Rookwood, William Harrison Ainsworth [best classic books txt] 📗

thus he held his way, while, in the words of the ballad,

Fled past, on right and left, how fast,
Each forest, grove, and bower;
On right and left, fled past, how fast,
Each city, town, and tower.


CHAPTER VI

BLACK BESS

Dauphin. I will not change my horse with any that treads but on
four pasterns. Ca, ha! He bounds from the earth as if his entrails
were hairs; le cheval volant , the Pegasus qui a les narines de
feu ! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air;
the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is
more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

SHAKESPEARE: Henry V., Act III.


Black Bess being undoubtedly the heroine of the Fourth Book of this Romance, we may, perhaps, be pardoned for expatiating a little in this place upon her birth, parentage, breeding, appearance, and attractions. And first as to her pedigree; for in the horse, unlike the human species, nature has strongly impressed the noble or ignoble caste. He is the real aristocrat, and the pure blood that flows in the veins of the gallant steed will infallibly be transmitted, if his mate be suitable, throughout all his line. Bess was no cock-tail . She was thorough-bred; she boasted blood in every bright and branching vein:

If blood can give nobility,
A noble steed was she;
Her sire was blood, and blood her dam,
And all her pedigree.

As to her pedigree. Her sire was a desert Arab, renowned in his day, and brought to this country by a wealthy traveller; her dam was an English racer, coal-black as her child. Bess united all the fire and gentleness, the strength and hardihood, the abstinence and endurance of fatigue of the one, with the spirit and extraordinary fleetness of the other. How Turpin became possessed of her is of little consequence. We never heard that he paid a heavy price for her; though we doubt if any sum would have induced him to part with her. In color, she was perfectly black, with a skin smooth on the surface as polished jet; not a single white hair could be detected in her satin coat. In make she was magnificent. Every point was perfect, beautiful, compact; modelled, in little, for strength and speed. Arched was her neck, as that of the swan; clean and fine were her lower limbs, as those of the gazelle; round and sound as a drum was her carcase, and as broad as a cloth-yard shaft her width of chest. Hers were the " pulchrae clunes, breve caput, arduaque cervix ," of the Roman bard. There was no redundancy of flesh, 'tis true; her flanks might, to please some tastes, have been rounder, and her shoulders fuller; but look at the nerve and sinew, palpable through the veined limbs! She was built more for strength than beauty, and yet she
was beautiful. Look at that elegant little head; those thin, tapering ears, closely placed together; that broad, snorting nostril, which seems to snuff the gale with disdain; that eye, glowing and large as the diamond of Giamschid! Is she not beautiful? Behold her paces! how gracefully she moves! She is off!--no eagle on the wing could skim the air more swiftly. Is she not superb? As to her temper, the lamb is not more gentle. A child might guide her.

But hark back to Dick Turpin. We left him rattling along in superb style, and in the highest possible glee. He could not, in fact, be otherwise than exhilarated; nothing being so wildly intoxicating as a mad gallop. We seem to start out of ourselves--to be endued, for the time, with new energies. Our thoughts take wings rapid as our steed. We feel as if his fleetness and boundless impulses were for the moment our own. We laugh; we exult; we shout for very joy. We cry out with Mephistopheles, but in anything but a sardonic mood, "What I enjoy with spirit, is it the less my own on that account? If I can pay for six horses, are not their powers mine! I drive along, and am a proper man, as if I had four-and-twenty legs!" These were Turpin's sentiments precisely. Give him four legs and a wide plain, and he needed no Mephistopheles to bid him ride to perdition as fast as his nag could carry him. Away, away!--the road is level, the path is clear. Press on, thou gallant steed, no obstacle is in thy way!--and, lo! the moon breaks forth! Her silvery light is thrown over the woody landscape. Dark shadows are cast athwart the road, and the flying figures of thy rider and thyself are traced, like giant phantoms, in the dust!

Away, away! our breath is gone in keeping up with this tremendous run. Yet Dick Turpin has not lost his wind, for we hear his cheering cry--hark! he sings. The reader will bear in mind that Oliver means the moon--to "whiddle" is to blab.

OLIVER WHIDDLES!

Oliver whiddles--the tattler old!
Telling what best had been left untold.
Oliver ne'er was a friend of mine;
All glims I hate that so brightly shine.
Give me a night black as hell, and then
See what I'll show to you, my merry men.

Oliver whiddles!--who cares--who cares,
If down upon us he peers and stares?
Mind him who will, with his great white face,
Boldly I'll ride by his glim to the chase;
Give him a Rowland, and loudly as ever
Shout, as I show myself, "Stand and deliver!"

"Egad," soliloquized Dick, as he concluded his song, looking up at the moon. "Old Noll's no bad fellow, either. I wouldn't be without his white face to-night for a trifle. He's as good as a lamp to guide one, and let Bess only hold on as she goes now, and I'll do it with ease. Softly, wench, softly--dost not see it's a hill we're rising. The devil's in the mare, she cares for nothing." And as they ascended the hill, Dick's voice once more awoke the echoes of night.


WILL DAVIES AND DICK TURPIN

Hodie mihi, cras tibi.--SAINT AUGUSTIN.

One night, when mounted on my mare,
To Bagshot Heath I did repair,
And saw Will Davies hanging there,
Upon the gibbet bleak and bare,
With a rustified, fustified, mustified air!

Within his chains bold Will looked blue,
Gone were his sword and snappers too,
Which served their master well and true;
Says I, "Will Davies, how are you?
With your rustified, fustified, mustified air! "

Says he, "Dick Turpin, here I be,
Upon the gibbet, as you see;
I take the matter easily;
You'll have your turn as well as me,
With your whistle-me, pistol-me, cut-my-throat air! "

Says I, "That's very true, my lad;
Meantime, with pistol and with prad,
I'm quite contented as I am,
And heed the gibbet not a d--n!
With its rustified, fustified, mustified air! "

"Poor Will Davies!" sighed Dick; "Bagshot ought never to forget him."[110]

For never more shall Bagshot see
A highwayman of such degree,
Appearance, and gentility,
As Will, who hangs upon the tree,
With his rustified, fustified, mustified air!

"Well," mused Turpin, "I suppose one day it will be with me like all the rest of 'em, and that I shall dance a long lavolta to the music of the four whistling winds, as my betters have done before me; but I trust, whenever the chanter-culls and last-speech scribblers get hold of me, they'll at least put no cursed nonsense into my mouth, but make me speak, as I have ever felt, like a man who never either feared death, or turned his back upon his friend. In the mean time I'll give them something to talk about. This ride of mine shall ring in their ears long after I'm done for--put to bed with a mattock, and tucked up with a spade.

And when I am gone, boys, each huntsman shall say,
None rode like Dick Turpin, so far in a day.

And thou, too, brave Bess!--thy name shall be linked with mine, and we'll go down to posterity together; and what," added he, despondingly, "if it should be too much for thee? what if----but no matter! Better die now, while I am with thee, than fall into the knacker's hands. Better die with all thy honors upon thy head, than drag out thy old age at the sand-cart. Hark forward, lass--hark forward!"

By what peculiar instinct is it that this noble animal, the horse, will at once perceive the slightest change in his rider's physical temperament, and allow himself so to be influenced by it, that, according as his master's spirits fluctuate, will his own energies rise and fall, wavering

From walk to trot, from canter to full speed?

How is it, we ask of those more intimately acquainted with the metaphysics of the Houyhnhnm than we pretend to be? Do the saddle or the rein convey, like metallic tractors, vibrations of the spirit betwixt the two? We know not, but this much is certain, that no servant partakes so much of the character of his master as the horse. The steed we are wont to ride becomes a portion of ourselves. He thinks and feels with us. As we are lively, he is sprightly; as we are depressed, his courage droops. In proof of this, let the reader see what horses some men make-- make , we say, because in such hands their character is wholly altered. Partaking, in a measure, of the courage and the firmness of the hand that guides them, and of the resolution of the frame that sways them--what their rider wills, they do, or strive to do. When that governing power is relaxed, their energies are relaxed likewise; and their fine sensibilities supply them with an instant knowledge of the disposition