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"I should be glad so to annul it; but what is Kenelm's weak side? the turf? the hunting-field? women? poetry? One can only conciliate a man by getting on his weak side." "Hist! I see him from the windows. Kenelm's weak side was, when I knew him some years ago, and I rather fancy it still is " "Well, make haste! I hear his ring at your door-bell."
The rendezvous was to be at ten o'clock on Encampment Butte, a plateau overlooking the entire hunting-field and visible for miles. An hour before the appointed time the clans began to gather. All the camps within twenty-five miles, and which were entertaining participants of the hunt, put in a prompt appearance.
Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton, their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and welfare, there were the seeds of death.
If a man lose a venture of money he can tell his friend; or if he be unsuccessful in trying for a seat in parliament; or be thrown out of a run in the hunting-field; or even if he be blackballed for a club; but a man can hardly bring himself to tell his dearest comrade that his Mary has preferred another man to himself.
They mayn't realise what a nice person you are! Would you like me to explain to Tishy Mangan " Bill Kirby, who was possessed of good brown eyes and a profile like a handsome battle-axe, was a young man of no special intellectual gifts, but the sound judgment that distinguished him in the hunting-field was wont to stand his friend in other emergencies.
The grave writer, the stern moralist, the uncompromising advocate of the inflexible rule of right, is a dandy with essenced locks, loose trousers, and looser morals, who breakfasts at four in the afternoon, and spends his evenings among the side scenes of the opera; the merry writer of whims and oddities, who shakes his puns about like pepper from a pepper-castor, is a misanthropic, melancholy gentleman, of mournful look and unhappy aspect: the advocate of field-sports, of all the joyous excitement of the hunting-field, and the bold dangers of the chase, is an asthmatic sexagenarian, with care in his heart and gout in his ankles; and lastly, he who lives but in the horrors of a charnel-house, whose gloomy mind finds no pleasure save in the dark and dismal pictures of crime and suffering, of lingering agony, or cruel death, is a fat, round, portly, comely gentleman, with a laugh like Falstaff, and a face whose every lineament and feature seems to exhale the merriment of a jocose and happy temperament.
Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later.
And, after making use of a host of different viands in order to attain the culinary variety which is to-day adopted by the whole of the Sphex nation, lo and behold, each species confines itself to a single sort of game, outside which every specimen is obstinately refused, not at table, of course, but in the hunting-field!
"The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and helplessly paralysed by an accident in the hunting-field, and of a beautiful and high-spirited young woman almost a girl. She took a romantic interest in him talked of his ruined career and blighted life, and all that sort of thing. And they married, and she found her bondage intolerable.... It ended in his divorcing her.
Warrington scarcely expected to see much of him, however much he liked that officer's conversation and society. It was different from the talk of the ribald people round about Harry. Mr. Wolfe never spoke of cards, or horses' pedigrees; or bragged of his performances in the hunting-field; or boasted of the favours of women; or retailed any of the innumerable scandals of the time.
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