“Curate was he; a slashing trade that,” was the brutal reply. “Curate of Fuzby? are you sure it isn’t Fusty?”
Kenrick looked at him with a strange glowing of the eyes, which, so far from disconcerting Mackworth, only made him chuckle at the success of his taunt. He determined to exercise the lancet of his tongue again, and let fresh blood if possible.
“Well, glare-eyes! so you didn’t like my remark?”
Kenrick made no answer, and Mackworth continued—
“What charity-boy has left you his off-cast clothes? May I ask if your jacket was intended to serve also as a looking-glass? and is it the custom in your part of the country not to wear breeches below the knees?”
There was a corrosive malice in this speech so intense that Kenrick never saw Mackworth without recalling the shame and anguish it had caused. Fresh from home, full of quick sensibility, feeling ridicule with great keenness, Kenrick was too much pained by these words even for anger. He had hung his head and slunk away. For days after, until, at his most earnest entreaty, his mother had incurred much privation to afford him a new and better suit, he had hardly dared to lift up his face. He had fancied himself a mark for ridicule, and the sense of shabbiness and poverty had gone far to crush his spirit. After a time he recovered, but never since that day had he deigned to speak to Mackworth a single word.
He was surprised, therefore, at the obtrusive impertinence of these two fellows, and when next he passed them, he surveyed them from head to foot with a haughty and indignant stare. The moment after he heard them burst into a laugh, and begin talking very loudly.
“It was the rummiest vehicle you ever saw,” he heard Jones say; “a cart, I assure you—nothing more or less, and drawn by the very scraggiest scarecrow of a blind horse.”
He caught no more as the distance between them lessened, but he heard Jones bubbling over with a stupid giggle at some remark of Mackworth’s about glare-eyes being drawn by a blind horse.
“How rude those fellows are, Ken,” said Whalley; “what do they mean by it?”