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It was a very wet morning and the curate had ridden over from Dillsborough on a little pony which the rector kept for him in addition to the 100 pounds per annum paid for his services.
That was sure to cause discomfort; and then he had pledged himself to decline Goarly's business. Reginald Morton We will now go back to Hoppet Hall and its inhabitants. When the old squire died he left by his will Hoppet Hall and certain other houses in Dillsborough, which was all that he could leave, to his grandson Reginald Morton.
Masters, Nickem winked again and put his fore-finger to the side of his big carbuncled nose. That evening Larry Twentyman came in, but was not received with any great favour by Mrs. Masters. There was growing up at this moment in Dillsborough the bitterness of real warfare between the friends and enemies of sport in general, and Mrs. Masters was ranking herself thereby among the enemies.
Runciman's great friend and patron and best customer, and not a word against Lord Rufford was allowed in that room, though elsewhere in Dillsborough ill-natured things were sometimes said of his lordship. Then there came on that well-worn dispute among sportsmen, whether foxes and pheasants are or are not pleasant companions to each other.
The poor man paused before he made his answer; but when he did, he made it plain enough. "I ain't good enough for her! Nor more I ain't, Mr. Morton. She was brought up in this house, Mr. Morton, by your own grand-aunt." "So I have heard, Mr. Twentyman." "And there's more of Bragton than there is of Dillsborough about her; that's just where it is.
On the Tuesday afternoon, after the meeting of the Dillsborough Club which has been recorded, he was seated, about three o'clock, on the rail of the foot-bridge over the Dil, with a long German pipe hanging from his mouth. He was noted throughout the whole country for this pipe, or for others like it, such a one usually being in his mouth as he wandered about.
"I don't know a better fellow round Dillsborough, or one who is more always on the square. But he's weak. You know him as well as I, Mr. Masters." "He's not so weak but what he can keep what he's got." "This'll be the way to try him. He'd melt away like water into sand if he were to live for a few weeks with such men as his Lordship's friends.
Morton who was deep in the boundary question put aside his papers and welcomed his neighbour. Now it must be explained that when, in former years, his son's debts had accumulated on old Mr. Reginald Morton, so that he had been obliged to part with some portion of his unentailed property, he had sold that which lay in the parish of St. John's, Dillsborough.
Those dinners of Lord Rufford's at the Bush had been a special grief to him. The young lord had been always courteous to him in the field, and he had been able, as he thought, to requite such courtesy by little attentions in the way of game preserving. If pheasants from Dillsborough Wood ate Goarly's wheat, so did they eat Larry Twentyman's barley.
Masters, as I have said in the last chapter, was the attorney in Dillsborough, and the Mortons had been for centuries past the squires of Bragton. I need not take the reader back farther than old Reginald Morton. He had come to the throne of his family as a young man, and had sat upon it for more than half a century.
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