'What is Harriet on to-day?' asked Staveley of a constant member of the hunt. Now Harriet was the eldest Miss Tristram.
'A little brown mare she got last week. That was a terrible brush we had on Friday. You weren't out, I think. We killed in the open, just at the edge of Rotherham Common. Harriet was one of the few that was up, and I don't think the chestnut horse will be the better of it this season.'
'That was the horse she got from Griggs?'
'Yes; she gave a hundred and fifty for him; and I'm told he was as nearly done on Friday as any animal you ever put your eyes on. They say Harriet cried when she got home.' Now the gentleman who was talking about Harriet on this occasion was one with whom she would no more have sat down to table than with her own groom.
But though Harriet may have cried when she got home on that fatal Friday evening, she was full of the triumph of the hunt on this morning. It is not often that the hounds run into a fox and absolutely surround and kill him on the open ground, and when this is done after a severe run there are seldom many there to see it. If a man can fairly take a fox's brush on such an occasion as that, let him do it; otherwise let him leave it to the huntsman. On the occasion in question it seems that Harriet Tristram might have done so, and some one coming second to her had been gallant enough to do it for her.
'Oh, my lord, you should have been out on Friday,' she said to Lord Alston. 'We had the prettiest thing I ever saw.'
'A great deal too pretty for me, my dear.'
'Oh, you who know the roads so well would certainly have been up. I suppose it was thirteen miles from Cobbleton's Bushes to Rotherham Common.'
'Not much less, indeed,' said his lordship, unwilling to diminish the lady's triumph. Had a gentleman made the boast his lordship would have demonstrated that it was hardly more than eleven.
'I timed it accurately from the moment he went away,' said the lady, 'and it was exactly fifty-seven minutes. The first part of it was awfully fast. Then we had a little check at Moseley Bottom. But for that, nobody could have lived through it. I never shall forget how deep it was coming up from there to Cringleton. I saw two men get off to ease their horses up the deep bit of plough; and I would have done so too, only my horse would not have stood for me to get up.'
'I hope he was none the worse for it,' said the sporting character who had been telling Staveley just now how she had cried when she got home that night.
'To tell the truth, I fear it has done him no good. He would not feed, you know, that night at all.'
