Young Mr. Ainslie's courtship

Front matter

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Chapter I

MAN with a natural taste for litigation as a rule, greatly to be pitied, and still more is he deserving of our sympathy when in addition he is afflicted with an insane desire to plead his own cause in person. No doubt a railway manager, thoroughly conversant with his work and with all the details of his own line, and of long experience in Parliamentary Committees, and accustomed also to address meetings of shareholders, would be very well able to figure as a Parliamentary counsel. This, however, is an exceptional case. And we are as far off from the ideal state ot things in which every man is to be his own lawyer, as from that in which every man will be his own architect, engineer, stock-broker, banker, surgeon, and physician* Lawyers and doctors know better

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than this. They almost invariably take advice even upon small occasions. They are quite aware that a man is very seldom indeed a competent judge of his own case. But there are many such people to be found in the world as the man to whom I have referred, and amongst the number was Colonel George Ainslie.

This warrior, after giving up the command of that famous old regiment, the 25th (the Prince of Wales’ Own) Lancers, retired to his country place in Surrey, and with the exception of marrying a charming and accomplished wife, and begetting a promising son, occupied himself in no other way than in quarrelling with his neighbours and his friends and his tradespeople, and, indeed, with nearly every one with whom he was brought in contact. These quarrels generally found their solution in the courts of law, and as the Colonel was for the most part in the wrong, and even when he happened to be in the right managed to spoil a good cause by insisting upon conducting it himself, his success as a litigant was not altogether brilliant. Indeed, fifteen years of indulgence in this expensive amusement reduced his fortune, which had been a ver' ample one, to what is called a modest competence. Want of success, however, did not diminish the Colonel’s ardour, nor quench his desire to exhibit his prowess in the law courts, and there is little doubt that if a chill, caught (as he said) out hunting, or, as Mrs. Ainslie affirmed, in the corridors of the Royal Courts of Justice (and this interesting problem was never satisfactorily solved), had not providentially carried him off, he and his wife and child would before long have been reduced to positive beggary. Mrs. Ainslie was perilously approaching her fortieth year at the time of the Colonel’s death, while their only child, Philip, with whose fortunes this veracious history will for the most part deal, was just fourteen ; and it was seven years from the date of that not altogether to be regretted event when the story opens.

Colonel Ainslie had been usually described by the garrison hacks, and the ladies’-maids, and the nurse-maids in the various towns where he had been quartered during his period of military service, as a magnificent man, and in this description there was scarcely a tinge of exaggeration. In this respect, and in this respect only, did Philip resemble his father. He was of fine stature and build, being considerably over six feet, and his chest and limbs were those of a giant, and, the physiognomy excepted, he reminded you of some of those quaint statuettes and rice-paper paintings, now everywhere to be seen, of Burmese wrestlers. Indeed, this peculiarity was very maiked, and it is on record that during his sixteenth year, when a great lout twice his weight insulted him by calling him a “Daddy Longlegs,” he took the offender by his collar and the slack of his nether garments, and threw him into a quickset hedge, from which the unhappy young man emerged considerably dilapidated and with much loss of personal dignity, having to hold his garments together with both hands as he wended his way home a sadder and a wiser person.

As years grew upon him, Master Philip’s physical strength did not develop itself at all in the direction of *the modern craze, now happily past its prime, of athleticism. He knew what he could do, and he was content with it; and at Cambridge he rowed in his college eight, and was persuaded to occupy a thwart in the University boat, very much, however, against his inclination. But he entirely declined to go about pot-hunting at athletic sports and regattas, and took his exercise by himself or with his companions, having a distinct preference for the prosaic and useful side of athletics. He was only an ordinary runner, but he could walk any number of hours a day; he could keep up swimming till his limbs were numbed ; he could lift and carry great weights with comparative ease; his boxing and wrestling almost reached professional rank ; and — a fact which students of character will appreciate — he was a first-rate climber

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of trees, and would spend hours together among their branches, sometimes with a pipe or a book, or both, and very often without any other source of occupation than his own thoughts.

So Philip grew up until it became necessary to think what was to be done with him. He had not been sent to a public school. Now, this was, of course, in many ways a great disadvantage to the lad. On the other hand, his character retained its originality. For the English public-school boy is now as stereotyped as is the English public-school boy^s Sunday dress of sober trousers, black waistcoat and jacket, or tail coat, according to age and size, with shirt collar to match, silver watch and chain, and tall silk hat. Philip was a child of nature.

He left the University with what is termed the highest credit. He had by no means covered himself with academical honours, and bets were freely laid that he would not take his degree at the first opportunity. The layers were disappointed, for he took his degree without any trouble, if without any great distinction, the first time he had the chance to offer himself for examination, and was of the standing to do so. He left Cambridge without a shilling of University debts, with a considerable number of friendships more or less close, and leaving behind him a general and well-deserved

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impression that he was a thoroughly good fellow, or, as they call it at Cambridge, & good man all round.”

Then came life, for the University is only the finishing school, except for those who mean to be^ come pedagogues themselves, or to devote their whole lives to study, and even these latter generally go abroad, where the libraries and museums at their disposal are better than those of twenty Oxfords and Cambridges rolled into one. And now the question arose, what was Philip to do? Tutors have stereotyped answers worthy only of a guide book. Ask them what your son is to do now that he has taken his degree. They begin with the Bar, profoundly pointing out that it is the quickest road to the peerage of any, except perhaps the Army, but that it requires immense industry and self-denial. In the same vein — like the Fool of Jacques who took a dial from his poke, and, gazing at it with lack-lustre eye, quoth very wisely, It is ten o’clock,” going on to observe that an hour ago it was nine, and that in another hour it would be eleven — they discourse on the relative advantages of civil engineering, of taking a mastership in a school, of taking Orders and becoming a curate, and so forth.

It is astonishing with how little wisdom advice, apparently the most solemn, is often given. Tlie

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wisdom of Polonius had no effect upon Philip, and next to none upon his mother.

“ You had better be, my dear,” said that most sensible lady, ‘‘just whatever you think the best, for you can afford to be anything in reason. I would rather not see you in business; nor do I want you to become at once a small country squire, a nobody among the Lord-lieutenant and his companions, and only just able to keep your couple of hunters; but if I do not want to see you in business, I certainly do not want to see you idle. Choose a profession, and make sure you choose one you like. I only hope it will not be the Army, or indeed any that will separate us during the rest of my life.”

“All right, mother,” said Philip, “I will think it over.” And giving her a kiss on each cheek, he took down his hat and stick from their place in the hall, whistled to his spaniels, and strolled out into the village.

The little country house in which mother and son lived was nine miles from Fairminster, and in that direction Philip marched along with great strides, for he was a capital walker, and could easily do his five-and-a-half miles an hour.

Now Fairminster is one of the most curious old towns in Surrey. The houses are red -tiled and quaintly gabled. Little streams of .water unex-

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pectedly make their appearance in the street, pursue a noisy rattling course for several yards, and then suddenly disappear again under the ground. There is a local trade in saddlery which is considerable. There are one or two old coaching inns, and there are several of the most marked features of a county market-town more strongly accentuated than usual.

Arriving at Fairminster about half-past one, Philip felt hungry. “ No good worrying your mind on an empty stomach,” he said to himself, as he sat down to cold ribs of beef, hot potatoes, and sound draught Burton ale. Then being soon satisfied that he should not have to think upon the dreaded empty stomach, he lit his briar, and sauntered out of the hotel into the pleasantly wooded environs of the town. His spaniels followed happily at his heels, but beyond their occasional interchange of barks there was nothing to break the stillness of the air except the drowsy hum of insects or the occasional note of a wild bird.

On he went till he came to some felled and lopped trees lying in a vacant space by the roadside, and on one of these he sat, wondering whether sitting on a fallen tree might rot somehow give him inspiration much in the same way that sitting on a three-legged stool with no seat to it over a vaporous hole in the ground inspired the priestess at Delphi, and he laughed at the quaintness of the idea.

There are certain lengths of distance in the Dutch canal where the bargemen calculate the ground they have covered, or have got to cover, by the number of pipes that can be smoked in its transit, saying, for instance, “ It is four pipes to Utderdam, and from there it will be six pipes to Zuyprecken; so we can get to Zuyprecken in good time for supper, and at Zuyprecken the schnapps is good.’'

In a frame of mind as philosophical as this Philip at last rose from his tree. “ Five briars this size,” said he looking fondly at his favourite pipe, ought to be time enough to any man with nerve to decide, even were it to be between peace and war. Thank Heaven I never had any difficulty from the first ; but it is always pleasant, if you can, to come to the ultimate conclusion that jmu have been right all along. Now I must walk back, and after dinner I will tell my mother what result I have arrived at. Never talk business before dinner, or at any rate immediately before it. I know it puts you off your feed, and I have been told on credible authority that it injures your digestion. So, too, do gin and bitters, but — here we are,” and he strolled through the open portals of “ The Chequers,” and ordered a wine-glass full of that

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invigorating giver of appetite for which it can, at any rate, be claimed that it is not, like absinthe, a distinct poison, judging by the results the latter produces if taken with sufficient devotion and perseverance.

After a kindly word to the landlady and the barmaid, Philip left the inn and commenced striding home with his immense long swinging, almost slouching step, through the streets where everybody knew him by sight, and where none had a bad word for him, and along the country lanes, reaching after eleven miles, accomplished, to be exact, in two hours and thirteen minutes, the long shadow thrown by his mother’s house across the road.

Mrs. Ainslie was standing at the gate, — not waiting for her son, but out of habit, — and she waved her handkerchief to him as he came up towards her with the spaniels at his heels.

“ We’ll have dinner, mother,” he said, “ and then I will tell you the conclusions I have arrived at, and submit them to your approval.”

His mother smiled, and he presently descended from his chamber radiant in fresh linen, and redolent of that most homely of cosmetics, brown Windsor soap.

Chapter II

FTER a meal, in which his own share would have done credit to Gargantua, Philip, in the plainest possible fashion, without hinting or suggesting, but laying down proposition after proposition as simply and yet completely as if he were demonstrating some problem in Euclid, with its “ therefores ” following each other like the links of a chain, gave his mother the whole of his mind.

Now it may be as w'ell to say at once what it was that Philip had determined to do, and how he had abandoned his intention when he saw what pain it would be likely to cause his mother.

He had become, even so early in life, tired of the same trees, the same meadows, every square foot of which he could have mapped out, the same brook with its trout, and the same town with the same market-place, the same farmers round about the doors of “The Lion,” and “The Chequers,” and “The Dragon,” and “The Golden Heart,” of the saddlers, of the old dealer in corn and seed, and of the veterinary surgeon, the same little knots of townsfolk discussing as usual whether it would rain to-morrow, whether turnips would be an/ more than an average crop, whether there would be a good show of cubs at which to enter the young hounds, and whether it was true that Sir Jacob, the member for the Eastern Division, was so drunk the other night in the House of Commons that he actually awoke to the fact himself and abruptly concluded a rambling incoherent soliloquy with the emphatic remark, “Those are my sentiments, Mr. Speaker; they have been my sentiments from a boy. There is no element of party feeling in them ; and by adherence to them England will once again become the England of Pitt and of Burleigh, of Fox, Newcastle, and North.”

The dream of Philip’s life had been to travel from the East to the Western Ind. He knew, of course, that exploring was hopelessly beyond his reach. He was quite aware that you must be a very rich man indeed to equip yourself with waggons and bullocks, and make an attempt to see what there is six or seven hundred miles beyond the farthest known point on the Congo.

All this, as I have said, Philip clearly and fully explained to his mother. Mrs. Aid she was less astonished than he thought, but it may be mentioned that she happened to be a very shrewd lady indeed. She could, to use a homely proverb, see as far into a brick wall as can most people. And if your vision is equal to even an attempt upon a brick wall, you may satisfy yourself that you are quite as intelligent as your neighbours and probably even more so. So‘ the estimable lady listened to her son with all the judicial solemnity of a Burleigh, and finally put a very terrible question.

How long,” she asked, “ has all this nonsense been fermenting in your head ? ”

“I am not at all sure that it is nonsense, dear mother. But it has been fermenting, as you call it, for some time. Indeed, it ought to have been bunged down and in the cellar a long time ago. That, however, is my loss and my laziness; and I can now only tell you that you know everything that I have to say.”

Then you had better also know, my dear, that what you have to say has made your mother very unhappy and unquiet. She had always looked forward to your being, and she knows you would be if you were at home, a comfort and support to her in her old age. But she sees it all now, and is sorry if she has been selfish. You shall do as you please, my son, and it will perhaps, after all, make me the happier for you to do so.” And Mrs. Ainslie got up out of her arm-chair, her state dress (always donned on important family occasions)

rustling like a copse in autumn, and came towards him. Philip had his arms round her before she had advanced three yards.

“ All right, dearest mother, I shall never oppose your wishes. You may consider everything settled as you desire. And you may be sure I should never have acted against your views in the slightest degree. I owe you, and you only, everything in this world; and now you must have your tea, for look, it is past bedtime, and when you are off upstairs I will just have a smoke in the library, and to-morrow morning we will meet as usual at breakfast and settle matters without any argument. That will be easy enough, as we are quite agreed upon them. I will be up early, and I shall come to you fresh from the mill tail. And, unless the sunset misled me to-night, which I don’t think it did, there will be my trout to-morrow for breakfast, as weU as your ham and eggs. Some people say trout are the better for keeping a day or two. What a pleasant world it would be if there were not so many fools in it ! ”

And so mother and son parted; the former going off to her room, and the latter, who was no better than most young men of his age, to the library, where the Annual Register, the Encyclopsedia Britannica, and some antiquated volumes of a similar description, some old novels, such as

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Thaddeus of Warsaw, Shakespeare, a Bible, a history of the County published by subscription, in five volumes, with steel plates ; Blair’s Sermons, Miss Plumptre’s Letters, and Holy Living and Dying, formed, with Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and the poem 3 of Mr. Montgomery, as complete a collection of the English classics as any country gentleman with means — even the High Sheriff himself — might desire ; unless the works of Nimrod, the illustrious Colonel Hawker, and with them the Mr. Jorrock’s series, are to be considered absolutely necessary in a properly appointed library. Old Colonel Ainslie, indeed, had enjoyed the reputation in the county of being a bit of a bookworm.

In the library Philip brewed himself a great tumbler of punch, which, when concocted, contained amongst other ingredients lump sugar, hot water, slices of lemon, spices, and whisky. Then he virtuously locked up the whisky in a cupboard, the key of which he hung ostentatiously on a nail, as if to communicate to all whom it might concern that it — the key — had done its day’s work, and had now turned in for the night. Then he sat and smoked, slowly, and with Batavian deliberation and silence.

“ I am sure I have done the right thing,” said he, rising from his chair and shaking himself. “Anyhow, I have done, and I mean to do, what I i6 YOUNG MR, AINSLIE^ S C0UR2SHIP, think is right, and more than that I cannot do. So here goes for Bedfordshire.”

Philip’s mind was now fully made up. Truth to tell, he loved his mother far better probably than most men love their wives. He understood her slightest wishes almost before she could express them herself; and he had accustomed himself to hang round about her and look after her in a rough, gruff kind of way, as an elephant in India, if put to the test, will look after a child, taking it up when it gets too near a puddle, and solemnly depositing it in the centre of a patch of dry turf sheltered by the shadow of a tree, to which it will patiently restore its charge from time to time as it. strays. The sagacity of an elephant in this respect is far superior to that of the ordinary haymakers dog.

Philip had consequently decided with himself to remain at home until his mother might die, for however long that might be. Of course he could not tell her this in so many words ; but an American, viewing the matter as did Philip, and wishing to put it “ plump and flat,” would have said he was a good son, above the average of them ; that he was champing his teeth to get away, but that it was quite clear he’d hung up his prospecting boots till the time should come for the old lady to croak; and then he’d see the matter through all right and square down to the full stop on the headstone and the pensioning off of the family cat, realise the little estate in dollars, and be off on the rampage — not a spree, but a rampage — such as a gentleman might be proud of, from its beginning to its end, and write a book about it when it was over, if he chose to do so, with pictures of big game and all that kiud of shop.”

I do not believe Philip had an enemy, and I am sure that he had many friends. Had it been whispered — ^if the bucolic mouth can whisper — at the farmers- ordinary on market day, that Master Philip was going to let the house and the shooting and go abroad for a bit, the matter would have created far more commotion in the village than would in London an assurance that the young princes were going with Nares to shoot white bear and musk ox at Smith’s Sound, spend a week or two in Nova Zembla, and explore the natural history of XJpernavik.

After all,” said Philip to himself, when he was undressing that evening, leaning on the sill of his bedroom window and watching the bats flit about with their sharp querulous chirrup, listening to the hoot of an owl in an old tree hard by that was said to be older than the Parish Church, and also looking out for an antiquated goat-sucker that used now and then to show himself, “After all, I am very happy here with my mother; and it would be a i8 burning shame to go away if she wishes me to stop. The shooting is good, the fishing is fair, and, if I wanted a couple of months for grouse, or red deer, or salmon, she wouldn’t lift her little finger in protest. It’s the idea of the distance and of my being among black men, and in a place where warming-pans and mustard poultices, and cough lozenges, and foot-baths, and other such things necessary to salvation are wholly unknown, that puts her off her head. If I were to tell her now that I wanted to go to the Pyrenees for bear, or to Sicily for sword fish, or even to Disco for sealing, she wouldn’t mind a bit, because they happen to be all in Europe, and yet the journey I should have liked to make is little longer, if at all, and I should have been able to write home much more regularly. However, there is no help for it; there it is” (he knocked the ashes out of his pipe) ; “ out you go, old briar, and in your master turns.”

And he had not turned in five minutes before a measured tranquil snore announced that a healthy body, which contained a healthy mind, had gone to sleep soundly in company, and that neither of the two wished for the present to be vexed by the incidents of daily life.

Chapter III

T was now approaching the English countrygentleman’s time of glory, Christmas. The haies were strong on their legs, and almost as swift as full-sized saplings. Feathers were never more abundant or better stuffed. You could hardly walk a hundred yards from the hall door without hearing the chuckle of an old cock pheasant. It threatened, too, to be a cold winter, and Philip foresaw plenty of his own particular enjoyment, snap shooting, to which you go out alone, except for a knowing old dog who likes this rough work, and return with a mixed bag — curlew, snipe, plover, even occasionally eight or ten big fieldfare — which are delicious in a pudding — to say nothing of a cock, if one should come spiring over your head against the wind, or a brace of duck marked down in that little pond at the corner of the spinney.

There is a fascination of its own about snap-shot shooting, which no man can explain, and many a good old shikarree of the type of Probyn or St. Croix will tell you, that, next to flooring the tiger with a straight bullet in the hollow of the chest, or between the eyes, there is no enjoyment like that of roaming about on your elephant, picking up snipe in the paddy and indigo fields.

Philip, with the spaniels, took a walk round what, when he was in a cynical temperament, he used to call *‘the estate.” His mind was made up, but the piU was not the less a bitter one. “After all,” said he, “ we aU of us have our troubles, and what does this trouble of mine amount to ? Why, nothing at all — nothing at all. Its childish to howl, like a schoolboy when the thaw comes and puts a stop to his sliding, or a girl who wants, for reasons of her own, to go to Brighton when the family edict has gone forth for Eastbourne. I have had precious little of the rough in this life; in fact — ” and he strongly emphasized this remark — “I think I have had a great deal too much of my

own way in this world and got spoilt. It’s a jolly

place this.” He sat down on a stile. “Let me see. It’s only pleasure deferred. What’s that to a man who has as much pleasure as he wants already ? I must look forward a bit for my big game, my

tuskers, and my tigers with a toenail that would

rip up a dray horse, and I must possess my soul in peace. If ever a man’s duty was clear, it’s mine to-day. Right you are ! Stir yourselves up, you lazy beasts, and let me see you quarter that field ! ”

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And he watched while his dogs quartered an acre or two of turnips in a manner that seemed to meet with his full approval. ** They are getting shy, and are beginning to scatter already,” he said, critically; and so he strolled home. His mother was at the door and welcomed him.

“What do you want for dinner to-day, dear?”

“ Whatever you have got, mother.”

“We have only cold, and I wanted to get you something nice after your long walk.”

“ Did you, mother ? ” puzzling his brains to think what were the resources of the house. “Now, after a long walk, a man at my time of life ought to have learnt to be content with what he can get.”

Philip was not a bad judge. Cold silverside of beef and pickled walnuts, some hot potatoes, if they can be got, a tankard of ale, and some bread and cheese, is a meal after which, —

Serenely calm, the epicure may say ;

* Fate cannot harm me ; I have dined to-day.’ *

I may note — for it is well to be careful in important matters — that the ale, if possible, should be old Burton, the potatoes mealy, the pickled walnuts in their third year, and the beef a piece that has been cooked to get cold. The perfection of cold meat is that which has been cooked that it may be served as cold meat, and I well remember the wink of a dear old country squire with a

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fussy Pharisaical wife, as he said to me while we were composing ourselves for lunch, “Cold leg of mutton, my boy, uncut. Susan will have no cooking on Sundays; at least, no meat. But she likes to see the joint come up whole. It’s keeping the Sabbath, and at the same time paying proper respect to High Day. And she’s quite right, my boy,” as his teeth closed on a thick slice cut from two-thirds down the leg, “quite right. If a man can’t eat cold mutton one day a week, I have no patience with him.”