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He was never sent on out-post duty after 'rickshaws any more, nor was he given dances which never came off, nor were the drains on his purse continued. Mrs. Hauksbee held him on the snaffle; and after his treatment at Mrs. Reiver's hands, he appreciated the change. Mrs. Reiver had broken him of talking about himself, and made him talk about her own merits. Mrs.
A man who rides much knows exactly what a horse is going to do next before he does it. In the same way, a woman of Mrs. Hauksbee's experience knows accurately how a boy will behave under certain circumstances notably when he is infatuated with one of Mrs. Reiver's stamp. She said that, sooner or later, little Pluffles would break off that engagement for nothing at all simply to gratify Mrs.
'The third time brings luck, thought I, as I squatted down in the fork of the same old twisted elm; 'and 'tis something stormy this evening, which might suit our reiver's tastes.
But all this was put down to nervousness, and the quiet, steady, "sip-sip-sip, fill and sip-sip-sip, again," that went on in his own room when he was by himself, was never known. Which was miraculous, seeing how everything in a man's private life is public property out here. Moriarty was drawn, not into Mrs. Reiver's set, because they were not his sort, but into the power of Mrs.
It seemed as though, in answer to his invocation, a tremor began to pass through Douglas's frame, and as Ringan exclaimed, 'There! there! he lives! Sir, sir! Blessings on the saints! I was sure that a French reiver's lance could never be the end of the Master, George opened his eyes. 'What is it? he said faintly. 'Where are the ladies?
And when law and justice became stronger than the reiver's right, they by no means tamed his spirit. Though necessity, then, compelled him to be a buyer and seller of cattle, he looked upon the occupation and the necessity as a disgrace, and he sighed for the honoured and happier days of his youth, when the freebooter's might was the freebooter's right.
But the biggest trouble Pluffles ever manufactured came about at Simla some years ago, when he was four-and-twenty. He began by trusting to his own judgment, as usual, and the result was that, after a time, he was bound hand and foot to Mrs. Reiver's 'rickshaw wheels. There was nothing good about Mrs. Reiver, unless it was her dress.
The shouts of the party, and the winding of one or two horns, at length brought to a loophole, which flanked the entrance, the haggard face of an old woman. "That's the Reiver's mother," said one of the Elliots; "she's ten times waur than himsell, and is wyted for muckle of the ill he does about the country." "Wha are ye? what d'ye want here?" were the queries of the respectable progenitor.
He took his peg and wine at dinner, but he never drank alone, and never let what he drank have the least hold on him. Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how the "influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well" had saved him. When the man startled at anything good being laid to Mrs. Reiver's door laughed, it cost him Moriarty's friendship.
SCOTT, The Reiver's Wedding. "They are gone," said Margaret of York, standing half dressed at the deep-set window of the chamber where Grisell lay in state in her big bed. "Who are gone?" asked Grisell, turning as well as she could under the great heraldically-embroidered covering. "Leonard Copeland and his father. Did'st not hear the horses' tramp in the court?"
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