be to them!—There is one class, however,” he went on, “which I should like to see wait a while before they got their creatures back;—I mean those foolish women who, for their own pleasure, so spoil their dogs that they make other people hate them, doing their best to keep them from rising in the scale of God’s creation.”
“They don’t know better!” I said. For every time he stopped, I wanted to hear what he would say next.
“True,” he answered; “but how much do they want to know the right way of anything? They have good and lovely instincts—like their dogs, but do they care that there is a right way and a wrong way of following them?”
We walked in silence, and were now coming near the other side of the small wood.
“I hope I shall not interfere with your plans for the day!” I said.
“I seldom have any plans for the day,” he answered. “Or if I have, they are made to break easily. In general I wait. The hour brings its plans with it—comes itself to tell me what is wanted of me. It has done so now. And see, there is Memnon again in attendance on us!”
There, sure enough, was the horse, on the other side of the paling that here fenced the wood from a well-kept country-road. His long neck was stretched over it toward his master.
“Memnon,” said Mr. Skymer as we issued by the gate, “I want you to carry this gentleman home.”
I had often enough in my youth ridden without a saddle, but seldom indeed without some sort of bridle, however inadequate: I did not, at the first thought of the thing, relish mounting without one a horse of which all I knew was that he and his master were on better terms than I had ever seen man and horse upon before. But even while the thought was passing through my head, Memnon was lying at my feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase—astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and lifted me into the natural relation of man and horse. Then he looked round at his master, and they set off at a leisurely pace.
“You have me captive!” I said.
“Memnon and I,” answered Mr. Skymer, “will do what we can to make your captivity pleasant.”
A silence followed my thanks. In this procession of horse and foot, we went about half a mile ere anything more was said worth setting down. Then began evidence that we were drawing nigh to a house: the grassy lane between hedges in which we had been moving, was gradually changing its character. First came trees in the hedge-rows. Then the hedges gave way to trees—a grand avenue of splendid elms and beeches alternated. The ground under our feet was the loveliest sward, and between us and the sun came the sweetest shadow. A glad heave but instant subsidence of the live power under me, let me know Memnon’s delight at feeling the soft elastic turf under his feet: he had said to himself, “Now we shall have a gallop!” but immediately checked the thought with the reflection that he was no longer a colt ignorant of manners.
“What a lovely road the turf makes!” I said. “It is a lower sky—solidified for feet that are not yet angelic.”
My host looked up with a brighter smile than he had shown before.
“It is the only kind of road I really like,” he said, “—though turf has its disadvantages! I have as much of it about the place as it will bear. Such roads won’t do for carriages!”
“You ride a good deal, I suppose?”
“I do. I was at one time so accustomed to horseback that, without thinking, I was not aware whether I was on my horse’s feet or my own.”
“Where, may I ask, does my friend who is now doing me the favour to carry ‘this weight and size,’ come from?”
“He was born in England, but his mother was a Syrian—of one of the oldest breeds there known. He was born into my arms, and for a week never touched the ground. Next month, as I think I mentioned, he will be forty years old!”
“It is a great age for a horse!” I said.
“The more the shame as well as the pity!” he answered.
“Then you think horses might live longer?”
“Much longer than they are allowed to live in this country,” he answered. “And a part of our punishment is that we do not know them. We treat them so selfishly that they do not live long enough to become our friends. At present there are but few men worthy of their friendship. What else is a man’s admiration, when it is without love or respect or justice, but a bitter form of despite! It is small wonder there should be so many stupid horses, when they receive so little education, have such bad associates, and die so much too young to have gained any ripe experience to transmit to their posterity. Where would humanity be now, if we all went before five-and-twenty?”
“I think you must be right. I have myself in my possession at this moment, given me by one who loved her, an ink-stand made from the hoof of a pony that died at the age of at least forty-two, and did her part of the work of a pair till within a year or two of her death.—Poor little Zephyr!”
“Why, Mr. Gowrie, you talk of her as if she were a Christian!” exclaimed Mr. Skymer.
“That’s how you talked of Memnon a moment ago! Where is the difference? Not in the size, though Memnon would make three of Zephyr!”
“I didn’t say poor Memnon, did I? You said poor Zephyr! That is the way Christians talk about their friends gone home to the grand old family mansion! Why they do, they would hardly like one to tell them!”
“It is true,” I responded. “I understand you now! I don’t think I ever heard a widow speak of her departed husband without putting poor, or poor dear, before his name.—By the way, when you hear a woman speak of her late husband, can you help thinking her ready to marry again?”
“It does sound as if she had done with him! But here we are at the gate!—Call, Memnon.”
The horse gave a clear whinny, gentle, but loud enough to be heard at some distance. It was a tall gate of wrought iron, but Memnon’s summons was answered by one who could clear it—though not open it any more than he: a little bird, which I was not ornithologist enough to recognize—mainly because of my short-sightedness, I hope—came fluttering from the long avenue within, perched on the top of the gate, looked down at our party for a moment as if debating the prudent, dropped suddenly on Memnon’s left ear, and thence to his master’s shoulder, where he sat till the gate was opened. The little one went half-way up the inner avenue with us, making several flights and returns before he left us.
The boy that opened the gate, a chubby little fellow of seven, looked up in Mr. Skymer’s face as if he had been his father and king in one, and stood gazing after him as long as he was in sight. I noticed also—who could have failed to notice?—that every now and then a bird would drop from the tree we were passing under, and alight for a minute on my host’s head. Once when he happened to uncover it, seven or eight perched together upon it. One tiny bird got caught in his beard by the claws.
“You cannot surely have tamed all the birds in your grounds!” I said.
“If I have,” he answered, “it has been by permitting them to be themselves.”
“You mean it is the nature of birds to be friendly with man?”
“I do. Through long ages men have been their enemies, and so have alienated them—they too not being themselves.”
“You mean that unfriendliness is not natural to men?”
“It cannot be human to be cruel!”
“How is it, then, that so many boys are careless what suffering they inflict?”
“Because they have in them the blood of men who loved cruelty, and never repented of it.”
“But how do you account for those men loving cruelty—for their being what you say is contrary to their nature?”
“Ah, if