England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Social classes -- England -- Fiction
"Wonderful morning for scent," she heard somebody say, and flushed
because she thought a personal remark had been passed about herself; but
before she had time to worry who had said it and why it had been said
Mignonette was nearly leading the field.
"Dorothy," shouted her husband, "for God's sake don't get too far in
front. Hold your mare in a bit. And for God's sake don't ride over
hounds."
But Dorothy paid no attention to him and was soon galloping with the
first half-dozen. By her side appeared Charlie Fanhope.
"Topping run," he breathed. "I say, you're looking glorious. Awful to
think I shall be on the way to Eton this time to-morrow."
She smiled at him; from out of the past came the memory of an old
colored Christmas supplement on the walls of the nursery in Lonsdale
Road. A girl and a boy on rocking-horses, brown and dapple-gray, the boy
wearing a green-velvet cap and jacket, the girl befrilled and besashed,
were both plunging forward with rosy smiles. Underneath it had been
inscribed: "Yoicks! Tally-ho!" While her mare's heels thudded over the
soft turf, Dorothy kept saying to herself, "Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks!"
Charlie Fanhope, riding beside her, was as fresh and rosy as the boy in
the picture.
"You can't take that gate, can you?" he was saying.
Before her like a ladder rose a five-barred gate. At the riding-school
in Knightsbridge Dorothy had jumped obstacles quite as high; but those
had been obstacles that collapsed conveniently when touched by the heels
of her horse.
"I say I don't think you can take that gate," Charlie Fanhope repeated,
anxiously. "I'll open it. I'll open it."
But Dorothy in a dream left all to Mignonette; remembering from real
life to grip the pommel, to keep her wrists down, and to sit well back,
she seemed to be uttering a prolonged gasp that was carried away by the
wind as a diver's gasp is lost in the sound of the water. Where was her
cousin? Left behind to crackle through one of those gaps he knew of.
Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks! They were in a wide, down-sloping meadowland
intensely green, and checkered with the black and red riders in groups;
hounds were disappearing at the bottom of the slope in a thick coppice.
Nursery pictures of Caldecott came back to Dorothy when she saw the
squire with his horn and his mulberry-colored face and his huge bay
horse go puffing past to investigate the check, which lasted long enough
for Dorothy to receive many felicitations upon her horsewomanship.
"My word! Doodles," said her husband, cantering up to her side. "You
really are a wonder, but for the Lord's sake be careful."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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