to be brought up as keen fox-hunters, game-shooters, and salmon-fishers. And however strongly the Author of his religion might have condemned these sports, no one could deny him the Christian adjectives gentle, patient, and just.
At first I had been intimidated by him, for the scrutinizing look that he gave me was both earnest and stern. His were eyes which looked straight at the world from under level brows, and there was strictness in the lines of his mouth. But the kindliness of his nature emerged in the tone of his voice, which was pitched moderately low. In his voice a desire for gaiety seemed to be striving to overmaster an inherent sadness. This undertone of sadness may have been accentuated as the result of his ripened understanding of a world which was not all skylarking and sport, but Stephen (who was a lankier and less regular-featured edition of his father) had inherited the same quality of voice. Mr. Colwood was a naturally nervous man with strong emotions, which he rigidly repressed at all times.
When I arrived that afternoon both the Rector and his wife were attending some parochial function in the village. So Stephen took me up to the schoolroom, where we had our tea and he jawed to me
