When Sir Peter came to that postscript he took off his spectacles and wiped them: they were very moist.
Then he fell into a profound meditation. Sir Peter was, as I have said, a learned man; he was also in some things a sensible man, and he had a strong sympathy with the humorous side of his son’s crotchety character. What was to be said to Lady Chillingly? That matron was quite guiltless of any crime which should deprive her of a husband’s confidence in a matter relating to her only son. She was a virtuous matron; morals irreproachable, manners dignified, and she-baronety. Any one seeing her for the first time would intuitively say, “Your ladyship.” Was this a matron to be suppressed in any well-ordered domestic circle? Sir Peter’s conscience loudly answered, “No;” but when, putting conscience into his pocket, he regarded the question at issue as a man of the world, Sir Peter felt that to communicate the contents of his son’s letter to Lady Chillingly would be the foolishest thing he could possibly do. Did she know that Kenelm had absconded with the family dignity invested in his very name, no marital authority short of such abuses of power as constitute the offence of cruelty in a wife’s action for divorce from social board and nuptial bed could prevent Lady Chillingly from summoning all the grooms, sending them in all directions with strict orders to bring back the runaway dead or alive; the walls would be placarded with hand-bills, “Strayed from his home,” etc.; the police would be telegraphing private instructions from town to town; the scandal would stick to Kenelm Chillingly for life, accompanied with vague hints of criminal propensities and insane hallucinations; he would be ever afterwards pointed out as “THE MAN WHO HAD DISAPPEARED.” And to disappear and to turn up again, instead of being murdered, is the most hateful thing a man can do: all the newspapers bark at him, “Tray, Blanche, Sweetheart, and all;” strict explanations of the unseemly fact of his safe existence are demanded in the name of public decorum, and no explanations are accepted; it is life saved, character lost.
Sir Peter seized his hat and walked forth, not to deliberate whether to fib or not to fib to the wife of his bosom, but to consider what kind of fib would the most quickly sink into the bosom of his wife.
A few turns to and fro on the terrace sufficed for the conception and maturing of the fib selected; a proof that Sir Peter was a practised fibber. He re-entered the house, passed into her ladyship’s habitual sitting-room, and said with careless gayety, “My old friend the Duke of Clareville is just setting off on a tour to Switzerland with his family. His youngest daughter, Lady Jane, is a pretty girl, and would not be a bad match for Kenelm.”
“Lady Jane, the youngest daughter with fair hair, whom I saw last as a very charming child, nursing a lovely doll presented to her by the Empress Eugenie,—a good match indeed for Kenelm.”
“I am glad you agree with me. Would it not be a favourable step towards that alliance, and an excellent thing for Kenelm generally, if he were to visit the Continent as one of the Duke’s travelling party?”
“Of course it would.”
“Then you approve what I have done; the Duke starts the day after to-morrow, and I have packed Kenelm off to town, with a letter to my old friend. You will excuse all leave taking. You know that though the best of sons he is an odd fellow; and seeing that I had talked him into it, I struck while the iron was hot, and sent him off by the express at nine o’clock this morning, for fear that if I allowed any delay he would talk himself out of it.”
“Do you mean to say Kenelm is actually gone? Good gracious.”
Sir Peter stole softly from the room, and summoning his valet, said, “I have sent Mr. Chillingly to London. Pack up the clothes he is likely to want, so that he can have them sent at once, whenever he writes for them.”
And thus, by a judicious violation of truth on the part of his father, that exemplary truth-teller Kenelm Chillingly saved the honour of his house and his own reputation from the breath of scandal and the inquisition of the police. He was not “THE MAN WHO HAD DISAPPEARED.”
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
KENELM CHILLINGLY had quitted the paternal home at daybreak before any of the household was astir. “Unquestionably,” said he, as he walked along the solitary lanes,—“unquestionably I begin the world as poets begin poetry, an imitator and a plagiarist. I am imitating an itinerant verse-maker, as, no doubt, he began by imitating some other maker of verse. But if there be anything in me, it will work itself out in original form. And, after all, the verse-maker is not the inventor of ideas. Adventure on foot is a notion that remounts to the age of fable. Hercules, for instance; that was the way in which he got to heaven, as a foot-traveller. How solitary the world is at this hour! Is it not for that reason that this is of all hours the most beautiful?”
Here he paused, and looked around and above. It was the very height of summer. The sun was just rising over gentle sloping uplands. All the dews on the hedgerows sparkled. There was not a cloud in the heavens. Up rose from the green blades of corn a solitary skylark. His voice woke up the other birds. A few minutes more and the joyous concert began. Kenelm reverently doffed his hat, and bowed his head in mute homage and thanksgiving.
CHAPTER II
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