Barrington. Volume 1. Lever Charles James
how they had lost their way, having first of all taken the wrong bank of the river, and been obliged to retrace their steps upwards of three miles to retrieve their mistake.
“Where were you going to?” asked Barringtou.
“We were in search of a little inn they had told us of, called the ‘Fisherman’s Home.’ I conclude we have reached it at last, and you are the host, I take it?”
Barrington bowed assent.
“And these gentlemen are visitors here?” But without waiting for any reply, – difficult at all times, for he spoke with great rapidity and continual change of topic, – he now stooped down to whisper something to the sick man. “My friend thinks he’ll do capitally now, and, if we leave him, that he’ll soon drop asleep; so I vote we give him the chance.” Thus saying, he made a gesture for the others to leave, following them up as they went, almost like one enforcing an order.
“If I am correct in my reading, you are a soldier, sir,” said Barrington, when they reached the outer room, “and this gentleman here is a brother officer, – Major M’Cor-mick.”
“Full pay, eh?”
“No, I am an old Walcheren man.”
“Walcheren – Walcheren – why, that sounds like Malplaquet or Blenheim! Where the deuce was Walcheren? Did n’t believe that there was an old tumbril of that affair to the fore still. You were all licked there, or you died of the ague, or jaundice? Oh, dummy whist, as I live! Who’s the unlucky dog has got the dummy? – bad as Walcheren, by Jove! Is n’t that a supper I see laid out there? Don’t I smell Stilton from that room?”
“If you ‘ll do us the honor to join us – ”
“That I will, and astonish you with an appetite too! We breakfasted at a beastly hole called Graigue, and tasted nothing since, except a few peaches I stole out of an old fellow’s garden on the riverside, – ‘Old Dan the miser,’ a country fellow called him.”
“I have the honor to have afforded you the entertainment you speak of,” said M’Cormick, smarting with anger.
“All right! The peaches were excellent, – would have been better if riper. I ‘m afraid I smashed a window of yours; it was a stone I shied at a confounded dog, – a sort of terrier. Pickled onions and walnuts, by all that ‘s civilized! And so this is the ‘Fisherman’s Home,’ and you the fisherman, eh? Well, why not show a light or a lantern over the door? Who the deuce is to know that this is a place of entertainment? We only guessed it at last.”
“May I help you to some mutton?” said Barrington, more amused than put out by his guest’s discursiveness.
“By all means. But don’t carve it that way; cut it lengthwise, as if it were the saddle, which it ought to have been. You must tell me where you got this sherry. I have tasted nothing like it for many a day, – real brown sherry. I suppose you know how they brown it? It’s not done by sugar, – that’s a vulgar error. It’s done by boiling; they boil down so many butts and reduce them to about a fourth or a fifth. You haven’t got any currant-jelly, have you? it is just as good with cold mutton as hot. And then it is the wine thus reduced they use for coloring matter. I got up all my sherry experiences on the spot.”
“The wine you approve of has been in my cellar about five-and-forty years.”
“It would not if I ‘d have been your neighbor, rely upon that. I’d have secured every bottle of it for our mess; and mind, whatever remains of it is mine.”
“Might I make bold to remark,” said Dill, interposing, “that we are the guests of my friend here on this occasion?”
“Eh, what, – guests?”
“I am proud enough to believe that you will not refuse me the honor of your company; for though an innkeeper, I write myself gentleman,” said Barrington, blandly, though not without emotion.
“I should think you might,” broke in the stranger, heartily; “and I’d say the man who had a doubt about your claims had very little of his own. And now a word of apology for the mode of our entrance here, and to introduce myself. I am Colonel Hunter, of the 21st Hussars; my friend is a young subaltern of the regiment.”
A moment before, and all the awkwardness of his position was painful to Barrington. He felt that the traveller was there by a right, free to order, condemn, and criticise as he pleased. The few words of explanation, given in all the frankness of a soldier, and with the tact of a gentleman, relieved this embarrassment, and he was himself again. As for M’Cormick and Dill, the mere announcement of the regiment he commanded seemed to move and impress them. It was one of those corps especially known in the service for the rank and fortune of its officers. The Prince himself was their colonel, and they had acquired a wide notoriety for exclusiveness and pride, which, when treated by unfriendly critics, assumed a shape less favorable still.
Colonel Hunter, if he were to be taken as a type of his regiment, might have rebutted a good deal of this floating criticism; he had a fine honest countenance, a rich mellow voice, and a sort of easy jollity in manner, that spoke well both for his spirits and his temper. He did, it is true, occasionally chafe against some susceptible spot or other of those around him, but there was no malice prepense in it, any more than there is intentional offence in the passage of a strong man through a crowd; so he elbowed his way, and pushed on in conversation, never so much as suspecting that he jostled any one in his path.
Both Barrington and Hunter were inveterate sportsmen, and they ranged over hunting-fields and grouse mountains and partridge stubble and trout streams with all the zest of men who feel a sort of mesmeric brotherhood in the interchange of their experiences. Long after the Major and the doctor had taken their leave, they sat there recounting stories of their several adventures, and recalling incidents of flood and field.
In return for a cordial invitation to Hunter to stay and fish the river for some days, Barrington pledged himself to visit the Colonel the first time he should go up to Kilkenny.
“And I ‘ll mount you. You shall have a horse I never lent in my life. I ‘ll put you on Trumpeter, – sire Sir Hercules, – no mistake there; would carry sixteen stone with the fastest hounds in England.”
Barrington shook his head, and smiled, as he said, “It’s two-and-twenty years since I sat a fence. I ‘m afraid I ‘ll not revive the fame of my horsemanship by appearing again in the saddle.”
“Why, what age do you call yourself?”
“Eighty-three, if I live to August next.”
“I ‘d not have guessed you within ten years of it. I ‘ve just passed fifty, and already I begin to look for a horse with more bone beneath the knee, and more substance across the loins.”
“These are only premonitory symptoms, after all,” said Barrington, laughing. “You’ve many a day before you come to a fourteen-hand cob and a kitchen chair to mount him.”
Hunter laughed at the picture, and dashed away, in his own half-reckless way, to other topics. He talked of his regiment proudly, and told Barrington what a splendid set of young fellows were his officers. “I ‘ll show you such a mess,” said he, “as no corps in the service can match.” While he talked of their high-hearted and generous natures, and with enthusiasm of the life of a soldier, Barrington could scarcely refrain from speaking of his own “boy,” the son from whom he had hoped so much, and whose loss had been the death-blow to all his ambitions. There were, however, circumstances in that story which sealed his lips; and though the father never believed one syllable of the allegations against his son, though he had paid the penalty of a King’s Bench mandamus and imprisonment for horsewhipping the editor who had aspersed his “boy,” the world and the world’s verdict were against him, and he did not dare to revive the memory of a name against which all the severities of the press had been directed, and public opinion had condemned with all its weight and power.
“I see that I am wearying you,” said Hunter, as he remarked the grave and saddened expression that now stole over Barrington’s face. “I ought to have remembered what an hour it was, – more than half-past