“No, it was certainly unwise, but he will know better another time. I expect he would be glad of that hot brick you brought up for me.”
At this, Tom uttered a growling protest, which had the effect of drawing Mrs. Appleby’s attention to him. She now perceived that he was younger than she had at first supposed, and looking extremely wan and battered. Her face softened; she said: “I will see to it, sir. Oh, dearie me, and the way his good clothes are spoilt! I do hope he has not run away from school!”
“No, I have not!” Tom said.
She shook her head, but said: “Do you take him to No. 6, sir: you will find the bed is ready made up. And if he will take off his jacket and his nether-garments I will see what can be done to furbish them up.”
She bustled away, and Tom, asserting that he was quite well, and did not wish to go to bed, allowed himself to be led down the passage to a small room at the back of the house. When upon his feet he was obliged to confess that he still felt as sick as a horse. The Duke said that he would feel very much better when he had swallowed a glass of hartshorn and water, and rested for a little while, and helped him to strip off his mired clothing. Tom then lay down upon the bed in his underlinen, and the Duke covered him with the patchwork quilt.
“I did not think it would be bellows to mend with me so easily!” Tom murmured discontentedly. “But he hit me with a cudgel, after all! I am as dead as a herring! I only hope old Snape is feeling half as bad!”
He closed his eyes on this pious aspiration; and the Duke, wondering a little ruefully into what difficulties his sympathy with a fellow-sufferer might lead him, went away to ask Mrs. Appleby for some hartshorn.
Chapter X
The Duke did not borrow Mrs. Appleby’s gig again until the following afternoon, for the morning was fully taken up with purchasing such articles of apparel and toilet as he considered necessary for his protégé’s comfort and respectability. His notions did not always jump with Tom’s, since he laid what that young gentleman considered to be undue stress on the indispensability of soap and tooth-powder, and other such frivolous luxuries. Nor did Tom perceive the necessity of carrying with him on his travels more than one shirt. But the Duke was firm on these points, and after dealing patiently with a sudden and alarming fit of independence in young Mr. Mamble, in which he was informed that Pa would not like his son and heir to be beholden to anyone, he led him forth on a tour of the Baldock shops, assuring him that he would keep faithful tally of his expenditure, and present Pa with his bill in due course.
Mr. Mamble, whose resilient constitution Gilly could not but envy, had very soon recovered from his malaise, and had got up from his bed on the previous evening in time to work his way steadily through two glazed veal olives, a collop of beef, part of a leg of pork, two helpings of ratafia pudding, and a felly. He told Gilly, after this repast, that he was now in bang-up form; and after selecting two apples from a dish on the side-table, which he set aside to be consumed when pangs or hunger should attack him later in the evening, he settled down before the fire, and poured forth a jumbled history of his life and its trials to his sympathetic host. From this recital Gilly gathered that his mother had died when he was still in short-coats, and that his remaining parent, who seemed to have prospered exceedingly in his business, had set his heart and his considerable energy on to the task of turning his heir into an out-and-out gentleman. To this end he had engaged Mr. Snape, whose unenviable duty it was to instruct Tom in every branch of a gentleman’s education, to keep him out of mischief and low company, and to guard him from the chances of chills or infection. Mr. Snape appeared to be a joyless individual, whom the Duke found no difficulty at all in disliking. He very soon perceived that Tom’s lot was worse than his own had been, for whereas Lord Lionel was naturally untroubled by considerations of gentility, and had been quite as determined that his nephew should learn to clean his own guns, saddle and bridle his horses (and even shoe them), carve joints, and protect himself with his fists, as that he should acquire a proper knowledge of the Humanities, Mr. Mamble was morbidly anxious that Tom should engage on no occupation which might lead supercilious persons to suppose that he was not born into the haut ton. Consequently, poor Tom, himself unaffected by social ambitions, had been fenced in on all sides, his natural bents frowned upon, and his overflowing spirits curbed. The Duke, listening to him, felt real pity stir his heart, and thought that if he could lighten the lot of this oddly likeable boy he would have performed the first meritorious action of his life. Whatever the outcome of his interview with Mr. Liversedge, he would, he supposed, be journeying back to London within two days. If the zealous Mr. Snape had not by that time tracked his pupil down, he would take him to London, and from Sale House write a letter to Mr. Mamble, informing him that, having picked Tom up on the road, he had carried him to town, and would render him up to his parent whenever that busy gentleman could spare the time to visit the Metropolis. The Duke knew the world well enough to be sure that the knowledge that his son had fallen into noble company would suffice to allay Mr. Mamble’s wrath; and he had little doubt that if he chose to put himself to the trouble of doing it he could persuade Mr. Mamble to dismiss Mr. Snape, and send his son to school. If, on the other hand, Mr. Snape arrived in Baldock before he had left for London, the Duke, who had never made the least push to deal with his own tutor, anticipated no difficulty in dealing with Tom’s. As for the desirability of setting an anxious parent’s mind at rest without loss of time, he dismissed this without compunction. It would ill become him, he thought, to waste any consideration on Tom’s father when he had none for his own far more estimable uncle. If Lord Lionel stood in need of a lesson, so, in greater measure, did Mr. Mamble, and he should have it. Meanwhile, he would keep Tom safely out of harm’s way—and heaven alone knew what harm Tom would plunge into if allowed to wander about the countryside alone and gratify his longing to see all the sights of London.