“Little gentleman,” said Kenelm, gravely, “I am just of age, and you, I suppose, are about fourteen.”
“What fun!” cried the boy, abruptly. “Isn’t it fun?”
“It will not be fun if I am sentenced to penal servitude for stealing your uncle’s gig, and robbing his little nephew of L10. By the by, that choleric relation of yours meant to knock down somebody else when he struck at me. He asked, ‘Are you the villain?’ Pray who is the villain? he is evidently in your confidence.”
“Villain! he is the most honourable, high-minded—But no matter now: I’ll introduce you to him when we reach Tor-Hadham. Whip that pony: he is crawling.”
“It is up hill: a good man spares his beast.”
No art and no eloquence could extort from his young companion any further explanation than Kenelm had yet received; and indeed, as the journey advanced, and they approached their destination, both parties sank into silence. Kenelm was seriously considering that his first day’s experience of real life in the skin of another had placed in some peril his own. He had knocked down a man evidently respectable and well to do, had carried off that man’s nephew, and made free with that man’s goods and chattels; namely, his gig and horse. All this might be explained satisfactorily to a justice of the peace, but how? By returning to his former skin; by avowing himself to be Kenelm Chillingly, a distinguished university medalist, heir to no ignoble name and some L10,000 a year. But then what a scandal! he who abhorred scandal; in vulgar parlance, what a “row!” he who denied that the very word “row” was sanctioned by any classic authorities in the English language. He would have to explain how he came to be found disguised, carefully disguised, in garments such as no baronet’s eldest son—even though that baronet be the least ancestral man of mark whom it suits the convenience of a First Minister to recommend to the Sovereign for exaltation over the rank of Mister—was ever beheld in, unless he had taken flight to the gold-diggings. Was this a position in which the heir of the Chillinglys, a distinguished family, whose coat-of-arms dated from the earliest authenticated period of English heraldry under Edward III. as Three Fishes azure, could be placed without grievous slur on the cold and ancient blood of the Three Fishes?
And then individually to himself, Kenelm, irrespectively of the Three Fishes,—what a humiliation! He had put aside his respected father’s deliberate preparations for his entrance into real life; he had perversely chosen his own walk on his own responsibility; and here, before half the first day was over, what an infernal scrape he had walked himself into! and what was his excuse? A wretched little boy, sobbing and chuckling by turns, and yet who was clever enough to twist Kenelm Chillingly round his finger; twist him, a man who thought himself so much wiser than his parents,—a man who had gained honours at the University,—a man of the gravest temperament,—a man of so nicely critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this mess was, to say the least of it, an uncomfortable reflection.
The boy himself, as Kenelm glanced at him from time to time, became impish and Will-of-the-Wisp-ish. Sometimes he laughed to himself loudly, sometimes he wept to himself quietly; sometimes, neither laughing nor weeping, he seemed absorbed in reflection. Twice as they came nearer to the town of Tor-Hadham, Kenelm nudged the boy, and said, “My boy, I must talk with you;” and twice the boy, withdrawing his arm from the nudge, had answered dreamily, “Hush! I am thinking.”
And so they entered the town of Tor-Hadham, the cob very much done up.