But the daughter of the Old Buccaneer would have inherited a tenderness for the sight of blood.  She should make a natural Lady Patroness of England’s National Sports.  We might turn her to that purpose; wander over England with a tail of shouting riff-raft; have exhibitions, join in them, display our accomplishments; issue challenges to fence, shoot, walk, run, box, in time:  the creature has muscle.  It’s one way of crowning a freak; we follow the direction, since the deed done can’t be undone; and a precious poetical life, too!  You may get as royally intoxicated on swipes as on choice wine; win a name for yourself as the husband of such a wife; a name in sporting journals and shilling biographies:  quite a revival of the Peerage they have begun to rail at!

‘I would not wish to leave you,’ said Carinthia.

‘You have chosen,’ said Fleetwood.

CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD ENGLAND

Cheers at an open gate of a field saluted the familiar scarlet of the Earl of Fleetwood’s coach in Kentish land.  They were chorister cheers, the spontaneous ringing out of English country hearts in homage to the nobleman who brightened the heaviness of life on English land with a spectacle of the noble art distinguishing their fathers.  He drove along over muffling turf; ploughboys and blue butcher-boys, and smocked old men, with an approach to a hundred-weight on their heels, at the trot to right and left; all hoping for an occasional sight of the jewel called Kitty, that he carried inside.  Kitty was there.

Kitty’s eyes are shut.  Think of that:  cradled innocence and angels’ dreams and the whole of the hymn just before ding-dong-bang on noses and jaws!  That means confidence?  Looks like it.  But Kitty’s not asleep you try him.  He’s only quiet because he has got to undergo great exertion.  Last fight he was knocked out of time, because he went into it honest drunk, they tell.  And the earl took him up, to give him a chance of recovering his good name, and that’s Christian.  But the earl, he knows a man as well as a horse.  He’s one to follow.  Go to a fayte down at Esslemont, you won’t forget your day.  See there, he’s brought a lady on the top o’ the coach.  That seems for to signify he don’t expect it’s going to be much of a bloody business.  But there’s no accounting.  Anyhow, Broadfield ‘ll have a name in the papers for Sunday reading.  In comes t’ other lord’s coach.  They’ve timed it together closes they have.

They were pronounced to be both the right sort of noblemen for the country.  Lord Brailstone’s blue coach rattled through an eastern gate to the corner of the thirty-acre meadow, where Lord Fleetwood had drawn up, a toss from the ring.  The meeting of the blue and scarlet coaches drew forth Old England’s thunders; and when the costly treasures contained in them popped out heads, the moment was delirious.  Kit Ines came after his head on a bound.  Ben Todds was ostentatiously deliberate:  his party said he was no dancing-master.  He stepped out, grave as a barge emerging from a lock, though alive to the hurrahs of supporters and punctilious in returning the formal portion of his rival’s too roguish nod.  Their look was sharp into the eyes, just an instant.