Boy Woodburn: A Story of the Sussex Downs — John Shaqi
Boy Woodburn: A Story of the Sussex DownsOllivant, Alfred
General
Boy Woodburn: A Story of the Sussex Downs
Ollivant, Alfred
Sussex (England) -- Fiction
There is a famous caricature of Mat leading in the winner on the first
of these occasions. He looked then much as he does to-day--like
Humpty-Dumpty of the nursery ballad; but he grew always more
Humpty-Dumptyish with the years. His round red head, bald and shining,
sat like a poached egg between the enormous spread of his shoulders. His
neck, always short, grew shorter and finally disappeared; and his crisp,
pink face had the air of one who finds breathing a perpetually
increasing difficulty.
In build Mat was very short, and very broad; and his legs were so thin
that it was no wonder they were somewhat bowed beneath their load. Far
back in the Dark Ages, when his body was more on a par with his legs,
it was rumoured that Mat had himself won hunt-races.
"Then my body went on, or rayther spread out," he would tell his
intimates, "while me legs stayed where they was. So Mat become a trainer
'stead of a jockey."
And Mat's legs were not the only part of him that had stayed as they
were in those remote days. He wore the same clothes now as then; or if
not the identical clothes, as many averred, clothes of the identical
cut. Younger trainers, who were fond of having their joke with the old
man, would often inquire of him,
"Who's your tailor, Mat?"
To which the invariable answer in the familiar wheeze was,
"He died reign o' William the Fo'th, my son. Don't you wish he'd lived
to show _your_ Snips how to cut a coat?"
Mat indeed was distinctly early Victorian in his dress. He always wore a
stock instead of a tie, and the felt hat with a flat top and
broad-curled brim, which a rising young Radical statesman, for whom Mat
had once trained, had imitated. He walked with a curious and
characteristic lilt, as of a boy, rising on his toes as though reaching
after heaven. And his eye underlined, as it were, the mischievous gaiety
of his walk. It was a baffling eye: bright, blue, merry as a robin's and
very shrewd; "the eye of a cherubim," Mat once described it himself.
When it turned on you, grave yet twinkling, you knew that it summed you
up, saw through you, was aware of your wickedness, condoned it, pitied
you, comforted you, and bade you rejoice in the world and its crooked
ways. It was an innocent eye, a dewy eye, and yet a mighty knowing one.
Whether the owner of the eye was a saint or a sinner you could not
affirm. Therefore it bade you beware what you said, what you did, and
not least, what you thought, while its mild yet radiant beams were
turned upon you. One thing was quite certain: that blue eye had seen a
great deal. More, it had enjoyed the seeing. And its owner had a way of
wiping it as he ended some tale of rascality, successful or exposed,
with his habitual cliche--"I wep a tear. I did reelly," which made you
realize that the only tears it had in fact ever wept were in truth tears
of suppressed laughter over the foolishness of mortals. It had never
mourned over a lost sinner, though it had often winked over one. And it
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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