BLACK SHEEP!

BY THE AUTHOR OF "LAND AT LAST," "KISSING THE ROD,"
&c. &c.

CHAPTER III. THE PHILISTINES.

THE cold weather, which in the country
produced rugged roads and ice-bound ponds; which
frosted the leafless branches of the trees with
a silver tint, and gave a thousand different
fantastic but ever lovely hues and shapes to nature;
had no such pleasant refreshing effect in London,
where the frost, ere three hours old, was
beaten into mud under foot, ran drizzling in
dirty streams from house-tops, and subsided
into rain and fog before the daylight had
disappeared. The day succeeding that on which
George Dallas had entered the town of Amherst
was a thorough specimen of what London can do
when put to its worst. It was bad in the large
thoroughfares where the passing crowds jostled
each other ill-temperedly, digging at each other's
umbrellas, and viciously contesting every inch
of foot pavement, where the omnibus wheels
revolved amid mud-ruts, and every passing cab-
horse produced a fountain of slush and spray.
But it was even worse in the by-streets, where
an attempt at sweeping had been made, where
the mud lay in a thick slimy, shiny tide between
the narrow ridges of footpath, where the tall
houses, so close together that they completely
filtered the air and light and retained nothing
but the darkness and the dirt, were splashed
with mud to their first-floor windows, and whose
inhabitants or visitors desirous of crossing the
road had to proceed to the junction with the
main street, and, after tacking across in
comparative cleanliness, commence their descent on
the opposite side.

In the front room of the first floor of a house
in such a street, South Molton-street, connecting
Oxford-street the plebeian, with Brook-
street the superb, just as the feeble glimmer of
daylight which had vouchsafed itself during
the day was beginning to wax even feebler,
previous to its sudden departure, a man sat
astride a chair, sunk in thought. He had
apparently just entered, for he still wore his
hat and overcoat, though the former was
pushed to the back of his head, and the
latter thrown negligently open. He was a tall
handsome man, with keen black eyes glancing
sharply, with thick black brows, a long straight
nose, thin tight lips unshrouded by moustache
or beard, and a small round chin. He had full
flowing black whiskers, and the blue line round
his mouth showed that the beard was naturally
strong; had he suffered it to grow, he might
have passed for an Italian. As it was, there was
no mistaking him for anything but an Englishman
—darker, harder-looking than most of his
race, but an Englishman. His face, especially
round the eyes, was flushed and marked and
lined, telling of reckless dissipation. There
was a something not exactly fast, but yet
slangy, in the cut of his clothes and in the
manner in which he wore them; his attitude
as he sat at the window with his hands clasped
in front of him over the back rail of his chair,
his knees straight out and his feet drawn back,
as a man sits a horse at a hunt, was in its best
aspect suggestive of the mess-room: in its worst,
of the billiard-room. And yet there was an
indescribable something in the general aspect
of the man, in the very ease of his position, in
the shape of the hands clasped in front of him,
in the manner, slight as it was, in which now
and again he would turn on his chair and peer
back into the darkness behind him, by which
you would have known that he had had a
refined education, and had been conversant with
the manners of society.

Nor would you have been wrong. In Burke's
Landed Gentry, the Rouths of Carr Abbey
take up their full quota of pages, and when the
county election for Herefordshire comes off, the
liberal agent is forced to bring to bear all
the science he can boast of, to counteract the
influence which the never-failing adhesion of
the old family throws into the Tory scale.
Never having risen, never for an instant having
dreamed of demeaning themselves by rising,
above the squirearchy, owners of the largest
and best herds in all that splendid cattle-breeding
county, high-sheriffs and chairmen of
quarter-sessions as though by prescriptive right,
perpetual presidents of agricultural societies,
and in reality taking precedence immediately
after the lord-lieutenant, the Rouths of Carr
Abbey, from time immemorial, have sent their
sons to Oxford, and their daughters to court,
and have never, save in one instance, had to
blush for their children.

Save in one instance. The last entry in the
old family Bible of Carr Abbey is erased by a
thick black line. The old squire speaks habitually