Derby Day Read Online Free PDF

shelf of a gaping bookcase. It also contained Captain Raff, Mr Happerton’s particular friend, who just at this moment was making a practice stroke into thin air with a billiard cue he had carried up from one of the downstairs rooms, and a couple of coffee cups on a little occasional table with which the two men had been recruiting themselves. There was no one else in the room, which in truth was not much used by members of the Blue Riband Club, and something in Mr Happerton’s expression suggested that he was not very troubled by their absence.
    The Blue Riband was an altogether new thing in the way of clubs. To begin with it was not situated in the West End, but in a dingy little square around the back of Thavies Inn, which its founders had reckoned handy for the law courts and the City. Then again, its members were perhaps a shade more heterodox than is generally the case in St James’s or Pall Mall. They tended to be sporting men – the walls of the club were covered with pictures of Mr Gully and the Tutbury Pet – commission agents and persons for whom the provision of stamped paper is an absolute necessity; there was no blackballing at the Blue Riband. People generally said, when they wanted to praise it, that it was not quite disreputable, and perhaps the same thing could have been said of Mr Happerton, who sat now in its library looking rather as if he owned it and wrinkling his face over the last of the grounds from his coffee cup. He was a tallish, rather florid-looking man of thirty-one or thirty-two, well dressed in a showy way, taking his place among the sporting gentlemen by virtue of a pair of top-boots and various pins and ornaments distributed about his clothing in the shape of horses, indolent-seeming but at the same time vaguely restless, and making little assaults on the coffee cups, the copy of the New Sporting Magazine that lay to hand on the brass salver, and Captain Raff, who continued, in a somewhat mournful way, to make his practice shots with the billiard cue.
    He was quite a well-off man, people said – the members of the Blue Riband Club certainly said so – yet there was some mystery about how his money was made, whether it came from discounted bills, or commercial speculations, or, as was commonly thought, from the turf. Probably not even Captain Raff could have produced a proper explanation. For all his sojourning in Thavies Inn, Mr Happerton was known in the West End, rode a neat horse in the park, gave bachelor dinners at Richmond, knew a great many ladies and gentlemen from all walks of fashionable and bohemian life and – something that served to deepen the shades of mystery – was a particular friend of Captain Raff’s.
    The contrast between the two men was very marked. Captain Raff was a small, dirty and rather ill-favoured former officer, perhaps a dozen years older than his protégé, of whose career and emoluments after he had sold out of the Rifles no one was very sure, except that he occasionally made very bitter remarks about the Bankruptcy Court. But the greater difference between them was this: that Mr Happerton, in his top-boots and his equine pins, was respectable, invited to parties and made much of in the circles in which he moved, and Captain Raff, in his shabby highlows and a scarlet stock that seemed to have hung round his neck since he brought it back from the Crimea, was not. People said that he was Mr Happerton’s jackal – which is not a nice word – that some disreputable bargain bound them together, that Mr Happerton had tried to throw him over but had not dared to, and that Mr Faker the celebrated West End card-sharp knew all about it, but in truth their association was not so very mysterious. Just as a duchess in Hay Hill needs her secretary-companion, so the Mr Happertons of this world need their Captain Raffs. They need their little errands done and their little commissions transacted, their confederates at Tattersall’s and their emissaries at the