The next morning they
found him with--"that across his throat that you had scarcely cared to
see." The hand whose tremor used to make him so savage when he was
lifting a glass to his lips, had been strong and steady enough when it
shattered the Golden Bowl and cut the Silver Cord asunder.
Whether he was looking death in the face while he uttered those last
cynicisms, and calculated on heightening the stage effect of the morrow,
or whether a paroxysm of pain drove him mad, as it had done better men,
who can tell? I think and hope the latter was the case, but--I doubt.
Though Sir Henry Fallowfield had never read Aristotle, he had studied,
all his life, the principles of the peripeteia.
Godfrey Parndon no longer ruled over the Pytchley. He had backed his own
opinions and other men's bills once or twice too often, and had retired
temporarily into private life till he could get "his second wind." The
new M.F.H. was his complete contrast--pale-faced, low-voiced, mild-eyed,
and melancholy as a lotus-eater--one of the class of "weak-minded but
gentlemanly young men" that Tom Cradock used to ask his friends to
recommend to him as pupils. The farmers missed sadly Godfrey's bluff
face and stalwart figure at the cover-side, while the "bruisers" from
Leamington, and the "railers" from town, hearing no longer his great
voice, good-naturedly imperative, adjuring them to "hold hard, and not
to spoil their own sport," rode over the hounds rejoicing.
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