CHAPTER VII
KENELM CHILLINGLY rose with the sun, according to his usual custom, and took his way to the Temperance Hotel. All in that sober building seemed still in the arms of Morpheus. He turned towards the stables in which he had left the gray cob, and had the pleasure to see that ill-used animal in the healthful process of rubbing down.
“That’s right,” said he to the hostler. “I am glad to see you are so early a riser.”
“Why,” quoth the hostler, “the gentleman as owns the pony knocked me up at two o’clock in the morning, and pleased enough he was to see the creature again lying down in the clean straw.”
“Oh, he has arrived at the hotel, I presume?—a stout gentleman?”
“Yes, stout enough; and a passionate gentleman too. Came in a yellow and two posters, knocked up the Temperance and then knocked up me to see for the pony, and was much put out as he could not get any grog at the Temperance.”
“I dare say he was. I wish he had got his grog: it might have put him in better humour. Poor little thing!” muttered Kenelm, turning away; “I am afraid she is in for a regular vituperation. My turn next, I suppose. But he must be a good fellow to have come at once for his niece in the dead of the night.”
About nine o’clock Kenelm presented himself again at the Temperance Hotel, inquired for Mr. Bovill, and was shown by the prim maid-servant into the drawing-room, where he found Mr. Bovill seated amicably at breakfast with his niece, who of course was still in boy’s clothing, having no other costume at hand. To Kenelm’s great relief, Mr. Bovill rose from the table with a beaming countenance, and extending his hand to Kenelm, said,—
“Sir, you are a gentleman; sit down, sit down and take breakfast.”
Then, as soon as the maid was out of the room, the uncle continued,—
“I have heard all your good conduct from this young simpleton. Things might have been worse, sir.”
Kenelm bowed his head, and drew the loaf towards him in silence. Then, considering that some apology was due to his entertainer, he said,—
“I hope you forgive me for that unfortunate mistake, when—”
“You knocked me down, or rather tripped me up. All right now. Elsie, give the gentleman a cup of tea. Pretty little rogue, is she not? and a good girl, in spite of her nonsense. It was all my fault letting her go to the play and be intimate with Miss Lockit, a stage-stricken, foolish old maid, who ought to have known better than to lead her into all this trouble.”
“No, uncle,” cried the girl, resolutely; “don’t blame her, nor any one but me.”
Kenelm turned his dark eyes approvingly towards the girl, and saw that her lips were firmly set; there was an expression, not of grief nor shame, but compressed resolution in her countenance. But when her eyes met his they fell softly, and a blush mantled over her cheeks up to her very forehead.
“Ah!” said the uncle, “just like you, Elsie; always ready to take everybody’s fault on your own shoulders. Well, well, say no more about that. Now, my young friend, what brings you across the country tramping it on foot, eh? a young man’s whim?” As he spoke, he eyed Kenelm very closely, and his look was that of an intelligent man not unaccustomed to observe the faces of those he conversed with. In fact a more shrewd man of business than Mr. Bovill is seldom met with on ‘Change or in market.
“I travel on foot to please myself, sir,” answered Kenelm, curtly, and unconsciously set on his guard.
“Of course you do,” cried Mr. Bovill, with a jovial laugh. “But it seems you don’t object to a chaise and pony whenever you can get them for nothing,—ha, ha!—excuse me,—a joke.”
Herewith Mr. Bovill, still in excellent good-humour, abruptly changed the conversation to general matters,—agricultural prospects, chance of a good harvest, corn trade, money market in general, politics, state of the nation. Kenelm felt there was an attempt to draw him out, to sound, to pump him, and replied only by monosyllables, generally significant of ignorance on the questions broached; and at the close, if the philosophical heir of the Chillinglys was in the habit of allowing himself to be surprised he would certainly have been startled when Mr. Bovill rose, slapped him on the shoulder, and said in a tone of great satisfaction, “Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters: you are a gentleman born and bred; your clothes can’t disguise you, sir. Elsie was right. My dear, just leave us for a few minutes: I have something to say to our young friend. You can get ready meanwhile to go with me.” Elsie left the table and walked obediently towards the doorway. There she halted a moment, turned round, and looked timidly towards Kenelm. He had naturally risen from his seat as she rose, and advanced some paces as if to open the door for her. Thus their looks encountered. He could not interpret that shy gaze of hers: it was tender, it was deprecating, it was humble, it was pleading; a man accustomed to female conquests might have thought it was something more, something in which was the key to all. But that something more was an unknown tongue to Kenelm Chillingly.
When the two men were alone, Mr. Bovill reseated himself and motioned to Kenelm to do the same. “Now, young sir,” said the former, “you and I can talk at our ease. That adventure of yours yesterday may be the luckiest thing that could happen to you.”
“It is sufficiently lucky if I have been of any service to your niece. But her own good sense would have been her safeguard if she had been alone, and discovered, as she would have done, that Mr. Compton had, knowingly or not, misled her to believe that he was a single man.”
“Hang Mr. Compton! we have done with him. I am a plain man, and I come to the point. It is you who have carried off my niece; it is with you that she came to this hotel. Now when Elsie told me how well you had behaved, and that your language and manners were those of a real gentleman, my mind was made up. I guess pretty well what you are; you are a gentleman’s son; probably a college youth; not overburdened with cash; had a quarrel with your governor, and he keeps you short. Don’t interrupt me. Well, Elsie is a good girl and a pretty girl, and will make a good wife, as wives go; and, hark ye, she has L20,000. So just confide in me; and if you don’t like your parents to know about it till the thing’s done and they be only got to forgive and bless you, why, you shall marry Elsie before you can say Jack Robinson.”
For the first time in his life Kenelm Chillingly was seized with terror,—terror and consternation. His jaw dropped; his tongue was palsied. If hair ever stands on end, his hair did. At last, with superhuman effort, he gasped out the word, “Marry!”
“Yes; marry. If you are a gentleman you are bound to it. You have compromised my niece,—a respectable, virtuous girl, sir; an orphan, but not unprotected. I repeat, it is you who have plucked her from my very arms, and with violence and assault eloped with her; and what would the world say if it knew? Would it believe in your prudent conduct?—conduct only to be explained by the respect you felt due to your future wife. And where will you find a better? Where will you find an uncle who will part with his ward and L20,000 without asking if you have a sixpence? and the girl has taken a fancy to you; I see it: would she have given up that player so easily if you had not stolen her heart? Would you break that heart? No, young man: you are not a villain. Shake hands on it!”
“Mr. Bovill,” said Kenelm, recovering his wonted equanimity, “I am inexpressibly flattered by the honour you propose to me, and I do not deny that Miss Elsie is worthy of a much better man than myself. But I have inconceivable prejudices against the connubial state. If it be permitted to a member of the Established Church to cavil at any sentence written by Saint Paul,—and I think that liberty may be permitted to a simple layman, since eminent members of the clergy criticise the whole Bible as freely as if it were the history of Queen Elizabeth by Mr. Froude,—I should demur at the doctrine that it is better to marry than to burn: I myself should prefer burning. With these sentiments it would ill become any one entitled to that distinction of ‘gentleman’ which you confer on me to lead a fellow-victim to the sacrificial altar. As for any reproach attached to Miss Elsie, since in my telegram I directed you to ask for a young gentleman at this hotel, her very sex is not known in this place unless you divulge it. And—”
Here Kenelm was interrupted by a violent explosion of rage from the uncle. He stamped his feet; he almost foamed at the mouth; he doubled his fist, and shook it in Kenelm’s face.
“Sir, you are mocking me: John Bovill is not a man to be jeered in this way. You shall marry the girl. I’ll not have her thrust back upon me to be the plague of my life with her whims and tantrums. You have taken her, and you shall keep her, or I’ll break every bone in your skin.”
“Break them,” said Kenelm, resignedly, but at the same time falling back into a formidable attitude of defence, which cooled the pugnacity of his accuser. Mr. Bovill sank into his chair, and wiped his forehead. Kenelm craftily pursued the advantage he had gained, and in mild accents proceeded to reason,—
“When you recover your habitual serenity of humour, Mr. Bovill, you will see how much your very excusable desire to secure your niece’s happiness, and, I may add, to reward what you allow to have been forbearing and well-bred conduct on my part, has hurried you into an error of judgment. You know nothing of me. I may be, for what you know, an impostor or swindler; I may have every bad quality, and yet you are to be contented with my assurance, or rather your own assumption, that I am born a gentleman, in order to give me your niece and her L20,000. This is temporary insanity on your part. Allow me to leave you to recover from your excitement.”
“Stop, sir,” said Mr. Bovill, in a changed and sullen tone; “I am not quite the madman you think me. But I dare say I have been too hasty and too rough. Nevertheless the facts are as I have stated them, and I do not see how, as a man of honour, you can get off marrying my niece. The mistake you made in running away with her was, no doubt, innocent on your part: but still there it is; and supposing the case came before a jury, it would be an ugly one for you and your family. Marriage alone could mend it. Come, come, I own I was too business-like in rushing to the point at once, and I no longer say, ‘Marry my niece off-hand.’ You have only seen her disguised and in a false position. Pay me a visit at Oakdale; stay with me a month; and if at the end of that time you do not like her well enough to propose, I’ll let you off and say no more about it.”
While Mr. Bovill thus spoke, and Kenelm listened, neither saw that the door had been noiselessly opened and that Elsie stood at the threshold. Now, before Kenelm could reply, she advanced into the middle of the room, and, her small figure drawn up to its fullest height, her cheeks glowing, her lips quivering, exclaimed,—
“Uncle, for shame!” Then addressing Kenelm in a sharp tone of anguish, “Oh, do not believe I knew anything of this!” she covered her face with both hands and stood mute.
All of chivalry that Kenelm had received with his baptismal appellation was aroused. He sprang up, and, bending his knee as he drew one of her hands into his own, he said,—
“I am as convinced that your uncle’s words are abhorrent to you as I am that you are a pure-hearted and high-spirited woman, of whose friendship I shall be proud. We meet again.” Then releasing her hand, he addressed Mr. Bovill: “Sir, you are unworthy the charge of your niece. Had you not been so, she would have committed no imprudence. If she have any female relation, to that relation transfer your charge.”
“I have! I have!” cried Elsie; “my lost mother’s sister: let me go to her.”
“The woman who keeps a school!” said Mr. Bovill sneeringly.
“Why not?” asked Kenelm.
“She never would go there. I proposed it to her a year ago. The minx would not go into a school.”
“I will now, Uncle.”
“Well, then, you shall at once; and I hope you’ll be put on bread and water. Fool! fool! you have spoilt your own game. Mr. Chillingly, now that Miss Elsie has turned her back on herself, I can convince you that I am not the mad man you thought me. I was at the festive meeting held when you came of age: my brother is one of your father’s tenants. I did not recognize your face immediately in the excitement of our encounter and in your change of dress; but in walking home it struck me that I had seen it before, and I knew it at once when you entered the room to-day. It has been a tussle between us which should beat the other. You have beat me; and thanks to that idiot! If she had not put her spoke into my wheel, she would have lived to be ‘my lady.’ Now good-day, sir.”
“Mr. Bovill, you offered to shake hands: shake hands now, and promise me, with the good grace of one honourable combatant to another, that Miss Elsie shall go to her aunt the schoolmistress at once if she wishes it. Hark ye, my friend” (this in Mr. Bovill’s ear): “a man can never manage a woman. Till a woman marries, a prudent man leaves her to women; when she does marry, she manages her husband, and there’s an end of it.”
Kenelm was gone.
“Oh, wise young man!” murmured the uncle. “Elsie, dear, how can you go to your aunt’s while you are in that dress?”
Elsie started as from a trance, her eyes directed towards the doorway through which Kenelm had vanished. “This dress,” she said contemptuously, “this dress; is not that easily altered with shops in the town?”
“Gad!” muttered Mr. Bovill, “that youngster is a second Solomon; and if I can’t manage Elsie, she’ll manage a husband—whenever she gets one.”
CHAPTER VIII
“BY the powers that guard innocence and celibacy,” soliloquized Kenelm Chillingly, “but I have had a narrow escape! and had that amphibious creature been in girl’s clothes instead of boy’s, when she intervened like the deity of the ancient drama, I might have plunged my armorial Fishes into hot water. Though, indeed, it is hard to suppose that a young lady head-over-ears in love with Mr. Compton yesterday could have consigned her affections to me to-day. Still she looked as if she could, which proves either that one is never to trust a woman’s heart or never to trust a woman’s looks. Decimus Roach is right. Man must never relax his flight from the women, if he strives to achieve an ‘Approach to the Angels.’”
These reflections were made by Kenelm Chillingly as, having turned his back upon the town in which such temptations and trials had befallen him, he took his solitary way along a footpath that wound through meads and cornfields, and shortened by three miles the distance to a cathedral town at which he proposed to rest for the night.
He had travelled for some hours, and the sun was beginning to slope towards a range of blue hills in the west, when he came to the margin of a fresh rivulet, overshadowed by feathery willows and the quivering leaves of silvery Italian poplars. Tempted by the quiet and cool of this pleasant spot, he flung himself down on the banks, drew from his knapsack some crusts of bread with which he had wisely provided himself, and, dipping them into the pure lymph as it rippled over its pebbly bed, enjoyed one of those luxurious repasts for which epicures would exchange their banquet in return for the appetite of youth. Then, reclining along the bank, and crushing the wild thyme that grows best and sweetest in wooded coverts, provided they be neighboured by water, no matter whether in pool or rill, he resigned himself to that intermediate state between thought and dream-land which we call “revery.” At a little distance he heard the low still sound of the mower’s scythe, and the air came to his brow sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay.
He was roused by a gentle tap on the shoulder, and turning lazily round, saw a good-humoured jovial face upon a pair of massive shoulders, and heard a hearty and winning voice say,—
“Young man, if you are not too tired, will you lend a hand to get in my hay? We are very short of hands, and I am afraid we shall have rain pretty soon.”
Kenelm rose and shook himself, gravely contemplated the stranger, and replied in his customary sententious fashion, “Man is born to help his fellow-man,—especially to get in hay while the sun shines. I am at your service.”
“That’s a good fellow, and I’m greatly obliged to you. You see I had counted on a gang of roving haymakers, but they were bought up by another farmer. This way;” and leading on through a gap in the brushwood, he emerged, followed by Kenelm, into a large meadow, one-third of which was still under the scythe, the rest being occupied with persons of both sexes, tossing and spreading the cut grass. Among the latter, Kenelm, stripped to his shirt-sleeves, soon found himself tossing and spreading like the rest, with his usual melancholy resignation of mien and aspect. Though a little awkward at first in the use of his unfamiliar implements, his practice in all athletic accomplishments bestowed on him that invaluable quality which is termed “handiness,” and he soon distinguished himself by the superior activity and neatness with which he performed his work. Something—it might be in his countenance or in the charm of his being a stranger—attracted the attention of the feminine section of haymakers, and one very pretty girl who was nearer to him than the rest attempted to commence conversation.
“This is new to you,” she said smiling.
“Nothing is new to me,” answered Kenelm, mournfully. “But allow me to observe that to do things well you should only do one thing at a time. I am here to make hay and not conversation.”
“My!” said the girl, in amazed ejaculation, and turned off with a toss of her pretty head.
“I wonder if that jade has got an uncle,” thought Kenelm. The farmer, who took his share of work with the men, halting now and then to look round, noticed Kenelm’s vigorous application with much approval, and at the close of the day’s work shook him heartily by the hand, leaving a two-shilling piece in his palm. The heir of the Chillinglys gazed on that honorarium, and turned it over with the finger and thumb of the left hand.
“Be n’t it eno’?” said the farmer, nettled.
“Pardon me,” answered Kenelm. “But, to tell you the truth, it is the first money I ever earned by my own bodily labour; and I regard it with equal curiosity and respect. But if it would not offend you, I would rather that, instead of the money, you had offered me some supper; for I have tasted nothing but bread and water since the morning.”
“You shall have the money and supper both, my lad,” said the farmer, cheerily. “And if you will stay and help till I have got in the hay, I dare say my good woman can find you a better bed than you’ll get in the village inn; if, indeed, you can get one there at all.”
“You are very kind. But before I accept your hospitality excuse one question: have you any nieces about you?”
“Nieces!” echoed the farmer, mechanically thrusting his hands into his breeches-pockets as if in search of something there, “nieces about me! what do you mean? Be that a newfangled word for coppers?”
“Not for coppers, though perhaps for brass. But I spoke without metaphor. I object to nieces upon abstract principle, confirmed by the test of experience.”
The farmer stared, and thought his new friend not quite so sound in his mental as he evidently was in his physical conformation, but replied, with a laugh, “Make yourself easy, then. I have only one niece, and she is married to an iron-monger and lives in Exeter.”
On entering the farmhouse, Kenelm’s host conducted him straight into the kitchen, and cried out, in a hearty voice, to a comely middle-aged dame, who, with a stout girl, was intent on culinary operations, “Hulloa! old woman, I have brought you a guest who has well earned his supper, for he has done the work of two, and I have promised him a bed.”
The farmer’s wife turned sharply round. “He is heartily welcome to supper. As to a bed,” she said doubtfully, “I don’t know.” But here her eyes settled on Kenelm; and there was something in his aspect so unlike what she expected to see in an itinerant haymaker, that she involuntarily dropped a courtesy, and resumed, with a change of tone, “The gentleman shall have the guest-room: but it will take a little time to get ready; you know, John, all the furniture is covered up.”
“Well, wife, there will be leisure eno’ for that. He don’t want to go to roost till he has supped.”
“Certainly not,” said Kenelm, sniffing a very agreeable odour.
“Where are the girls?” asked the farmer.
“They have been in these five minutes, and gone upstairs to tidy themselves.”
“What girls?” faltered Kenelm, retreating towards the door. “I thought you said you had no nieces.”
“But I did not say I had no daughters. Why, you are not afraid of them, are you?”
“Sir,” replied Kenelm, with a polite and politic evasion of that question, “if your daughters are like their mother, you can’t say that they are not dangerous.”
“Come,” cried the farmer, looking very much pleased, while his dame smiled and blushed, “come, that’s as nicely said as if you were canvassing the county. ‘Tis not among haymakers that you learned manners, I guess; and perhaps I have been making too free with my betters.”
“What!” quoth the courteous Kenelm, “do you mean to imply that you were too free with your shillings? Apologize for that, if you like, but I don’t think you’ll get back the shillings. I have not seen so much of this life as you have, but, according to my experience, when a man once parts with his money, whether to his betters or his worsers, the chances are that he’ll never see it again.”
At this aphorism the farmer laughed ready to kill himself, his wife chuckled, and even the maid-of-all-work grinned. Kenelm, preserving his unalterable gravity, said to himself,—
“Wit consists in the epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women. Certainly I am a wit without knowing it.”
Here the farmer touched him on the shoulder—touched it, did not slap it, as he would have done ten minutes before—and said,—
“We must not disturb the Missis or we shall get no supper. I’ll just go and give a look into the cow-sheds. Do you know much about cows?”
“Yes, cows produce cream and butter. The best cows are those which produce at the least cost the best cream and butter. But how the best cream and butter can be produced at a price which will place them free of expense on a poor man’s breakfast-table is a question to be settled by a Reformed Parliament and a Liberal Administration. In the meanwhile let us not delay the supper.”
The farmer and his guest quitted the kitchen and entered the farmyard.
“You are quite a stranger in these parts?”
“Quite.”
“You don’t even know my name?”
“No, except that I heard your wife call you John.”
“My name is John Saunderson.”
“Ah! you come from the North, then? That’s why you are so sensible and shrewd. Names that end in ‘son’ are chiefly borne by the descendants of the Danes, to whom King Alfred, Heaven bless him! peacefully assigned no less than sixteen English counties. And when a Dane was called somebody’s son, it is a sign that he was the son of a somebody.”
“By gosh! I never heard that before.”
“If I thought you had I should not have said it.”
“Now I have told you my name, what is yours?”
“A wise man asks questions and a fool answers them. Suppose for a moment that I am not a fool.”
Farmer Saunderson scratched his head, and looked more puzzled than became the descendant of a Dane settled by King Alfred in the north of England.
“Dash it,” said he at last, “but I think you are Yorkshire too.”
“Man, who is the most conceited of all animals, says that he alone has the prerogative of thought, and condemns the other animals to the meaner mechanical operation which he calls instinct. But as instincts are unerring and thoughts generally go wrong, man has not much to boast of according to his own definition. When you say you think, and take it for granted, that I am Yorkshire, you err. I am not Yorkshire. Confining yourself to instinct, can you divine when we shall sup? The cows you are about to visit divine to a moment when they shall be fed.”
Said the farmer, recovering his sense of superiority to the guest whom he obliged with a supper, “In ten minutes.” Then, after a pause, and in a tone of deprecation, as if he feared he might be thought fine, he continued, “We don’t sup in the kitchen. My father did, and so did I till I married; but my Bess, though she’s as good a farmer’s wife as ever wore shoe-leather, was a tradesman’s daughter, and had been brought up different. You see she was not without a good bit of money: but even if she had been, I should not have liked her folks to say I had lowered her; so we sup in the parlour.”
Quoth Kenelm, “The first consideration is to sup at all. Supper conceded, every man is more likely to get on in life who would rather sup in his parlour than his kitchen. Meanwhile, I see a pump; while you go to the cows I will stay here and wash my hands of them.”
“Hold! you seem a sharp fellow, and certainly no fool. I have a son, a good smart chap, but stuck up; crows it over us all; thinks no small beer of himself. You’d do me a service, and him too, if you’d let him down a peg or two.”
Kenelm, who was now hard at work at the pump-handle, only replied by a gracious nod. But as he seldom lost an opportunity for reflection, he said to himself, while he laved his face in the stream from the spout, “One can’t wonder why every small man thinks it so pleasant to let down a big one, when a father asks a stranger to let down his own son for even fancying that he is not small beer. It is upon that principle in human nature that criticism wisely relinquishes its pretensions as an analytical science, and becomes a lucrative profession. It relies on the pleasure its readers find in letting a man down.”