Kenelm Chillingly — Complete eBook

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.

CHAPTER III.

“NOW, young sir,” said Kenelm, in a tone calm, but peremptory,—­“now we are in the town, where am I to take you? and wherever it be, there to say good-by.”

“No, not good-by.  Stay with me a little bit.  I begin to feel frightened, and I am so friendless;” and the boy, who had before resented the slightest nudge on the part of Kenelm, now wound his arm into Kenelm’s, and clung to him caressingly.

I don’t know what my readers have hitherto thought of Kenelm Chillingly:  but, amid all the curves and windings of his whimsical humour, there was one way that went straight to his heart; you had only to be weaker than himself and ask his protection.

He turned round abruptly; he forgot all the strangeness of his position, and replied:  “Little brute that you are, I’ll be shot if I forsake you if in trouble.  But some compassion is also due to the cob:  for his sake say where we are to stop.”