KENELM remained a year and a half with this distinguished preceptor.
During that time he learned much in book-lore; he saw much, too, of
the eminent men of the day, in literature, the law, and the senate.
He saw, also, a good deal of the fashionable world. Fine ladies, who
had been friends of his mother in her youth, took him up, counselled
and petted him,--one in especial, the Marchioness of Glenalvon, to
whom he was endeared by grateful association, for her youngest son had
been a fellow-pupil of Kenelm at Merton School, and Kenelm had saved
his life from drowning. The poor boy died of consumption later, and
her grief for his loss made her affection for Kenelm yet more tender.
Lady Glenalvon was one of the queens of the London world. Though in
the fiftieth year she was still very handsome: she was also very
accomplished, very clever, and very kind-hearted, as some of such
queens are; just one of those women invaluable in forming the manners
and elevating the character of young men destined to make a figure in
after-life. But she was very angry with herself in thinking that she
failed to arouse any such ambition in the heir of the Chillinglys.
It may here be said that Kenelm was not without great advantages of
form and countenance. He was tall, and the youthful grace of his
proportions concealed his physical strength, which was extraordinary
rather from the iron texture than the bulk of his thews and sinews.
His face, though it certainly lacked the roundness of youth, had a
grave, sombre, haunting sort of beauty, not artistically regular, but
picturesque, peculiar, with large dark expressive eyes, and a certain
indescribable combination of sweetness and melancholy in his quiet
smile. He never laughed audibly, but he had a quick sense of the
comic, and his eye would laugh when his lips were silent. He would
say queer, droll, unexpected things which passed for humour; but, save
for that gleam in the eye, he could not have said them with more
seeming innocence of intentional joke if he had been a monk of La
Trappe looking up from the grave he was digging in order to utter
"memento mori."
That face of his was a great "take in." Women thought it full of
romantic sentiment; the face of one easily moved to love, and whose
love would be replete alike with poetry and passion. But he remained
as proof as the youthful Hippolytus to all female attraction. He
delighted the Parson by keeping up his practice in athletic pursuits;
and obtained a reputation at the pugilistic school, which he attended
regularly, as the best gentleman boxer about town.
He made many acquaintances, but still formed no friendships. Yet
every one who saw him much conceived affection for him. If he did not
return that affection, he did not repel it. He was exceedingly gentle
in voice and manner, and had all his father's placidity of temper:
children and dogs took to him as by instinct.
On leaving Mr. Welby's, Kenelm carried to Cambridge a mind largely
stocked with the new ideas that were budding into leaf. He certainly
astonished the other freshmen, and occasionally puzzled the mighty
Fellows of Trinity and St. John's. But he gradually withdrew himself
much from general society. In fact, he was too old in mind for his
years; and after having mixed in the choicest circles of a metropolis,
college suppers and wine parties had little charm for him. He
maintained his pugilistic renown; and on certain occasions, when some
delicate undergraduate had been bullied by some gigantic bargeman, his
muscular Christianity nobly developed itself. He did not do as much
as he might have done in the more intellectual ways of academical
distinction. Still, he was always among the first in the college
examinations; he won two university prizes, and took a very creditable
degree, after which he returned home, more odd, more saturnine--in
short, less like other people--than when he had left Merton School.
He had woven a solitude round him out of his own heart, and in that
solitude he sat still and watchful as a spider sits in his web.
Whether from natural temperament or from his educational training
under such teachers as Mr. Mivers, who carried out the new ideas of
reform by revering nothing in the past, and Mr. Welby, who accepted
the routine of the present as realistic, and pooh-poohed all visions
of the future as idealistic, Kenelm's chief mental characteristic was
a kind of tranquil indifferentism. It was difficult to detect in him
either of those ordinary incentives to action,--vanity or ambition,
the yearning for applause or the desire of power. To all female
fascinations he had been hitherto star-proof. He had never
experienced love, but he had read a good deal about it; and that
passion seemed to him an unaccountable aberration of human reason, and
an ignominious surrender of the equanimity of thought which it should
be the object of masculine natures to maintain undisturbed. A very
eloquent book in praise of celibacy, and entitled "The Approach to the
Angels," written by that eminent Oxford scholar, Decimus Roach, had
produced so remarkable an effect upon his youthful mind that, had he
been a Roman Catholic, he might have become a monk. Where he most
evinced ardour it was a logician's ardour for abstract truth; that is,
for what he considered truth: and, as what seems truth to one man is
sure to seem falsehood to some other man, this predilection of his was
not without its inconveniences and dangers, as may probably be seen in
the following chapter.
Meanwhile, rightly to appreciate his conduct therein, I entreat thee,
O candid reader (not that any reader ever is candid), to remember that
he is brimful of new ideas, which, met by a deep and hostile
undercurrent of old ideas, become more provocatively billowy and
surging.