ABOUT nine o’clock Kenelm entered a town some twelve miles distant from
his father’s house, and towards which he had designedly made his way,
because in that town he was scarcely if at all known by sight, and he
might there make the purchases he required without attracting any
marked observation. He had selected for his travelling costume a
shooting-dress, as the simplest and least likely to belong to his
rank as a gentleman. But still in its very cut there was an air of
distinction, and every labourer he had met on the way had touched his
hat to him. Besides, who wears a shooting-dress in the middle of June,
or a shooting-dress at all, unless he be either a game-keeper or a
gentleman licensed to shoot?
Kenelm entered a large store-shop for ready-made clothes and purchased
a suit such as might be worn on Sundays by a small country yeoman or
tenant-farmer of a petty holding,--a stout coarse broadcloth upper
garment, half coat, half jacket, with waistcoat to match, strong
corduroy trousers, a smart Belcher neckcloth, with a small stock of
linen and woollen socks in harmony with the other raiment. He bought
also a leathern knapsack, just big enough to contain this wardrobe, and
a couple of books, which with his combs and brushes he had brought away
in his pockets; for among all his trunks at home there was no knapsack.
These purchases made and paid for, he passed quickly through the town,
and stopped at a humble inn at the outskirt, to which he was attracted
by the notice, “Refreshment for man and beast.” He entered a little
sanded parlour, which at that hour he had all to himself, called for
breakfast, and devoured the best part of a fourpenny loaf with a couple
of hard eggs.
Thus recruited, he again sallied forth, and deviating into a thick wood
by the roadside, he exchanged the habiliments with which he had left
home for those he had purchased, and by the help of one or two big
stones sunk the relinquished garments into a small but deep pool which
he was lucky enough to find in a bush-grown dell much haunted by snipes
in the winter.
“Now,” said Kenelm, “I really begin to think I have got out of myself.
I am in another man’s skin; for what, after all, is a skin but a soul’s
clothing, and what is clothing but a decenter skin? Of its own natural
skin every civilized soul is ashamed. It is the height of impropriety
for any one but the lowest kind of savage to show it. If the purest
soul now existent upon earth, the Pope of Rome’s or the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s, were to pass down the Strand with the skin which Nature
gave to it bare to the eye, it would be brought up before a magistrate,
prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and committed to
jail as a public nuisance.
“Decidedly I am now in another man’s skin. Kenelm Chillingly, I no
longer
“Remain
“Yours faithfully;
“But am,
“With profound consideration,
“Your obedient humble servant.”
With light step and elated crest, the wanderer, thus transformed, sprang
from the wood into the dusty thoroughfare. He had travelled on for about
an hour, meeting but few other passengers, when he heard to the right a
loud shrill young voice, “Help! help! I will not go; I tell you, I will
not!” Just before him stood, by a high five-barred gate, a pensive gray
cob attached to a neat-looking gig. The bridle was loose on the cob’s
neck. The animal was evidently accustomed to stand quietly when ordered
to do so, and glad of the opportunity.
The cries, “Help, help!” were renewed, mingled with louder tones in a
rougher voice, tones of wrath and menace. Evidently these sounds did
not come from the cob. Kenelm looked over the gate, and saw a few yards
distant in a grass field a well-dressed boy struggling violently against
a stout middle-aged man who was rudely hauling him along by the arm.
The chivalry natural to a namesake of the valiant Sir Kenelm Digby
was instantly aroused. He vaulted over the gate, seized the man by the
collar, and exclaimed, “For shame! what are you doing to that poor boy?
let him go!”
“Why the devil do you interfere?” cried the stout man, his eyes glaring
and his lips foaming with rage. “Ah, are you the villain? yes, no doubt
of it. I’ll give it to you, jackanapes,” and still grasping the boy with
one hand, with the other the stout man darted a blow at Kenelm, from
which nothing less than the practised pugilistic skill and natural
alertness of the youth thus suddenly assaulted could have saved his eyes
and nose. As it was, the stout man had the worst of it: the blow was
parried, returned with a dexterous manoeuvre of Kenelm’s right foot in
Cornish fashion, and _procumbit humi bos_; the stout man lay sprawling
on his back. The boy, thus released, seized hold of Kenelm by the arm,
and hurrying him along up the field, cried, “Come, come before he gets
up! save me! save me!” Ere he had recovered his own surprise, the boy
had dragged Kenelm to the gate, and jumped into the gig, sobbing forth,
“Get in, get in, I can’t drive; get in, and drive--you. Quick! Quick!”
“But--” began Kenelm.
“Get in, or I shall go mad.” Kenelm obeyed; the boy gave him the reins,
and seizing the whip himself, applied it lustily to the cob. On sprang
the cob. “Stop, stop, stop, thief! villain! Holloa! thieves! thieves!
thieves! stop!” cried a voice behind. Kenelm involuntarily turned his
head and beheld the stout man perched upon the gate and gesticulating
furiously. It was but a glimpse; again the whip was plied, the cob
frantically broke into a gallop, the gig jolted and bumped and swerved,
and it was not till they had put a good mile between themselves and the
stout man that Kenelm succeeded in obtaining possession of the whip and
calming the cob into a rational trot.
“Young gentleman,” then said Kenelm, “perhaps you will have the goodness
to explain.”
“By and by; get on, that’s a good fellow; you shall be well paid for it,
well and handsomely.”
Quoth Kenelm, gravely, “I know that in real life payment and service
naturally go together. But we will put aside the payment till you tell
me what is to be the service. And first, whither am I to drive you? We
are coming to a place where three roads meet; which of the three shall I
take?”
“Oh, I don’t know; there is a finger-post. I want to get to,--but it is
a secret; you’ll not betray me? Promise,--swear.”
“I don’t swear except when I am in a passion, which, I am sorry to say,
is very seldom; and I don’t promise till I know what I promise; neither
do I go on driving runaway boys in other men’s gigs unless I know that I
am taking them to a safe place, where their papas and mammas can get at
them.”
“I have no papa, no mamma,” said the boy, dolefully and with quivering
lips.
“Poor boy! I suppose that burly brute is your schoolmaster, and you are
running away home for fear of a flogging.”
The boy burst out laughing; a pretty, silvery, merry laugh: it thrilled
through Kenelm Chillingly. “No, he would not flog me: he is not a
schoolmaster; he is worse than that.”
“Is it possible? What is he?”
“An uncle.”
“Hum! uncles are proverbial for cruelty; were so in the classical days,
and Richard III. was the only scholar in his family.”
“Eh! classical and Richard III.!” said the boy, startled, and looking
attentively at the pensive driver. “Who are you? you talk like a
gentleman.”
“I beg pardon. I’ll not do so again if I can help it.”--“Decidedly,”
thought Kenelm, “I am beginning to be amused. What a blessing it is to
get into another man’s skin, and another man’s gig too!” Aloud, “Here
we are at the fingerpost. If you are running away from your uncle, it is
time to inform me where you are running to.”
Here the boy leaned over the gig and examined the fingerpost. Then he
clapped his hands joyfully.
“All right! I thought so, ‘To Tor-Hadham, eighteen miles.’ That’s the
road to Tor-Hadham.”
“Do you mean to say I am to drive you all that way,--eighteen miles?”
“Yes.”
“And to whom are you going?”
“I will tell you by and by. Do go on; do, pray. I can’t drive--never
drove in my life--or I would not ask you. Pray, pray, don’t desert me!
If you are a gentleman you will not; and if you are not a gentleman,
I have got L10 in my purse, which you shall have when I am safe at
Tor-Hadham. Don’t hesitate: my whole life is at stake!” And the boy
began once more to sob.
Kenelm directed the pony’s head towards Tor-Hadham, and the boy ceased
to sob.
“You are a good, dear fellow,” said the boy, wiping his eyes. “I am
afraid I am taking you very much out of your road.”
“I have no road in particular, and would as soon go to Tor-Hadham, which
I have never seen, as anywhere else. I am but a wanderer on the face of
the earth.”
“Have you lost your papa and mamma too? Why, you are not much older than
I am.”
“Little gentleman,” said Kenelm, gravely, “I am just of age, and you, I
suppose, are about fourteen.”
“What fun!” cried the boy, abruptly. “Isn’t it fun?”
“It will not be fun if I am sentenced to penal servitude for stealing
your uncle’s gig, and robbing his little nephew of L10. By the by, that
choleric relation of yours meant to knock down somebody else when he
struck at me. He asked, ‘Are you the villain?’ Pray who is the villain?
he is evidently in your confidence.”
“Villain! he is the most honourable, high-minded--But no matter now:
I’ll introduce you to him when we reach Tor-Hadham. Whip that pony: he
is crawling.”
“It is up hill: a good man spares his beast.”
No art and no eloquence could extort from his young companion any
further explanation than Kenelm had yet received; and indeed, as the
journey advanced, and they approached their destination, both parties
sank into silence. Kenelm was seriously considering that his first day’s
experience of real life in the skin of another had placed in some peril
his own. He had knocked down a man evidently respectable and well to do,
had carried off that man’s nephew, and made free with that man’s goods
and chattels; namely, his gig and horse. All this might be explained
satisfactorily to a justice of the peace, but how? By returning to his
former skin; by avowing himself to be Kenelm Chillingly, a distinguished
university medalist, heir to no ignoble name and some L10,000 a year.
But then what a scandal! he who abhorred scandal; in vulgar parlance,
what a “row!” he who denied that the very word “row” was sanctioned
by any classic authorities in the English language. He would have to
explain how he came to be found disguised, carefully disguised, in
garments such as no baronet’s eldest son--even though that baronet be
the least ancestral man of mark whom it suits the convenience of a First
Minister to recommend to the Sovereign for exaltation over the rank
of Mister--was ever beheld in, unless he had taken flight to the
gold-diggings. Was this a position in which the heir of the Chillinglys,
a distinguished family, whose coat-of-arms dated from the earliest
authenticated period of English heraldry under Edward III. as Three
Fishes _azure_, could be placed without grievous slur on the cold and
ancient blood of the Three Fishes?
And then individually to himself, Kenelm, irrespectively of the Three
Fishes,--what a humiliation! He had put aside his respected father’s
deliberate preparations for his entrance into real life; he had
perversely chosen his own walk on his own responsibility; and here,
before half the first day was over, what an infernal scrape he had
walked himself into! and what was his excuse? A wretched little boy,
sobbing and chuckling by turns, and yet who was clever enough to twist
Kenelm Chillingly round his finger; twist _him_, a man who thought
himself so much wiser than his parents,--a man who had gained honours at
the University,--a man of the gravest temperament,--a man of so nicely
critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in
which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this
mess was, to say the least of it, an uncomfortable reflection.
The boy himself, as Kenelm glanced at him from time to time, became
impish and Will-of-the-Wisp-ish. Sometimes he laughed to himself loudly,
sometimes he wept to himself quietly; sometimes, neither laughing nor
weeping, he seemed absorbed in reflection. Twice as they came nearer to
the town of Tor-Hadham, Kenelm nudged the boy, and said, “My boy, I must
talk with you;” and twice the boy, withdrawing his arm from the nudge,
had answered dreamily, “Hush! I am thinking.”
And so they entered the town of Tor-Hadham, the cob very much done up.