CHAPTER LIII
MR. BAGWELL THE KEEPER
THE Duke of Tergiversation’s were capital covers, and wanted nothing but the barley to make them perfect. They were warm and dry, with plenty of nice underwood, mingled with briars and brambles and other leaf-retaining shrubs, or weeds as they would be called elsewhere. Then there were thick grassy and sedgy spots for the accommodation of the hares and restless rabbits, with rare temptation for woodcocks. Altogether they were very good, and ranged conveniently round the castle. Bagwell’s pretty lodge stood on the gently rising ground of Sunnybrow Hill, nestling among cedars and evergreens, and cut off from the kennel by a huge, well-clipped yew hedge, that would have puzzled Mr. Haggish to get over. It was a thatched, lattice-windowed, woodbine-porticoed house, with the usual museum of natural history—rats, cats, weazels, hawks, owls, magpies, &c., in various stages of decomposition—nailed in rows against the end.
Mr. Bagwell had been in a good many places, and there were few of the tricks of his trade that he was not up to. He never staid very long anywhere, having been dismissed from one place for not having any foxes, from another for having too many, and from a third for having neither foxes nor pheasants. Still he was what the country people call a “slee chap;” knew well where to sprinkle the white peas, sow sunflower or plant Jerusalem artichokes, to tice over a neighbour’s pheasants; and being a big, burly, bullying sort of fellow, he kept the country quiet, and prevented stories getting to the Duke’s ears that might otherwise have reached them.
Bagwell used often to turn out on his white pony to criticise his aversion, Mr. Haggish’s proceedings with the hounds, always declaring confidentially to his comrades, that that “Haggish John,” as he called him, was the greatest humbug he had ever set eyes on. It was now, however, Mr. Haggish’s turn, and Bagwell felt that he would be sure to retaliate. He would have given his ears for it to have been a wet day. No such luck, however, for Bag; on the contrary, it was a lovely one —a sort of summer day, that somehow or other had got slipped into winter, just as a sovereign sometimes gets slipped into one’s silver. The sky was blue, the air was clear and calm; the sun shone brightly, burnishing up the ruddy beech and the browning oaks, while the evergreens, the yews, the pines, the cedars, stretched themselves out comfortably against their late oppressive rivals, the now leafless elms and ash. This is the time that a man feels the value of his evergreens, and almost wishes his trees were all such, just as in spring, when the larch puts forth its early light-green leaves, he wishes his trees were all larch; and when the sycamore or something else succeeds, he wishes they were all sycamores, or whatever the others happen to be, and inwardly resolves to plant a great profusion of his favourites in the autumn.
The days of early winter are generally either very fine and bright, or very dull and hazy, scarcely any day at all, indeed—days that in towns the sun has to be supplemented by the gas, and the country looks like an immense vapour bath.
Having started betimes and cracked the country round, and placed sentinels at all the likely points to scare back invaders, Mr. Bagwell at length returned to his residence to array his stalwart figure in the green and gold livery of office, and proceed to the rendezvous at Ranger the Under-keeper’s Lodge at Merevale Gate. Having accomplished the toilette, and crowned himself with the lace-bedizened hat, he invested himself with the insignia of office in the shape of a little knotty dog-whip, and, unkennelling a couple of spaniels, set off on his mission, inwardly hoping that things might turn out as well as he could wish. He didn’t want to change his place if he could help it. As he crossed the spacious park, the straggling infantry of beaters—youths in smocks, youths in fustian, youths in tweeds—were seen converging on the same quarter; while the clatter-patter, clatter-patter, of the distant blockers was borne down wind upon the light western breeze.
