“You are so wild that we must make you fast,” his captor said, with a benignant smile; and struggle as he might, the boy was very soon secured. His antagonist drew forth a red bandana handkerchief, and fastened his bleeding hands behind his back. “There, now, lad,” he said, “you can do no mischief. Recover your temper, sir, and tell us who you are, as soon as you are sane enough to know.”
Pet, having spent his just indignation, began to perceive that he had made a bad investment. His desire had been to maintain in this particular spot strict privacy from all except Insie, to whom in the largeness of love he had declared himself. Yet here he stood, promulged and published, strikingly and flagrantly pronounced! At first he was like to sulk in the style of a hawk who has failed of his swoop; but seeing his enemy arising slowly with grunts, and action nodose and angular—rather than flexibly graceful—contempt became the uppermost feature of his mind.
“My name,” he said, “if you are not afraid of it, that you tie me in this cowardly low manner, is—Lancelot Yordas Carnaby.”
“My boy, it is a long name for any one to carry. No wonder that you look weak beneath it. And where do you live, young gentleman?”
Amazement sat upon the face of Pet—a genuine astonishment, entirely pure from wrath. It was wholly beyond his imagination that any one, after hearing his name, should have to ask him where he lived. He thought that the question must be put in low mockery, and to answer was far beneath his dignity.
By this time the veteran Jack of the Smithies had got out of his trap, and was standing stiffly, passing his hand across his sadly smitten eyes, and talking to himself about them.
“Two black eyes, at my time of life, as sure as I'm a Christian! Howsomever, young chap, I likes you better. Never dreamed there was such good stuff in you. Master Bert, cast him loose, if so please you. Let me shake hands with 'un, and bear no malice. Bad words deserve hard blows, and I ask his pardon for driving him into it. I called 'un a milksop, and he hath proved me a liar. He may be a bad 'un, but with good stuff in 'un. Lord bless me, I never would have believed the lad could hit so smartly!”
Pet was well pleased with this tribute to his prowess; but as for shaking hands with a tenant, and a “common man”—as every one not of gentle birth was then called—such an act was quite below him, or above him, according as we take his own opinion, or the truth. And possibly he rose in Smithies' mind by drawing back from bodily overture.
Mr. Bert looked on with all the bliss of an ancient interpreter. He could follow out the level of the vein of each, as no one may do except a gentleman, perhaps, who has turned himself deliberately into a “common man.” Bert had done his utmost toward this end; but the process is difficult when voluntary.
“I think it is time,” he now said, firmly, to the unshackled and triumphant Pet, “for Lancelot Yordas Carnaby to explain what has brought him into such humble quarters, and induced him to turn eavesdropper; which was not considered (at least in my young days) altogether the part of a gentleman.”