WHILE the conversation just related took place between Cecilia and
Lady Glenalvon, Chillingly Gordon was seated alone with Mivers in the
comfortable apartment of the cynical old bachelor. Gordon had
breakfasted with his kinsman, but that meal was long over; the two men
having found much to talk about on matters very interesting to the
younger, nor without interest to the elder one.
It is true that Chillingly Gordon had, within the very short space of
time that had elapsed since his entrance into the House of Commons,
achieved one of those reputations which mark out a man for early
admission into the progressive career of office,--not a very showy
reputation, but a very solid one. He had none of the gifts of the
genuine orator, no enthusiasm, no imagination, no imprudent bursts of
fiery words from a passionate heart. But he had all the gifts of an
exceedingly telling speaker,--a clear metallic voice; well-bred,
appropriate action, not less dignified for being somewhat too quiet;
readiness for extempore replies; industry and method for prepared
expositions of principle or fact. But his principal merit with the
chiefs of the assembly was in the strong good sense and worldly tact
which made him a safe speaker. For this merit he was largely indebted
to his frequent conferences with Chillingly Mivers. That gentleman,
whether owing to his social qualities or to the influence of "The
Londoner" on public opinion, enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the
chiefs of all parties, and was up to his ears in the wisdom of the
world. "Nothing," he would say, "hurts a young Parliamentary speaker
like violence in opinion, one way or the other. Shun it. Always
allow that much may be said on both sides. When the chiefs of your
own side suddenly adopt a violence, you can go with them or against
them, according as best suits your own book."
"So," said Mivers, reclined on his sofa, and approaching the end of
his second Trabuco (he never allowed himself more than two), "so I
think we have pretty well settled the tone you must take in your
speech to-night. It is a great occasion."
"True. It is the first time in which the debate has been arranged so
that I may speak at ten o'clock or later. That in itself is a great
leap; and it is a Cabinet minister whom I am to answer,--luckily, he
is a very dull fellow. Do you think I might hazard a joke,--at least
a witticism?"
"At his expense? Decidedly not. Though his office compels him to
introduce this measure, he was by no means in its favour when it was
discussed in the Cabinet; and though, as you say, he is dull, it is
precisely that sort of dulness which is essential to the formation of
every respectable Cabinet. Joke at him, indeed! Learn that gentle
dulness never loves a joke--at its own expense. Vain man! seize the
occasion which your blame of his measure affords you to secure his
praise of yourself; compliment him. Enough of politics. It never
does to think too much over what one has already decided to say.
Brooding over it, one may become too much in earnest, and commit an
indiscretion. So Kenelm has come back?"
"Yes. I heard that news last night, at White's, from Travers. Sir
Peter had called on Travers."
"Travers still favours your suit to the heiress?"
"More, I think, than ever. Success in Parliament has great effect on
a man who has success in fashion and respects the opinion of clubs.
But last night he was unusually cordial. Between you and me, I think
he is a little afraid that Kenelm may yet be my rival. I gathered
that from a hint he let fall of the unwelcome nature of Sir Peter's
talk to him."
"Why has Travers conceived a dislike to poor Kenelm? He seemed
partial enough to him once."
"Ay, but not as a son-in-law, even before I had a chance of becoming
so. And when, after Kenelm appeared at Exmundham, while Travers was
staying there, Travers learned, I suppose from Lady Chillingly, that
Kenelm had fallen in love with and wanted to marry some other girl,
who it seems rejected him; and still more when he heard that Kenelm
had been subsequently travelling on the Continent in company with a
low-lived fellow, the drunken, riotous son of a farrier, you may well
conceive how so polished and sensible a man as Leopold Travers would
dislike the idea of giving his daughter to one so little likely to
make an agreeable son-in-law. Bah! I have no fear of Kenelm. By the
way, did Sir Peter say if Kenelm had quite recovered his health? He
was at death's door some eighteen months ago, when Sir Peter and Lady
Chillingly were summoned to town by the doctors."
"My dear Gordon, I fear there is no chance of your succession to
Exmundham. Sir Peter says that his wandering Hercules is as stalwart
as ever, and more equable in temperament, more taciturn and grave,--in
short, less odd. But when you say you have no fear of Kenelm's
rivalry, do you mean only as to Cecilia Travers?"
"Neither as to that nor as to anything in life; and as to the
succession to Exmundham, it is his to leave as he pleases, and I have
cause to think he would never leave it to me. More likely to Parson
John or the parson's son,--or why not to yourself? I often think that
for the prizes immediately set before my ambition I am better off
without land: land is a great obfuscator."
"Humph, there is some truth in that. Yet the fear of land and
obfuscation does not seem to operate against your suit to Cecilia
Travers?"
"Her father is likely enough to live till I maybe contented to 'rest
and be thankful' in the Upper House; and I should not like to be a
landless peer."
"You are right there; but I should tell you that, now Kenelm has come
back, Sir Peter has set his heart on his son's being your rival."
"For Cecilia?"
"Perhaps; but certainly for Parliamentary reputation. The senior
member for the county means to retire, and Sir Peter has been urged to
allow his son to be brought forward,--from what I hear, with the
certainty of success."
"What! in spite of that wonderful speech of his on coming of age?"
"Pooh! that is now understood to have been but a bad joke on the new
ideas, and their organs, including 'The Londoner.' But if Kenelm does
come into the House, it will not be on your side of the question; and
unless I greatly overrate his abilities--which very likely I do--he
will not be a rival to despise. Except, indeed, that he may have one
fault which in the present day would be enough to unfit him for public
life."
"And what is that fault?"
"Treason to the blood of the Chillinglys. This is the age, in
England, when one cannot be too much of a Chillingly. I fear that if
Kenelm does become bewildered by a political abstraction,--call it, no
matter what, say, 'love of his country,' or some such old-fashioned
crotchet,--I fear, I greatly fear, that he may be--in earnest."
CHAPTER THE LAST.
IT was a field night in the House of Commons,--an adjourned debate,
opened by George Belvoir, who had been, the last two years, very
slowly creeping on in the favour, or rather the indulgence of the
House, and more than justifying Kenelm's prediction of his career.
Heir to a noble name and vast estates, extremely hard-working, very
well informed, it was impossible that he should not creep on. That
night he spoke sensibly enough, assisting his memory by frequent
references to his notes; listened to courteously, and greeted with a
faint "Hear, hear!" of relief when he had done.
Then the House gradually thinned till nine o'clock, at which hour it
became very rapidly crowded. A Cabinet minister had solemnly risen,
deposited on the table before him a formidable array of printed
papers, including a corpulent blue-book. Leaning his arm on the red
box, he commenced with this awe-compelling sentence,--
"Sir, I join issue with the right honourable gentleman opposite. He
says this is not raised as a party question. I deny it. Her
Majesty's Government are put upon their trial."
Here there were cheers, so loudly, and so rarely greeting a speech
from that Cabinet minister, that he was put out, and had much to "hum"
and to "ha," before he could recover the thread of his speech. Then
he went on, with unbroken but lethargic fluency; read long extracts
from the public papers, inflicted a whole page from the blue-book,
wound up with a peroration of respectable platitudes, glanced at the
clock, saw that he had completed the hour which a Cabinet minister who
does not profess to be oratorical is expected to speak, but not to
exceed; and sat down.
Up rose a crowd of eager faces, from which the Speaker, as previously
arranged with the party whips, selected one,--a young face, hardy,
intelligent, emotionless.
I need not say that it was the face of Chillingly Gordon. His
position that night was one that required dexterous management and
delicate tact. He habitually supported the Government; his speeches
had been hitherto in their favour. On this occasion he differed from
the Government. The difference was known to the chiefs of the
Opposition, and hence the arrangement of the whips, that he should
speak for the first time after ten o'clock, and for the first time in
reply to a Cabinet minister. It is a position in which a young party
man makes or mars his future. Chillingly Gordon spoke from the third
row behind the Government; he had been duly cautioned by Mivers not to
affect a conceited independence, or an adhesion to "violence" in
ultra-liberal opinions, by seating himself below the gangway.
Speaking thus, amid the rank and file of the Ministerial supporters,
any opinion at variance with the mouthpieces of the Treasury Bench
would be sure to produce a more effective sensation than if delivered
from the ranks of the mutinous Bashi Bazouks divided by the gangway
from better disciplined forces. His first brief sentences enthralled
the House, conciliated the Ministerial side, kept the Opposition side
in suspense. The whole speech was, indeed, felicitously adroit, and
especially in this, that, while in opposition to the Government as a
whole, it expressed the opinions of a powerful section of the Cabinet,
which, though at present a minority, yet being the most enamoured of a
New Idea, the progress of the age would probably render a safe
investment for the confidence which honest Gordon reposed in its
chance of beating its colleagues.
It was not, however, till Gordon had concluded that the cheers of his
audience--impulsive and hearty as are the cheers of that assembly when
the evidence of intellect is unmistakable--made manifest to the
gallery and the reporters the full effect of the speech he had
delivered. The chief of the Opposition whispered to his next
neighbour, "I wish we could get that man." The Cabinet minister whom
Gordon had answered--more pleased with a personal compliment to
himself than displeased with an attack on the measure his office
compelled him to advocate--whispered to his chief, "That is a man we
must not lose."
Two gentlemen in the Speaker's gallery, who had sat there from the
opening of the debate, now quitted their places. Coming into the
lobby, they found themselves commingled with a crowd of members who
had also quitted their seats, after Gordon's speech, in order to
discuss its merits, as they gathered round the refreshment table for
oranges or soda-water. Among them was George Belvoir, who, on sight
of the younger of the two gentlemen issuing from the Speaker's
gallery, accosted him with friendly greeting,--
"Ha! Chillingly, how are you? Did not know you were in town. Been
here all the evening? Yes; very good debate. How did you like
Gordon's speech?"
"I liked yours much better."
"Mine!" cried George, very much flattered and very much surprised.
"Oh, mine was a mere humdrum affair, a plain statement of the reasons
for the vote I should give. And Gordon's was anything but that. You
did not like his opinions?"
"I don't know what his opinions are. But I did not like his ideas."
"I don't quite understand you. What ideas?"
"The new ones; by which it is shown how rapidly a great state can be
made small."
Here Mr. Belvoir was taken aside by a brother member, on an important
matter to be brought before the committee on salmon fisheries, on
which they both served; and Kenelm, with his companion, Sir Peter,
threaded his way through the crowded lobby and disappeared. Emerging
into the broad space, with its lofty clock-tower, Sir Peter halted,
and pointing towards the old Abbey, half in shadow, half in light,
under the tranquil moonbeams, said,--
"It tells much for the duration of a people when it accords with the
instinct of immortality in a man; when an honoured tomb is deemed
recompense for the toils and dangers of a noble life. How much of the
history of England Nelson summed up in the simple words,--'Victory or
Westminster Abbey.'"
"Admirably expressed, my dear father," said Kenelm, briefly.
"I agree with your remark, which I overheard, on Gordon's speech,"
resumed Sir Peter. "It was wonderfully clever; yet I should have been
sorry to hear you speak it. It is not by such sentiments that Nelsons
become great. If such sentiments should ever be national, the cry
will not be 'Victory or Westminster Abbey!' but 'Defeat and the Three
per Cents!'"
Pleased with his own unwonted animation, and with the sympathizing
half-smile on his son's taciturn lips, Sir Peter then proceeded more
immediately to the subjects which pressed upon his heart. Gordon's
success in Parliament, Gordon's suit to Cecilia Travers, favoured, as
Sir Peter had learned, by her father, rejected as yet by herself, were
somehow inseparably mixed up in Sir Peter's mind and his words, as he
sought to kindle his son's emulation. He dwelt on the obligations
which a country imposed on its citizens, especially on the young and
vigorous generation to which the destinies of those to follow were
intrusted; and with these stern obligations he combined all the
cheering and tender associations which an English public man connects
with an English home: the wife with a smile to soothe the cares, and a
mind to share the aspirations, of a life that must go through labour
to achieve renown; thus, in all he said, binding together, as if they
could not be disparted, Ambition and Cecilia.
His son did not interrupt him by a word, Sir Peter in his eagerness
not noticing that Kenelm had drawn him aside from the direct
thoroughfare, and had now made halt in the middle of Westminster
bridge, bending over the massive parapet and gazing abstractedly upon
the waves of the starlit river. On the right the stately length of
the people's legislative palace, so new in its date, so elaborately in
each detail ancient in its form, stretching on towards the lowly and
jagged roofs of penury and crime. Well might these be so near to the
halls of a people's legislative palace: near to the heart of every
legislator for a people must be the mighty problem how to increase a
people's splendour and its virtue, and how to diminish its penury and
its crime.
"How strange it is," said Kenelm, still bending over the parapet,
"that throughout all my desultory wanderings I have ever been
attracted towards the sight and the sound of running waters, even
those of the humblest rill! Of what thoughts, of what dreams, of what
memories, colouring the history of my past, the waves of the humblest
rill could speak, were the waves themselves not such supreme
philosophers,--roused indeed on their surface, vexed by a check to
their own course, but so indifferent to all that makes gloom or death
to the mortals who think and dream and feel beside their banks."
"Bless me," said Peter to himself, "the boy has got back to his old
vein of humours and melancholies. He has not heard a word I have been
saying. Travers is right. He will never do anything in life. Why
did I christen him Kenelm? he might as well have been christened
Peter." Still, loth to own that his eloquence had been expended in
vain and that the wish of his heart was doomed to expire disappointed,
Sir Peter said aloud, "You have not listened to what I said; Kenelm,
you grieve me."
"Grieve you! you! do not say that, Father, dear Father. Listen to
you! Every word you have said has sunk into the deepest deep of my
heart. Pardon my foolish, purposeless snatch of talk to myself: it is
but my way, only my way, dear Father!"
"Boy, boy," cried Sir Peter, with tears in his voice, "if you could
get out of those odd ways of yours I should be so thankful. But if
you cannot, nothing you can do shall grieve me. Only, let me say
this; running waters have had a great charm for you. With a humble
rill you associate thoughts, dreams, memories in your past. But now
you halt by the stream of the mighty river: before you the senate of
an empire wider than Alexander's; behind you the market of a commerce
to which that of Tyre was a pitiful trade. Look farther down, those
squalid hovels, how much there to redeem or to remedy; and out of
sight, but not very distant, the nation's Walhalla, 'Victory or
Westminster Abbey!' The humble rill has witnessed your past. Has the
mighty river no effect on your future? The rill keeps no record of
your past: shall the river keep no record of your future? Ah, boy,
boy, I see you are dreaming still,--no use talking. Let us go home."
"I was not dreaming, I was telling myself that the time had come to
replace the old Kenelm with the new ideas, by a new Kenelm with the
Ideas of Old. Ah! perhaps we must,--at whatever cost to
ourselves,--we must go through the romance of life before we clearly
detect what is grand in its realities. I can no longer lament that I
stand estranged from the objects and pursuits of my race. I have
learned how much I have with them in common. I have known love; I
have known sorrow."
Kenelm paused a moment, only a moment, then lifted the head which,
during that pause, had drooped, and stood erect at the full height of
his stature, startling his father by the change that had passed over
his face; lip, eye, his whole aspect, eloquent with a resolute
enthusiasm, too grave to be the flash of a passing moment.
"Ay, ay," he said, "Victory or Westminster Abbey! The world is a
battle-field in which the worst wounded are the deserters, stricken as
they seek to fly, and hushing the groans that would betray the secret
of their inglorious hiding-place. The pain of wounds received in the
thick of the fight is scarcely felt in the joy of service to some
honoured cause, and is amply atoned by the reverence for noble scars.
My choice is made. Not that of deserter, that of soldier in the
ranks."
"It will not be long before you rise from the ranks, my boy, if you
hold fast to the Idea of Old, symbolized in the English battle-cry,
'Victory or Westminster Abbey.'"
So saying, Sir Peter took his son's arm, leaning on it proudly; and
so, into the crowded thoroughfares, from the halting-place on the
modern bridge that spans the legendary river, passes the Man of the
Young Generation to fates beyond the verge of the horizon to which the
eyes of my generation must limit their wistful gaze.
THE END.