WHETHER or not his spirits were raised by Kenelm's praise and
exhortations, the minstrel that day talked with a charm that
spellbound Tom, and Kenelm was satisfied with brief remarks on his
side tending to draw out the principal performer.
The talk was drawn from outward things, from natural objects,--objects
that interest children, and men who, like Tom Bowles, have been
accustomed to view surroundings more with the heart's eye than the
mind's eye. This rover about the country knew much of the habits of
birds and beasts and insects, and told anecdotes of them with a
mixture of humour and pathos, which fascinated Tom's attention, made
him laugh heartily, and sometimes brought tears into his big blue
eyes.
They dined at an inn by the wayside, and the dinner was mirthful; then
they wended their way slowly back. By the declining daylight their
talk grew somewhat graver, and Kenelm took more part in it. Tom
listened mute,--still fascinated. At length, as the town came in
sight, they agreed to halt a while, in a bosky nook soft with mosses
and sweet with wild thyme.
There, as they lay stretched at their ease, the birds hymning vesper
songs amid the boughs above, or dropping, noiseless and fearless, for
their evening food on the swards around them, the wanderer said to
Kenelm, "You tell me that you are no poet, yet I am sure you have a
poet's perception: you must have written poetry?"
"Not I; as I before told you, only school verses in dead languages:
but I found in my knapsack this morning a copy of some rhymes, made by
a fellow-collegian, which I put into my pocket meaning to read them to
you both. They are not verses like yours, which evidently burst from
you spontaneously, and are not imitated from any other poets. These
verses were written by a Scotchman, and smack of imitation from the
old ballad style. There is little to admire in the words themselves,
but there is something in the idea which struck me as original, and
impressed me sufficiently to keep a copy, and somehow or other it got
into the leaves of one of the two books I carried with me from home."
"What are those books? Books of poetry both, I will venture to
wager--"
"Wrong! Both metaphysical, and dry as a bone. Tom, light your pipe,
and you, sir, lean more at ease on your elbow; I should warn you that
the ballad is long. Patience!"
"Attention!" said the minstrel.
"Fire!" added Tom.
Kenelm began to read,--and he read well.
LORD RONALD'S BRIDE.
PART I.
"WHY gathers the crowd in the market-place
Ere the stars have yet left the sky?"
"For a holiday show and an act of grace,--
At the sunrise a witch shall die."
"What deed has she done to deserve that doom?
Has she blighted the standing corn,
Or rifled for philters a dead man's tomb,
Or rid mothers of babes new-born?"
"Her pact with the fiend was not thus revealed,
She taught sinners the Word to hear;
The hungry she fed, and the sick she healed,
And was held as a Saint last year.
"But a holy man, who at Rome had been,
Had discovered, by book and bell,
That the marvels she wrought were through arts unclean,
And the lies of the Prince of Hell.
"And our Mother the Church, for the dame was rich,
And her husband was Lord of Clyde,
Would fain have been mild to this saint-like witch
If her sins she had not denied.
"But hush, and come nearer to see the sight,
Sheriff, halberds, and torchmen,--look!
That's the witch standing mute in her garb of white,
By the priest with his bell and book."
So the witch was consumed on the sacred pyre,
And the priest grew in power and pride,
And the witch left a son to succeed his sire
In the halls and the lands of Clyde.
And the infant waxed comely and strong and brave,
But his manhood had scarce begun,
When his vessel was launched on the northern wave
To the shores which are near the sun.
PART II.
Lord Ronald has come to his halls in Clyde
With a bride of some unknown race;
Compared with the man who would kiss that bride
Wallace wight were a coward base.
Her eyes had the glare of the mountain-cat
When it springs on the hunter's spear,
At the head of the board when that lady sate
Hungry men could not eat for fear.
And the tones of her voice had that deadly growl
Of the bloodhound that scents its prey;
No storm was so dark as that lady's scowl
Under tresses of wintry gray.
"Lord Ronald! men marry for love or gold,
Mickle rich must have been thy bride!"
"Man's heart may be bought, woman's hand be sold,
On the banks of our northern Clyde.
"My bride is, in sooth, mickle rich to me
Though she brought not a groat in dower,
For her face, couldst thou see it as I do see,
Is the fairest in hall or bower!"
Quoth the bishop one day to our lord the king,
"Satan reigns on the Clyde alway,
And the taint in the blood of the witch doth cling
To the child that she brought to day.
"Lord Ronald hath come from the Paynim land
With a bride that appals the sight;
Like his dam she hath moles on her dread right hand,
And she turns to a snake at night.
"It is plain that a Scot who can blindly dote
On the face of an Eastern ghoul,
And a ghoul who was worth not a silver groat,
Is a Scot who has lost his soul.
"It were wise to have done with this demon tree
Which has teemed with such caukered fruit;
Add the soil where it stands to my holy See,
And consign to the flames its root."
"Holy man!" quoth King James, and he laughed, "we know
That thy tongue never wags in vain,
But the Church cist is full, and the king's is low,
And the Clyde is a fair domain.
"Yet a knight that's bewitched by a laidly fere
Needs not much to dissolve the spell;
We will summon the bride and the bridegroom here
Be at hand with thy book and bell."
PART III.
Lord Ronald stood up in King James's court,
And his dame by his dauntless side;
The barons who came in the hopes of sport
Shook with fright when they saw the bride.
The bishop, though armed with his bell and book,
Grew as white as if turned to stone;
It was only our king who could face that look,
But he spoke with a trembling tone.
"Lord Ronald, the knights of thy race and mine
Should have mates in their own degree;
What parentage, say, hath that bride of thine
Who hath come from the far countree?
"And what was her dowry in gold or land,
Or what was the charm, I pray,
That a comely young gallant should woo the hand
Of the ladye we see to-day?"
And the lords would have laughed, but that awful dame
Struck them dumb with her thunder-frown:
"Saucy king, did I utter my father's name,
Thou wouldst kneel as his liegeman down.
"Though I brought to Lord Ronald nor lands nor gold,
Nor the bloom of a fading cheek;
Yet, were I a widow, both young and old
Would my hand and my dowry seek.
"For the wish that he covets the most below,
And would hide from the saints above,
Which he dares not to pray for in weal or woe,
Is the dowry I bring my love.
"Let every man look in his heart and see
What the wish he most lusts to win,
And then let him fasten his eyes on me
While he thinks of his darling sin."
And every man--bishop, and lord, and king
Thought of what he most wished to win,
And, fixing his eye on that grewsome thing,
He beheld his own darling sin.
No longer a ghoul in that face he saw;
It was fair as a boy's first love:
The voice that had curdled his veins with awe
Was the coo of the woodland dove.
Each heart was on flame for the peerless dame
At the price of the husband's life;
Bright claymores flash out, and loud voices shout,
"In thy widow shall be my wife."
Then darkness fell over the palace hall,
More dark and more dark it fell,
And a death-groan boomed hoarse underneath the pall,
And was drowned amid roar and yell.
When light through the lattice-pane stole once more,
It was gray as a wintry dawn,
And the bishop lay cold on the regal floor,
With a stain on his robes of lawn.
Lord Ronald was standing beside the dead,
In the scabbard he plunged his sword,
And with visage as wan as the corpse, he said,
"Lo! my ladye hath kept her word.
"Now I leave her to others to woo and win,
For no longer I find her fair;
Could I look on the face of my darling sin,
I should see but a dead man's there.
"And the dowry she brought me is here returned,
For the wish of my heart has died,
It is quenched in the blood of the priest who burned
My sweet mother, the Saint of Clyde."
Lord Ronald strode over the stony floor,
Not a hand was outstretched to stay;
Lord Ronald has passed through the gaping door,
Not an eye ever traced the way.
And the ladye, left widowed, was prized above
All the maidens in hall and bower,
Many bartered their lives for that ladye's love,
And their souls for that ladye's dower.
God grant that the wish which I dare not pray
Be not that which I lust to win,
And that ever I look with my first dismay
On the face of my darling sin!
As he ceased, Kenelm's eye fell on Tom's face upturned to his own,
with open lips, an intent stare, and paled cheeks, and a look of that
higher sort of terror which belongs to awe. The man, then recovering
himself, tried to speak, and attempted a sickly smile, but neither
would do. He rose abruptly and walked away, crept under the shadow of
a dark beech-tree, and stood there leaning against the trunk.
"What say you to the ballad?" asked Kenelm of the singer.
"It is not without power," answered he.
"Ay, of a certain kind."
The minstrel looked hard at Kenelm, and dropped his eyes, with a
heightened glow on his cheek.
"The Scotch are a thoughtful race. The Scot who wrote this thing may
have thought of a day when he saw beauty in the face of a darling sin;
but, if so, it is evident that his sight recovered from that glamoury.
Shall we walk on? Come, Tom."
The minstrel left them at the entrance of the town, saying, "I regret
that I cannot see more of either of you, as I quit Luscombe at
daybreak. Here, by the by, I forgot to give it before, is the address
you wanted."
KENELM.--"Of the little child. I am glad you remembered her."
The minstrel again looked hard at Kenelm, this time without dropping
his eyes. Kenelm's expression of face was so simply quiet that it
might be almost called vacant.
Kenelm and Tom continued to walk on towards the veterinary surgeon's
house, for some minutes silently. Then Tom said in a whisper, "Did
you not mean those rhymes to hit me here--/here/?" and he struck his
breast.
"The rhymes were written long before I saw you, Tom; but it is well if
their meaning strike us all. Of you, my friend, I have no fear now.
Are you not already a changed man?"
"I feel as if I were going through a change," answered Tom, in slow,
dreary accents. "In hearing you and that gentleman talk so much of
things that I never thought of, I felt something in me,--you will
laugh when I tell you,--something like a bird."
"Like a bird,--good!--a bird has wings."
"Just so."
"And you felt wings that you were unconscious of before, fluttering
and beating themselves as against the wires of a cage. You were true
to your instincts then, my dear fellow-man,--instincts of space and
Heaven. Courage!--the cage-door will open soon. And now, practically
speaking, I give you this advice in parting: You have a quick and
sensitive mind which you have allowed that strong body of yours to
incarcerate and suppress. Give that mind fair play. Attend to the
business of your calling diligently; the craving for regular work is
the healthful appetite of mind: but in your spare hours cultivate the
new ideas which your talk with men who have been accustomed to
cultivate the mind more than the body has sown within you. Belong to
a book-club, and interest yourself in books. A wise man has said,
'Books widen the present by adding to it the past and the future.'
Seek the company of educated men and educated women too; and when you
are angry with another, reason with him: don't knock him down; and
don't be knocked down yourself by an enemy much stronger than
yourself,--Drink. Do all this, and when I see you again you will
be--"
"Stop, sir,--you will see me again?"
"Yes, if we both live, I promise it."
"When?"
"You see, Tom, we have both of us something in our old selves which we
must work off. You will work off your something by repose, and I must
work off mine, if I can, by moving about. So I am on my travels. May
we both have new selves better than the old selves, when we again
shake hands! For your part try your best, dear Tom, and Heaven
prosper you."
"And Heaven bless you!" cried Tom, fervently, with tears rolling
unheeded from his bold blue eyes.
CHAPTER XIV.
THOUGH Kenelm left Luscombe on Tuesday morning, he did not appear at
Neesdale Park till the Wednesday, a little before the dressing-bell
for dinner. His adventures in the interim are not worth repeating.
He had hoped he might fall in again with the minstrel, but he did not.
His portmanteau had arrived, and he heaved a sigh as he cased himself
in a gentleman's evening dress. "Alas! I have soon got back again
into my own skin."
There were several other guests in the house, though not a large
party,--they had been asked with an eye to the approaching
election,--consisting of squires and clergy from remoter parts of the
county. Chief among the guests in rank and importance, and rendered
by the occasion the central object of interest, was George Belvoir.
Kenelm bore his part in this society with a resignation that partook
of repentance.
The first day he spoke very little, and was considered a very dull
young man by the lady he took in to dinner. Mr. Travers in vain tried
to draw him out. He had anticipated much amusement from the
eccentricities of his guest, who had talked volubly enough in the
fernery, and was sadly disappointed. "I feel," he whispered to Mrs.
Campion, "like poor Lord Pomfret, who, charmed with Punch's lively
conversation, bought him, and was greatly surprised that, when he had
once brought him home, Punch would not talk."
"But your Punch listens," said Mrs. Campion, "and he observes."
George Belvoir, on the other hand, was universally declared to be very
agreeable. Though not naturally jovial, he forced himself to appear
so,--laughing loud with the squires, and entering heartily with their
wives and daughters into such topics as county-balls and
croquet-parties; and when after dinner he had, Cato-like, 'warmed his
virtue with wine,' the virtue came out very lustily in praise of good
men,--namely, men of his own party,--and anathemas on bad
men,--namely, men of the other party.
Now and then he appealed to Kenelm, and Kenelm always returned the
same answer, "There is much in what you say."
The first evening closed in the usual way in country houses. There
was some lounging under moonlight on the terrace before the house;
then there was some singing by young lady amateurs, and a rubber of
whist for the elders; then wine-and-water, hand-candlesticks, a
smoking-room for those who smoked, and bed for those who did not.
In the course of the evening, Cecilia, partly in obedience to the
duties of hostess and partly from that compassion for shyness which
kindly and high-bred persons entertain, had gone a little out of her
way to allure Kenelm forth from the estranged solitude he had
contrived to weave around him. In vain for the daughter as for the
father. He replied to her with the quiet self-possession which should
have convinced her that no man on earth was less entitled to
indulgence for the gentlemanlike infirmity of shyness, and no man less
needed the duties of any hostess for the augmentation of his comforts,
or rather for his diminished sense of discomfort; but his replies were
in monosyllables, and made with the air of a man who says in his
heart, "If this creature would but leave me alone!"
Cecilia, for the first time in her life, was piqued, and, strange to
say, began to feel more interest about this indifferent stranger than
about the popular, animated, pleasant George Belvoir, who she knew by
womanly instinct was as much in love with her as he could be.
Cecilia Travers that night on retiring to rest told her maid,
smilingly, that she was too tired to have her hair done; and yet, when
the maid was dismissed, she looked at herself in the glass more
gravely and more discontentedly than she had ever looked there before;
and, tired though she was, stood at the window gazing into the moonlit
night for a good hour after the maid left her.
CHAPTER XV.
KENELM CHILLINGLY has now been several days a guest at Neesdale Park.
He has recovered speech; the other guests have gone, including George
Belvoir. Leopold Travers has taken a great fancy to Kenelm. Leopold
was one of those men, not uncommon perhaps in England, who, with great
mental energies, have little book-knowledge, and when they come in
contact with a book-reader who is not a pedant feel a pleasant
excitement in his society, a source of interest in comparing notes
with him, a constant surprise in finding by what venerable authorities
the deductions which their own mother-wit has drawn from life are
supported, or by what cogent arguments derived from books those
deductions are contravened or upset. Leopold Travers had in him that
sense of humour which generally accompanies a strong practical
understanding (no man, for instance, has more practical understanding
than a Scot, and no man has a keener susceptibility to humour), and
not only enjoyed Kenelm's odd way of expressing himself, but very
often mistook Kenelm's irony for opinion spoken in earnest.
Since his early removal from the capital and his devotion to
agricultural pursuits, it was so seldom that Leopold Travers met a man
by whose conversation his mind was diverted to other subjects than
those which were incidental to the commonplace routine of his life
that he found in Kenelm's views of men and things a source of novel
amusement, and a stirring appeal to such metaphysical creeds of his
own as had been formed unconsciously, and had long reposed unexamined
in the recesses of an intellect shrewd and strong, but more accustomed
to dictate than to argue. Kenelm, on his side, saw much in his host
to like and to admire; but, reversing their relative positions in
point of years, he conversed with Travers as with a mind younger than
his own. Indeed, it was one of his crotchety theories that each
generation is in substance mentally older than the generation
preceding it, especially in all that relates to science; and, as he
would say, "The study of life is a science, and not an art."
But Cecilia,--what impression did she create upon the young visitor?
Was he alive to the charm of her rare beauty, to the grace of a mind
sufficiently stored for commune with those who love to think and to
imagine, and yet sufficiently feminine and playful to seize the
sportive side of realities, and allow their proper place to the
trifles which make the sum of human things? An impression she did
make, and that impression was new to him and pleasing. Nay, sometimes
in her presence and sometimes when alone, he fell into abstracted
consultations with himself, saying, "Kenelm Chillingly, now that thou
hast got back into thy proper skin, dost thou not think that thou
hadst better remain there? Couldst thou not be contented with thy lot
as erring descendant of Adam, if thou couldst win for thy mate so
faultless a descendant of Eve as now flits before thee?" But he could
not abstract from himself any satisfactory answer to the question he
had addressed to himself.
Once he said abruptly to Travers, as, on their return from their
rambles, they caught a glimpse of Cecilia's light form bending over
the flower-beds on the lawn, "Do you admire Virgil?"
"To say truth I have not read Virgil since I was a boy; and, between
you and me, I then thought him rather monotonous."
"Perhaps because his verse is so smooth in its beauty?"
"Probably. When one is very young one's taste is faulty; and if a
poet is not faulty, we are apt to think he wants vivacity and fire."
"Thank you for your lucid explanation," answered Kenelm, adding
musingly to himself, "I am afraid I should yawn very often if I were
married to a Miss Virgil."
CHAPTER XVI.
THE house of Mr. Travers contained a considerable collection of family
portraits, few of them well painted, but the Squire was evidently
proud of such evidences of ancestry. They not only occupied a
considerable space on the walls of the reception rooms, but swarmed
into the principal sleeping-chambers, and smiled or frowned on the
beholder from dark passages and remote lobbies. One morning, Cecilia,
on her way to the china closet, found Kenelm gazing very intently upon
a female portrait consigned to one of those obscure receptacles by
which through a back staircase he gained the only approach from the
hall to his chamber.
"I don't pretend to be a good judge of paintings," said Kenelm, as
Cecilia paused beside him; "but it strikes me that this picture is
very much better than most of those to which places of honour are
assigned in your collection. And the face itself is so lovely that it
would add an embellishment to the princeliest galleries."
"Yes," said Cecilia, with a half-sigh. "The face is lovely, and the
portrait is considered one of Lely's rarest masterpieces. It used to
hang over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. My father had it
placed here many years ago."
"Perhaps because he discovered it was not a family portrait?"
"On the contrary,--because it grieves him to think it is a family
portrait. Hush! I hear his footstep: don't speak of it to him; don't
let him see you looking at it. The subject is very painful to him."
Here Cecilia vanished into the china closet and Kenelm turned off to
his own room.
What sin committed by the original in the time of Charles II. but only
discovered in the reign of Victoria could have justified Leopold
Travers in removing the most pleasing portrait in the house from the
honoured place it had occupied, and banishing it to so obscure a
recess? Kenelm said no more on the subject, and indeed an hour
afterwards had dismissed it from his thoughts. The next day he rode
out with Travers and Cecilia. Their way passed through quiet shady
lanes without any purposed direction, when suddenly, at the spot where
three of those lanes met on an angle of common ground, a lonely gray
tower, in the midst of a wide space of grass-land which looked as if
it had once been a park, with huge boles of pollarded oak dotting the
space here and there, rose before them.
"Cissy!" cried Travers, angrily reining in his horse and stopping
short in a political discussion which he had forced upon Kenelm,
"Cissy! How comes this? We have taken the wrong turn! No matter, I
see there," pointing to the right, "the chimney-pots of old Mondell's
homestead. He has not yet promised his vote to George Belvoir. I'll
go and have a talk with him. Turn back, you and Mr. Chillingly,--meet
me at Terner's Green, and wait for me there till I come. I need not
excuse myself to you, Chillingly. A vote is a vote." So saying, the
Squire, whose ordinary riding-horse was an old hunter, halted, turned,
and, no gate being visible, put the horse over a stiff fence and
vanished in the direction of old Mondell's chimney-pots. Kenelm,
scarcely hearing his host's instructions to Cecilia and excuses to
himself, remained still and gazing on the old tower thus abruptly
obtruded on his view.
Though no learned antiquarian like his father, Kenelm had a strange
fascinating interest in all relics of the past; and old gray towers,
where they are not church towers, are very rarely to be seen in
England. All around the old gray tower spoke with an unutterable
mournfulness of a past in ruins: you could see remains of some large
Gothic building once attached to it, rising here and there in
fragments of deeply buttressed walls; you could see in a dry ditch,
between high ridges, where there had been a fortified moat: nay, you
could even see where once had been the bailey hill from which a baron
of old had dispensed justice. Seldom indeed does the most acute of
antiquarians discover that remnant of Norman times on lands still held
by the oldest of Anglo-Norman families. Then, the wild nature of the
demesne around; those ranges of sward, with those old giant
oak-trunks, hollowed within and pollarded at top,--all spoke, in
unison with the gray tower, of a past as remote from the reign of
Victoria as the Pyramids are from the sway of the Viceroy of Egypt.
"Let us turn back," said Miss Travers; "my father would not like me to
stay here."
"Pardon me a moment. I wish my father were here; he would stay till
sunset. But what is the history of that old tower? a history it must
have."
"Every home has a history, even a peasant's hut," said Cecilia. "But
do pardon me if I ask you to comply with my father's request. I at
least must turn back."
Thus commanded, Kenelm reluctantly withdrew his gaze from the ruin and
regained Cecilia, who was already some paces in return down the lane.
"I am far from a very inquisitive man by temperament," said Kenelm,
"so far as the affairs of the living are concerned. But I should not
care to open a book if I had no interest in the past. Pray indulge my
curiosity to learn something about that old tower. It could not look
more melancholy and solitary if I had built it myself."
"Its most melancholy associations are with a very recent past,"
answered Cecilia. "The tower, in remote times, formed the keep of a
castle belonging to the most ancient and once the most powerful family
in these parts. The owners were barons who took active share in the
Wars of the Roses. The last of them sided with Richard III., and
after the battle of Bosworth the title was attainted, and the larger
portion of the lands was confiscated. Loyalty to a Plantagenet was of
course treason to a Tudor. But the regeneration of the family rested
with their direct descendants, who had saved from the general wreck of
their fortunes what may be called a good squire's estate,--about,
perhaps, the same rental as my father's, but of much larger acreage.
These squires, however, were more looked up to in the county than the
wealthiest peer. They were still by far the oldest family in the
county; and traced in their pedigree alliances with the most
illustrious houses in English history. In themselves too for many
generations they were a high-spirited, hospitable, popular race,
living unostentatiously on their income, and contented with their rank
of squires. The castle, ruined by time and siege, they did not
attempt to restore. They dwelt in a house near to it, built about
Elizabeth's time, which you could not see, for it lies in a hollow
behind the tower,--a moderate-sized, picturesque, country gentleman's
house. Our family intermarried with them,--the portrait you saw was a
daughter of their house,--and very proud was any squire in the county
of intermarriage with the Fletwodes."
"Fletwode,--that was their name? I have a vague recollection of
having heard the name connected with some disastrous--oh, but it can't
be the same family: pray go on."
"I fear it is the same family. But I will finish the story as I have
heard it. The property descended at last to one Bertram Fletwode,
who, unfortunately, obtained the reputation of being a very clever man
of business. There was some mining company in which, with other
gentlemen in the county, he took great interest; invested largely in
shares; became the head of the direction--"
"I see; and was of course ruined."
"No; worse than that: he became very rich; and, unhappily, became
desirous of being richer still. I have heard that there was a great
mania for speculations just about that time. He embarked in these,
and prospered, till at last he was induced to invest a large share of
the fortune thus acquired in the partnership of a bank which enjoyed a
high character. Up to that time he had retained popularity and esteem
in the county; but the squires who shared in the adventures of the
mining company, and knew little or nothing about other speculations in
which his name did not appear, professed to be shocked at the idea of
a Fletwode of Fletwode being ostensibly joined in partnership with a
Jones of Clapham in a London bank."
"Slow folks, those country squires,--behind the progress of the age.
Well?"
"I have heard that Bertram Fletwode was himself very reluctant to take
this step, but was persuaded to do so by his son. This son, Alfred,
was said to have still greater talents for business than the father,
and had been not only associated with but consulted by him in all the
later speculations which had proved so fortunate. Mrs. Campion knew
Alfred Fletwode very well. She describes him as handsome, with quick,
eager eyes; showy and imposing in his talk; immensely ambitious, more
ambitious than avaricious,--collecting money less for its own sake
than for that which it could give,--rank and power. According to her
it was the dearest wish of his heart to claim the old barony, but not
before there could go with the barony a fortune adequate to the lustre
of a title so ancient, and equal to the wealth of modern peers with
higher nominal rank."
"A poor ambition at the best; of the two I should prefer that of a
poet in a garret. But I am no judge. Thank Heaven I have no
ambition. Still, all ambition, all desire to rise, is interesting to
him who is ignominiously contented if he does not fall. So the son
had his way, and Fletwode joined company with Jones on the road to
wealth and the peerage; meanwhile did the son marry? if so, of course
the daughter of a duke or a millionnaire. Tuft-hunting, or
money-making, at the risk of degradation and the workhouse. Progress
of the age!"
"No," replied Cecilia, smiling at this outburst, but smiling sadly,
"Fletwode did not marry the daughter of a duke or a millionnaire; but
still his wife belonged to a noble family,--very poor, but very proud.
Perhaps he married from motives of ambition, though not of gain. Her
father was of much political influence that might perhaps assist his
claim to the barony. The mother, a woman of the world, enjoying a
high social position, and nearly related to a connection of
ours,--Lady Glenalvon."
"Lady Glenalvon, the dearest of my lady friends! You are connected
with her?"
"Yes; Lord Glenalvon was my mother's uncle. But I wish to finish my
story before my father joins us. Alfred Fletwode did not marry till
long after the partnership in the bank. His father, at his desire,
had bought up the whole business, Mr. Jones having died. The bank was
carried on in the names of Fletwode and Son. But the father had
become merely a nominal or what I believe is called a 'sleeping'
partner. He had long ceased to reside in the county. The old house
was not grand enough for him. He had purchased a palatial residence
in one of the home counties; lived there in great splendour; was a
munificent patron of science and art; and in spite of his earlier
addictions to business-like speculations he appears to have been a
singularly accomplished, high-bred gentleman. Some years before his
son's marriage, Mr. Fletwode had been afflicted with partial
paralysis, and his medical attendant enjoined rigid abstention from
business. From that time he never interfered with his son's
management of the bank. He had an only daughter, much younger than
Alfred. Lord Eagleton, my mother's brother, was engaged to be married
to her. The wedding-day was fixed,--when the world was startled by
the news that the great firm of Fletwode and Son had stopped payment;
is that the right phrase?"
"I believe so."
"A great many people were ruined in that failure. The public
indignation was very great. Of course all the Fletwode property went
to the creditors. Old Mr. Fletwode was legally acquitted of all other
offence than that of overconfidence in his son. Alfred was convicted
of fraud,--of forgery. I don't, of course, know the particulars, they
are very complicated. He was sentenced to a long term of servitude,
but died the day he was condemned; apparently by poison, which he had
long secreted about his person. Now you can understand why my father,
who is almost gratuitously sensitive on the point of honour, removed
into a dark corner the portrait of Arabella Fletwode,--his own
ancestress, but also the ancestress of a convicted felon: you can
understand why the whole subject is so painful to him. His wife's
brother was to have married the felon's sister; and though, of course,
that marriage was tacitly broken off by the terrible disgrace that had
befallen the Fletwodes, yet I don't think my poor uncle ever recovered
the blow to his hopes. He went abroad, and died in Madeira of a slow
decline."
"And the felon's sister, did she die too?"
"No; not that I know of. Mrs. Campion says that she saw in a
newspaper the announcement of old Mr. Fletwode's death, and a
paragraph to the effect that after that event Miss Fletwode had sailed
from Liverpool to New York."
"Alfred Fletwode's wife went back, of course, to her family?"
"Alas! no,--poor thing! She had not been many months married when the
bank broke; and among his friends her wretched husband appears to have
forged the names of the trustees to her marriage settlement, and sold
out the sums which would otherwise have served her as a competence.
Her father, too, was a great sufferer by the bankruptcy, having by his
son-in-law's advice placed a considerable portion of his moderate
fortune in Alfred's hands for investment, all of which was involved in
the general wreck. I am afraid he was a very hard-hearted man: at all
events his poor daughter never returned to him. She died, I think,
even before the death of Bertram Fletwode. The whole story is very
dismal."
"Dismal indeed, but pregnant with salutary warnings to those who live
in an age of progress. Here you see a family of fair fortune, living
hospitably, beloved, revered, more looked up to by their neighbours
than the wealthiest nobles; no family not proud to boast alliance with
it. All at once, in the tranquil record of this happy race, appears
that darling of the age, that hero of progress,--a clever man of
business. He be contented to live as his fathers! He be contented
with such trifles as competence, respect, and love! Much too clever
for that. The age is money-making,--go with the age! He goes with
the age. Born a gentleman only, he exalts himself into a trader. But
at least he, it seems, if greedy, was not dishonest. He was born a
gentleman, but his son was born a trader. The son is a still cleverer
man of business; the son is consulted and trusted. Aha! He too goes
with the age; to greed he links ambition. The trader's son wishes to
return--what? to the rank of gentleman?--gentleman! nonsense!
everybody is a gentleman nowadays,--to the title of Lord. How ends it
all! Could I sit but for twelve hours in the innermost heart of that
Alfred Fletwode; could I see how, step by step from his childhood, the
dishonest son was avariciously led on by the honest father to depart
from the old /vestigia/ of Fletwodes of Fletwode,--scorning The Enough
to covet The More, gaining The More to sigh, 'It is not The
Enough,'--I think I might show that the age lives in a house of glass,
and had better not for its own sake throw stones on the felon!"
"Ah, but, Mr. Chillingly, surely this is a very rare exception in the
general--"
"Rare!" interrupted Kenelm, who was excited to a warmth of passion
which would have startled his most intimate friend,-if indeed an
intimate friend had ever been vouchsafed to him,--"rare! nay, how
common--I don't say to the extent of forgery and fraud, but to the
extent of degradation and ruin--is the greed of a Little More to those
who have The Enough! is the discontent with competence, respect, and
love, when catching sight of a money-bag! How many well-descended
county families, cursed with an heir who is called a clever man of
business, have vanished from the soil! A company starts, the clever
man joins it one bright day. Pouf! the old estates and the old name
are powder. Ascend higher. Take nobles whose ancestral titles ought
to be to English ears like the sound of clarions, awakening the most
slothful to the scorn of money-bags and the passion for renown. Lo!
in that mocking dance of death called the Progress of the Age, one who
did not find Enough in a sovereign's revenue, and seeks The Little
More as a gambler on the turf by the advice of blacklegs! Lo!
another, with lands wider than his greatest ancestors ever possessed,
must still go in for The Little More, adding acre to acre, heaping
debt upon debt! Lo! a third, whose name, borne by his ancestors, was
once the terror of England's foes,--the landlord of a hotel! A
fourth,--but why go on through the list? Another and another still
succeeds; each on the Road to Ruin, each in the Age of Progress. Ah,
Miss Travers! in the old time it was through the Temple of Honour that
one passed to the Temple of Fortune. In this wise age the process is
reversed. But here comes your father."
"A thousand pardons!" said Leopold Travers. "That numskull Mondell
kept me so long with his old-fashioned Tory doubts whether liberal
politics are favourable to agricultural prospects. But as he owes a
round sum to a Whig lawyer I had to talk with his wife, a prudent
woman; convinced her that his own agricultural prospects were safest
on the Whig side of the question; and, after kissing his baby and
shaking his hand, booked his vote for George Belvoir,--a plumper."
"I suppose," said Kenelm to himself, and with that candour which
characterized him whenever he talked to himself, "that Travers has
taken the right road to the Temple, not of Honour, but of honours, in
every country, ancient or modern, which has adopted the system of
popular suffrage."
CHAPTER XVII.
THE next day Mrs. Campion and Cecilia were seated under the veranda.
They were both ostensibly employed on two several pieces of
embroidery, one intended for a screen, the other for a sofa-cushion;
but the mind of neither was on her work.
MRS. CAMPION.--"Has Mr. Chillingly said when he means to take leave?"
CECILIA.--"Not to me. How much my dear father enjoys his
conversation!"
MRS. CAMPION.--"Cynicism and mockery were not so much the fashion
among young men in your father's day as I suppose they are now, and
therefore they seem new to Mr. Travers. To me they are not new,
because I saw more of the old than the young when I lived in London,
and cynicism and mockery are more natural to men who are leaving the
world than to those who are entering it."
CECILIA.--"Dear Mrs. Campion, how bitter you are, and how unjust! You
take much too literally the jesting way in which Mr. Chillingly
expresses himself. There can be no cynicism in one who goes out of
his way to make others happy."
MRS. CAMPION.--"You mean in the whim of making an ill-assorted
marriage between a pretty village flirt and a sickly cripple, and
settling a couple of peasants in a business for which they are wholly
unfitted."
CECILIA.--"Jessie Wiles is not a flirt, and I am convinced that she
will make Will Somers a very good wife, and that the shop will be a
great success."
MRS. CAMPION.--"We shall see. Still, if Mr. Chillingly's talk belies
his actions, he may be a good man, but he is a very affected one."
CECILIA.--"Have I not heard you say that there are persons so natural
that they seem affected to those who do not understand them?"
Mrs. Campion raised her eyes to Cecilia's face, dropped them again
over her work, and said, in grave undertones,--"Take care, Cecilia."
"Take care of what?"
"My dearest child, forgive me; but I do not like the warmth with which
you defend Mr. Chillingly."
"Would not my father defend him still more warmly if he had heard
you?"
"Men judge of men in their relations to men. I am a woman, and judge
of men in their relations to women. I should tremble for the
happiness of any woman who joined her fate with that of Kenelm
Chillingly."
"My dear friend, I do not understand you to-day."
"Nay; I did not mean to be so solemn, my love. After all, it is
nothing to us whom Mr. Chillingly may or may not marry. He is but a
passing visitor, and, once gone, the chances are that we may not see
him again for years."
Thus speaking, Mrs. Campion again raised her eyes from her work,
stealing a sidelong glance at Cecilia; and her mother-like heart sank
within her, on noticing how suddenly pale the girl had become, and how
her lips quivered. Mrs. Campion had enough knowledge of life to feel
aware that she had committed a grievous blunder. In that earliest
stage of virgin affection, when a girl is unconscious of more than a
certain vague interest in one man which distinguishes him from others
in her thoughts,--if she hears him unjustly disparaged, if some
warning against him is implied, if the probability that he will never
be more to her than a passing acquaintance is forcibly obtruded on
her,--suddenly that vague interest, which might otherwise have faded
away with many another girlish fancy, becomes arrested, consolidated;
the quick pang it occasions makes her involuntarily, and for the first
time, question herself, and ask, "Do I love?" But when a girl of a
nature so delicate as that of Cecilia Travers can ask herself the
question, "Do I love?" her very modesty, her very shrinking from
acknowledging that any power over her thoughts for weal or for woe can
be acquired by a man, except through the sanction of that love which
only becomes divine in her eyes when it is earnest and pure and
self-devoted, makes her prematurely disposed to answer "yes." And
when a girl of such a nature in her own heart answers "yes" to such a
question, even if she deceive herself at the moment, she begins to
cherish the deceit till the belief in her love becomes a reality. She
has adopted a religion, false or true, and she would despise herself
if she could be easily converted.
Mrs. Campion had so contrived that she had forced that question upon
Cecilia, and she feared, by the girl's change of countenance, that the
girl's heart had answered "yes."
CHAPTER XVIII.
WHILE the conversation just narrated took place, Kenelm had walked
forth to pay a visit to Will Somers. All obstacles to Will's marriage
were now cleared away; the transfer of lease for the shop had been
signed, and the banns were to be published for the first time on the
following Sunday. We need not say that Will was very happy. Kenelm
then paid a visit to Mrs. Bowles, with whom he stayed an hour. On
reentering the Park, he saw Travers, walking slowly, with downcast
eyes and his hands clasped behind him (his habit when in thought). He
did not observe Kenelm's approach till within a few feet of him, and
he then greeted his guest in listless accents, unlike his usual
cheerful tones.
"I have been visiting the man you have made so happy," said Kenelm.
"Who can that be?"
"Will Somers. Do you make so many people happy that your reminiscence
of them is lost in their number?"
Travers smiled faintly, and shook his head.
Kenelm went on. "I have also seen Mrs. Bowles, and you will be
pleased to hear that Tom is satisfied with his change of abode: there
is no chance of his returning to Graveleigh; and Mrs. Bowles took very
kindly to my suggestion that the little property you wish for should
be sold to you, and, in that case, she would remove to Luscombe to be
near her son."
"I thank you much for your thought of me," said Travers, "and the
affair shall be seen to at once, though the purchase is no longer
important to me. I ought to have told you three days ago, but it
slipped my memory, that a neighbouring squire, a young fellow just
come into his property, has offered to exchange a capital farm, much
nearer to my residence, for the lands I hold in Graveleigh, including
Saunderson's farm and the cottages: they are quite at the outskirts of
my estate, but run into his, and the exchange will be advantageous to
both. Still I am glad that the neighbourhood should be thoroughly rid
of a brute like Tom Bowles."
"You would not call him brute if you knew him; but I am sorry to hear
that Will Somers will be under another landlord."
"It does not matter, since his tenure is secured for fourteen years."
"What sort of man is the new landlord?"
"I don't know much of him. He was in the army till his father died,
and has only just made his appearance in the county. He has, however,
already earned the character of being too fond of the other sex: it is
well that pretty Jessie is to be safely married."
Travers then relapsed into a moody silence from which Kenelm found it
difficult to rouse him. At length the latter said kindly,--
"My dear Mr. Travers, do not think I take a liberty if I venture to
guess that something has happened this morning which troubles or vexes
you. When that is the case, it is often a relief to say what it is,
even to a confidant so unable to advise or to comfort as myself."
"You are a good fellow, Chillingly, and I know not, at least in these
parts, a man to whom I would unburden myself more freely. I am put
out, I confess; disappointed unreasonably, in a cherished wish, and,"
he added, with a slight laugh, "it always annoys me when I don't have
my own way."
"So it does me."
"Don't you think that George Belvoir is a very fine young man?"
"Certainly."
"/I/ call him handsome; he is steadier, too, than most men of his age,
and of his command of money; and yet he does not want spirit nor
knowledge of life. To every advantage of rank and fortune he adds the
industry and the ambition which attain distinction in public life."
"Quite true. Is he going to withdraw from the election after all?"
"Good heavens, no!"
"Then how does he not let you have your own way?"
"It is not he," said Travers, peevishly; "it is Cecilia. Don't you
understand that George is precisely the husband I would choose for
her; and this morning came a very well written manly letter from him,
asking my permission to pay his addresses to her."
"But that is your own way so far."
"Yes, and here comes the balk. Of course I had to refer it to
Cecilia, and she positively declines, and has no reasons to give; does
not deny that George is good-looking and sensible, that he is a man of
whose preference any girl might be proud; but she chooses to say she
cannot love him, and when I ask why she cannot love him, has no other
answer than that 'she cannot say.' It is too provoking."
"It is provoking," answered Kenelm; "but then Love is the most
dunderheaded of all the passions; it never will listen to reason. The
very rudiments of logic are unknown to it. 'Love has no wherefore,'
says one of those Latin poets who wrote love-verses called elegies,--a
name which we moderns appropriate to funeral dirges. For my own part,
I can't understand how any one can be expected voluntarily to make up
his mind to go out of his mind. And if Miss Travers cannot go out of
her mind because George Belvoir does, you could not argue her into
doing so if you talked till doomsday."
Travers smiled in spite of himself, but he answered gravely,
"Certainly, I would not wish Cissy to marry any man she disliked, but
she does not dislike George; no girl could: and where that is the
case, a girl so sensible, so affectionate, so well brought up, is sure
to love, after marriage, a thoroughly kind and estimable man,
especially when she has no previous attachment,--which, of course,
Cissy never had. In fact, though I do not wish to force my daughter's
will, I am not yet disposed to give up my own. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly."
"I am the more inclined to a marriage so desirable in every way,
because when Cissy comes out in London, which she has not yet done,
she is sure to collect round her face and her presumptive inheritance
all the handsome fortune-hunters and titled /vauriens/; and if in love
there is no wherefore, how can I be sure that she may not fall in love
with a scamp?"
"I think you may be sure of that," said Kenelm. "Miss Travers has too
much mind."
"Yes, at present; but did you not say that in love people go out of
their mind?"
"True! I forgot that."
"I am not then disposed to dismiss poor George's offer with a decided
negative, and yet it would be unfair to mislead him by encouragement.
In fact, I'll be hanged if I know how to reply."
"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."
"You are going abroad, then?" asked Mrs. Campion.
"Yes."
"A sudden resolution, Mr. Chillingly. The other day you talked of
visiting the Scotch lakes."
"True; but, on reflection, they will be crowded with holiday tourists,
many of whom I shall probably know. Abroad I shall be free, for I
shall be unknown."
"I suppose you will be back for the hunting season," said Travers.
"I think not. I do not hunt foxes."
"Probably we shall at all events meet in London," said Travers. "I
think, after long rustication, that a season or two in the bustling
capital may be a salutary change for mind as well as for body; and it
is time that Cecilia were presented and her court-dress specially
commemorated in the columns of the 'Morning Post.'"
Cecilia was seemingly too busied behind the tea-urn to heed this
reference to her debut.
"I shall miss you terribly," cried Travers, a few moments afterwards,
and with a hearty emphasis. "I declare that you have quite unsettled
me. Your quaint sayings will be ringing in my ears long after you are
gone."
There was a rustle as of a woman's dress in sudden change of movement
behind the tea-urn.
"Cissy," said Mrs. Campion, "are we ever to have our tea?"
"I beg pardon," answered a voice behind the urn. "I hear Pompey" (the
Skye terrier) "whining on the lawn. They have shut him out. I will
be back presently."
Cecilia rose and was gone. Mrs. Campion took her place at the
tea-urn.
"It is quite absurd of Cissy to be so fond of that hideous dog," said
Travers, petulantly.
"Its hideousness is its beauty," returned Mrs. Campion, laughing.
"Mr. Belvoir selected it for her as having the longest back and the
shortest legs of any dog he could find in Scotland."
"Ah, George gave it to her; I forgot that," said Travers, laughing
pleasantly.
It was some minutes before Miss Travers returned with the Skye
terrier, and she seemed to have recovered her spirits in regaining
that ornamental accession to the party; talking very quickly and
gayly, and with flushed cheeks, like a young person excited by her own
overflow of mirth.
But when, half an hour afterwards, Kenelm took leave of her and Mrs.
Campion at the hall-door, the flush was gone, her lips were tightly
compressed, and her parting words were not audible. Then, as his
figure (side by side with her father, who accompanied his guest to the
lodge) swiftly passed across the lawn and vanished amid the trees
beyond, Mrs. Campion wound a mother-like arm around her waist and
kissed her. Cecilia shivered and turned her face to her friend
smiling; but such a smile,--one of those smiles that seem brimful of
tears.
"Thank you, dear," she said meekly; and, gliding away towards the
flower-garden, lingered a while by the gate which Kenelm had opened
the night before. Then she went with languid steps up the green
slopes towards the ruined priory.