This was on Monday evening, and the Brake hounds went out generally five days a week. 'You'll hunt tomorrow, I suppose,'
Lady Chiltern said to Silverbridge.
'I hope so.'
'You must hunt tomorrow. Indeed there is nothing else to do.
Chiltern has taken such a dislike to shooting-men, that he won't shoot pheasants himself. We don't hunt on Wednesdays or Sundays, and then everybody lies in bed. Here is Mr Maule, he lies in bed on other mornings as well, and spend the rest of his day riding about the country looking for the hounds.
'Does he ever find them?'
'What did become of you all today?' said Mr Maule, as he took his place at the dinner-table. 'You can't have drawn any of the coverts regularly.'
'Then we found our foxes without drawing them,' said the master.
'We chopped one at Bromley's,' said Mr Spooner.
'I went there.'
'Then you ought to have known better,' said Mrs Spooner. 'When a man loses the hounds in that country, he ought to go direct to Brackett's Wood. If you had come on to Brackett's Wood, you'd have seen as good a thirty-two minutes as ever you wished to ride.'
When the ladies went out of the room Mrs Spooner gave a parting word of advice to her husband, and to the host. 'Now, Tom, don't you drink port-wine. Lord Chiltern, look after him, and don't let him have port-wine.'
Then there began an altogether different phase of hunting conversation. As long as the ladies were there it was all very well to talk of hunting as an amusement, good sport, a thirty minutes or so, the delight of having a friend in a ditch, or the glory of a still-built rail were fitting subjects for a higher hour. But now the business of the night was to begin. The difficulties, the enmities, the precautions, the resolutions, the resources of the Brake hunt were to be discussed. And from thence the conversation of these devotees strayed away to the perils at large to which hunting in these modern days is subjected;--not the perils of broken necks and crushed ribs, which can be reduced to an average, and so an end made of that small matter; but the perils from outsiders, the perils of newfangled prejudices, the perils from more modern sports, the perils from over-cultivation, the perils from extended population, the perils from intruding cads, the perils from indifferent magistrates,--the Duke of Omnium for instance,--and that peril of perils, the peril of decrease of funds and increase of expenditure! The jaunty gentleman who puts on his dainty breeches and his pair of boots, and his single horse rides out on a pleasant morning to some neighbouring meet, thinking himself a sportsman, has but a faint idea of the troubles which a few staunch workmen endure in order that he may not be made to think that his boots, and his breeches, and his horse, have not been in vain.
A word or two further was at first said about that unfortunate wood for which Silverbridge at the present felt himself responsible. Finn said that he was sure the Duke would look to it, if Silverbridge would mention it. Chiltern simply groaned.
Silverbridge said nothing, remembering how many troubles he had on hand at this moment. Then by degrees their solicitude worked itself round to the cares of a neighbouring hunt. The A.R.U. had lost their master. One Captain Glomax was going, and the county had been driven to the necessity of advertising for a successor.
'When hunting comes to that,' said Lord Chiltern, 'one begins to think that it is in a bad way.' It may always be observed that when hunting-men speak seriously of their sport, they speak despondingly. Everything is going wrong. Perhaps the same thing may be remarked in other pursuits. Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin. Trade is always bad. The church is in danger. The House of Lords isn't worth a dozen years' purchase. The throne totters.
'An itinerant master with a carpet-bag never can carry on a country,' said Mr Spooner.
'You ought really to have a gentleman of property in the country,' said Lord Chiltern, in a self-deprecating tone. His father's acres lay elsewhere.
'It should be someone who has a real stake in the country,' replied Mr Spooner,--'whom the farmers can respect. Glomax understood hunting no doubt, but the farmers didn't care for him.
If you don't have the farmers with you, you can't have hunting.'
Then he filled a glass of port.
'If you don't approve of Glomax, what do you think of a man like Major Tifto?' asked Mr Maule.
'That was in the Runnymede,' said Spooner contemptuously.
'Who is Major Tifto?' asked Lord Chiltern.
'He is the man,' said Silverbridge boldly, 'who owned Prime Minister with me, when he didn't win the Leger last September.'
'There was a deuce of a row,' said Maule. Then Mr Spooner, who read his 'Bell's Life' and 'Field' very religiously, and who never missed an article in 'Bayley's', proceeded to give them an account of everything that had taken place in the Runnymede Hunt. It mattered but little that he was wrong in all his details.
Narrations always are. The result to which he nearly came right when he declared that the Major had been turned off, that a committed had been appointed, and that Messrs Topps and Jawstock had been threatened with a lawsuit.
