Читать книгу Broken to Harness - Edmund Yates - Страница 6

Mr. Charles Beresford, Junior Commissioner of the Tin-Tax Office, who was expected down at Bissett, did not leave London, as he had intended, on the day which witnessed Mr. Churchill's arrival at that hospitable mansion. His portmanteau and gun-case had been taken by his servant to the Club, where he was to call for them on his way to the station; and he had arranged with one of his brother-commissioners to undertake his work of placing his initials in the corner of various documents submitted to him. He had stayed in town longer than his wont; and as he looked out into the dreary quadrangle of Rutland House, in a block of which the Tin-Tax Office was situate, and gazed upon the blazing flags, and the dull commissionnaires sitting on their bench outside the principal entrance and winking in the heat, and upon the open windows opposite,--whereat two clerks were concocting an effervescent drink in a tumbler, and stirring it round with a paper-knife,--he cursed the dulness, and expressed his delight that he was about to rusticate for a lengthened period.

Nobody heard this speech; or if indeed, the words fell upon the ear of the soft-shod messenger who at that moment entered the room, he was far too dexterous and too old an official to let his face betray it. He glided softly to Mr. Beresford's elbow, as that gentleman still remained at the window, vacantly watching the powder-mixing clerks, and murmured,

"Letter, sir."

"Put it down," aid Beresford, without turning round. "Official, eh?"

"No, sir, private. Brought just now by a groom. No answer, sir."

"Give it here," said Beresford, stretching out his hand. "Ah, no answer! That'll do, Stubbs."

And Stubbs went his way to a glass-case, in which, in the company of four other messengers and twenty bells, his official days were passed, and gave himself up to bemoaning his stupidity in having taken his fortnight's leave of absence in the past wet July instead of the present sultry season.

Mr. Beresford looked at the address of the letter, and frowned slightly. It was a small note, pink paper, with a couchant dog and an utterly illegible monogram on the seal, and the superscription was written in a long scrawly hand. There was an odour of patchouli, too, about it which roused Beresford's ire, and he muttered as he opened it, "Confounded stuff! Who on earth is she copying now, with her scents and crests and humbug? I thought she'd more sense than that!" And he ran his eye over the note. It was very short.

"Dear Charley,--What has become of you? Why do you never come near The Den? It is nearly three weeks since you were here. I'm off to Scarborough on Tuesday; a lot of my pupils are there and want me, so I can carry on my little game of money-making, get some fresh air, and perhaps pick up some fresh nags to sell before the hunting season, all 'under vun hat,' as Tom Orme fasechous--facesh (I don't know how to spell it)--says. Come up and dine to-night at seven. There are two or three good fellows coming, and I want to talk to you and to look at your old phiz again, and see how much older you've grown during your absence, and how much balder; for, you know, you're growing bald, Charley, and that will be awful hard lines to such a swell as you. Seven sharp, mind.

"Always yours,

"K. M.

"P.S. Charley, if you don't come, I shall think you've grown proud; and it'll be a great shame, and I shall never speak to you again.

"K.M."

Now lest, after a perusal of this letter, any one should think ill of its writer, I take leave to announce at once that Kate Mellon was a virtuous woman; pure in heart, though any thing but simple; without fear, but not without as much reproach as could possibly be heaped upon her by all of her own sex who envied her good looks, her high spirits, and her success. There are, I take it, plenty of novels in which one can read the doings, either openly described or broadly hinted at, of the daughters of Shame under many a pretty alias; and it is because one of these aliases describes the calling of which Kate Mellon was the most successful follower, that I am so desirous of clearing her good name, and immediately vindicating her position with my readers. Kate Mellon was a horsebreaker, a bonâ-fide horsebreaker; one who curbed colts, and "took it out of" kickers and rearers, and taught wild Irish horses and four-year-olds fresh from Yorkshire spinneys to curvet and caper prettily in the Park. She taught riding, too; and half the Amazons in the Row owed their tightness of seat and lightness of hand to her judicious training. She hunted occasionally with the Queen's hounds and with the Pytchley, and no one rode straighter or with more nonchalance than she. Give her a lead, that was all she wanted; and when she got it, as she invariably did from the boldest horseman in the field, she would settle herself in her saddle, left hand well down, right hand jauntily on her hip, and fly over timber, water, no matter what, like a bird. In social life her great pride was that there "was no nonsense" about her; she was not more civil to the great ladies who sent their horses to her establishment to be broke, and who would occasionally come up and inspect the process, than she was to the stable-helpers' wives and children, who all worshipped her for her openhanded generosity. Tommy Orme who was popularly supposed to be a hundred and fifty years old, but who lived with the youth of the Household Brigade and the Foreign Office and the coryphées, and who knew every body remarkable in any one way, never was tired of telling how Kate, teaching the Dowager Lady Wylminster to drive a pair of spirited dun ponies, had, in the grand lady's idea, intrenched upon her prerogative, and was told that she was a presuming person, and desired to remember her place.