Kit and Kitty: A Story of West Middlesex

by R. D. Blackmore

“Stuff!” cried my uncle, not caring to discuss this extreme test of my constancy. “He has stopped at some house on the road, or up there. Perhaps the Professor would not let him go, when he saw how bad the weather was. There is nothing to be done, till the post comes in; though I am not sure that the post will be able to get in. If the letters are not here by ten o’clock, I shall go to Hampton to look for them. They are pretty sure to get that far.”

The morning was fine, though bitterly cold after that very heavy fall; and people began to get about again, though the drifts were too deep in many places for a carriage to pass till they had been cleared. My uncle set out on foot for Hampton, and there found the mail cart just come in. The postmaster was in a state of flurry, and would not open the Sunbury bag, but sent it on by special messenger, as the cart could get no further. My uncle had the pleasure of walking with it as far as our post-office; and after all that there was nothing for him. “Well, a man must eat,” was his sound reflection. “I shall have a bit of dinner, and consider what to do.”

It was getting on for two o’clock, as they told me, when a man who had come from the Bear at Hanworth, upon some particular business in our village, knocked at my uncle’s door on his return, to say that I had forgotten (which was the truth) to pay for what I had the night before. He was also to ask how I got home, because I looked “uncommon dickey,” as he beautifully expressed it. In half an hour every man in Sunbury, owning a good pair of legs, and even a number of women and boys, set forth to search the roads and fields, for it was hard sometimes to tell which was which, in the direction of Hanworth. This was no small proof of the good-will and brave humanity of our neighbourhood; for any of these people might have lost themselves in the numb frost, and the depth of drift; and there were signs of another storm in the north-east.

My uncle, with a big shovel on his shoulder, and a bottle of brandy in his pocket, put a guinea upon me at first, and then two, and then jumped to five pounds, and even ten, as the hope of discovery waned; and at last, when some had abandoned the search, and others were muffling themselves against the new snowstorm, he mounted a gate and with both hands to his mouth shouted—“Five and twenty pounds for my nephew Kit—dead or alive; twenty-five pounds reward to any one who finds Christopher Orchardson.”

This may appear a great deal of money for anybody to put me at (except my own mother, if I had one), and the people who heard it were of that opinion, none of them being aware perhaps that the reward would come out of my mother’s property, which had no trustees to prevent it. And for many years afterwards, if I dared to think anything said or done by my uncle was anything short of perfection, the women, and even the men would ask—as if I were made of ingratitude—“Who offered five and twenty pounds for you?”

And they felt the effect of it now so strongly that a loud hurrah went along the white plain, and several stout fellows who were turning home turned back again, and flapped themselves, saying, “Never say die!” With one accord a fresh pursuit began, though perhaps of a ghost even whiter than the snow; and taking care to keep in sight of one another, they began to poke more holes, wherever they could poke them. For some had kidney-bean sticks, and some had garden forks, and some had sharp pitch-forks from the stable; and if they had found me, I had surely been riddled, and perhaps had both my eyes poked out. But the Lord was good to me once more, and I escaped being trussed, as I might have been.

For just when it was growing dark, and another bitter night was setting in, with spangles of hard snow driving, as they said, like a glazier’s diamond into their eyes, and even the heartiest man was saying that nothing more could be done for it; through the drifting of the white, and the lowering of the gray, a high-mettled horse came churning. It was beautiful, everybody thought, to see him scattering the snow like highway dust, flinging from his nostrils scornful volumes, with his great eyes flashing like a lighthouse in the foam. Men huddled aside, lest he should spurn them like a drift, for his courage was roused, and he knew no fear, but gloried in the power of his leap and plunge.

“Giving it over, are you all?” Sam Henderson shouted, as he drew the rein, and his favourite stallion Haro stood, and looked with the like contempt at them. “Then a horse and dog shall shame your pluck.”