However, a great deal more had to be said before the Duke could settle the affair. Mrs. Appleby very unwisely demanded to be told what should get into the boys to make them take and run a race backwards, and this encouraged Toni to explain indignantly and at length the difficulties of handicapping fairly two donkeys, one cow, and an old horse. He seemed to think that he deserved congratulation for having hit upon so novel a solution to the problem, and dwelled so insistently on the excellent performance of the cow under these conditions that everyone but the Duke and the beadle allowed themselves to be diverted from the main point at issue, and either exclaimed several times that they would never have thought it, or argued that it stood to reason the cow would have as good a chance as the horse, particularly seeing as the horse was that broken-down old brute of Mr. Datchet’s.
The Duke, meanwhile, detached the owner of the ruined cart from the circle, and settled his claims out of hand. Much mollified, Mr. Badby stowed away the money which the Duke paid him for the repair of his cart, and said that he had been young himself, and was never one to create a to-do over a trifle. It then transpired that the driver and the guard of the mail-coach had very handsomely forborne to lodge an official charge against Tom, so that with Mr. Badby’s retirement from the lists, the beadle was left without any very powerful weapon to use against the miscreants. The Duke was then inspired to suggest that after so much alarm and excitement everyone must stand in need of such revivifying cordials as could be found in the tap-room, and invited the assembled company to refresh themselves there at his expense. The idea took well; and after the Duke had sternly dismissed Tom to the Pink Parlour, and had promised the beadle that he should be suitably dealt with, the whole party repaired to the tap-room, where liberal potations of ale, gin, or porter very soon induced even the beadle and the weedy man, who proved to be Baldock’s leading tailor, to look upon the late disturbance as a very good jest. The Duke’s shy smile and quite unconscious charm were not without their effect, and since he was found to have not the least height in his manner it was not long before his obvious quality was forgotten, and he was being confided in on all manner of topics, from the Spasms endured by the lady in the mob-cap, to the shocking price of serges, corduroys, shalloons, and tammies.
By the time the Duke judged that he could bid farewell to his guests without causing them to think that he fancied himself above his company, Mrs. Appleby had three times whispered to him that his dinner was spoiling in the oven. He took his leave at last, and went upstairs to the parlour, where he found Tom awaiting him in a mood of almost equally matched penitence and vainglory. Tom was ready to justify himself at length, but as his protector, instead of rating him, succumbed to a fit of pent-up laughter as soon as he had fairly shut the door, his aggressive manner left him abruptly, and he offered up a handsome apology for having been the cause of so much trouble and expense.
“Indeed, I perceive clearly that you will soon ruin me!” the Duke said, still laughing. “I don’t know what you deserve should be done to you!”
“Sir, you won’t send me back to Pa and Mr. Snape, will you?” Tom demanded anxiously.
“No, no, nothing short of transportation will do for you!” the Duke told him.
His mind relieved of its only dread, Tom grinned gratefully, and applied himself with his usual energy and appetite to his dinner.
When he had retired to bed, which, since he was, he said, unaccountably tired, he was induced to do at an early hour, the Duke committed his cousin’s letters to the flames, and sent the waiter to obtain for him paper, ink, pens, and wafers. These commodities having been brought, the fire made up, and the blinds drawn, he sat down to write two letters. The first of these was to Matthew, at Oxford, and did not occupy him long. He sealed it with one of the wafers, wrote the direction, and was just about to scrawl his name across one corner when he recollected himself, and reopened the letter to add a postscript. “ I fear you will have to pay some sixpences for this history ” he wrote, smiling to himself,—“ but it would never do, you know, for me to frank this. I hope you will not grudge it! ” He then affixed a fresh wafer to his missive, laid it aside and wrote upon a new sheet of paper:
White Horse,
Baldock.