I had avoided him hitherto as much as possible. It seemed to be part of the bad luck of the day that I should be thrown into his society now. To have failed by thirty seconds in seeing Miss Merlin in the morning, and find myself the boon companion of young Plumtree at noon, was surely a combination of untoward circumstances which that individual himself would have called “hard lines.”
As I smoked my cigar, rather sulkily, and watched my aversion making the agreeable to Miss Lushington—a process at which, to do him justice, he appeared singularly skilful,—I recalled in my mind all I knew of his antecedents, and could not help congratulating myself, the while, that he was no son of mine.
Young James Plumtree, then—or “Jovial Jem,” as he was called by his familiars—was the only son of John Plumtree, of The Ashes, a most respectable, and, I believe, unimpeachable country gentleman, living in the vicinity of Soakington. I have always understood that the father was a man of grave and particularly gentlemanlike demeanour, and, although an excellent sportsman, extremely averse to anything approaching slang. It was, therefore, perfectly natural that his son should turn out one of the “loudest” and most uproarious rattles of his day.
The boy had an excellent education, too—at eight, a private tutor, who could never keep him out of the stable, and into the pockets of whose sad-coloured garments his pupil was continually putting white-mice and such abnormal vermin—nay, on one occasion, this long-suffering Mentor discovered a ferret in the tail of his coat, and an eel in the crown of his hat; at twelve, transferred to Eton, where he was placed as low as he possibly could be, and, notwithstanding repeated floggings, and constant wiggings from “my tutor,” persevered in the study of natural history with an ardour that could by no means be brought to harmonise with the rules of that elegant college. Corporal punishment is—or at least, in young Plumtree’s day, used to be—inflicted for the following misdemeanours, of which he was habitually found guilty, viz.: Entertaining fighting-dogs, at an outlay of a shilling per week, and making use of the same in their combative capacity; associating, both in and out of bounds, with cads and such low persons, with aggressive views on personal property in the form of hares, pheasants, etc., at Stoke, Burnham, Thames Ditton, and elsewhere; keeping singing-birds in a bureau that ought to have been devoted to school-books, and white-mice in the lower drawers of the same, along with clean linen; also, and this partiality for ferrets was one of the boy’s most remarkable characteristics, taking a female of that species into three-o’clock school, and producing her, so to speak, in open court; finally, never, under any circumstances, knowing one word of his lesson.