Chapter 29

The Duke's Hounds

Silver's Leicestershire friends were under the delusion that he was keeping his hunters at Lewes. And so indeed he did till the hunting season began; and then he brought them over to Putnam's.

The Duke's north-country stud-groom, who was in _The Beehive_ at Folkington, as they came along the road from Lewes, ran out of the bar to have a look at them.

"Ma wud!" he whistled. "Champion!"

And Mike Rigg was right. Silver's horses indeed were the one item of his personal expenditure on which the young man never spared his purse. He used to say with perfect truth that except for his stud he could live with joy on £3 a week. But there was no man in England who had a rarer stud of weight-carriers.

"Big as blood elefunks," said Monkey Brand in the awed voice of a worshipper. "Flip a couple o' ton across country singin' hallelooyah all the way."

The Duke, when first they appeared with his hounds at the covertside, shook his head over them: for Jim Silver came south with a formidable reputation as a thruster.

"Too classy for my country, Silver," he said. "What d'you want with that sort of stuff down here?"

"I didn't like to part with 'em, sir," replied the young man. "They've done me well in their time."

"I don't want you young bloods from the shires down here," scolded the Duke. "You'll be all over my hounds. This is an old man's country, ain't it, Boy?"

Thunderbolt stood on his hind legs and pawed deliberately at the heavens.

"They're big, your Grace," answered the girl. "But Mr. Silver's bigger. He can hold them."

"And you can hold him, my dear," said the Duke. "Keep him in your pocket, there's a good gal. Now, Joe, let's be moving on."

The Duke was fond of the girl. It was said, indeed, that he liked her better than anybody in the hunt. Certainly he was never so happy as when showing her round his famous piggeries at Raynor's, or talking goats to her at an Agricultural Show.

Boy on her side was one of the most regular followers of the Duke's hounds; but, as she never tired of impressing on her friends, she hunted for professional reasons, and not for pleasure. Indeed, she was honest as always when she declared that she did not care for hunting for its own sake. There was so much swank about it and so little business: oceans of gossip, flirting, swagger, and spite to every ounce of reality. Moreover, her refined and Puritan spirit revolted against the people who hunted: she thought of them all as bubbles, brilliant apparently, but liable to burst at any moment and leave nothing behind them but a taint of vulgarity.

When hounds were running people saw little of Silver and the girl, who were always well behind.

"Carrying on together," was the spiteful comment of those whom Boy was wont to call in scorn "the ladies."

But it was not true. The pair were not coffee-housing. Boy was at her job, schooling her youngsters with incomparable patience, judgment, and decision; and Jim Silver, on those great fretting weight-carriers of his, was marking time and in attendance.

The Duke, when he got the pair alone, never tired of chaffing them.

"I notice she always gives you the lead, Silver," he mocked.

"Yes, sir," replied the young man. "She makes the hole, and I creep through it afterward."

The couple were talked about, of course; and both were dimly aware of it. Boy was used to being made the subject of gossip; and Silver was almost as unconscious of and aloof from it as were the horses that he rode.

The ladies, to whom he paid no attention, were indignant and resentful.

"It can't be," they said; and--"I hate to see that chit making a fool of a nice man like that."

The Duke, whose ears were growing longer every day, heard them once and began to bellow suddenly in that disconcerting way of his.

"It's all right!" he shouted. "You needn't be afraid. She won't have him."

The ladies jeered secretly. To their minds the question was not whether the girl would have Silver, but whether he would be Mug enough to give her the chance.

Certainly the pair were drawing close.

Days together in the saddle, the risks and small adventures of the field, and by no means least those long hacks home at evening, not seldom in the dark, over the Downs, a great wind blowing gustily under clear stars, did their sure, unconscious work.

Up to Christmas the young man visited Putnam's regularly. Then he missed two successive week-ends. When he came again there was a cloud over him. It was so faint and far that nobody noticed it indeed but the girl. She was not deceived.

As they rode home in the afternoon he was more silent than his wont. Once or twice her eyes sought his. His brows were level and drawn down. There was resistance in his face.

"Are you worried?" she asked.

His plain, strong face broke up, brightened and became beautiful.

"Yes," he said.

"Tell me."

"It's the only thing that ever worries me."

"What?"

"The Bank."

"Is it going wrong?"

He laughed again.

"I don't know," he said, and began to chuckle at himself. "That's the trouble. I can't get the hang of it. There's a screw loose somewhere. I'm like a man steering a ship who knows nothing about navigation."

"It's all right if you do your best," said the girl, with the little preacher touch she inherited from her grand-dad. That note always caused an imp of mischief to bob up in the young man's heart.

"Hope so, de we," he said.

She looked at him sharply. _She_ might censure her father, but she allowed that liberty to no one else.

"What!" she said.

Jim Silver took to instant flight.

"None-nothing," he stammered. "Only I'm afraid the pup-passengers won't think it's all right when they find themselves going to the bottom. They'll say, 'What business had you at the wheel if you can't steer?' And they'll be right, too."

* * * * *

With the New Year the young man came no more for week-ends, and the reason was well known.

The hunting-field is always a great place for gossip, for except at rare intervals there is little else to do. And with the Duke's hounds the gossip was about Mr. Silver.

The Union Bank of Brazil and Uruguay was known to be in difficulties, and Boy hunted alone.

"Where's your Life Guardsman?" asked the Duke.

"Guarding the Bank, I believe, your Grace."

The Duke grunted.

"Wants guarding from what I can hear of it," he blurted. "Tell him it's no good," he shouted. "Tell him to come out of it. It's no job for an honest man."

"What isn't?"

"Bankin'." He muttered to himself. "There's only one thing an honest man can do, that's land. Everything else you get dirty over. I'm not overclean myself, but I'm not as dirty as some of 'em."

Then there appeared paragraphs in the paper.

The girl asked her father about them.

He shook his head.

"I don't understand it, my dear," he said. "And what's more, I don't believe Mr. Silver do himself. I see the accounts published in the paper. Accordin' to them the Bank had five millions in cash. You'd think you couldn't go very fur wrong with five millions in cash in the till."

"Perhaps a clerk's been taking some," said the girl eagerly.

Once, but only once, there had been a clerk at Putnam's.

The old man was not to be convinced.

"Take a tidy-sized clurk to go off with five million in his pocket," he said. "Course I don't say he couldn't do it, Gob 'elpin' 'im. Only he'd be carryin' a lot o' dead weight, as the Psalmist said. _Too_ 'eavily penalised, I should say. No, my dear, 'tain't the clurk. 'Tis the li'bilities."

"What are the liabilities?" asked Boy.

"They're the devil, my dear," said the old man. "That's all I can tell you. Land you in the lock-up soon as look at you."

Later that evening the girl went to call on her friend, Mr. Haggard.

He was in his study among his books, and rose to greet her with that affectionate kindliness he reserved for her.

"I want to know something, Mr. Haggard," said the girl in her determined way.

He looked at her over his spectacles.

"Yes."

"Can they put you in prison if you lose your money?"

"Not if you lose it honestly," replied the vicar.

One reason the girl liked him so much was that he never played the fool. The heavy horse-chaff with which the average Englishman of the Duke's type, in his elephantine efforts at gallantry, thinks it necessary to adorn his conversation, were not for him.

"Oh, he'll lose it honestly all right," cried the girl eagerly, unconscious of the fact that she was giving herself away, or careless of it.

It was not hard for the other to gauge her mind. Casually he turned over an evening paper.

"I see there's good news about Mr. Silver's Bank," he said. "It's weathered the storm."

He pointed out to her a paragraph in the stop-press column.