“These gentlemen have left some of their friends outside in their coaches. Sir Porteus, sir,” and he bowed to an apoplectic old fellow with a fringe of white hair and a tonsure like a monk’s, “there are people in your carriage. I trust you have not been too modest.”
The baronet stared boozily across the table.
“Certainly. And drinking small-beer when they should be drinking sherry.”
John Gore had such a stern and serious way with him at times that casual acquaintances might have set him down as a Puritan, with none of the sly, jesting spirit behind his swarthy and imperturbable face.
“I assure you, sir, there were gentlemen seated inside your coach. My father’s house is not so niggardly—”
Stephen Gore caught his son’s eye and twinkled. A servant came in at the same opportune moment, having taken fully three minutes to answer the bell.
“Here, Jeremy, sirrah, Sir Porteus has left some gentlemen to wait in his coach. Desire them to join us; my table is big enough.”
The man stared, and then appeared in a great hurry to go about his master’s business. But my lord hindered him.
“Jeremy, you rascal, come here. Pardon me, Porteus”—and my lord assumed his most impressive manner—“perhaps you had better call these friends of yours in to us.”
“I should recommend the other gentlemen to do likewise,” said John Gore, gravely; “Sir Porteus is not the only culprit. The more the merrier.”
The curiosity of the whole room appeared piqued. Several of my lord’s guests pushed their chairs back and made toward the door. But what Sir Porteus and the rest of them said when they poked their heads into the windows of their respective coaches no one but a hostler could possibly confess. The tallow dip on the pitchfork was knocked over by a judicious fist, but not before it had gutted all down the cushions of the door. There was a sudden exodus of stable boots and small clothes into the dark, and from the whistling and hissing in the stable any innocent man might have imagined that horses had never been so carefully rubbed down after a two-mile drive. The boy with the beer-can was the only thing captured, and most unjustly cuffed because his ears happened to be at the right level for the easy exercise of a gentleman’s hand.