A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Kenelm Chillingly, Book 3.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Kenelm Chillingly, Book 3.




"You think Miss Travers does not dislike George Belvoir, and if she
saw more of him may like him better, and it would be good for her as
well as for him not to put an end to that, chance?"

"Exactly so."

"Why not then write: 'My dear George,--You have my best wishes, but my
daughter does not seem disposed to marry at present. Let me consider
your letter not written, and continue on the same terms as we were
before.' Perhaps, as George knows Virgil, you might find your own
schoolboy recollections of that poet useful here, and add, /Varium et
mutabile semper femina/; hackneyed, but true."

"My dear Chillingly, your suggestion is capital. How the deuce at
your age have you contrived to know the world so well?"

Kenelm answered in the pathetic tones so natural to his voice, "By
being only a looker-on; alas!"

Leopold Travers felt much relieved after he had written his reply to
George. He had not been quite so ingenuous in his revelation to
Chillingly as he may have seemed. Conscious, like all proud and fond
fathers, of his daughter's attractions, he was not without some
apprehension that Kenelm himself might entertain an ambition at
variance with that of George Belvoir: if so, he deemed it well to put
an end to such ambition while yet in time: partly because his interest
was already pledged to George; partly because, in rank and fortune,
George was the better match; partly because George was of the same
political party as himself,--while Sir Peter, and probably Sir Peter's
heir, espoused the opposite side; and partly also because, with all
his personal liking to Kenelm, Leopold Travers, as a very sensible,
practical man of the world, was not sure that a baronet's heir who
tramped the country on foot in the dress of a petty farmer, and
indulged pugilistic propensities in martial encounters with stalwart
farriers, was likely to make a safe husband and a comfortable
son-in-law. Kenelm's words, and still more his manner, convinced
Travers that any apprehensions of rivalry that he had previously
conceived were utterly groundless.



CHAPTER XIX.

THE same evening, after dinner (during that lovely summer month they
dined at Neesdale Park at an unfashionably early hour), Kenelm, in
company with Travers and Cecilia, ascended a gentle eminence at the
back of the gardens, on which there were some picturesque ivy-grown
ruins of an ancient priory, and commanding the best view of a glorious
sunset and a subject landscape of vale and wood, rivulet and distant
hills.

"Is the delight in scenery," said Kenelm, "really an acquired gift, as
some philosophers tell us? Is it true that young children and rude
savages do not feel it; that the eye must be educated to comprehend
its charm, and that the eye can be only educated through the mind?"

"I should think your philosophers are right," said Travers. "When I
was a schoolboy, I thought no scenery was like the flat of a cricket
ground; when I hunted at Melton, I thought that unpicturesque country
more beautiful than Devonshire. It is only of late years that I feel
a sensible pleasure in scenery for its own sake, apart from
associations of custom or the uses to which we apply them."

"And what say you, Miss Travers?"

"I scarcely know what to say," answered Cecilia, musingly. "I can
remember no time in my childhood when I did not feel delight in that
which seemed to me beautiful in scenery, but I suspect that I vaguely
distinguished one kind of beauty from another. A common field with
daisies and buttercups was beautiful to me then, and I doubt if I saw
anything more beautiful in extensive landscapes."

"True," said Kenelm: "it is not in early childhood that we carry the
sight into distance: as is the mind so is the eye; in early childhood
the mind revels in the present, and the eye rejoices most in the
things nearest to it. I don't think in childhood that we--


"'Watched with wistful eyes the setting sun.'"


"Ah! what a world of thought in that word 'wistful'!" murmured
Cecilia, as her gaze riveted itself on the western heavens, towards
which Kenelm had pointed as he spoke, where the enlarging orb rested
half its disk on the rim of the horizon.

She had seated herself on a fragment of the ruin, backed by the
hollows of a broken arch. The last rays of the sun lingered on her
young face, and then lost themselves in the gloom of the arch behind.
There was a silence for some minutes, during which the sun had sunk.
Rosy clouds in thin flakes still floated, momently waning: and the
eve-star stole forth steadfast, bright, and lonely,--nay, lonely not
now; that sentinel has aroused a host.

Said a voice, "No sign of rain yet, Squire. What will become of the
turnips?"

"Real life again! Who can escape it?" muttered Kenelm, as his eye
rested on the burly figure of the Squire's bailiff.

"Ha! North," said Travers, "what brings you here? No bad news, I
hope?"

"Indeed, yes, Squire. The Durham bull--"

"The Durham bull! What of him? You frighten me."

"Taken bad. Colic."

"Excuse me, Chillingly," cried Travers; "I must be off. A most
valuable animal, and no one I can trust to doctor him but myself."

"That's true enough," said the bailiff, admiringly. "There's not a
veterinary in the county like the Squire."

Travers was already gone, and the panting bailiff had hard work to
catch him up.

Kenelm seated himself beside Cecilia on the ruined fragment.

"How I envy your father!" said he.

"Why just at this moment,--because he knows how to doctor the bull?"
said Cecilia, with a sweet low laugh.

"Well, that is something to envy. It is a pleasure to relieve from
pain any of God's creatures,--even a Durham bull."

"Indeed, yes. I am justly rebuked."

"On the contrary you are to be justly praised. Your question
suggested to me an amiable sentiment in place of the selfish one which
was uppermost in my thoughts. I envied your father because he creates
for himself so many objects of interest; because while he can
appreciate the mere sensuous enjoyment of a landscape and a sunset, he
can find mental excitement in turnip crops and bulls. Happy, Miss
Travers, is the Practical Man."

"When my dear father was as young as you, Mr. Chillingly, I am sure
that he had no more interest in turnips and bulls than you have. I do
not doubt that some day you will be as practical as he is in that
respect."

"Do you think so--sincerely?"

Cecilia made no answer.

Kenelm repeated the question.

"Sincerely, then, I do not know whether you will take interest in
precisely the same things that interest my father; but there are other
things than turnips and cattle which belong to what you call
'practical life,' and in these you will take interest, as you took in
the fortunes of Will Somers and Jessie Wiles."

"That was no practical interest. I got nothing by it. But even if
that interest were practical,--I mean productive, as cattle and turnip
crops are,--a succession of Somerses and Wileses is not to be hoped
for. History never repeats itself."

"May I answer you, though very humbly?"

"Miss Travers, the wisest man that ever existed never was wise enough
to know woman; but I think most men ordinarily wise will agree in
this, that woman is by no means a humble creature, and that when she
says she 'answers very humbly,' she does not mean what she says.
Permit me to entreat you to answer very loftily."

Cecilia laughed and blushed. The laugh was musical; the blush
was--what? Let any man, seated beside a girl like Cecilia at starry
twilight, find the right epithet for that blush. I pass it by
epithetless. But she answered, firmly though sweetly,--

"Are there not things very practical, and affecting the happiness, not
of one or two individuals, but of innumerable thousands, in which a
man like Mr. Chillingly cannot fail to feel interest, long before he
is my father's age?"

"Forgive me: you do not answer; you question. I imitate you, and ask
what are those things as applicable to a man like Mr. Chillingly?"

Cecilia gathered herself up, as with the desire to express a great
deal in short substance, and then said,--

"In the expression of thought, literature; in the conduct of action,
politics."

Kenelm Chillingly stared, dumfounded. I suppose the greatest
enthusiast for woman's rights could not assert more reverentially than
he did the cleverness of women; but among the things which the
cleverness of woman did not achieve, he had always placed "laconics."
"No woman," he was wont to say, "ever invented an axiom or a proverb."

"Miss Travers," he said at last, "before we proceed further, vouchsafe
to tell me if that very terse reply of yours is spontaneous and
original; or whether you have not borrowed it from some book which I
have not chanced to read?"

Cecilia pondered honestly, and then said, "I don't think it is from
any book; but I owe so many of my thoughts to Mrs. Campion, and she
lived so much among clever men, that--"

"I see it all, and accept your definition, no matter whence it came.
You think I might become an author or a politician. Did you ever read
an essay by a living author called 'Motive Power'?"

"No."

"That essay is designed to intimate that without motive power a man,
whatever his talents or his culture, does nothing practical. The
mainsprings of motive power are Want and Ambition. They are absent
from my mechanism. By the accident of birth I do not require bread
and cheese; by the accident of temperament and of philosophical
culture I care nothing about praise or blame. But without want of
bread and cheese, and with a most stolid indifference to praise and
blame, do you honestly think that a man will do anything practical in
literature or politics? Ask Mrs. Campion."

"I will not ask her. Is the sense of duty nothing?"

"Alas! we interpret duty so variously. Of mere duty, as we commonly
understand the word, I do not think I shall fail more than other men.
But for the fair development of all the good that is in us, do you
believe that we should adopt some line of conduct against which our
whole heart rebels? Can you say to the clerk, 'Be a poet'? Can you
say to the poet, 'Be a clerk'? It is no more to the happiness of a
man's being to order him to take to one career when his whole heart is
set on another, than it is to order him to marry one woman when it is
to another woman that his heart will turn."

Cecilia here winced and looked away. Kenelm had more tact than most
men of his age,--that is, a keener perception of subjects to avoid;
but then Kenelm had a wretched habit of forgetting the person he
talked to and talking to himself. Utterly oblivious of George
Belvoir, he was talking to himself now. Not then observing the effect
his /mal-a-propos/ dogma had produced on his listener, he went on,
"Happiness is a word very lightly used. It may mean little; it may
mean much. By the word happiness I would signify, not the momentary
joy of a child who gets a plaything, but the lasting harmony between
our inclinations and our objects; and without that harmony we are a
discord to ourselves, we are incompletions, we are failures. Yet
there are plenty of advisers who say to us, 'It is a duty to be a
discord.' I deny it."

Here Cecilia rose and said in a low voice, "It is getting late. We
must go homeward."

They descended the green eminence slowly, and at first in silence.
The bats, emerging from the ivied ruins they left behind, flitted and
skimmed before them, chasing the insects of the night. A moth,
escaping from its pursuer, alighted on Cecilia's breast, as if for
refuge.

"The bats are practical," said Kenelm; "they are hungry, and their
motive power to-night is strong. Their interest is in the insects
they chase. They have no interest in the stars; but the stars lure
the moth."

Cecilia drew her slight scarf over the moth, so that it might not fly
off and become a prey to the bats. "Yet," said she, "the moth is
practical too."

"Ay, just now, since it has found an asylum from the danger that
threatened it in its course towards the stars."

Cecilia felt the beating of her heart, upon which lay the moth
concealed. Did she think that a deeper and more tender meaning than
they outwardly expressed was couched in these words? If so, she
erred. They now neared the garden gate, and Kenelm paused as he
opened it. "See," he said, "the moon has just risen over those dark
firs, making the still night stiller. Is it not strange that we
mortals, placed amid perpetual agitation and tumult and strife, as if
our natural element, conceive a sense of holiness in the images
antagonistic to our real life; I mean in images of repose? I feel at
the moment as if I suddenly were made better, now that heaven and
earth have suddenly become yet more tranquil. I am now conscious of a
purer and sweeter moral than either I or you drew from the insect you
have sheltered. I must come to the poets to express it,--


"'The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow;
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.'


"Oh, that something afar! that something afar! never to be reached on
this earth,--never, never!"

There was such a wail in that cry from the man's heart that Cecilia
could not resist the impulse of a divine compassion. She laid her
hand on his, and looked on the dark wildness of his upward face with
eyes that Heaven meant to be wells of comfort to grieving man. At the
light touch of that hand Kenelm started, looked down, and met those
soothing eyes.

"I am happy to tell you that I have saved my Durham," cried out Mr.
Travers from the other side of the gate.



CHAPTER XX.

AS Kenelm that night retired to his own room, he paused on the
landing-place opposite to the portrait which Mr. Travers had consigned
to that desolate exile. This daughter of a race dishonoured in its
extinction might well have been the glory of the house she had entered
as a bride. The countenance was singularly beautiful, and of a
character of beauty eminently patrician; there was in its expression a
gentleness and modesty not often found in the female portraits of Sir
Peter Lely, and in the eyes and in the smile a wonderful aspect of
innocent happiness.

"What a speaking homily," soliloquized Kenelm, addressing the picture,
"against the ambition thy fair descendant would awake in me, art thou,
O lovely image! For generations thy beauty lived in this canvas, a
thing of joy, the pride of the race it adorned. Owner after owner
said to admiring guests, 'Yes, a fine portrait, by Lely; she was my
ancestress,--a Fletwode of Fletwode.' Now, lest guests should
remember that a Fletwode married a Travers thou art thrust out of
sight; not even Lely's art can make thee of value, can redeem thine
innocent self from disgrace. And the last of the Fletwodes, doubtless
the most ambitious of all, the most bent on restoring and regilding
the old lordly name, dies a felon; the infamy of one living man is so
large that it can blot out the honour of the dead." He turned his
eyes from the smile of the portrait, entered his own room, and,
seating himself by the writing-table, drew blotting-book and
note-paper towards him, took up the pen, and instead of writing fell
into deep revery. There was a slight frown on his brow, on which
frowns were rare. He was very angry with himself.

"Kenelm," he said, entering into his customary dialogue with that
self, "it becomes you, forsooth, to moralize about the honour of races
which have no affinity with you. Son of Sir Peter Chillingly, look at
home. Are you quite sure that you have not said or done or looked a
something that may bring trouble to the hearth on which you are
received as guest? What right had you to be moaning forth your
egotisms, not remembering that your words fell on compassionate ears,
and that such words, heard at moonlight by a girl whose heart they
move to pity, may have dangers for her peace? Shame on you, Kenelm!
shame! knowing too what her father's wish is; and knowing too that you
have not the excuse of desiring to win that fair creature for
yourself. What do you mean, Kenelm? I don't hear you; speak out. Oh,
'that I am a vain coxcomb to fancy that she could take a fancy to me:'
well, perhaps I am; I hope so earnestly; and at all events, there has
been and shall be no time for much mischief. We are off to-morrow,
Kenelm; bestir yourself and pack up, write your letters, and then 'put
out the light,--put out /the/ light!'"

But this converser with himself did not immediately set to work, as
agreed upon by that twofold one. He rose and walked restlessly to and
fro the floor, stopping ever and anon to look at the pictures on the
walls.

Several of the worst painted of the family portraits had been
consigned to the room tenanted by Kenelm, which, though both the
oldest and largest bed-chamber in the house, was always appropriated
to a bachelor male guest, partly because it was without dressing-room,
remote, and only approached by the small back-staircase, to the
landing-place of which Arabella had been banished in disgrace; and
partly because it had the reputation of being haunted, and ladies are
more alarmed by that superstition than men are supposed to be. The
portraits on which Kenelm now paused to gaze were of various dates,
from the reign of Elizabeth to that of George III., none of them by
eminent artists, and none of them the effigies of ancestors who had
left names in history,--in short, such portraits as are often seen in
the country houses of well-born squires. One family type of features
or expression pervaded most of these portraits; features clear-cut and
hardy, expression open and honest. And though not one of those dead
men had been famous, each of them had contributed his unostentatious
share, in his own simple way, to the movements of his time. That
worthy in ruff and corselet had manned his own ship at his own cost
against the Armada; never had been repaid by the thrifty Burleigh the
expenses which had harassed him and diminished his patrimony; never
had been even knighted. That gentleman with short straight hair,
which overhung his forehead, leaning on his sword with one hand, and a
book open in the other hand, had served as representative of his
county town in the Long Parliament, fought under Cromwell at Marston
Moor, and, resisting the Protector when he removed the "bauble," was
one of the patriots incarcerated in "Hell hole." He, too, had
diminished his patrimony, maintaining two troopers and two horses at
his own charge, and "Hell hole" was all he got in return. A third,
with a sleeker expression of countenance, and a large wig, flourishing
in the quiet times of Charles II., had only been a justice of the
peace, but his alert look showed that he had been a very active one.
He had neither increased nor diminished his ancestral fortune. A
fourth, in the costume of William III.'s reign, had somewhat added to
the patrimony by becoming a lawyer. He must have been a successful
one. He is inscribed "Sergeant-at-law." A fifth, a lieutenant in the
army, was killed at Blenheim; his portrait was that of a very young
and handsome man, taken the year before his death. His wife's
portrait is placed in the drawing-room because it was painted by
Kneller. She was handsome too, and married again a nobleman, whose
portrait, of course, was not in the family collection. Here there was
a gap in chronological arrangement, the lieutenant's heir being an
infant; but in the time of George II. another Travers appeared as the
governor of a West India colony. His son took part in a very
different movement of the age. He is represented old, venerable, with
white hair, and underneath his effigy is inscribed, "Follower of
Wesley." His successor completes the collection. He is in naval
uniform; he is in full length, and one of his legs is a wooden one.
He is Captain, R.N., and inscribed, "Fought under Nelson at
Trafalgar." That portrait would have found more dignified place in
the reception-rooms if the face had not been forbiddingly ugly, and
the picture itself a villanous daub.

"I see," said Kenelm, stopping short, "why Cecilia Travers has been
reared to talk of duty as a practical interest in life. These men of
a former time seem to have lived to discharge a duty, and not to
follow the progress of the age in the chase of a money-bag,--except
perhaps one, but then to be sure he was a lawyer. Kenelm, rouse up
and listen to me; whatever we are, whether active or indolent, is not
my favourite maxim a just and a true one; namely, 'A good man does
good by living'? But, for that, he must be a harmony and not a
discord. Kenelm, you lazy dog, we must pack up."

Kenelm then refilled his portmanteau, and labelled and directed it to
Exmundham, after which he wrote these three notes:--


NOTE I.

TO THE MARCHIONESS OF GLENALVON.

MY DEAR FRIEND AND MONITRESS,--I have left your last letter a month
unanswered. I could not reply to your congratulations on the event of
my attaining the age of twenty-one. That event is a conventional
sham, and you know how I abhor shams and conventions. The truth is
that I am either much younger than twenty-one or much older. As to
all designs on my peace in standing for our county at the next
election, I wished to defeat them, and I have done so; and now I have
commenced a course of travel. I had intended on starting to confine
it to my native country. Intentions are mutable. I am going abroad.
You shall hear of my whereabout. I write this from the house of
Leopold Travers, who, I understand from his fair daughter, is a
connection of yours; a man to be highly esteemed and cordially liked.

No, in spite of all your flattering predictions, I shall never be
anything in this life more distinguished than what I am now. Lady
Glenalvon allows me to sign myself her grateful friend,

K. C.


NOTE II.

DEAR COUSIN MIVERS,--I am going abroad. I may want money; for, in
order to rouse motive power within me, I mean to want money if I can.
When I was a boy of sixteen you offered me money to write attacks upon
veteran authors for "The Londoner." Will you give me money now for a
similar display of that grand New Idea of our generation; namely, that
the less a man knows of a subject the better he understands it? I am
about to travel into countries which I have never seen, and among
races I have never known. My arbitrary judgments on both will be
invaluable to "The Londoner" from a Special Correspondent who shares
your respect for the anonymous, and whose name is never to be
divulged. Direct your answer by return to me, /poste restante/,
Calais.

Yours truly,

K. C.


NOTE III.

MY DEAR FATHER,--I found your letter here, whence I depart to-morrow.
Excuse haste. I go abroad, and shall write to you from Calais.

I admire Leopold Travers very much. After all, how much of
self-balance there is in a true English gentleman! Toss him up and
down where you will, and he always alights on his feet,--a gentleman.
He has one child, a daughter named Cecilia,--handsome enough to allure
into wedlock any mortal whom Decimus Roach had not convinced that in
celibacy lay the right "Approach to the Angels." Moreover, she is a
girl whom one can talk with. Even you could talk with her. Travers
wishes her to marry a very respectable, good-looking, promising
gentleman, in every way "suitable," as they say. And if she does, she
will rival that pink and perfection of polished womanhood, Lady
Glenalvon. I send you back my portmanteau. I have pretty well
exhausted my experience-money, but have not yet encroached on my
monthly allowance. I mean still to live upon that, eking it out, if
necessary, by the sweat of my brow or brains. But if any case
requiring extra funds should occur,--a case in which that extra would
do such real good to another that I feel /you/ would do it,--why, I
must draw a check on your bankers. But understand that is your
expense, not mine, and it is /you/ who are to be repaid in Heaven.
Dear father, how I do love and honour you every day more and more!
Promise you not to propose to any young lady till I come first to you
for consent!--oh, my dear father, how could you doubt it? how doubt
that I could not be happy with any wife whom you could not love as a
daughter? Accept that promise as sacred. But I wish you had asked me
something in which obedience was not much too facile to be a test of
duty. I could not have obeyed you more cheerfully if you had asked me
to promise never to propose to any young lady at all. Had you asked
me to promise that I would renounce the dignity of reason for the
frenzy of love, or the freedom of man for the servitude of husband,
then I might have sought to achieve the impossible; but I should have
died in the effort!--and thou wouldst have known that remorse which
haunts the bed of the tyrant.

Your affectionate son,

K. C.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE next morning Kenelm surprised the party at breakfast by appearing
in the coarse habiliments in which he had first made his host's
acquaintance. He did not glance towards Cecilia when he announced his
departure; but, his eye resting on Mrs. Campion, he smiled, perhaps a
little sadly, at seeing her countenance brighten up and hearing her
give a short sigh of relief. Travers tried hard to induce him to stay
a few days longer, but Kenelm was firm. "The summer is wearing away,"
said he, "and I have far to go before the flowers fade and the snows
fall. On the third night from this I shall sleep on foreign soil."

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