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Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #7658 · 1,086,100 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton


        
Release date: November 24, 2004 [eBook #7658]
                Most recently updated: August 28, 2016

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Widger and Dagny


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KENELM CHILLINGLY — COMPLETE ***




Produced by David Widger and Dagny





KENELM CHILLINGLY

HIS ADVENTURES AND OPINIONS


By Edward Bulwer Lytton

(LORD LYTTON)




BOOK I.



CHAPTER I.

SIR PETER CHILLINGLY, of Exmundham, Baronet, F.R.S. and F.A.S., was the
representative of an ancient family, and a landed proprietor of some
importance. He had married young; not from any ardent inclination for
the connubial state, but in compliance with the request of his parents.
They took the pains to select his bride; and if they might have chosen
better, they might have chosen worse, which is more than can be said for
many men who choose wives for themselves. Miss Caroline Brotherton was
in all respects a suitable connection. She had a pretty fortune, which
was of much use in buying a couple of farms, long desiderated by the
Chillinglys as necessary for the rounding of their property into a
ring-fence. She was highly connected, and brought into the county that
experience of fashionable life acquired by a young lady who has attended
a course of balls for three seasons, and gone out in matrimonial
honours, with credit to herself and her chaperon. She was handsome
enough to satisfy a husband’s pride, but not so handsome as to keep
perpetually on the _qui vive_ a husband’s jealousy. She was considered
highly accomplished; that is, she played upon the pianoforte so that any
musician would say she “was very well taught;” but no musician would
go out of his way to hear her a second time. She painted in
water-colours--well enough to amuse herself. She knew French and Italian
with an elegance so lady-like that, without having read more than
selected extracts from authors in those languages, she spoke them both
with an accent more correct than we have any reason to attribute to
Rousseau or Ariosto. What else a young lady may acquire in order to be
styled highly accomplished I do not pretend to know; but I am sure that
the young lady in question fulfilled that requirement in the opinion
of the best masters. It was not only an eligible match for Sir
Peter Chillingly,--it was a brilliant match. It was also a very
unexceptionable match for Miss Caroline Brotherton. This excellent
couple got on together as most excellent couples do. A short time after
marriage, Sir Peter, by the death of his parents--who, having married
their heir, had nothing left in life worth the trouble of living
for--succeeded to the hereditary estates; he lived for nine months of
the year at Exmundham, going to town for the other three months. Lady
Chillingly and himself were both very glad to go to town, being bored at
Exmundham; and very glad to go back to Exmundham, being bored in town.
With one exception it was an exceedingly happy marriage, as marriages
go. Lady Chillingly had her way in small things; Sir Peter his way in
great. Small things happen every day; great things once in three years.
Once in three years Lady Chillingly gave way to Sir Peter; households so
managed go on regularly. The exception to their connubial happiness was,
after all, but of a negative description. Their affection was such
that they sighed for a pledge of it; fourteen years had he and Lady
Chillingly remained unvisited by the little stranger.

Now, in default of male issue, Sir Peter’s estates passed to a distant
cousin as heir-at-law; and during the last four years this heir-at-law
had evinced his belief that practically speaking he was already
heir-apparent; and (though Sir Peter was a much younger man than
himself, and as healthy as any man well can be) had made his
expectations of a speedy succession unpleasantly conspicuous. He had
refused his consent to a small exchange of lands with a neighbouring
squire, by which Sir Peter would have obtained some good arable land,
for an outlying unprofitable wood that produced nothing but fagots and
rabbits, with the blunt declaration that he, the heir-at-law, was fond
of rabbit-shooting, and that the wood would be convenient to him next
season if he came into the property by that time, which he very possibly
might. He disputed Sir Peter’s right to make his customary fall of
timber, and had even threatened him with a bill in Chancery on that
subject. In short, this heir-at-law was exactly one of those persons
to spite whom a landed proprietor would, if single, marry at the age of
eighty in the hope of a family.

Nor was it only on account of his very natural wish to frustrate the
expectations of this unamiable relation that Sir Peter Chillingly
lamented the absence of the little stranger. Although belonging to that
class of country gentlemen to whom certain political reasoners deny the
intelligence vouchsafed to other members of the community, Sir Peter was
not without a considerable degree of book-learning and a great taste
for speculative philosophy. He sighed for a legitimate inheritor to the
stores of his erudition, and, being a very benevolent man, for a more
active and useful dispenser of those benefits to the human race which
philosophers confer by striking hard against each other; just as, how
full soever of sparks a flint may be, they might lurk concealed in the
flint till doomsday, if the flint were not hit by the steel. Sir Peter,
in short, longed for a son amply endowed with the combative quality, in
which he himself was deficient, but which is the first essential to all
seekers after renown, and especially to benevolent philosophers.

Under these circumstances one may well conceive the joy that filled
the household of Exmundham and extended to all the tenantry on that
venerable estate, by whom the present possessor was much beloved and
the prospect of an heir-at-law with a special eye to the preservation
of rabbits much detested, when the medical attendant of the Chillinglys
declared that ‘her ladyship was in an interesting way;’ and to what
height that joy culminated when, in due course of time, a male baby was
safely enthroned in his cradle. To that cradle Sir Peter was summoned.
He entered the room with a lively bound and a radiant countenance: he
quitted it with a musing step and an overclouded brow.

Yet the baby was no monster. It did not come into the world with two
heads, as some babies are said to have done; it was formed as babies are
in general; was on the whole a thriving baby, a fine baby. Nevertheless,
its aspect awed the father as already it had awed the nurse. The
creature looked so unutterably solemn. It fixed its eyes upon Sir Peter
with a melancholy reproachful stare; its lips were compressed and drawn
downward as if discontentedly meditating its future destinies. The nurse
declared in a frightened whisper that it had uttered no cry on facing
the light. It had taken possession of its cradle in all the dignity of
silent sorrow. A more saddened and a more thoughtful countenance a human
being could not exhibit if he were leaving the world instead of entering
it.

“Hem!” said Sir Peter to himself on regaining the solitude of his
library; “a philosopher who contributes a new inhabitant to this vale of
tears takes upon himself very anxious responsibilities--”

At that moment the joy-bells rang out from the neighbouring church
tower, the summer sun shone into the windows, the bees hummed among the
flowers on the lawn. Sir Peter roused himself and looked forth, “After
all,” said he, cheerily, “the vale of tears is not without a smile.”



CHAPTER II.

A FAMILY council was held at Exmundham Hall to deliberate on the name
by which this remarkable infant should be admitted into the Christian
community. The junior branches of that ancient house consisted, first,
of the obnoxious heir-at-law--a Scotch branch named Chillingly Gordon.
He was the widowed father of one son, now of the age of three, and
happily unconscious of the injury inflicted on his future prospects by
the advent of the new-born, which could not be truthfully said of his
Caledonian father. Mr. Chillingly Gordon was one of those men who get on
in the world with out our being able to discover why. His parents died
in his infancy and left him nothing; but the family interest procured
him an admission into the Charterhouse School, at which illustrious
academy he obtained no remarkable distinction. Nevertheless, as soon as
he left it the State took him under its special care, and appointed him
to a clerkship in a public office. From that moment he continued to get
on in the world, and was now a Commissioner of Customs, with a salary of
L1500 a year. As soon as he had been thus enabled to maintain a wife,
he selected a wife who assisted to maintain himself. She was an Irish
peer’s widow, with a jointure of L2000 a year.

A few months after his marriage, Chillingly Gordon effected insurances
on his wife’s life, so as to secure himself an annuity of L1000 a year
in case of her decease. As she appeared to be a fine healthy woman, some
years younger than her husband, the deduction from his income effected
by the annual payments for the insurance seemed an over-sacrifice of
present enjoyment to future contingencies. The result bore witness to
his reputation for sagacity, as the lady died in the second year of
their wedding, a few months after the birth of her only child, and of a
heart-disease which had been latent to the doctors, but which, no doubt,
Gordon had affectionately discovered before he had insured a life too
valuable not to need some compensation for its loss. He was now, then,
in the possession of L2500 a year, and was therefore very well off,
in the pecuniary sense of the phrase. He had, moreover, acquired a
reputation which gave him a social rank beyond that accorded to him by
a discerning State. He was considered a man of solid judgment, and
his opinion upon all matters, private and public, carried weight. The
opinion itself, critically examined, was not worth much, but the way he
announced it was imposing. Mr. Fox said that ‘No one ever was so wise as
Lord Thurlow looked.’ Lord Thurlow could not have looked wiser than Mr.
Chillingly Gordon. He had a square jaw and large red bushy eyebrows,
which he lowered down with great effect when he delivered judgment.
He had another advantage for acquiring grave reputation. He was a very
unpleasant man. He could be rude if you contradicted him; and as few
persons wish to provoke rudeness, so he was seldom contradicted.

Mr. Chillingly Mivers, another cadet of the house, was also
distinguished, but in a different way. He was a bachelor, now about the
age of thirty-five. He was eminent for a supreme well-bred contempt for
everybody and everything. He was the originator and chief proprietor of
a public journal called “The Londoner,” which had lately been set up on
that principle of contempt, and we need not say, was exceedingly popular
with those leading members of the community who admire nobody and
believe in nothing. Mr. Chillingly Mivers was regarded by himself and
by others as a man who might have achieved the highest success in any
branch of literature, if he had deigned to exhibit his talents therein.
But he did not so deign, and therefore he had full right to imply that,
if he had written an epic, a drama, a novel, a history, a metaphysical
treatise, Milton, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Hume, Berkeley would have been
nowhere. He held greatly to the dignity of the anonymous; and even in
the journal which he originated nobody could ever ascertain what he
wrote. But, at all events, Mr. Chillingly Mivers was what Mr. Chillingly
Gordon was not; namely, a very clever man, and by no means an unpleasant
one in general society.

The Rev. John Stalworth Chillingly was a decided adherent to the creed
of what is called “muscular Christianity,” and a very fine specimen
of it too. A tall stout man with broad shoulders, and that division of
lower limb which intervenes between the knee and the ankle powerfully
developed. He would have knocked down a deist as soon as looked at
him. It is told by the Sieur de Joinville, in his Memoir of Louis, the
sainted king, that an assembly of divines and theologians convened the
Jews of an Oriental city for the purpose of arguing with them on the
truths of Christianity, and a certain knight, who was at that time
crippled, and supporting himself on crutches, asked and obtained
permission to be present at the debate. The Jews flocked to the summons,
when a prelate, selecting a learned rabbi, mildly put to him the leading
question whether he owned the divine conception of our Lord. “Certainly
not,” replied the rabbi; whereon the pious knight, shocked by such
blasphemy, uplifted his crutch and felled the rabbi, and then flung
himself among the other misbelievers, whom he soon dispersed in
ignominious flight and in a very belaboured condition. The conduct of
the knight was reported to the sainted king, with a request that it
should be properly reprimanded; but the sainted king delivered himself
of this wise judgment:--

“If a pious knight is a very learned clerk, and can meet in fair
argument the doctrines of the misbeliever, by all means let him argue
fairly; but if a pious knight is not a learned clerk, and the argument
goes against him, then let the pious knight cut the discussion short by
the edge of his good sword.”

The Rev. John Stalworth Chillingly was of the same opinion as Saint
Louis; otherwise, he was a mild and amiable man. He encouraged cricket
and other manly sports among his rural parishioners. He was a skilful
and bold rider, but he did not hunt; a convivial man--and took his
bottle freely. But his tastes in literature were of a refined and
peaceful character, contrasting therein the tendencies some might have
expected from his muscular development of Christianity. He was a great
reader of poetry, but he disliked Scott and Byron, whom he considered
flashy and noisy; he maintained that Pope was only a versifier, and that
the greatest poet in the language was Wordsworth; he did not care much
for the ancient classics; he refused all merit to the French poets; he
knew nothing of the Italian, but he dabbled in German, and was inclined
to bore one about the “Hermann and Dorothea” of Goethe. He was married
to a homely little wife, who revered him in silence, and thought there
would be no schism in the Church if he were in his right place as
Archbishop of Canterbury; in this opinion he entirely agreed with his
wife.

Besides these three male specimens of the Chillingly race, the fairer
sex was represented, in the absence of her ladyship, who still kept her
room, by three female Chillinglys, sisters of Sir Peter, and all three
spinsters. Perhaps one reason why they had remained single was, that
externally they were so like each other that a suitor must have been
puzzled which to choose, and may have been afraid that if he did choose
one, he should be caught next day kissing another one in mistake. They
were all tall, all thin, with long throats--and beneath the throats a
fine development of bone. They had all pale hair, pale eyelids, pale
eyes, and pale complexions. They all dressed exactly alike, and their
favourite colour was a vivid green: they were so dressed on this
occasion.

As there was such similitude in their persons, so, to an ordinary
observer, they were exactly the same in character and mind. Very
well behaved, with proper notions of female decorum: very distant and
reserved in manner to strangers; very affectionate to each other and
their relations or favourites; very good to the poor, whom they looked
upon as a different order of creation, and treated with that sort of
benevolence which humane people bestow upon dumb animals. Their minds
had been nourished on the same books--what one read the others had read.
The books were mainly divided into two classes,--novels, and what they
called “good books.” They had a habit of taking a specimen of each
alternately; one day a novel, then a good book, then a novel again, and
so on. Thus if the imagination was overwarmed on Monday, on Tuesday it
was cooled down to a proper temperature; and if frost-bitten on Tuesday,
it took a tepid bath on Wednesday. The novels they chose were indeed
rarely of a nature to raise the intellectual thermometer into blood
heat: the heroes and heroines were models of correct conduct. Mr.
James’s novels were then in vogue, and they united in saying that those
“were novels a father might allow his daughters to read.” But though an
ordinary observer might have failed to recognize any distinction between
these three ladies, and, finding them habitually dressed in green, would
have said they were as much alike as one pea is to another, they had
their idiosyncratic differences, when duly examined. Miss Margaret, the
eldest, was the commanding one of the three; it was she who regulated
their household (they all lived together), kept the joint purse, and
decided every doubtful point that arose: whether they should or should
not ask Mrs. So-and-so to tea; whether Mary should or should not be
discharged; whether or not they should go to Broadstairs or to Sandgate
for the month of October. In fact, Miss Margaret was the WILL of the
body corporate.

Miss Sibyl was of milder nature and more melancholy temperament; she had
a poetic turn of mind, and occasionally wrote verses. Some of these
had been printed on satin paper, and sold for objects of beneficence
at charity bazaars. The county newspapers said that the verses “were
characterized by all the elegance of a cultured and feminine mind.” The
other two sisters agreed that Sibyl was the genius of the household,
but, like all geniuses, not sufficiently practical for the world.
Miss Sarah Chillingly, the youngest of the three, and now just in her
forty-fourth year, was looked upon by the others as “a dear thing,
inclined to be naughty, but such a darling that nobody could have the
heart to scold her.” Miss Margaret said “she was a giddy creature.” Miss
Sibyl wrote a poem on her, entitled, “Warning to a young Lady against
the Pleasures of the World.” They all called her Sally; the other
two sisters had no diminutive synonyms. Sally is a name indicative of
fastness. But this Sally would not have been thought fast in another
household, and she was now little likely to sally out of the one she
belonged to. These sisters, who were all many years older than Sir
Peter, lived in a handsome, old-fashioned, red-brick house, with a large
garden at the back, in the principal street of the capital of their
native county. They had each L10,000 for portion; and if he could have
married all three, the heir-at-law would have married them, and settled
the aggregate L30,000 on himself. But we have not yet come to recognize
Mormonism as legal, though if our social progress continues to slide in
the same grooves as at present, Heaven only knows what triumphs over
the prejudices of our ancestors may not be achieved by the wisdom of our
descendants!



CHAPTER III.

SIR PETER stood on his hearthstone, surveyed the guests seated in
semicircle, and said: “Friends,--in Parliament, before anything
affecting the fate of a Bill is discussed, it is, I believe, necessary
to introduce the Bill.” He paused a moment, rang the bell, and said to
the servant who entered, “Tell Nurse to bring in the Baby.”

Mr. CHILLINGLY GORDON.--“I don’t see the necessity for that, Sir Peter.
We may take the existence of the Baby for granted.”

Mr. MIVERS.--“It is an advantage to the reputation of Sir Peter’s work
to preserve the incognito. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_.”

THE REV. JOHN STALWORTH CHILLINGLY.--“I don’t approve the cynical
levity of such remarks. Of course we must all be anxious to see, in the
earliest stage of being, the future representative of our name and race.
Who would not wish to contemplate the source, however small, of the
Tigris or the Nile!--”

MISS SALLY (tittering).--“He! he!”

MISS MARGARET.--“For shame, you giddy thing!”

The Baby enters in the nurse’s arms. All rise and gather round the Baby
with one exception,--Mr. Gordon, who has ceased to be heir-at-law.

The Baby returned the gaze of its relations with the most contemptuous
indifference. Miss Sibyl was the first to pronounce an opinion on the
Baby’s attributes. Said she, in a solemn whisper, “What a heavenly
mournful expression! it seems so grieved to have left the angels!”

THE REV. JOHN.--“That is prettily said, Cousin Sibyl; but the infant
must pluck up its courage and fight its way among mortals with a good
heart, if it wants to get back to the angels again. And I think it will;
a fine child.” He took it from the nurse, and moving it deliberately up
and down, as if to weigh it, said cheerfully, “Monstrous heavy! by the
time it is twenty it will be a match for a prize-fighter of fifteen
stone!”

Therewith he strode to Gordon, who as if to show that he now considered
himself wholly apart from all interest in the affairs of a family who
had so ill-treated him in the birth of that Baby, had taken up the
“Times” newspaper and concealed his countenance beneath the ample sheet.
The Parson abruptly snatched away the “Times” with one hand, and,
with the other substituting to the indignant eyes of the _ci-devant_
heir-at-law the spectacle of the Baby, said, “Kiss it.”

“Kiss it!” echoed Chillingly Gordon, pushing back his chair--“kiss
it! pooh, sir, stand off! I never kissed my own baby: I shall not kiss
another man’s. Take the thing away, sir: it is ugly; it has black eyes.”

Sir Peter, who was near-sighted, put on his spectacles and examined
the face of the new-born. “True,” said he, “it has black eyes,--very
extraordinary: portentous: the first Chillingly that ever had black
eyes.”

“Its mamma has black eyes,” said Miss Margaret: “it takes after its
mamma; it has not the fair beauty of the Chillinglys, but it is not
ugly.”

“Sweet infant!” sighed Sibyl; “and so good; does not cry.”

“It has neither cried nor crowed since it was born,” said the nurse;
“bless its little heart.”

She took the Baby from the Parson’s arms, and smoothed back the frill of
its cap, which had got ruffled.

“You may go now, Nurse,” said Sir Peter.



CHAPTER IV.

“I AGREE with Mr. Shandy,” said Sir Peter, resuming his stand on the
hearthstone, “that among the responsibilities of a parent the choice of
the name which his child is to bear for life is one of the gravest. And
this is especially so with those who belong to the order of baronets.
In the case of a peer his Christian name, fused into his titular
designation, disappears. In the case of a Mister, if his baptismal
be cacophonous or provocative of ridicule, he need not ostentatiously
parade it: he may drop it altogether on his visiting cards, and may be
imprinted as Mr. Jones instead of Mr. Ebenezer Jones. In his signature,
save where the forms of the law demand Ebenezer in full, he may only
use an initial and be your obedient servant E. Jones, leaving it to be
conjectured that E. stands for Edward or Ernest,--names inoffensive, and
not suggestive of a Dissenting Chapel, like Ebenezer. If a man called
Edward or Ernest be detected in some youthful indiscretion, there is
no indelible stain on his moral character: but if an Ebenezer be so
detected he is set down as a hypocrite; it produces that shock on the
public mind which is felt when a professed saint is proved to be a
bit of a sinner. But a baronet never can escape from his baptismal: it
cannot lie _perdu_; it cannot shrink into an initial, it stands forth
glaringly in the light of day; christen him Ebenezer, and he is Sir
Ebenezer in full, with all its perilous consequences if he ever succumb
to those temptations to which even baronets are exposed. But, my
friends, it is not only the effect that the sound of a name has upon
others which is to be thoughtfully considered: the effect that his name
produces on the man himself is perhaps still more important. Some names
stimulate and encourage the owner; others deject and paralyze him: I
am a melancholy instance of that truth. Peter has been for many
generations, as you are aware, the baptismal to which the eldest-born
of our family has been devoted. On the altar of that name I have been
sacrificed. Never has there been a Sir Peter Chillingly who has, in any
way, distinguished himself above his fellows. That name has been a dead
weight on my intellectual energies. In the catalogue of illustrious
Englishmen there is, I think, no immortal Sir Peter, except Sir Peter
Teazle, and he only exists on the comic stage.”

MISS SIBYL.--“Sir Peter Lely?”

SIR PETER CHILLINGLY.--“That painter was not an Englishman. He was born
in Westphalia, famous for hams. I confine my remarks to the children of
our native land. I am aware that in foreign countries the name is not an
extinguisher to the genius of its owner. But why? In other countries its
sound is modified. Pierre Corneille was a great man; but I put it to
you whether, had he been an Englishman, he could have been the father of
European tragedy as Peter Crow?”

MISS SIBYL.--“Impossible!”

MISS SALLY.--“He! he!”

MISS MARGARET.--“There is nothing to laugh at, you giddy child!”

SIR PETER.--“My son shall not be petrified into Peter.”

MR. CHILLINGLY GORDON.--“If a man is such a fool--and I don’t say your
son will not be a fool, Cousin Peter--as to be influenced by the sound
of his own name, and you want the booby to turn the world topsy-turvy,
you had better call him Julius Caesar or Hannibal or Attila or
Charlemagne.”

SIR PETER, (who excels mankind in imperturbability of temper).--“On the
contrary, if you inflict upon a man the burden of one of those names,
the glory of which he cannot reasonably expect to eclipse or even to
equal, you crush him beneath the weight. If a poet were called John
Milton or William Shakspeare, he could not dare to publish even a
sonnet. No: the choice of a name lies between the two extremes of
ludicrous insignificance and oppressive renown. For this reason I have
ordered the family pedigree to be suspended on yonder wall. Let us
examine it with care, and see whether, among the Chillinglys themselves
or their alliances, we can discover a name that can be borne with
becoming dignity by the destined head of our house--a name neither too
light nor too heavy.”

Sir Peter here led the way to the family tree--a goodly roll of
parchment, with the arms of the family emblazoned at the top. Those arms
were simple, as ancient heraldic coats are,--three fishes _argent_ on
a field _azure_; the crest a mermaid’s head. All flocked to inspect the
pedigree except Mr. Gordon, who resumed the “Times” newspaper.

“I never could quite make out what kind of fishes these are,” said
the Rev. John Stalworth. “They are certainly not pike which formed the
emblematic blazon of the Hotofts, and are still grim enough to frighten
future Shakspeares on the scutcheon of the Warwickshire Lucys.”

“I believe they are tenches,” said Mr. Mivers. “The tench is a fish that
knows how to keep itself safe by a philosophical taste for an obscure
existence in deep holes and slush.”

SIR PETER.--“No, Mivers; the fishes are dace, a fish that, once
introduced into any pond, never can be got out again. You may drag
the water; you may let off the water; you may say, ‘Those dace are
extirpated,’--vain thought!--the dace reappear as before; and in this
respect the arms are really emblematic of the family. All the disorders
and revolutions that have occurred in England since the Heptarchy have
left the Chillinglys the same race in the same place. Somehow or other
the Norman Conquest did not despoil them; they held fiefs under Eudo
Dapifer as peacefully as they had held them under King Harold; they took
no part in the Crusades, nor the Wars of the Roses, nor the Civil Wars
between Charles the First and the Parliament. As the dace sticks to the
water and the water sticks by the dace, so the Chillinglys stuck to the
land and the land stuck by the Chillinglys. Perhaps I am wrong to wish
that the new Chillingly may be a little less like a dace.”

“Oh!” cried Miss Margaret, who, mounted on a chair, had been inspecting
the pedigree through an eye-glass, “I don’t see a fine Christian name
from the beginning, except Oliver.”

SIR PETER.--“That Chillingly was born in Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate,
and named Oliver in compliment to him, as his father, born in the reign
of James I., was christened James. The three fishes always swam with
the stream. Oliver!--Oliver not a bad name, but significant of radical
doctrines.”

Mr. MIVERS.--“I don’t think so. Oliver Cromwell made short work of
radicals and their doctrines; but perhaps we can find a name less awful
and revolutionary.”

“I have it! I have it!” cried the Parson. “Here is a descent from Sir
Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley. Sir Kenelm Digby! No finer specimen of
muscular Christianity. He fought as well as he wrote; eccentric, it is
true, but always a gentleman. Call the boy Kenelm!”

“A sweet name,” said Miss Sibyl: “it breathes of romance.”

“Sir Kenelm Chillingly! It sounds well,--imposing!” said Miss Margaret.

“And,” remarked Mr. Mivers, “it has this advantage--that while it has
sufficient association with honourable distinction to affect the mind of
the namesake and rouse his emulation, it is not that of so stupendous
a personage as to defy rivalry. Sir Kenelm Digby was certainly an
accomplished and gallant gentleman; but what with his silly superstition
about sympathetic powders, etc., any man nowadays might be clever in
comparison without being a prodigy. Yes, let us decide on Kenelm.”

Sir Peter meditated. “Certainly,” said he, after a pause, “certainly
the name of Kenelm carries with it very crotchety associations; and I am
afraid that Sir Kenelm Digby did not make a prudent choice in marriage.
The fair Venetia was no better than she should be; and I should wish
my heir not to be led away by beauty but wed a woman of respectable
character and decorous conduct.”

Miss MARGARET.--“A British matron, of course!”

THREE SISTERS (in chorus).--“Of course! of course!”

“But,” resumed Sir Peter, “I am crotchety myself, and crotchets are
innocent things enough; and as for marriage the Baby cannot marry
to-morrow, so that we have ample time to consider that matter. Kenelm
Digby was a man any family might be proud of; and, as you say, sister
Margaret, Kenelm Chillingly does not sound amiss: Kenelm Chillingly it
shall be!”

The Baby was accordingly christened Kenelm, after which ceremony its
face grew longer than before.



CHAPTER V.

BEFORE his relations dispersed, Sir Peter summoned Mr. Gordon into his
library.

“Cousin,” said he, kindly, “I do not blame you for the want of family
affection, or even of humane interest, which you exhibit towards the
New-born.”

“Blame me, Cousin Peter! I should think not. I exhibit as much
family affection and humane interest as could be expected from
me,--circumstances considered.”

“I own,” said Sir Peter, with all his wonted mildness, “that after
remaining childless for fourteen years of wedded life, the advent of
this little stranger must have occasioned you a disagreeable surprise.
But, after all, as I am many years younger than you, and in the course
of nature shall outlive you, the loss is less to yourself than to your
son, and upon that I wish to say a few words. You know too well the
conditions on which I hold my estate not to be aware that I have
not legally the power to saddle it with any bequest to your boy. The
New-born succeeds to the fee-simple as last in tail. But I intend,
from this moment, to lay by something every year for your son out of my
income; and, fond as I am of London for a part of the year, I shall now
give up my town-house. If I live to the years the Psalmist allots to
man, I shall thus accumulate something handsome for your son, which may
be taken in the way of compensation.”

Mr. Gordon was by no means softened by this generous speech. However,
he answered more politely than was his wont, “My son will be very much
obliged to you, should he ever need your intended bequest.” Pausing a
moment, he added with a cheerful smile, “A large percentage of infants
die before attaining the age of twenty-one.”

“Nay, but I am told your son is an uncommonly fine healthy child.”

“My son, Cousin Peter! I was not thinking of my son, but of yours. Yours
has a big head. I should not wonder if he had water in it. I don’t wish
to alarm you, but he may go off any day, and in that case it is not
likely that Lady Chillingly will condescend to replace him. So you will
excuse me if I still keep a watchful eye on my rights; and, however
painful to my feelings, I must still dispute your right to cut a stick
of the field timber.”

“That is nonsense, Gordon. I am tenant for life without impeachment of
waste, and can cut down all timber not ornamental.”

“I advise you not, Cousin Peter. I have told you before that I shall try
the question at law, should you provoke it, amicably, of course. Rights
are rights; and if I am driven to maintain mine, I trust that you are of
a mind too liberal to allow your family affection for me and mine to be
influenced by a decree of the Court of Chancery. But my fly is waiting.
I must not miss the train.”

“Well, good-by, Gordon. Shake hands.”

“Shake hands!--of course, of course. By the by, as I came through the
lodge, it seemed to me sadly out of repair. I believe you are liable for
dilapidations. Good-by.”

“The man is a hog in armour,” soliloquized Sir Peter, when his cousin
was gone; “and if it be hard to drive a common pig in the way he don’t
choose to go, a hog in armour is indeed undrivable. But his boy ought
not to suffer for his father’s hoggishness; and I shall begin at once to
see what I can lay by for him. After all, it is hard upon Gordon. Poor
Gordon; poor fellow! poor fellow! Still I hope he will not go to law
with me. I hate law. And a worm will turn, especially a worm that is put
into Chancery.”



CHAPTER VI.

DESPITE the sinister semi-predictions of the _ci-devant_ heir-at-law,
the youthful Chillingly passed with safety, and indeed with dignity,
through the infant stages of existence. He took his measles and
whooping-cough with philosophical equanimity. He gradually acquired
the use of speech, but he did not too lavishly exercise that special
attribute of humanity. During the earlier years of childhood he spoke
as little as if he had been prematurely trained in the school of
Pythagoras. But he evidently spoke the less in order to reflect the
more. He observed closely and pondered deeply over what he observed. At
the age of eight he began to converse more freely, and it was in that
year that he startled his mother with the question, “Mamma, are you not
sometimes overpowered by the sense of your own identity?”

Lady Chillingly,--I was about to say rushed, but Lady Chillingly never
rushed,--Lady Chillingly glided less sedately than her wont to Sir
Peter, and repeating her son’s question, said, “The boy is growing
troublesome, too wise for any woman: he must go to school.”

Sir Peter was of the same opinion. But where on earth did the child get
hold of so long a word as “identity,” and how did so extraordinary and
puzzling a metaphysical question come into his head? Sir Peter summoned
Kenelm, and ascertained that the boy, having free access to the library,
had fastened upon Locke on the Human Understanding, and was prepared to
dispute with that philosopher upon the doctrine of innate ideas. Quoth
Kenelm, gravely, “A want is an idea; and if, as soon as I was born, I
felt the want of food and knew at once where to turn for it, without
being taught, surely I came into the world with an ‘innate idea.’”

Sir Peter, though he dabbled in metaphysics, was posed, and scratched
his head without getting out a proper answer as to the distinction
between ideas and instincts. “My child,” he said at last, “you don’t
know what you are talking about: go and take a good gallop on your black
pony; and I forbid you to read any books that are not given to you by
myself or your mamma. Stick to ‘Puss in Boots.’”



CHAPTER VII.

SIR PETER ordered his carriage and drove to the house of the stout
parson. That doughty ecclesiastic held a family living a few miles
distant from the Hall, and was the only one of the cousins with whom Sir
Peter habitually communed on his domestic affairs.

He found the Parson in his study, which exhibited tastes other
than clerical. Over the chimney-piece were ranged fencing-foils,
boxing-gloves, and staffs for the athletic exercise of single-stick;
cricket-bats and fishing-rods filled up the angles. There were
sundry prints on the walls: one of Mr. Wordsworth, flanked by two of
distinguished race-horses; one of a Leicestershire short-horn, with
which the Parson, who farmed his own glebe and bred cattle in its rich
pastures, had won a prize at the county show; and on either side of that
animal were the portraits of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor. There were dwarf
book-cases containing miscellaneous works very handsomely bound; at
the open window, a stand of flower-pots, the flowers in full bloom. The
Parson’s flowers were famous.

The appearance of the whole room was that of a man who is tidy and neat
in his habits.

“Cousin,” said Sir Peter, “I have come to consult you.” And therewith he
related the marvellous precocity of Kenelm Chillingly. “You see the name
begins to work on him rather too much. He must go to school; and now
what school shall it be? Private or public?”

THE REV. JOHN STALWORTH.--“There is a great deal to be said for or
against either. At a public school the chances are that Kenelm will
no longer be overpowered by a sense of his own identity; he will more
probably lose identity altogether. The worst of a public school is that
a sort of common character is substituted for individual character.
The master, of course, can’t attend to the separate development of each
boy’s idiosyncrasy. All minds are thrown into one great mould, and come
out of it more or less in the same form. An Etonian may be clever or
stupid, but, as either, he remains emphatically Etonian. A public school
ripens talent, but its tendency is to stifle genius. Then, too, a public
school for an only son, heir to a good estate, which will be entirely at
his own disposal, is apt to encourage reckless and extravagant habits;
and your estate requires careful management, and leaves no margin for an
heir’s notes-of-hand and post-obits. On the whole, I am against a public
school for Kenelm.”

“Well then, we will decide on a private one.”

“Hold!” said the Parson: “a private school has its drawbacks. You can
seldom produce large fishes in small ponds. In private schools the
competition is narrowed, the energies stinted. The schoolmaster’s wife
interferes, and generally coddles the boys. There is not manliness
enough in those academies; no fagging, and very little fighting. A
clever boy turns out a prig; a boy of feebler intellect turns out a
well-behaved young lady in trousers. Nothing muscular in the system.
Decidedly the namesake and descendant of Kenelm Digby should not go to a
private seminary.”

“So far as I gather from your reasoning,” said Sir Peter, with
characteristic placidity, “Kenelm Chillingly is not to go to school at
all.”

“It does look like it,” said the Parson, candidly; “but, on
consideration, there is a medium. There are schools which unite the best
qualities of public and private schools, large enough to stimulate and
develop energies mental and physical, yet not so framed as to melt all
character in one crucible. For instance, there is a school which has
at this moment one of the first scholars in Europe for head-master,--a
school which has turned out some of the most remarkable men of the
rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and
takes pains with him accordingly. He is not a mere teacher of hexameters
and sapphics. His learning embraces all literature, ancient and modern.
He is a good writer and a fine critic; admires Wordsworth. He winks at
fighting: his boys know how to use their fists; and they are not in the
habit of signing post-obits before they are fifteen. Merton School is
the place for Kenelm.”

“Thank you,” said Sir Peter. “It is a great comfort in life to find
somebody who can decide for one. I am an irresolute man myself, and in
ordinary matters willingly let Lady Chillingly govern me.”

“I should like to see a wife govern _me_,” said the stout Parson.

“But you are not married to Lady Chillingly. And now let us go into the
garden and look at your dahlias.”



CHAPTER VIII.

THE youthful confuter of Locke was despatched to Merton School, and
ranked, according to his merits, as lag of the penultimate form. When he
came home for the Christmas holidays he was more saturnine than ever;
in fact, his countenance bore the impression of some absorbing grief.
He said, however, that he liked school very well, and eluded all other
questions. But early the next morning he mounted his black pony and
rode to the Parson’s rectory. The reverend gentleman was in his farmyard
examining his bullocks when Kenelm accosted him thus briefly,--

“Sir, I am disgraced, and I shall die of it if you cannot help to set me
right in my own eyes.”

“My dear boy, don’t talk in that way. Come into my study.”

As soon as they entered that room, and the Parson had carefully closed
the door, he took the boy’s arm, turned him round to the light, and saw
at once that there was something very grave on his mind. Chucking him
under the chin, the Parson said cheerily, “Hold up your head, Kenelm. I
am sure you have done nothing unworthy of a gentleman.”

“I don’t know that. I fought a boy very little bigger than myself, and
I have been licked. I did not give in, though; but the other boys picked
me up, for I could not stand any longer; and the fellow is a great
bully; and his name is Butt; and he’s the son of a lawyer; and he got my
head into chancery; and I have challenged him to fight again next
half; and unless you can help me to lick him, I shall never be good for
anything in the world,--never. It will break my heart.”

“I am very glad to hear you have had the pluck to challenge him. Just
let me see how you double your fist. Well, that’s not amiss. Now, put
yourself into a fighting attitude, and hit out at me,--hard! harder!
Pooh! that will never do. You should make your blows as straight as
an arrow. And that’s not the way to stand. Stop,--so: well on your
haunches; weight on the left leg; good! Now, put on these gloves, and
I’ll give you a lesson in boxing.”

Five minutes afterwards Mrs. John Chillingly, entering the room to
summon her husband to breakfast, stood astounded to see him with his
coat off, and parrying the blows of Kenelm, who flew at him like a young
tiger. The good pastor at that moment might certainly have appeared a
fine type of muscular Christianity, but not of that kind of Christianity
out of which one makes Archbishops of Canterbury.

“Good gracious me!” faltered Mrs. John Chillingly; and then, wife-like,
flying to the protection of her husband, she seized Kenelm by the
shoulders, and gave him a good shaking. The Parson, who was sadly out
of breath, was not displeased at the interruption, but took that
opportunity to put on his coat, and said, “We’ll begin again to-morrow.
Now, come to breakfast.” But during breakfast Kenelm’s face still
betrayed dejection, and he talked little and ate less.

As soon as the meal was over, he drew the Parson into the garden and
said, “I have been thinking, sir, that perhaps it is not fair to Butt
that I should be taking these lessons; and if it is not fair, I’d rather
not--”

“Give me your hand, my boy!” cried the Parson, transported. “The name
of Kenelm is not thrown away upon you. The natural desire of man in
his attribute of fighting animal (an attribute in which, I believe, he
excels all other animated beings, except a quail and a gamecock) is to
beat his adversary. But the natural desire of that culmination of man
which we call gentleman is to beat his adversary fairly. A gentleman
would rather be beaten fairly than beat unfairly. Is not that your
thought?”

“Yes,” replied Kenelm, firmly; and then, beginning to philosophize, he
added, “And it stands to reason; because if I beat a fellow unfairly, I
don’t really beat him at all.”

“Excellent! But suppose that you and another boy go into examination
upon Caesar’s Commentaries or the multiplication table, and the other
boy is cleverer than you, but you have taken the trouble to learn the
subject and he has not: should you say you beat him unfairly?”

Kenelm meditated a moment, and then said decidedly, “No.”

“That which applies to the use of your brains applies equally to the use
of your fists. Do you comprehend me?”

“Yes, sir; I do now.”

“In the time of your namesake, Sir Kenelm Digby, gentlemen wore swords,
and they learned how to use them, because, in case of quarrel, they had
to fight with them. Nobody, at least in England, fights with swords
now. It is a democratic age, and if you fight at all, you are reduced to
fists; and if Kenelm Digby learned to fence, so Kenelm Chillingly must
learn to box; and if a gentleman thrashes a drayman twice his size, who
has not learned to box, it is not unfair; it is but an exemplification
of the truth that knowledge is power. Come and take another lesson on
boxing to-morrow.”

Kenelm remounted his pony and returned home. He found his father
sauntering in the garden with a book in his hand. “Papa,” said Kenelm,
“how does one gentleman write to another with whom he has a quarrel,
and he don’t want to make it up, but he has something to say about the
quarrel which it is fair the other gentleman should know?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Well, just before I went to school I remember hearing you say that you
had a quarrel with Lord Hautfort, and that he was an ass, and you would
write and tell him so. When you wrote did you say, ‘You are an ass’? Is
that the way one gentleman writes to another?”

“Upon my honour, Kenelm, you ask very odd questions. But you cannot
learn too early this fact, that irony is to the high-bred what
Billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another
gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank: he implies it in the
politest terms he can invent. Lord Hautfort denies my right of free
warren over a trout-stream that runs through his lands. I don’t care a
rush about the trout-stream, but there is no doubt of my right to fish
in it. He was an ass to raise the question; for, if he had not, I
should not have exercised the right. As he did raise the question, I was
obliged to catch his trout.”

“And you wrote a letter to him?”

“Yes.”

“How did you write, Papa? What did you say?”

“Something like this. ‘Sir Peter Chillingly presents his compliments
to Lord Hautfort, and thinks it fair to his lordship to say that he has
taken the best legal advice with regard to his rights of free warren;
and trusts to be forgiven if he presumes to suggest that Lord Hautfort
might do well to consult his own lawyer before he decides on disputing
them.’”

“Thank you, Papa. I see.”

That evening Kenelm wrote the following letter:--


Mr. Chillingly presents his compliments to Mr. Butt, and thinks it fair
to Mr. Butt to say that he is taking lessons in boxing; and trusts to be
forgiven if he presumes to suggest that Mr. Butt might do well to take
lessons himself before fighting with Mr. Chillingly next half.


“Papa,” said Kenelm the next morning, “I want to write to a schoolfellow
whose name is Butt; he is the son of a lawyer who is called a serjeant.
I don’t know where to direct to him.”

“That is easily ascertained,” said Sir Peter. “Serjeant Butt is an
eminent man, and his address will be in the Court Guide.”

The address was found,--Bloomsbury Square; and Kenelm directed his
letter accordingly. In due course he received this answer,--


You are an insolent little fool, and I’ll thrash you within an inch of
your life.

ROBERT BUTT.


After the receipt of that polite epistle, Kenelm Chillingly’s scruples
vanished, and he took daily lessons in muscular Christianity.

Kenelm returned to school with a brow cleared from care, and three days
after his return he wrote to the Reverend John,--


DEAR SIR,--I have licked Butt. Knowledge is power.

Your affectionate KENELM.

P. S.--Now that I have licked Butt, I have made it up with him.


From that time Kenelm prospered. Eulogistic letters from the illustrious
head-master showered in upon Sir Peter. At the age of sixteen Kenelm
Chillingly was the head of the school, and, quitting it finally,
brought home the following letter from his Orbilius to Sir Peter, marked
“confidential”:--


DEAR SIR PETER CHILLINGLY,--I have never felt more anxious for the
future career of any of my pupils than I do for that of your son. He is
so clever that, with ease to himself, he may become a great man. He is
so peculiar that it is quite as likely that he may only make himself
known to the world as a great oddity. That distinguished teacher Dr.
Arnold said that the difference between one boy and another was not so
much talent as energy. Your son has talent, has energy: yet he wants
something for success in life; he wants the faculty of amalgamation. He
is of a melancholic and therefore unsocial temperament. He will not act
in concert with others. He is lovable enough: the other boys like him,
especially the smaller ones, with whom he is a sort of hero; but he
has not one intimate friend. So far as school learning is concerned,
he might go to college at once, and with the certainty of distinction
provided he chose to exert himself. But if I may venture to offer an
advice, I should say employ the next two years in letting him see
a little more of real life and acquire a due sense of its practical
objects. Send him to a private tutor who is not a pedant, but a man
of letters or a man of the world, and if in the metropolis so much the
better. In a word, my young friend is unlike other people; and, with
qualities that might do anything in life, I fear, unless you can get
him to be like other people, that he will do nothing. Excuse the freedom
with which I write, and ascribe it to the singular interest with which
your son has inspired me. I have the honour to be, dear Sir Peter,

Yours truly, WILLIAM HORTON.


Upon the strength of this letter Sir Peter did not indeed summon another
family council; for he did not consider that his three maiden sisters
could offer any practical advice on the matter. And as to Mr. Gordon,
that gentleman having gone to law on the great timber question, and
having been signally beaten thereon, had informed Sir Peter that he
disowned him as a cousin and despised him as a man; not exactly in those
words,--more covertly, and therefore more stingingly. But Sir Peter
invited Mr. Mivers for a week’s shooting, and requested the Reverend
John to meet him.

Mr. Mivers arrived. The sixteen years that had elapsed since he was
first introduced to the reader had made no perceptible change in his
appearance. It was one of his maxims that in youth a man of the world
should appear older than he is; and in middle age, and thence to his
dying day, younger. And he announced one secret for attaining that art
in these words: “Begin your wig early, thus you never become gray.”

Unlike most philosophers, Mivers made his practice conform to his
precepts; and while in the prime of youth inaugurated a wig in a
fashion that defied the flight of time, not curly and hyacinthine, but
straight-haired and unassuming. He looked five-and-thirty from the day
he put on that wig at the age of twenty-five. He looked five-and-thirty
now at the age of fifty-one.

“I mean,” said he, “to remain thirty-five all my life. No better age to
stick at. People may choose to say I am more, but I shall not own it. No
one is bound to criminate himself.”

Mr. Mivers had some other aphorisms on this important subject. One
was, “Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to
yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on
principle at the onset. It should never be allowed to get in the thin
end of the wedge. But take care of your constitution, and, having
ascertained the best habits for it, keep to them like clockwork.” Mr.
Mivers would not have missed his constitutional walk in the Park before
breakfast if, by going in a cab to St. Giles’s, he could have saved the
city of London from conflagration.

Another aphorism of his was, “If you want to keep young, live in a
metropolis; never stay above a few weeks at a time in the country. Take
two men of similar constitution at the age of twenty-five; let one live
in London and enjoy a regular sort of club life; send the other to some
rural district, preposterously called ‘salubrious.’ Look at these men
when they have both reached the age of forty-five. The London man has
preserved his figure: the rural man has a paunch. The London man has
an interesting delicacy of complexion: the face of the rural man is
coarse-grained and perhaps jowly.”

A third axiom was, “Don’t be a family man; nothing ages one like
matrimonial felicity and paternal ties. Never multiply cares, and pack
up your life in the briefest compass you can. Why add to your carpet-bag
of troubles the contents of a lady’s imperials and bonnet-boxes, and the
travelling _fourgon_ required by the nursery? Shun ambition: it is so
gouty. It takes a great deal out of a man’s life, and gives him nothing
worth having till he has ceased to enjoy it.” Another of his aphorisms
was this, “A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the
day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to
consider it when it becomes to-day.”

Preserving himself by attention to these rules, Mr. Mivers appeared at
Exmundham _totus, teres_, but not _rotundus_,--a man of middle height,
slender, upright, with well-cut, small, slight features, thin lips,
enclosing an excellent set of teeth, even, white, and not indebted
to the dentist. For the sake of those teeth he shunned acid wines,
especially hock in all its varieties, culinary sweets, and hot drinks.
He drank even his tea cold.

“There are,” he said, “two things in life that a sage must preserve at
every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth.
Some evils admit of consolations: there are no comforters for dyspepsia
and toothache.” A man of letters, but a man of the world, he had so
cultivated his mind as both that he was feared as the one and liked as
the other. As a man of letters he despised the world; as a man of the
world he despised letters. As the representative of both he revered
himself.



CHAPTER IX.

ON the evening of the third day from the arrival of Mr. Mivers, he, the
Parson, and Sir Peter were seated in the host’s parlour, the Parson in
an armchair by the ingle, smoking a short cutty-pipe; Mivers at length
on the couch, slowly inhaling the perfumes of one of his own choice
_trabucos_. Sir Peter never smoked. There were spirits and hot water and
lemons on the table. The Parson was famed for skill in the composition
of toddy. From time to time the Parson sipped his glass, and Sir Peter
less frequently did the same. It is needless to say that Mr. Mivers
eschewed toddy; but beside him, on a chair, was a tumbler and a large
carafe of iced water.

SIR PETER.--“Cousin Mivers, you have now had time to study Kenelm,
and to compare his character with that assigned to him in the Doctor’s
letter.”

MIVERS (languidly).--“Ay.”

SIR PETER.--“I ask you, as a man of the world, what you think I had
best do with the boy. Shall I send him to such a tutor as the Doctor
suggests? Cousin John is not of the same mind as the Doctor, and thinks
that Kenelm’s oddities are fine things in their way, and should not be
prematurely ground out of him by contact with worldly tutors and London
pavements.”

“Ay,” repeated Mr. Mivers more languidly than before. After a pause he
added, “Parson John, let us hear you.”

The Parson laid aside his cutty-pipe and emptied his fourth tumbler of
toddy; then, throwing back his head in the dreamy fashion of the great
Coleridge when he indulged in a monologue, he thus began, speaking
somewhat through his nose,--

“At the morning of life--”

Here Mivers shrugged his shoulders, turned round on his couch, and
closed his eyes with the sigh of a man resigning himself to a homily.

“At the morning of life, when the dews--”

“I knew the dews were coming,” said Mivers. “Dry them, if you please;
nothing so unwholesome. We anticipate what you mean to say, which is
plainly this, When a fellow is sixteen he is very fresh: so he is; pass
on; what then?”

“If you mean to interrupt me with your habitual cynicism,” said the
Parson, “why did you ask to hear me?”

“That was a mistake I grant; but who on earth could conceive that you
were going to commence in that florid style? Morning of life indeed!
bosh!”

“Cousin Mivers,” said Sir Peter, “you are not reviewing John’s style in
‘The Londoner;’ and I will beg you to remember that my son’s morning of
life is a serious thing to his father, and not to be nipped in its bud
by a cousin. Proceed, John!”

Quoth the Parson, good-humouredly, “I will adapt my style to the taste
of my critic. When a fellow is at the age of sixteen, and very fresh
to life, the question is whether he should begin thus prematurely to
exchange the ideas that belong to youth for the ideas that properly
belong to middle age,--whether he should begin to acquire that knowledge
of the world which middle-aged men have acquired and can teach. I think
not. I would rather have him yet a while in the company of the poets;
in the indulgence of glorious hopes and beautiful dreams, forming to
himself some type of the Heroic, which he will keep before his eyes as
a standard when he goes into the world as man. There are two schools of
thought for the formation of character,--the Real and the Ideal. I would
form the character in the Ideal school, in order to make it bolder and
grander and lovelier when it takes its place in that every-day life
which is called Real. And therefore I am not for placing the descendant
of Sir Kenelm Digby, in the interval between school and college, with a
man of the world, probably as cynical as Cousin Mivers and living in the
stony thoroughfares of London.”

MR. MIVERS (rousing himself).--“Before we plunge into that Serbonian
bog--the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic
academicians--I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm
to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what
kind of shoes they are to be,--court pumps or strong walking shoes;
and I don’t ask the shoemaker to give me a preliminary lecture upon the
different purposes of locomotion to which leather can be applied. If,
Sir Peter, you want Kenelm to scribble lackadaisical poems, listen to
Parson John; if you want to fill his head with pastoral rubbish about
innocent love, which may end in marrying the miller’s daughter, listen
to Parson John; if you want him to enter life a soft-headed greenhorn,
who will sign any bill carrying 50 per cent to which a young scamp asks
him to be security, listen to Parson John; in fine, if you wish a clever
lad to become either a pigeon or a ring-dove, a credulous booby or a
sentimental milksop, Parson John is the best adviser you can have.”

“But I don’t want my son to ripen into either of those imbecile
developments of species.”

“Then don’t listen to Parson John; and there’s an end of the
discussion.”

“No, there is not. I have not heard your advice what to do if John’s
advice is not to be taken.”

Mr. Mivers hesitated. He seemed puzzled.

“The fact is,” said the Parson, “that Mivers got up ‘The Londoner’
upon a principle that regulates his own mind,--find fault with the way
everything is done, but never commit yourself by saying how anything can
be done better.”

“That is true,” said Mivers, candidly. “The destructive order of mind is
seldom allied to the constructive. I and ‘The Londoner’ are destructive
by nature and by policy. We can reduce a building into rubbish, but we
don’t profess to turn rubbish into a building. We are critics, and, as
you say, not such fools as to commit ourselves to the proposition of
amendments that can be criticised by others. Nevertheless, for your
sake, Cousin Peter, and on the condition that if I give my advice you
will never say that I gave it, and if you take it that you will never
reproach me if it turns out, as most advice does, very ill,--I will
depart from my custom and hazard my opinion.”

“I accept the conditions.”

“Well then, with every new generation there springs up a new order of
ideas. The earlier the age at which a man seizes the ideas that will
influence his own generation, the more he has a start in the race with
his contemporaries. If Kenelm comprehends at sixteen those intellectual
signs of the time which, when he goes up to college, he will find young
men of eighteen or twenty only just _prepared_ to comprehend, he
will produce a deep impression of his powers for reasoning and their
adaptation to actual life, which will be of great service to him later.
Now the ideas that influence the mass of the rising generation never
have their well-head in the generation itself. They have their source in
the generation before them, generally in a small minority, neglected or
contemned by the great majority which adopt them later. Therefore a lad
at the age of sixteen, if he wants to get at such ideas, must come
into close contact with some superior mind in which they were conceived
twenty or thirty years before. I am consequently for placing Kenelm with
a person from whom the new ideas can be learned. I am also for his being
placed in the metropolis during the process of this initiation. With
such introductions as are at our command, he may come in contact not
only with new ideas, but with eminent men in all vocations. It is a
great thing to mix betimes with clever people. One picks their brains
unconsciously. There is another advantage, and not a small one, in
this early entrance into good society. A youth learns manners,
self-possession, readiness of resource; and he is much less likely to
get into scrapes and contract tastes for low vices and mean dissipation,
when he comes into life wholly his own master, after having acquired
a predilection for refined companionship under the guidance of those
competent to select it. There, I have talked myself out of breath. And
you had better decide at once in favour of my advice; for as I am of a
contradictory temperament, myself of to-morrow may probably contradict
myself of to-day.”

Sir Peter was greatly impressed with his cousin’s argumentative
eloquence.

The Parson smoked his cutty-pipe in silence until appealed to by Sir
Peter, and he then said, “In this programme of education for a Christian
gentleman, the part of Christian seems to me left out.”

“The tendency of the age,” observed Mr. Mivers, calmly, “is towards that
omission. Secular education is the necessary reaction from the special
theological training which arose in the dislike of one set of Christians
to the teaching of another set; and as these antagonists will not agree
how religion is to be taught, either there must be no teaching at all,
or religion must be eliminated from the tuition.”

“That may do very well for some huge system of national education,” said
Sir Peter, “but it does not apply to Kenelm, as one of a family all of
whose members belong to the Established Church. He may be taught the
creed of his forefathers without offending a Dissenter.”

“Which Established Church is he to belong to?” asked Mr. Mivers,--“High
Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Puseyite Church, Ritualistic Church,
or any other Established Church that may be coming into fashion?”

“Pshaw!” said the Parson. “That sneer is out of place. You know very
well that one merit of our Church is the spirit of toleration, which
does not magnify every variety of opinion into a heresy or a schism.
But if Sir Peter sends his son at the age of sixteen to a tutor who
eliminates the religion of Christianity from his teaching, he deserves
to be thrashed within an inch of his life; and,” continued the Parson,
eying Sir Peter sternly, and mechanically turning up his cuffs, “I
should _like_ to thrash him.”

“Gently, John,” said Sir Peter, recoiling; “gently, my dear kinsman. My
heir shall not be educated as a heathen, and Mivers is only bantering
us. Come, Mivers, do you happen to know among your London friends some
man who, though a scholar and a man of the world, is still a Christian?”

“A Christian as by law established?”

“Well--yes.”

“And who will receive Kenelm as a pupil?”

“Of course I am not putting such questions to you out of idle
curiosity.”

“I know exactly the man. He was originally intended for orders, and is
a very learned theologian. He relinquished the thought of the clerical
profession on succeeding to a small landed estate by the sudden death of
an elder brother. He then came to London and bought experience: that
is, he was naturally generous; he became easily taken in; got into
difficulties; the estate was transferred to trustees for the benefit of
creditors, and on the payment of L400 a year to himself. By this time
he was married and had two children. He found the necessity of employing
his pen in order to add to his income, and is one of the ablest
contributors to the periodical press. He is an elegant scholar, an
effective writer, much courted by public men, a thorough gentleman, has
a pleasant house, and receives the best society. Having been once taken
in, he defies any one to take him in again. His experience was not
bought too dearly. No more acute and accomplished man of the world. The
three hundred a year or so that you would pay for Kenelm would suit him
very well. His name is Welby, and he lives in Chester Square.”

“No doubt he is a contributor to ‘The Londoner,’” said the Parson,
sarcastically.

“True. He writes our classical, theological, and metaphysical articles.
Suppose I invite him to come here for a day or two, and you can see him
and judge for yourself, Sir Peter?”

“Do.”



CHAPTER X.

MR. WELBY arrived, and pleased everybody. A man of the happiest manners,
easy and courteous. There was no pedantry in him, yet you could soon see
that his reading covered an extensive surface, and here and there
had dived deeply. He enchanted the Parson by his comments on Saint
Chrysostom; he dazzled Sir Peter with his lore in the antiquities of
ancient Britain; he captivated Kenelm by his readiness to enter into
that most disputatious of sciences called metaphysics; while for Lady
Chillingly, and the three sisters who were invited to meet him, he was
more entertaining, but not less instructive. Equally at home in novels
and in good books, he gave to the spinsters a list of innocent works
in either; while for Lady Chillingly he sparkled with anecdotes of
fashionable life, the newest _bons mots_, the latest scandals. In fact,
Mr. Welby was one of those brilliant persons who adorn any society
amidst which they are thrown. If at heart he was a disappointed man,
the disappointment was concealed by an even serenity of spirits; he
had entertained high and justifiable hopes of a brilliant career and a
lasting reputation as a theologian and a preacher; the succession to
his estate at the age of twenty-three had changed the nature of his
ambition. The charm of his manner was such that he sprang at once into
the fashion, and became beguiled by his own genial temperament into that
lesser but pleasanter kind of ambition which contents itself with social
successes and enjoys the present hour. When his circumstances compelled
him to eke out his income by literary profits, he slid into the grooves
of periodical composition, and resigned all thoughts of the labour
required for any complete work, which might take much time and be
attended with scanty profits. He still remained very popular in society,
and perhaps his general reputation for ability made him fearful to
hazard it by any great undertaking. He was not, like Mivers, a despiser
of all men and all things; but he regarded men and things as an
indifferent though good-natured spectator regards the thronging streets
from a drawing-room window. He could not be called _blase_, but he was
thoroughly _desillusionne_. Once over-romantic, his character now was so
entirely imbued with the neutral tints of life that romance offended his
taste as an obtrusion of violent colour into a sober woof. He was become
a thorough Realist in his code of criticism, and in his worldly mode
of action and thought. But Parson John did not perceive this, for
Welby listened to that gentleman’s eulogies on the Ideal school without
troubling himself to contradict them. He had grown too indolent to be
combative in conversation, and only as a critic betrayed such pugnacity
as remained to him by the polished cruelty of sarcasm.

He came off with flying colours through an examination into his Church
orthodoxy instituted by the Parson and Sir Peter. Amid a cloud of
ecclesiastical erudition, his own opinions vanished in those of the
Fathers. In truth, he was a Realist, in religion as in everything else.
He regarded Christianity as a type of existent civilization, which
ought to be reverenced, as one might recognize the other types of that
civilization; such as the liberty of the press, the representative
system, white neckcloths and black coats of an evening, etc. He
belonged, therefore, to what he himself called the school of Eclectical
Christiology; and accommodated the reasonings of Deism to the doctrines
of the Church, if not as a creed, at least as an institution. Finally,
he united all the Chillingly votes in his favour; and when he departed
from the Hall carried off Kenelm for his initiation into the new ideas
that were to govern his generation.



CHAPTER XI.

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.



CHAPTER XII.

THERE had been great festivities at Exmundham, in celebration of the
honour bestowed upon the world by the fact that Kenelm Chillingly had
lived twenty-one years in it.

The young heir had made a speech to the assembled tenants and other
admitted revellers, which had by no means added to the exhilaration of
the proceedings. He spoke with a fluency and self-possession which were
surprising in a youth addressing a multitude for the first time. But his
speech was not cheerful.

The principal tenant on the estate, in proposing his health, had
naturally referred to the long line of his ancestors. His father’s
merits as man and landlord had been enthusiastically commemorated; and
many happy auguries for his own future career had been drawn, partly
from the excellences of his parentage, partly from his own youthful
promise in the honours achieved at the University.

Kenelm Chillingly in reply largely availed himself of those new ideas
which were to influence the rising generation, and with which he had
been rendered familiar by the journal of Mr. Mivers and the conversation
of Mr. Welby.

He briefly disposed of the ancestral part of the question. He observed
that it was singular to note how long any given family or dynasty could
continue to flourish in any given nook of matter in creation, without
any exhibition of intellectual powers beyond those displayed by a
succession of vegetable crops. “It is certainly true,” he said, “that
the Chillinglys have lived in this place from father to son for about a
fourth part of the history of the world, since the date which Sir Isaac
Newton assigns to the Deluge. But, so far as can be judged by existent
records, the world has not been in any way wiser or better for their
existence. They were born to eat as long as they could eat, and when
they could eat no longer they died. Not that in this respect they were
a whit less insignificant than the generality of their fellow-creatures.
Most of us now present,” continued the youthful orator, “are only born
in order to die; and the chief consolation of our wounded pride in
admitting this fact is in the probability that our posterity will not
be of more consequence to the scheme of Nature than we ourselves are.”
 Passing from that philosophical view of his own ancestors in particular,
and of the human race in general, Kenelm Chillingly then touched with
serene analysis on the eulogies lavished on his father as man and
landlord.

“As man,” he said, “my father no doubt deserves all that can be said
by man in favour of man. But what, at the best, is man? A crude,
struggling, undeveloped embryo, of whom it is the highest attribute that
he feels a vague consciousness that he is only an embryo, and cannot
complete himself till he ceases to be a man; that is, until he becomes
another being in another form of existence. We can praise a dog as
a dog, because a dog is a completed _ens_, and not an embryo. But to
praise a man as man, forgetting that he is only a germ out of which a
form wholly different is ultimately to spring, is equally opposed
to Scriptural belief in his present crudity and imperfection, and to
psychological or metaphysical examination of a mental construction
evidently designed for purposes that he can never fulfil as man. That my
father is an embryo not more incomplete than any present is quite true;
but that, you will see on reflection, is saying very little on his
behalf. Even in the boasted physical formation of us men, you are
aware that the best-shaped amongst us, according to the last scientific
discoveries, is only a development of some hideous hairy animal, such
as a gorilla; and the ancestral gorilla itself had its own aboriginal
forefather in a small marine animal shaped like a two-necked bottle. The
probability is that, some day or other, we shall be exterminated by a
new development of species.

“As for the merits assigned to my father as landlord, I must
respectfully dissent from the panegyrics so rashly bestowed on him. For
all sound reasoners must concur in this, that the first duty of an owner
of land is not to the occupiers to whom he leases it, but to the nation
at large. It is his duty to see that the land yields to the community
the utmost it can yield. In order to effect this object, a landlord
should put up his farms to competition, exacting the highest rent he can
possibly get from responsible competitors. Competitive examination is
the enlightened order of the day, even in professions in which the best
men would have qualities that defy examination. In agriculture, happily,
the principle of competitive examination is not so hostile to the choice
of the best man as it must be, for instance, in diplomacy, where a
Talleyrand would be excluded for knowing no language but his own; and
still more in the army, where promotion would be denied to an officer
who, like Marlborough, could not spell. But in agriculture a landlord
has only to inquire who can give the highest rent, having the largest
capital, subject by the strictest penalties of law to the conditions of
a lease dictated by the most scientific agriculturists under penalties
fixed by the most cautious conveyancers. By this mode of procedure,
recommended by the most liberal economists of our age,--barring those
still more liberal who deny that property in land is any property at
all,--by this mode of procedure, I say, a landlord does his duty to his
country. He secures tenants who can produce the most to the community by
their capital, tested through competitive examination in their bankers’
accounts and the security they can give, and through the rigidity of
covenants suggested by a Liebig and reduced into law by a Chitty. But on
my father’s land I see a great many tenants with little skill and less
capital, ignorant of a Liebig and revolting from a Chitty, and no
filial enthusiasm can induce me honestly to say that my father is a good
landlord. He has preferred his affection for individuals to his duties
to the community. It is not, my friends, a question whether a handful of
farmers like yourselves go to the workhouse or not. It is a consumer’s
question. Do you produce the maximum of corn to the consumer?

“With respect to myself,” continued the orator, warming as the cold
he had engendered in his audience became more freezingly felt,--“with
respect to myself, I do not deny that, owing to the accident of training
for a very faulty and contracted course of education, I have obtained
what are called ‘honours’ at the University of Cambridge; but you must
not regard that fact as a promise of any worth in my future passage
through life. Some of the most useless persons--especially narrow-minded
and bigoted--have acquired far higher honours at the University than
have fallen to my lot.

“I thank you no less for the civil things you have said of me and of my
family; but I shall endeavour to walk to that grave to which we are all
bound with a tranquil indifference as to what people may say of me in
so short a journey. And the sooner, my friends, we get to our journey’s
end, the better our chance of escaping a great many pains, troubles,
sins, and diseases. So that when I drink to your good healths, you must
feel that in reality I wish you an early deliverance from the ills to
which flesh is exposed, and which so generally increase with our years
that good health is scarcely compatible with the decaying faculties of
old age. Gentlemen, your good healths!”



CHAPTER XIII.

THE morning after these birthday rejoicings, Sir Peter and Lady
Chillingly held a long consultation on the peculiarities of their heir,
and the best mode of instilling into his mind the expediency either
of entertaining more pleasing views, or at least of professing less
unpopular sentiments; compatibly of course, though they did not say it,
with the new ideas that were to govern his century. Having come to an
agreement on this delicate subject, they went forth, arm in arm, in
search of their heir. Kenelm seldom met them at breakfast. He was an
early riser, and accustomed to solitary rambles before his parents were
out of bed.

The worthy pair found Kenelm seated on the banks of a trout-stream that
meandered through Chillingly Park, dipping his line into the water, and
yawning, with apparent relief in that operation.

“Does fishing amuse you, my boy?” said Sir Peter, heartily.

“Not in the least, sir,” answered Kenelm.

“Then why do you do it?” asked Lady Chillingly.

“Because I know nothing else that amuses me more.”

“Ah! that is it,” said Sir Peter: “the whole secret of Kenelm’s oddities
is to be found in these words, my dear; he needs amusement. Voltaire
says truly, ‘Amusement is one of the wants of man.’ And if Kenelm could
be amused like other people, he would be like other people.”

“In that case,” said Kenelm, gravely, and extracting from the water
a small but lively trout, which settled itself in Lady Chillingly’s
lap,--“in that case I would rather not be amused. I have no interest
in the absurdities of other people. The instinct of self-preservation
compels me to have some interest in my own.”

“Kenelm, sir,” exclaimed Lady Chillingly, with an animation into which
her tranquil ladyship was very rarely betrayed, “take away that horrid
damp thing! Put down your rod and attend to what your father says. Your
strange conduct gives us cause of serious anxiety.”

Kenelm unhooked the trout, deposited the fish in his basket, and raising
his large eyes to his father’s face, said, “What is there in my conduct
that occasions you displeasure?”

“Not displeasure, Kenelm,” said Sir Peter, kindly, “but anxiety; your
mother has hit upon the right word. You see, my dear son, that it is
my wish that you should distinguish yourself in the world. You might
represent this county, as your ancestors have done before. I have looked
forward to the proceedings of yesterday as an admirable occasion for
your introduction to your future constituents. Oratory is the talent
most appreciated in a free country, and why should you not be an orator?
Demosthenes says that delivery, delivery, delivery, is the art of
oratory; and your delivery is excellent, graceful, self-possessed,
classical.”

“Pardon me, my dear father, Demosthenes does not say delivery,
nor action, as the word is commonly rendered; he says, ‘acting, or
stage-play,’--the art by which a man delivers a speech in a feigned
character, whence we get the word hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy,
hypocrisy! is, according to Demosthenes, the triple art of the orator.
Do you wish me to become triply a hypocrite?”

“Kenelm, I am ashamed of you. You know as well as I do that it is only
by metaphor that you can twist the word ascribed to the great Athenian
into the sense of hypocrisy. But assuming it, as you say, to mean not
delivery, but acting, I understand why your debut as an orator was
not successful. Your delivery was excellent, your acting defective.
An orator should please, conciliate, persuade, prepossess. You did the
reverse of all this; and though you produced a great effect, the effect
was so decidedly to your disadvantage that it would have lost you an
election on any hustings in England.”

“Am I to understand, my dear father,” said Kenelm, in the mournful and
compassionate tones with which a pious minister of the Church reproves
some abandoned and hoary sinner,--“am I to understand that you would
commend to your son the adoption of deliberate falsehood for the gain of
a selfish advantage?”

“Deliberate falsehood! you impertinent puppy!”

“Puppy!” repeated Kenelm, not indignantly but musingly,--“puppy! a
well-bred puppy takes after its parents.”

Sir Peter burst out laughing.

Lady Chillingly rose with dignity, shook her gown, unfolded her parasol,
and stalked away speechless.

“Now, look you, Kenelm,” said Sir Peter, as soon as he had composed
himself. “These quips and humours of yours are amusing enough to an
eccentric man like myself, but they will not do for the world; and
how at your age, and with the rare advantages you have had in an early
introduction to the best intellectual society, under the guidance of a
tutor acquainted with the new ideas which are to influence the
conduct of statesmen, you could have made so silly a speech as you did
yesterday, I cannot understand.”

“My dear father, allow me to assure you that the ideas I expressed are
the new ideas most in vogue,--ideas expressed in still plainer, or, if
you prefer the epithet, still sillier terms than I employed. You will
find them instilled into the public mind by ‘The Londoner’ and by most
intellectual journals of a liberal character.”

“Kenelm, Kenelm, such ideas would turn the world topsy-turvy.”

“New ideas always do tend to turn old ideas topsy-turvy. And the world,
after all, is only an idea, which is turned topsy-turvy with every
successive century.”

“You make me sick of the word ‘ideas.’ Leave off your metaphysics and
study real life.”

“It is real life which I did study under Mr. Welby. He is the
Archimandrite of Realism. It is sham life which you wish me to study. To
oblige you I am willing to commence it. I dare say it is very pleasant.
Real life is not; on the contrary--dull,” and Kenelm yawned again.

“Have you no young friends among your fellow-collegians?”

“Friends! certainly not, sir. But I believe I have some enemies, who
answer the same purpose as friends, only they don’t hurt one so much.”

“Do you mean to say that you lived alone at Cambridge?”

“No, I lived a good deal with Aristophanes, and a little with Conic
Sections and Hydrostatics.”

“Books. Dry company.”

“More innocent, at least, than moist company. Did you ever get drunk,
sir?”

“Drunk!”

“I tried to do so once with the young companions whom you would commend
to me as friends. I don’t think I succeeded, but I woke with a headache.
Real life at college abounds with headache.”

“Kenelm, my boy, one thing is clear: you must travel.”

“As you please, sir. Marcus Antoninus says that it is all one to a stone
whether it be thrown upwards or downwards. When shall I start?”

“Very soon. Of course there are preparations to make; you should have a
travelling companion. I don’t mean a tutor,--you are too clever and
too steady to need one,--but a pleasant, sensible, well-mannered young
person of your own age.”

“My own age,--male or female?”

Sir Peter tried hard to frown. The utmost he could do was to reply
gravely, “FEMALE! If I said you were too steady to need a tutor, it was
because you have hitherto seemed little likely to be led out of your
way by female allurements. Among your other studies may I inquire if you
have included that which no man has ever yet thoroughly mastered,--the
study of women?”

“Certainly. Do you object to my catching another trout?”

“Trout be--blessed, or the reverse. So you have studied woman. I should
never have thought it. Where and when did you commence that department
of science?”

“When? ever since I was ten years old. Where? first in your own house,
then at college. Hush!--a bite,” and another trout left its native
element and alighted on Sir Peter’s nose, whence it was solemnly
transferred to the basket.

“At ten years old, and in my own house! That flaunting hussy Jane, the
under-housemaid--”

“Jane! No, sir. Pamela, Miss Byron, Clarissa,--females in Richardson,
who, according to Dr. Johnson, ‘taught the passions to move at the
command of virtue.’ I trust for your sake that Dr. Johnson did not err
in that assertion, for I found all these females at night in your own
private apartments.”

“Oh!” said Sir Peter, “that’s all?”

“All I remember at ten years old,” replied Kenelm.

“And at Mr. Welby’s or at college,” proceeded Sir Peter, timorously,
“was your acquaintance with females of the same kind?”

Kenelm shook his head. “Much worse: they were very naughty indeed at
college.”

“I should think so, with such a lot of young fellows running after
them.”

“Very few fellows run after the females. I mean--rather avoid them.”

“So much the better.”

“No, my father, so much the worse; without an intimate knowledge of
those females there is little use going to college at all.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Every one who receives a classical education is introduced into their
society,--Pyrrha and Lydia, Glycera and Corinna, and many more of the
same sort; and then the females in Aristophanes, what do you say to
them, sir?”

“Is it only females who lived two thousand or three thousand years ago,
or more probably never lived at all, whose intimacy you have cultivated?
Have you never admired any real women?”

“Real women! I never met one. Never met a woman who was not a sham,
a sham from the moment she is told to be pretty-behaved, conceal her
sentiments, and look fibs when she does not speak them. But if I am to
learn sham life, I suppose I must put up with sham women.”

“Have you been crossed in love that you speak so bitterly of the sex?”

“I don’t speak bitterly of the sex. Examine any woman on her oath, and
she’ll own she is a sham, always has been, and always will be, and is
proud of it.”

“I am glad your mother is not by to hear you. You will think differently
one of these days. Meanwhile, to turn to the other sex, is there no
young man of your own rank with whom you would like to travel?”

“Certainly not. I hate quarrelling.”

“As you please. But you cannot go quite alone: I will find you a good
travelling-servant. I must write to town to-day about your preparations,
and in another week or so I hope all will be ready. Your allowance will
be whatever you like to fix it at; you have never been extravagant,
and--boy--I love you. Amuse yourself, enjoy yourself, and come back
cured of your oddities, but preserving your honour.”

Sir Peter bent down and kissed his son’s brow. Kenelm was moved; he
rose, put his arm round his father’s shoulder, and lovingly said, in
an undertone, “If ever I am tempted to do a base thing, may I remember
whose son I am: I shall be safe then.” He withdrew his arm as he said
this, and took his solitary way along the banks of the stream, forgetful
of rod and line.



CHAPTER XIV.

THE young man continued to skirt the side of the stream until he reached
the boundary pale of the park. Here, placed on a rough grass mound,
some former proprietor, of a social temperament, had built a kind of
belvidere, so as to command a cheerful view of the high road below.
Mechanically the heir of the Chillinglys ascended the mound, seated
himself within the belvidere, and leaned his chin on his hand in a
thoughtful attitude. It was rarely that the building was honoured by a
human visitor: its habitual occupants were spiders. Of those industrious
insects it was a well-populated colony. Their webs, darkened with
dust and ornamented with the wings and legs and skeletons of many an
unfortunate traveller, clung thick to angle and window-sill, festooned
the rickety table on which the young man leaned his elbow, and described
geometrical circles and rhomboids between the gaping rails that formed
the backs of venerable chairs. One large black spider--who was probably
the oldest inhabitant, and held possession of the best place by the
window, ready to offer perfidious welcome to every winged itinerant
who might be tempted to turn aside from the high road for the sake of
a little cool and repose--rushed from its innermost penetralia at the
entrance of Kenelm, and remained motionless in the centre of its meshes,
staring at him. It did not seem quite sure whether the stranger was too
big or not.

“It is a wonderful proof of the wisdom of Providence,” said Kenelm,
“that whenever any large number of its creatures forms a community
or class, a secret element of disunion enters into the hearts of the
individuals forming the congregation, and prevents their co-operating
heartily and effectually for their common interest. ‘The fleas would
have dragged me out of bed if they had been unanimous,’ said the great
Mr. Curran; and there can be no doubt that if all the spiders in this
commonwealth would unite to attack me in a body, I should fall a victim
to their combined nippers. But spiders, though inhabiting the same
region, constituting the same race, animated by the same instincts,
do not combine even against a butterfly: each seeks his own special
advantage, and not that of the community at large. And how completely
the life of each thing resembles a circle in this respect, that it can
never touch another circle at more than one point. Nay, I doubt if it
quite touches it even there,--there is a space between every atom; self
is always selfish: and yet there are eminent masters in the Academe of
New Ideas who wish to make us believe that all the working classes of a
civilized world could merge every difference of race, creed, intellect,
individual propensities and interests into the construction of a single
web, stocked as a larder in common!” Here the soliloquist came to a dead
stop, and, leaning out of the window, contemplated the high road. It was
a very fine high road, straight and level, kept in excellent order by
turn pikes at every eight miles. A pleasant greensward bordered it on
either side, and under the belvidere the benevolence of some mediaeval
Chillingly had placed a little drinking-fountain for the refreshment of
wayfarers. Close to the fountain stood a rude stone bench, overshadowed
by a large willow, and commanding from the high table-ground on which
it was placed a wide view of cornfields, meadows, and distant hills,
suffused in the mellow light of the summer sun. Along that road there
came successively a wagon filled with passengers seated on straw,--an
old woman, a pretty girl, two children; then a stout farmer going to
market in his dog-cart; then three flies carrying fares to the nearest
railway station; then a handsome young man on horseback, a handsome
young lady by his side, a groom behind. It was easy to see that the
young man and young lady were lovers. See it in his ardent looks and
serious lips parted but for whispers only to be heard by her; see it
in her downcast eyes and heightened colour. “‘Alas! regardless of
their doom,’” muttered Kenelm, “what trouble those ‘little victims’
are preparing for themselves and their progeny! Would I could lend them
Decimus Roach’s ‘Approach to the Angels’!” The road now for some minutes
became solitary and still, when there was heard to the right a sprightly
sort of carol, half sung, half recited, in musical voice, with a
singularly clear enunciation, so that the words reached Kenelm’s ear
distinctly. They ran thus:--


 “Black Karl looked forth from his cottage door,
   He looked on the forest green;
  And down the path, with his dogs before,
   Came the Ritter of Neirestein:
  Singing, singing, lustily singing,
   Down the path with his dogs before,
  Came the Ritter of Neirestein.”


At a voice so English, attuned to a strain so Germanic, Kenelm pricked
up attentive ears, and, turning his eye down the road, beheld, emerging
from the shade of beeches that overhung the park pales, a figure that
did not altogether harmonize with the idea of a Ritter of Neirestein. It
was, nevertheless, a picturesque figure enough. The man was attired in a
somewhat threadbare suit of Lincoln green, with a high-crowned Tyrolese
hat; a knapsack was slung behind his shoulders, and he was attended by a
white Pomeranian dog, evidently foot-sore, but doing his best to appear
proficient in the chase by limping some yards in advance of his master,
and sniffing into the hedges for rats and mice, and such small deer.

By the time the pedestrian had reached to the close of his refrain he
had gained the fountain, and greeted it with an exclamation of pleasure.
Slipping the knapsack from his shoulder, he filled the iron ladle
attached to the basin. He then called the dog by the name of Max, and
held the ladle for him to drink. Not till the animal had satisfied his
thirst did the master assuage his own. Then, lifting his hat and bathing
his temples and face, the pedestrian seated himself on the bench,
and the dog nestled on the turf at his feet. After a little pause the
wayfarer began again, though in a lower and slower tone, to chant his
refrain, and proceeded, with abrupt snatches, to link the verse on
to another stanza. It was evident that he was either endeavouring to
remember or to invent, and it seemed rather like the latter and more
laborious operation of mind.


 “‘Why on foot, why on foot, Ritter Karl,’ quoth he,
   ‘And not on thy palfrey gray?’


Palfrey gray--hum--gray.


 “‘The run of ill-luck was too strong for me,
   ‘And has galloped my steed away.’


That will do: good!”

“Good indeed! He is easily satisfied,” muttered Kenelm. “But such
pedestrians don’t pass the road every day. Let us talk to him.” So
saying he slipped quietly out of the window, descended the mound,
and letting himself into the road by a screened wicket-gate, took his
noiseless stand behind the wayfarer and beneath the bowery willow.

The man had now sunk into silence. Perhaps he had tired himself of
rhymes; or perhaps the mechanism of verse-making had been replaced by
that kind of sentiment, or that kind of revery, which is common to the
temperaments of those who indulge in verse-making. But the loveliness
of the scene before him had caught his eye, and fixed it into an intent
gaze upon wooded landscapes stretching farther and farther to the range
of hills on which the heaven seemed to rest.

“I should like to hear the rest of that German ballad,” said a voice,
abruptly.

The wayfarer started, and, turning round, presented to Kenelm’s view
a countenance in the ripest noon of manhood, with locks and beard of a
deep rich auburn, bright blue eyes, and a wonderful nameless charm both
of feature and expression, very cheerful, very frank, and not without a
certain nobleness of character which seemed to exact respect.

“I beg your pardon for my interruption,” said Kenelm, lifting his hat:
“but I overheard you reciting; and though I suppose your verses are a
translation from the German, I don’t remember anything like them in such
popular German poets as I happen to have read.”

“It is not a translation, sir,” replied the itinerant. “I was only
trying to string together some ideas that came into my head this fine
morning.”

“You are a poet, then?” said Kenelm, seating himself on the bench.

“I dare not say poet. I am a verse-maker.”

“Sir, I know there is a distinction. Many poets of the present day,
considered very good, are uncommonly bad verse-makers. For my part, I
could more readily imagine them to be good poets if they did not make
verses at all. But can I not hear the rest of the ballad?”

“Alas! the rest of the ballad is not yet made. It is rather a long
subject, and my flights are very brief.”

“That is much in their favour, and very unlike the poetry in fashion.
You do not belong, I think, to this neighbourhood. Are you and your dog
travelling far?”

“It is my holiday time, and I ramble on through the summer. I am
travelling far, for I travel till September. Life amid summer fields is
a very joyous thing.”

“Is it indeed?” said Kenelm, with much _naivete_. “I should have thought
that long before September you would have got very much bored with the
fields and the dog and yourself altogether. But, to be sure, you
have the resource of verse-making, and that seems a very pleasant and
absorbing occupation to those who practise it,--from our old friend
Horace, kneading laboured Alcaics into honey in his summer rambles among
the watered woodlands of Tibur, to Cardinal Richelieu, employing himself
on French rhymes in the intervals between chopping off noblemen’s heads.
It does not seem to signify much whether the verses be good or bad,
so far as the pleasure of the verse-maker himself is concerned; for
Richelieu was as much charmed with his occupation as Horace was, and his
verses were certainly not Horatian.”

“Surely at your age, sir, and with your evident education--”

“Say culture; that’s the word in fashion nowadays.”

“Well, your evident culture, you must have made verses.”

“Latin verses, yes; and occasionally Greek. I was obliged to do so at
school. It did not amuse me.”

“Try English.”

Kenelm shook his head. “Not I. Every cobbler should stick to his last.”

“Well, put aside the verse-making: don’t you find a sensible
enjoyment in those solitary summer walks, when you have Nature all to
yourself,--enjoyment in marking all the mobile evanescent changes in her
face,--her laugh, her smile, her tears, her very frown!”

“Assuming that by Nature you mean a mechanical series of external
phenomena, I object to your speaking of a machinery as if it were a
person of the feminine gender,--_her_ laugh, _her_ smile, etc. As
well talk of the laugh and smile of a steam-engine. But to descend to
common-sense. I grant there is some pleasure in solitary rambles in fine
weather and amid varying scenery. You say that it is a holiday excursion
that you are enjoying. I presume, therefore, that you have some
practical occupation which consumes the time that you do not devote to a
holiday?”

“Yes; I am not altogether an idler. I work sometimes, though not so hard
as I ought. ‘Life is earnest,’ as the poet says. But I and my dog are
rested now, and as I have still a long walk before me I must wish you
good-day.”

“I fear,” said Kenelm, with a grave and sweet politeness of tone and
manner, which he could command at times, and which, in its difference
from merely conventional urbanity, was not without fascination,--“I
fear that I have offended you by a question that must have seemed to you
inquisitive, perhaps impertinent; accept my excuse: it is very rarely
that I meet any one who interests me; and you do.” As he spoke he
offered his hand, which the wayfarer shook very cordially.

“I should be a churl indeed if your question could have given me
offence. It is rather perhaps I who am guilty of impertinence, if I
take advantage of my seniority in years and tender you a counsel. Do not
despise Nature or regard her as a steam-engine; you will find in her
a very agreeable and conversable friend if you will cultivate her
intimacy. And I don’t know a better mode of doing so at your age, and
with your strong limbs, than putting a knapsack on your shoulders and
turning foot-traveller like myself.”

“Sir, I thank you for your counsel; and I trust we may meet again
and interchange ideas as to the thing you call Nature,--a thing which
science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist
Nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all
matter that it contemplates: science turns all that is already gifted
with soul into matter. Good-day, sir.”

Here Kenelm turned back abruptly, and the traveller went his way,
silently and thoughtfully.



CHAPTER XV.

KENELM retraced his steps homeward under the shade of his “old
hereditary trees.” One might have thought his path along the
greenswards, and by the side of the babbling rivulet, was pleasanter and
more conducive to peaceful thoughts than the broad, dusty thoroughfare
along which plodded the wanderer he had quitted. But the man addicted to
revery forms his own landscapes and colours his own skies.

“It is,” soliloquized Kenelm Chillingly, “a strange yearning I have
long felt,--to get out of myself, to get, as it were, into another man’s
skin, and have a little variety of thought and emotion. One’s self is
always the same self; and that is why I yawn so often. But if I can’t
get into another man’s skin, the next best thing is to get as unlike
myself as I possibly can do. Let me see what is myself. Myself is
Kenelm Chillingly, son and heir to a rich gentleman. But a fellow with
a knapsack on his back, sleeping at wayside inns, is not at all like
Kenelm Chillingly; especially if he is very short of money and may come
to want a dinner. Perhaps that sort of fellow may take a livelier view
of things: he can’t take a duller one. Courage, Myself: you and I can
but try.”

For the next two days Kenelm was observed to be unusually pleasant. He
yawned much less frequently, walked with his father, played piquet
with his mother, was more like other people. Sir Peter was charmed:
he ascribed this happy change to the preparations he was making
for Kenelm’s travelling in style. The proud father was in active
correspondence with his great London friends, seeking letters of
introduction for Kenelm to all the courts of Europe. Portmanteaus, with
every modern convenience, were ordered; an experienced courier, who
could talk all languages and cook French dishes if required, was
invited to name his terms. In short, every arrangement worthy a young
patrician’s entrance into the great world was in rapid progress, when
suddenly Kenelm Chillingly disappeared, leaving behind him on Sir
Peter’s library table the following letter:--


MY VERY DEAR FATHER,--Obedient to your desire, I depart in search of
real life and real persons, or of the best imitations of them. Forgive
me, I beseech you, if I commence that search in my own way. I have seen
enough of ladies and gentlemen for the present: they must be all very
much alike in every part of the world. You desired me to be amused. I
go to try if that be possible. Ladies and gentlemen are not amusing; the
more ladylike or gentlemanlike they are, the more insipid I find them.
My dear father, I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don
Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only
people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books.
I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of
money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience,
and the first fees are heavy. In fact, I have put fifty pounds into my
pocket-book and into my purse five sovereigns and seventeen shillings.
This sum ought to last me a year; but I dare say inexperience will do
me out of it in a month, so we will count it as nothing. Since you have
asked me to fix my own allowance, I will beg you kindly to commence it
this day in advance, by an order to your banker to cash my checks to the
amount of five pounds, and to the same amount monthly; namely, at the
rate of sixty pounds a year. With that sum I can’t starve, and if I
want more it may be amusing to work for it. Pray don’t send after me,
or institute inquiries, or disturb the household and set all the
neighbourhood talking, by any mention either of my project or of your
surprise at it. I will not fail to write to you from time to time.
You will judge best what to say to my dear mother. If you tell her the
truth, which of course I should do did I tell her anything, my request
is virtually frustrated, and I shall be the talk of the county. You,
I know, don’t think telling fibs is immoral when it happens to be
convenient, as it would be in this case.

I expect to be absent a year or eighteen months; if I prolong my travels
it shall be in the way you proposed. I will then take my place in polite
society, call upon you to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account
to any extent required by that world of fiction which is peopled by
illusions and governed by shams.

Heaven bless you, my dear Father, and be quite sure that if I get into
any trouble requiring a friend, it is to you I shall turn. As yet I have
no other friend on earth, and with prudence and good luck I may escape
the infliction of any other friend.

   Yours ever affectionately,

     KENELM.

P. S.--Dear Father, I open my letter in your library to say again “Bless
you,” and to tell you how fondly I kissed your old beaver gloves, which
I found on the table.


When Sir Peter came to that postscript he took off his spectacles and
wiped them: they were very moist.

Then he fell into a profound meditation. Sir Peter was, as I have said,
a learned man; he was also in some things a sensible man, and he had a
strong sympathy with the humorous side of his son’s crotchety character.
What was to be said to Lady Chillingly? That matron was quite guiltless
of any crime which should deprive her of a husband’s confidence in
a matter relating to her only son. She was a virtuous matron; morals
irreproachable, manners dignified, and _she-baronety_. Any one seeing
her for the first time would intuitively say, “Your ladyship.” Was
this a matron to be suppressed in any well-ordered domestic circle? Sir
Peter’s conscience loudly answered, “No;” but when, putting conscience
into his pocket, he regarded the question at issue as a man of the
world, Sir Peter felt that to communicate the contents of his son’s
letter to Lady Chillingly would be the foolishest thing he could
possibly do. Did she know that Kenelm had absconded with the family
dignity invested in his very name, no marital authority short of such
abuses of power as constitute the offence of cruelty in a wife’s
action for divorce from social board and nuptial bed could prevent Lady
Chillingly from summoning all the grooms, sending them in all directions
with strict orders to bring back the runaway dead or alive; the walls
would be placarded with hand-bills, “Strayed from his home,” etc.; the
police would be telegraphing private instructions from town to town;
the scandal would stick to Kenelm Chillingly for life, accompanied with
vague hints of criminal propensities and insane hallucinations; he would
be ever afterwards pointed out as “THE MAN WHO HAD DISAPPEARED.” And to
disappear and to turn up again, instead of being murdered, is the most
hateful thing a man can do: all the newspapers bark at him, “Tray,
Blanche, Sweetheart, and all;” strict explanations of the unseemly fact
of his safe existence are demanded in the name of public decorum, and no
explanations are accepted; it is life saved, character lost.

Sir Peter seized his hat and walked forth, not to deliberate whether to
fib or not to fib to the wife of his bosom, but to consider what kind of
fib would the most quickly sink into the bosom of his wife.

A few turns to and fro on the terrace sufficed for the conception and
maturing of the fib selected; a proof that Sir Peter was a practised
fibber. He re-entered the house, passed into her ladyship’s habitual
sitting-room, and said with careless gayety, “My old friend the Duke of
Clareville is just setting off on a tour to Switzerland with his family.
His youngest daughter, Lady Jane, is a pretty girl, and would not be a
bad match for Kenelm.”

“Lady Jane, the youngest daughter with fair hair, whom I saw last as
a very charming child, nursing a lovely doll presented to her by the
Empress Eugenie,--a good match indeed for Kenelm.”

“I am glad you agree with me. Would it not be a favourable step towards
that alliance, and an excellent thing for Kenelm generally, if he were
to visit the Continent as one of the Duke’s travelling party?”

“Of course it would.”

“Then you approve what I have done; the Duke starts the day after
to-morrow, and I have packed Kenelm off to town, with a letter to my old
friend. You will excuse all leave taking. You know that though the best
of sons he is an odd fellow; and seeing that I had talked him into it,
I struck while the iron was hot, and sent him off by the express at nine
o’clock this morning, for fear that if I allowed any delay he would talk
himself out of it.”

“Do you mean to say Kenelm is actually gone? Good gracious.”

Sir Peter stole softly from the room, and summoning his valet, said, “I
have sent Mr. Chillingly to London. Pack up the clothes he is likely
to want, so that he can have them sent at once, whenever he writes for
them.”

And thus, by a judicious violation of truth on the part of his father,
that exemplary truth-teller Kenelm Chillingly saved the honour of
his house and his own reputation from the breath of scandal and the
inquisition of the police. He was not “THE MAN WHO HAD DISAPPEARED.”




BOOK II.



CHAPTER I.

KENELM CHILLINGLY had quitted the paternal home at daybreak before any
of the household was astir. “Unquestionably,” said he, as he walked
along the solitary lanes,--“unquestionably I begin the world as poets
begin poetry, an imitator and a plagiarist. I am imitating an itinerant
verse-maker, as, no doubt, he began by imitating some other maker
of verse. But if there be anything in me, it will work itself out in
original form. And, after all, the verse-maker is not the inventor of
ideas. Adventure on foot is a notion that remounts to the age of fable.
Hercules, for instance; that was the way in which he got to heaven, as
a foot-traveller. How solitary the world is at this hour! Is it not for
that reason that this is of all hours the most beautiful?”

Here he paused, and looked around and above. It was the very height of
summer. The sun was just rising over gentle sloping uplands. All the
dews on the hedgerows sparkled. There was not a cloud in the heavens. Up
rose from the green blades of corn a solitary skylark. His voice woke up
the other birds. A few minutes more and the joyous concert began.
Kenelm reverently doffed his hat, and bowed his head in mute homage and
thanksgiving.



CHAPTER II.

ABOUT nine o’clock Kenelm entered a town some twelve miles distant from
his father’s house, and towards which he had designedly made his way,
because in that town he was scarcely if at all known by sight, and he
might there make the purchases he required without attracting any
marked observation. He had selected for his travelling costume a
shooting-dress, as the simplest and least likely to belong to his
rank as a gentleman. But still in its very cut there was an air of
distinction, and every labourer he had met on the way had touched his
hat to him. Besides, who wears a shooting-dress in the middle of June,
or a shooting-dress at all, unless he be either a game-keeper or a
gentleman licensed to shoot?

Kenelm entered a large store-shop for ready-made clothes and purchased
a suit such as might be worn on Sundays by a small country yeoman or
tenant-farmer of a petty holding,--a stout coarse broadcloth upper
garment, half coat, half jacket, with waistcoat to match, strong
corduroy trousers, a smart Belcher neckcloth, with a small stock of
linen and woollen socks in harmony with the other raiment. He bought
also a leathern knapsack, just big enough to contain this wardrobe, and
a couple of books, which with his combs and brushes he had brought away
in his pockets; for among all his trunks at home there was no knapsack.

These purchases made and paid for, he passed quickly through the town,
and stopped at a humble inn at the outskirt, to which he was attracted
by the notice, “Refreshment for man and beast.” He entered a little
sanded parlour, which at that hour he had all to himself, called for
breakfast, and devoured the best part of a fourpenny loaf with a couple
of hard eggs.

Thus recruited, he again sallied forth, and deviating into a thick wood
by the roadside, he exchanged the habiliments with which he had left
home for those he had purchased, and by the help of one or two big
stones sunk the relinquished garments into a small but deep pool which
he was lucky enough to find in a bush-grown dell much haunted by snipes
in the winter.

“Now,” said Kenelm, “I really begin to think I have got out of myself.
I am in another man’s skin; for what, after all, is a skin but a soul’s
clothing, and what is clothing but a decenter skin? Of its own natural
skin every civilized soul is ashamed. It is the height of impropriety
for any one but the lowest kind of savage to show it. If the purest
soul now existent upon earth, the Pope of Rome’s or the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s, were to pass down the Strand with the skin which Nature
gave to it bare to the eye, it would be brought up before a magistrate,
prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and committed to
jail as a public nuisance.

“Decidedly I am now in another man’s skin. Kenelm Chillingly, I no
longer

   “Remain

     “Yours faithfully;

“But am,

   “With profound consideration,

     “Your obedient humble servant.”

With light step and elated crest, the wanderer, thus transformed, sprang
from the wood into the dusty thoroughfare. He had travelled on for about
an hour, meeting but few other passengers, when he heard to the right a
loud shrill young voice, “Help! help! I will not go; I tell you, I will
not!” Just before him stood, by a high five-barred gate, a pensive gray
cob attached to a neat-looking gig. The bridle was loose on the cob’s
neck. The animal was evidently accustomed to stand quietly when ordered
to do so, and glad of the opportunity.

The cries, “Help, help!” were renewed, mingled with louder tones in a
rougher voice, tones of wrath and menace. Evidently these sounds did
not come from the cob. Kenelm looked over the gate, and saw a few yards
distant in a grass field a well-dressed boy struggling violently against
a stout middle-aged man who was rudely hauling him along by the arm.

The chivalry natural to a namesake of the valiant Sir Kenelm Digby
was instantly aroused. He vaulted over the gate, seized the man by the
collar, and exclaimed, “For shame! what are you doing to that poor boy?
let him go!”

“Why the devil do you interfere?” cried the stout man, his eyes glaring
and his lips foaming with rage. “Ah, are you the villain? yes, no doubt
of it. I’ll give it to you, jackanapes,” and still grasping the boy with
one hand, with the other the stout man darted a blow at Kenelm, from
which nothing less than the practised pugilistic skill and natural
alertness of the youth thus suddenly assaulted could have saved his eyes
and nose. As it was, the stout man had the worst of it: the blow was
parried, returned with a dexterous manoeuvre of Kenelm’s right foot in
Cornish fashion, and _procumbit humi bos_; the stout man lay sprawling
on his back. The boy, thus released, seized hold of Kenelm by the arm,
and hurrying him along up the field, cried, “Come, come before he gets
up! save me! save me!” Ere he had recovered his own surprise, the boy
had dragged Kenelm to the gate, and jumped into the gig, sobbing forth,
“Get in, get in, I can’t drive; get in, and drive--you. Quick! Quick!”

“But--” began Kenelm.

“Get in, or I shall go mad.” Kenelm obeyed; the boy gave him the reins,
and seizing the whip himself, applied it lustily to the cob. On sprang
the cob. “Stop, stop, stop, thief! villain! Holloa! thieves! thieves!
thieves! stop!” cried a voice behind. Kenelm involuntarily turned his
head and beheld the stout man perched upon the gate and gesticulating
furiously. It was but a glimpse; again the whip was plied, the cob
frantically broke into a gallop, the gig jolted and bumped and swerved,
and it was not till they had put a good mile between themselves and the
stout man that Kenelm succeeded in obtaining possession of the whip and
calming the cob into a rational trot.

“Young gentleman,” then said Kenelm, “perhaps you will have the goodness
to explain.”

“By and by; get on, that’s a good fellow; you shall be well paid for it,
well and handsomely.”

Quoth Kenelm, gravely, “I know that in real life payment and service
naturally go together. But we will put aside the payment till you tell
me what is to be the service. And first, whither am I to drive you? We
are coming to a place where three roads meet; which of the three shall I
take?”

“Oh, I don’t know; there is a finger-post. I want to get to,--but it is
a secret; you’ll not betray me? Promise,--swear.”

“I don’t swear except when I am in a passion, which, I am sorry to say,
is very seldom; and I don’t promise till I know what I promise; neither
do I go on driving runaway boys in other men’s gigs unless I know that I
am taking them to a safe place, where their papas and mammas can get at
them.”

“I have no papa, no mamma,” said the boy, dolefully and with quivering
lips.

“Poor boy! I suppose that burly brute is your schoolmaster, and you are
running away home for fear of a flogging.”

The boy burst out laughing; a pretty, silvery, merry laugh: it thrilled
through Kenelm Chillingly. “No, he would not flog me: he is not a
schoolmaster; he is worse than that.”

“Is it possible? What is he?”

“An uncle.”

“Hum! uncles are proverbial for cruelty; were so in the classical days,
and Richard III. was the only scholar in his family.”

“Eh! classical and Richard III.!” said the boy, startled, and looking
attentively at the pensive driver. “Who are you? you talk like a
gentleman.”

“I beg pardon. I’ll not do so again if I can help it.”--“Decidedly,”
 thought Kenelm, “I am beginning to be amused. What a blessing it is to
get into another man’s skin, and another man’s gig too!” Aloud, “Here
we are at the fingerpost. If you are running away from your uncle, it is
time to inform me where you are running to.”

Here the boy leaned over the gig and examined the fingerpost. Then he
clapped his hands joyfully.

“All right! I thought so, ‘To Tor-Hadham, eighteen miles.’ That’s the
road to Tor-Hadham.”

“Do you mean to say I am to drive you all that way,--eighteen miles?”

“Yes.”

“And to whom are you going?”

“I will tell you by and by. Do go on; do, pray. I can’t drive--never
drove in my life--or I would not ask you. Pray, pray, don’t desert me!
If you are a gentleman you will not; and if you are not a gentleman,
I have got L10 in my purse, which you shall have when I am safe at
Tor-Hadham. Don’t hesitate: my whole life is at stake!” And the boy
began once more to sob.

Kenelm directed the pony’s head towards Tor-Hadham, and the boy ceased
to sob.

“You are a good, dear fellow,” said the boy, wiping his eyes. “I am
afraid I am taking you very much out of your road.”

“I have no road in particular, and would as soon go to Tor-Hadham, which
I have never seen, as anywhere else. I am but a wanderer on the face of
the earth.”

“Have you lost your papa and mamma too? Why, you are not much older than
I am.”

“Little gentleman,” said Kenelm, gravely, “I am just of age, and you, I
suppose, are about fourteen.”

“What fun!” cried the boy, abruptly. “Isn’t it fun?”

“It will not be fun if I am sentenced to penal servitude for stealing
your uncle’s gig, and robbing his little nephew of L10. By the by, that
choleric relation of yours meant to knock down somebody else when he
struck at me. He asked, ‘Are you the villain?’ Pray who is the villain?
he is evidently in your confidence.”

“Villain! he is the most honourable, high-minded--But no matter now:
I’ll introduce you to him when we reach Tor-Hadham. Whip that pony: he
is crawling.”

“It is up hill: a good man spares his beast.”

No art and no eloquence could extort from his young companion any
further explanation than Kenelm had yet received; and indeed, as the
journey advanced, and they approached their destination, both parties
sank into silence. Kenelm was seriously considering that his first day’s
experience of real life in the skin of another had placed in some peril
his own. He had knocked down a man evidently respectable and well to do,
had carried off that man’s nephew, and made free with that man’s goods
and chattels; namely, his gig and horse. All this might be explained
satisfactorily to a justice of the peace, but how? By returning to his
former skin; by avowing himself to be Kenelm Chillingly, a distinguished
university medalist, heir to no ignoble name and some L10,000 a year.
But then what a scandal! he who abhorred scandal; in vulgar parlance,
what a “row!” he who denied that the very word “row” was sanctioned
by any classic authorities in the English language. He would have to
explain how he came to be found disguised, carefully disguised, in
garments such as no baronet’s eldest son--even though that baronet be
the least ancestral man of mark whom it suits the convenience of a First
Minister to recommend to the Sovereign for exaltation over the rank
of Mister--was ever beheld in, unless he had taken flight to the
gold-diggings. Was this a position in which the heir of the Chillinglys,
a distinguished family, whose coat-of-arms dated from the earliest
authenticated period of English heraldry under Edward III. as Three
Fishes _azure_, could be placed without grievous slur on the cold and
ancient blood of the Three Fishes?

And then individually to himself, Kenelm, irrespectively of the Three
Fishes,--what a humiliation! He had put aside his respected father’s
deliberate preparations for his entrance into real life; he had
perversely chosen his own walk on his own responsibility; and here,
before half the first day was over, what an infernal scrape he had
walked himself into! and what was his excuse? A wretched little boy,
sobbing and chuckling by turns, and yet who was clever enough to twist
Kenelm Chillingly round his finger; twist _him_, a man who thought
himself so much wiser than his parents,--a man who had gained honours at
the University,--a man of the gravest temperament,--a man of so nicely
critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in
which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this
mess was, to say the least of it, an uncomfortable reflection.

The boy himself, as Kenelm glanced at him from time to time, became
impish and Will-of-the-Wisp-ish. Sometimes he laughed to himself loudly,
sometimes he wept to himself quietly; sometimes, neither laughing nor
weeping, he seemed absorbed in reflection. Twice as they came nearer to
the town of Tor-Hadham, Kenelm nudged the boy, and said, “My boy, I must
talk with you;” and twice the boy, withdrawing his arm from the nudge,
had answered dreamily, “Hush! I am thinking.”

And so they entered the town of Tor-Hadham, the cob very much done up.



CHAPTER III.

“NOW, young sir,” said Kenelm, in a tone calm, but peremptory,--“now we
are in the town, where am I to take you? and wherever it be, there to
say good-by.”

“No, not good-by. Stay with me a little bit. I begin to feel frightened,
and I am so friendless;” and the boy, who had before resented the
slightest nudge on the part of Kenelm, now wound his arm into Kenelm’s,
and clung to him caressingly.

I don’t know what my readers have hitherto thought of Kenelm Chillingly:
but, amid all the curves and windings of his whimsical humour, there was
one way that went straight to his heart; you had only to be weaker than
himself and ask his protection.

He turned round abruptly; he forgot all the strangeness of his position,
and replied: “Little brute that you are, I’ll be shot if I forsake you
if in trouble. But some compassion is also due to the cob: for his sake
say where we are to stop.”

“I am sure I can’t say: I never was here before. Let us go to a nice
quiet inn. Drive slowly: we’ll look out for one.”

Tor-Hadham was a large town, not nominally the capital of the county,
but, in point of trade and bustle and life, virtually the capital. The
straight street, through which the cob went as slowly as if he had
been drawing a Triumphal Car up the Sacred Hill, presented an animated
appearance. The shops had handsome facades and plate-glass windows;
the pavements exhibited a lively concourse, evidently not merely of
business, but of pleasure, for a large proportion of the passers-by was
composed of the fair sex, smartly dressed, many of them young and some
pretty. In fact a regiment of her Majesty’s -----th Hussars had been
sent into the town two days before; and, between the officers of that
fortunate regiment and the fair sex in that hospitable town, there was
a natural emulation which should make the greater number of slain and
wounded. The advent of these heroes, professional subtracters from
hostile and multipliers of friendly populations, gave a stimulus to
the caterers for those amusements which bring young folks
together,--archery-meetings, rifle-shootings, concerts, balls, announced
in bills attached to boards and walls and exposed at shop-windows.

The boy looked eagerly forth from the gig, scanning especially these
advertisements, till at length he uttered an excited exclamation, “Ah, I
was right: there it is!”

“There what is?” asked Kenelm,--“the inn?” His companion did not answer,
but Kenelm following the boy’s eye perceived an immense hand-bill.


   “TO-MORROW NIGHT THEATRE OPENS.

   “RICHARD III. Mr. COMPTON.”


“Do just ask where the theatre is,” said the boy, in a whisper, turning
away his head.

Kenelm stopped the cob, made the inquiry, and was directed to take the
next turning to the right. In a few minutes the compo portico of an ugly
dilapidated building, dedicated to the Dramatic Muses, presented itself
at the angle of a dreary, deserted lane. The walls were placarded with
play-bills, in which the name of Compton stood forth as gigantic as
capitals could make it. The boy drew a sigh. “Now,” said he, “let us
look out for an inn near here,--the nearest.”

No inn, however, beyond the rank of a small and questionable looking
public-house was apparent, until at a distance somewhat remote from the
theatre, and in a quaint, old-fashioned, deserted square, a neat,
newly whitewashed house displayed upon its frontispiece, in large black
letters of funereal aspect, “Temperance Hotel.”

“Stop,” said the boy; “don’t you think that would suit us? it looks
quiet.”

“Could not look more quiet if it were a tombstone,” replied Kenelm.

The boy put his hand upon the reins and stopped the cob. The cob was in
that condition that the slightest touch sufficed to stop him, though he
turned his head somewhat ruefully as if in doubt whether hay and corn
would be within the regulations of a Temperance Hotel. Kenelm descended
and entered the house. A tidy woman emerged from a sort of glass
cupboard which constituted the bar, minus the comforting drinks
associated with the _beau ideal_ of a bar, but which displayed instead
two large decanters of cold water with tumblers _a discretion_, and
sundry plates of thin biscuits and sponge-cakes. This tidy woman
politely inquired what was his “pleasure.”

“Pleasure,” answered Kenelm, with his usual gravity, “is not the word I
should myself have chosen. But could you oblige my horse--I mean _that_
horse--with a stall and a feed of oats, and that young gentleman and
myself with a private room and a dinner?”

“Dinner!” echoed the hostess,--“dinner!”

“A thousand pardons, ma’am. But if the word ‘dinner’ shock you I retract
it, and would say instead something to eat and drink.’”

“Drink! This is strictly a Temperance Hotel, sir.”

“Oh, if you don’t eat and drink here,” exclaimed Kenelm, fiercely, for
he was famished, “I wish you good morning.”

“Stay a bit, sir. We do eat and drink here. But we are very simple
folks. We allow no fermented liquors.”

“Not even a glass of beer?”

“Only ginger-beer. Alcohols are strictly forbidden. We have tea and
coffee and milk. But most of our customers prefer the pure liquid. As
for eating, sir,--anything you order, in reason.”

Kenelm shook his head and was retreating, when the boy, who had sprung
from the gig and overheard the conversation, cried petulantly, “What
does it signify? Who wants fermented liquors? Water will do very well.
And as for dinner,--anything convenient. Please, ma’am, show us into a
private room: I am so tired.” The last words were said in a caressing
manner, and so prettily, that the hostess at once changed her tone,
and muttering, “Poor boy!” and, in a still more subdued mutter, “What
a pretty face he has!” nodded, and led the way up a very clean
old-fashioned staircase.

“But the horse and gig, where are they to go?” said Kenelm, with a pang
of conscience on reflecting how ill treated hitherto had been both horse
and owner.

“Oh, as for the horse and gig, sir, you will find Jukes’s livery-stables
a few yards farther down. We don’t take in horses ourselves; our
customers seldom keep them: but you will find the best of accommodation
at Jukes’s.”

Kenelm conducted the cob to the livery-stables thus indicated, and
waited to see him walked about to cool, well rubbed down, and made
comfortable over half a peck of oats,--for Kenelm Chillingly was a
humane man to the brute creation,--and then, in a state of ravenous
appetite, returned to the Temperance Hotel, and was ushered into a small
drawing-room, with a small bit of carpet in the centre, six small chairs
with cane seats, prints on the walls descriptive of the various
effects of intoxicating liquors upon sundry specimens of mankind,--some
resembling ghosts, others fiends, and all with a general aspect of
beggary and perdition; contrasted by Happy-Family pictures,--smiling
wives, portly husbands, rosy infants, emblematic of the beatified
condition of members of the Temperance Society.

A table with a spotless cloth, and knives and forks for two, chiefly,
however, attracted Kenelm’s attention.

The boy was standing by the window, seemingly gazing on a small aquarium
which was there placed, and contained the usual variety of small fishes,
reptiles, and insects, enjoying the pleasures of Temperance in its
native element, including, of course, an occasional meal upon each
other.

“What are they going to give us to eat?” inquired Kenelm. “It must be
ready by this time I should think.”

Here he gave a brisk tug at the bell-pull. The boy advanced from
the window, and as he did so Kenelm was struck with the grace of his
bearing, and the improvement in his looks, now that he was without his
hat, and rest and ablution had refreshed from heat and dust the delicate
bloom of his complexion. There was no doubt about it that he was an
exceedingly pretty boy, and if he lived to be a man would make many a
lady’s heart ache. It was with a certain air of gracious superiority
such as is seldom warranted by superior rank if it be less than royal,
and chiefly becomes a marked seniority in years, that this young
gentleman, approaching the solemn heir of the Chillinglys, held out his
hand and said,--

“Sir, you have behaved extremely well, and I thank you very much.”

“Your Royal Highness is condescending to say so,” replied Kenelm
Chillingly, bowing low, “but have you ordered dinner? and what are
they going to give us? No one seems to answer the bell here. As it is a
Temperance Hotel, probably all the servants are drunk.”

“Why should they be drunk at a Temperance Hotel?”

“Why! because, as a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to
anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets
up for a saint is sure to be a sinner, and a man who boasts that he is a
sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship
about him which is enough to make him a humbug. Masculine honesty,
whether it be saint-like or sinner-like, does not label itself either
saint or sinner. Fancy Saint Augustine labelling himself saint, or
Robert Burns sinner; and therefore, though, little boy, you have
probably not read the poems of Robert Burns, and have certainly not read
the ‘Confessions’ of Saint Augustine, take my word for it, that both
those personages were very good fellows; and with a little difference of
training and experience, Burns might have written the ‘Confessions’ and
Augustine the poems. Powers above! I am starving. What did you order for
dinner, and when is it to appear?”

The boy, who had opened to an enormous width a naturally large pair of
hazel eyes, while his tall companion in fustian trousers and Belcher
neckcloth spoke thus patronizingly of Robert Burns and Saint Augustine,
now replied, with rather a deprecatory and shamefaced aspect, “I am
sorry I was not thinking of dinner. I was not so mindful of you as I
ought to have been. The landlady asked me what we would have. I said,
‘What you like;’ and the landlady muttered something about--” here the
boy hesitated.

“Yes. About what? Mutton-chops?”

“No. Cauliflowers and rice-pudding.”

Kenelm Chillingly never swore, never raged. Where ruder beings of
human mould swore or raged, he vented displeasure in an expression of
countenance so pathetically melancholic and lugubrious that it would
have melted the heart of an Hyrcanian tiger. He turned his countenance
now on the boy, and murmuring “Cauliflower!--Starvation!” sank into
one of the cane-bottomed chairs, and added quietly, “so much for human
gratitude.”

The boy was evidently smitten to the heart by the bitter sweetness
of this reproach. There were almost tears in his voice, as he said
falteringly, “Pray forgive me, I _was_ ungrateful. I’ll run down and see
what there is;” and, suiting the action to the word, he disappeared.

Kenelm remained motionless; in fact he was plunged into one of those
reveries, or rather absorptions of inward and spiritual being, into
which it is said that the consciousness of the Indian dervish can be by
prolonged fasting preternaturally resolved. The appetite of all men
of powerful muscular development is of a nature far exceeding the
properties of any reasonable number of cauliflowers and rice-puddings
to satisfy. Witness Hercules himself, whose cravings for substantial
nourishment were the standing joke of the classic poets. I don’t know
that Kenelm Chillingly would have beaten the Theban Hercules either in
fighting or in eating; but, when he wanted to fight or when he wanted
to eat, Hercules would have had to put forth all his strength not to be
beaten.

After ten minutes’ absence, the boy came back radiant. He tapped Kenelm
on the shoulder, and said playfully, “I made them cut a whole loin into
chops, besides the cauliflower; and such a big rice-pudding, and eggs
and bacon too! Cheer up! it will be served in a minute.”

“A-h!” said Kenelm.

“They are good people; they did not mean to stint you: but most of their
customers, it seems, live upon vegetables and farinaceous food. There
is a society here formed upon that principle; the landlady says they are
philosophers!”

At the word “philosophers” Kenelm’s crest rose as that of a practised
hunter at the cry of “Yoiks! Tally-ho!” “Philosophers!” said he,
“philosophers indeed! O ignoramuses, who do not even know the structure
of the human tooth! Look you, little boy, if nothing were left on this
earth of the present race of man, as we are assured upon great authority
will be the case one of these days,--and a mighty good riddance it will
be,--if nothing, I say, of man were left except fossils of his teeth and
his thumbs, a philosopher of that superior race which will succeed to
man would at once see in those relics all his characteristics and all
his history; would say, comparing his thumb with the talons of an eagle,
the claws of a tiger, the hoof of a horse, the owner of that thumb must
have been lord over creatures with talons and claws and hoofs. You may
say the monkey tribe has thumbs. True; but compare an ape’s thumb with
a man’s: could the biggest ape’s thumb have built Westminster Abbey? But
even thumbs are trivial evidence of man as compared with his teeth.
Look at his teeth!”--here Kenelm expanded his jaws from ear to ear
and displayed semicircles of ivory, so perfect for the purposes of
mastication that the most artistic dentist might have despaired of
his power to imitate them,--“look, I say, at his teeth!” The
boy involuntarily recoiled. “Are the teeth those of a miserable
cauliflower-eater? or is it purely by farinaceous food that the
proprietor of teeth like man’s obtains the rank of the sovereign
destroyer of creation? No, little boy, no,” continued Kenelm, closing
his jaws, but advancing upon the infant, who at each stride receded
towards the aquarium,--“no; man is the master of the world, because
of all created beings he devours the greatest variety and the greatest
number of created things. His teeth evince that man can live upon every
soil from the torrid to the frozen zone, because man can eat everything
that other creatures cannot eat. And the formation of his teeth proves
it. A tiger can eat a deer; so can man: but a tiger can’t eat an eel;
man can. An elephant can eat cauliflowers and rice-pudding; so can man!
but an elephant can’t eat a beefsteak; man can. In sum, man can
live everywhere, because he can eat anything, thanks to his dental
formation!” concluded Kenelm, making a prodigious stride towards the
boy. “Man, when everything else fails him, eats his own species.”

“Don’t; you frighten me,” said the boy. “Aha!” clapping his hands with a
sensation of gleeful relief, “here come the mutton-chops!”

A wonderfully clean, well-washed, indeed well-washed-out, middle-aged
parlour-maid now appeared, dish in hand. Putting the dish on the table
and taking off the cover, the handmaiden said civilly, though frigidly,
like one who lived upon salad and cold water, “Mistress is sorry to have
kept you waiting, but she thought you were Vegetarians.”

After helping his young friend to a mutton-chop, Kenelm helped himself,
and replied gravely, “Tell your mistress that if she had only given
us vegetables, I should have eaten you. Tell her that though man is
partially graminivorous, he is principally carnivorous. Tell her that
though a swine eats cabbages and such like, yet where a swine can get
a baby, it eats the baby. Tell her,” continued Kenelm (now at his third
chop), “that there is no animal that in digestive organs more resembles
man than a swine. Ask her if there is any baby in the house; if so, it
would be safe for the baby to send up some more chops.”

As the acutest observer could rarely be quite sure when Kenelm
Chillingly was in jest or in earnest, the parlour-maid paused a moment
and attempted a pale smile. Kenelm lifted his dark eyes, unspeakably sad
and profound, and said mournfully, “I should be so sorry for the baby.
Bring the chops!” The parlour-maid vanished. The boy laid down his
knife and fork, and looked fixedly and inquisitively on Kenelm. Kenelm,
unheeding the look, placed the last chop on the boy’s plate.

“No more,” cried the boy, impulsively, and returned the chop to the
dish. “I have dined: I have had enough.”

“Little boy, you lie,” said Kenelm; “you have not had enough to keep
body and soul together. Eat that chop or I shall thrash you: whatever I
say I do.”

Somehow or other the boy felt quelled; he ate the chop in silence, again
looked at Kenelm’s face, and said to himself, “I am afraid.”

The parlour-maid here entered with a fresh supply of chops and a dish of
bacon and eggs, soon followed by a rice-pudding baked in a tin dish, and
of size sufficient to have nourished a charity school. When the repast
was finished, Kenelm seemed to forget the dangerous properties of the
carnivorous animal; and stretching himself indolently out, appeared
to be as innocently ruminative as the most domestic of animals
graminivorous.

Then said the boy, rather timidly, “May I ask you another favour?”

“Is it to knock down another uncle, or to steal another gig and cob?”

“No, it is very simple: it is merely to find out the address of a friend
here; and when found to give him a note from me.”

“Does the commission press? ‘After dinner, rest a while,’ saith the
proverb; and proverbs are so wise that no one can guess the author
of them. They are supposed to be fragments of the philosophy of the
antediluvians: came to us packed up in the ark.”

“Really, indeed,” said the boy, seriously. “How interesting! No, my
commission does not press for an hour or so. Do you think, sir, they had
any drama before the Deluge?”

“Drama! not a doubt of it. Men who lived one or two thousand years had
time to invent and improve everything; and a play could have had its
natural length then. It would not have been necessary to crowd the
whole history of Macbeth, from his youth to his old age, into an absurd
epitome of three hours. One cannot trace a touch of real human nature in
any actor’s delineation of that very interesting Scotchman, because
the actor always comes on the stage as if he were the same age when he
murdered Duncan, and when, in his sear and yellow leaf, he was lopped
off by Macduff.”

“Do you think Macbeth was young when he murdered Duncan?”

“Certainly. No man ever commits a first crime of violent nature, such as
murder, after thirty; if he begins before, he may go on up to any age.
But youth is the season for commencing those wrong calculations which
belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus
read in the newspapers that the persons who murder their sweethearts are
generally from two to six and twenty; and persons who murder from other
motives than love--that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambition--are
generally about twenty-eight,--Iago’s age. Twenty-eight is the usual
close of the active season for getting rid of one’s fellow-creatures; a
prize-fighter falls off after that age. I take it that Macbeth was about
twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan, and from about fifty-four to sixty
when he began to whine about missing the comforts of old age. But
can any audience understand that difference of years in seeing a
three-hours’ play? or does any actor ever pretend to impress it on the
audience, and appear as twenty-eight in the first act and a sexagenarian
in the fifth?”

“I never thought of that,” said the boy, evidently interested. “But I
never saw ‘Macbeth.’ I have seen ‘Richard III.:’ is not that nice? Don’t
you dote on the play? I do. What a glorious life an actor’s must be!”

Kenelm, who had been hitherto rather talking to himself than to his
youthful companion, here roused his attention, looked on the boy
intently, and said,--

“I see you are stage-stricken. You have run away from home in order to
turn player, and I should not wonder if this note you want me to give is
for the manager of the theatre or one of his company.”

The young face that encountered Kenelm’s dark eye became very flushed,
but set and defiant in its expression.

“And what if it were? would not you give it?”

“What! help a child of your age run away from his home, to go upon the
stage against the consent of his relations? Certainly not.”

“I am not a child; but that has nothing to do with it. I don’t want to
go on the stage, at all events without the consent of the person who
has a right to dictate my actions. My note is not to the manager of
the theatre, nor to one of his company; but it is to a gentleman who
condescends to act here for a few nights; a thorough gentleman,--a great
actor,--my friend, the only friend I have in the world. I say frankly I
have run away from home so that he may have that note, and if you will
not give it some one else will!”

The boy had risen while he spoke, and he stood erect beside the
recumbent Kenelm, his lips quivering, his eyes suffused with suppressed
tears, but his whole aspect resolute and determined. Evidently, if he
did not get his own way in this world, it would not be for want of will.

“I will take your note,” said Kenelm.

“There it is; give it into the hands of the person it is addressed
to,--Mr. Herbert Compton.”



CHAPTER IV.

KENELM took his way to the theatre, and inquired of the door-keeper for
Mr. Herbert Compton. That functionary replied, “Mr. Compton does not act
to-night, and is not in the house.”

“Where does he lodge?”

The door-keeper pointed to a grocer’s shop on the other side of the way,
and said tersely, “There, private door; knock and ring.”

Kenelm did as he was directed. A slatternly maid-servant opened the
door, and, in answer to his interrogatory, said that Mr. Compton was at
home, but at supper.

“I am sorry to disturb him,” said Kenelm, raising his voice, for he
heard a clatter of knives and plates within a room hard by at his left,
“but my business requires to see him forthwith;” and, pushing the maid
aside, he entered at once the adjoining banquet-hall.

Before a savoury stew smelling strongly of onions sat a man very much at
his ease, without coat or neckcloth,--a decidedly handsome man, his hair
cut short and his face closely shaven, as befits an actor who has wigs
and beards of all hues and forms at his command. The man was not alone;
opposite to him sat a lady, who might be a few years younger, of a
somewhat faded complexion, but still pretty, with good stage features
and a profusion of blond ringlets.

“Mr. Compton, I presume,” said Kenelm, with a solemn bow.

“My name is Compton: any message from the theatre? or what do you want
with me?”

“I--nothing!” replied Kenelm; and then deepening his naturally mournful
voice into tones ominous and tragic, continued, “By whom you are wanted
let this explain;” therewith he placed in Mr. Compton’s hand the letter
with which he was charged, and stretching his arms and interlacing his
fingers in the _pose_ of Talma as Julius Caesar, added, “‘Qu’en dis-tu,
Brute?’”

Whether it was from the sombre aspect and awe-inspiring delivery of
the messenger, or the sight of the handwriting on the address of the
missive, Mr. Compton’s countenance suddenly fell, and his hand rested
irresolute, as if not daring to open the letter.

“Never mind me, dear,” said the lady with blond ringlets, in a tone of
stinging affability: “read your _billet-doux_; don’t keep the young man
waiting, love!”

“Nonsense, Matilda, nonsense! _billet-doux_ indeed! more likely a bill
from Duke the tailor. Excuse me for a moment, my dear. Follow me, sir,”
 and rising, still with shirtsleeves uncovered, he quitted the room,
closing the door after him, motioned Kenelm into a small parlour on the
opposite side of the passage, and by the light of a suspended gas-lamp
ran his eye hastily over the letter, which, though it seemed very short,
drew from him sundry exclamations. “Good heavens, how very absurd!
what’s to be done?” Then, thrusting the letter into his trousers-pocket,
he fixed upon Kenelm a very brilliant pair of dark eyes, which soon
dropped before the steadfast look of that saturnine adventurer.

“Are you in the confidence of the writer of this letter?” asked Mr.
Compton, rather confusedly.

“I am not the confidant of the writer,” answered Kenelm, “but for the
time being I am the protector!”

“Protector!”

“Protector.”

Mr. Compton again eyed the messenger, and this time fully realizing the
gladiatorial development of that dark stranger’s physical form, he grew
many shades paler, and involuntarily retreated towards the bell-pull.

After a short pause, he said, “I am requested to call on the writer. If
I do so, may I understand that the interview will be strictly private?”

“So far as I am concerned, yes: on the condition that no attempt be made
to withdraw the writer from the house.”

“Certainly not, certainly not; quite the contrary,” exclaimed Mr.
Compton, with genuine animation. “Say I will call in half an hour.”

“I will give your message,” said Kenelm, with a polite inclination of
his head; “and pray pardon me if I remind you that I styled myself the
protector of your correspondent, and if the slightest advantage be
taken of that correspondent’s youth and inexperience or the smallest
encouragement be given to plans of abduction from home and friends, the
stage will lose an ornament and Herbert Compton vanish from the scene.”
 With these words Kenelm left the player standing aghast. Gaining the
street-door, a lad with a band-box ran against him and was nearly upset.

“Stupid,” cried the lad, “can’t you see where you are going? Give this
to Mrs. Compton.”

“I should deserve the title you give if I did for nothing the business
for which you are paid,” replied Kenelm, sententiously, and striding on.



CHAPTER V.

“I HAVE fulfilled my mission,” said Kenelm, on rejoining his travelling
companion. “Mr. Compton said he would be here in half an hour.”

“You saw him?”

“Of course: I promised to give your letter into his own hands.”

“Was he alone?”

“No; at supper with his wife.”

“His wife! what do you mean, sir?--wife! he has no wife.”

“Appearances are deceitful. At least he was with a lady who called him
‘dear’ and ‘love’ in as spiteful a tone of voice as if she had been his
wife; and as I was coming out of his street-door a lad who ran against
me asked me to give a band-box to Mrs. Compton.”

The boy turned as white as death, staggered back a few steps, and
dropped into a chair.

A suspicion which during his absence had suggested itself to Kenelm’s
inquiring mind now took strong confirmation. He approached softly, drew
a chair close to the companion whom fate had forced upon him, and said
in a gentle whisper,--

“This is no boy’s agitation. If you have been deceived or misled, and
I can in any way advise or aid you, count on me as women under the
circumstances count on men and gentlemen.”

The boy started to his feet, and paced the room with disordered steps,
and a countenance working with passions which he attempted vainly to
suppress. Suddenly arresting his steps, he seized Kenelm’s hand, pressed
it convulsively, and said, in a voice struggling against a sob,--

“I thank you,--I bless you. Leave me now: I would be alone. Alone, too,
I must face this man. There may be some mistake yet; go.”

“You will promise not to leave the house till I return?”

“Yes, I promise that.”

“And if it be as I fear, you will then let me counsel with and advise
you?”

“Heaven help me, if so! Whom else should I trust to? Go, go!”

Kenelm once more found himself in the streets, beneath the mingled light
of gas-lamps and the midsummer moon. He walked on mechanically till he
reached the extremity of the town. There he halted, and seating himself
on a milestone, indulged in these meditations:--

“Kenelm, my friend, you are in a still worse scrape than I thought you
were an hour ago. You have evidently now got a woman on your hands. What
on earth are you to do with her? A runaway woman, who, meaning to run
off with somebody else--such are the crosses and contradictions in human
destiny--has run off with you instead. What mortal can hope to be safe?
The last thing I thought could befall me when I got up this morning was
that I should have any trouble about the other sex before the day was
over. If I were of an amatory temperament, the Fates might have some
justification for leading me into this snare, but, as it is, those
meddling old maids have none. Kenelm, my friend, do you think you ever
can be in love? and, if you were in love, do you think you could be a
greater fool than you are now?”

Kenelm had not decided this knotty question in the conference held with
himself, when a light and soft strain of music came upon his ear. It was
but from a stringed instrument, and might have sounded thin and tinkling
but for the stillness of the night, and that peculiar addition of
fulness which music acquires when it is borne along a tranquil air.
Presently a voice in song was heard from the distance accompanying
the instrument. It was a man’s voice, a mellow and a rich voice, but
Kenelm’s ear could not catch the words. Mechanically he moved on towards
the quarter from which the sounds came, for Kenelm Chillingly had music
in his soul, though he was not quite aware of it himself. He saw before
him a patch of greensward, on which grew a solitary elm with a seat
for wayfarers beneath it. From this sward the ground receded in a wide
semicircle bordered partly by shops, partly by the tea-gardens of a
pretty cottage-like tavern. Round the tables scattered throughout the
gardens were grouped quiet customers, evidently belonging to the class
of small tradespeople or superior artisans. They had an appearance of
decorous respectability, and were listening intently to the music. So
were many persons at the shop-doors and at the windows of upper rooms.
On the sward, a little in advance of the tree, but beneath its shadow,
stood the musician, and in that musician Kenelm recognized the wanderer
from whose talk he had conceived the idea of the pedestrian excursion
which had already brought him into a very awkward position. The
instrument on which the singer accompanied himself was a guitar, and his
song was evidently a love-song, though, as it was now drawing near to
its close, Kenelm could but imperfectly guess at its general meaning.
He heard enough to perceive that its words were at least free from the
vulgarity which generally characterizes street ballads, and were yet
simple enough to please a very homely audience.

When the singer ended there was no applause; but there was evident
sensation among the audience,--a feeling as if something that had given
a common enjoyment had ceased. Presently the white Pomeranian dog, who
had hitherto kept himself out of sight under the seat of the elm-tree,
advanced, with a small metal tray between his teeth, and, after looking
round him deliberately, as if to select whom of the audience should
be honoured with the commencement of a general subscription, gravely
approached Kenelm, stood on his hind legs, stared at him, and presented
the tray.

Kenelm dropped a shilling into that depository, and the dog, looking
gratified, took his way towards the tea-gardens. Lifting his hat, for he
was, in his way, a very polite man, Kenelm approached the singer, and,
trusting to the alteration in his dress for not being recognized by a
stranger who had only once before encountered him he said,--

“Judging by the little I heard, you sing very well, sir. May I ask who
composed the words?”

“They are mine,” replied the singer.

“And the air?”

“Mine too.”

“Accept my compliments. I hope you find these manifestations of genius
lucrative?”

The singer, who had not hitherto vouchsafed more than a careless glance
at the rustic garb of the questioner, now fixed his eyes full upon
Kenelm, and said, with a smile, “Your voice betrays you, sir. We have
met before.”

“True; but I did not then notice your guitar, nor, though acquainted
with your poetical gifts, suppose that you selected this primitive
method of making them publicly known.”

“Nor did I anticipate the pleasure of meeting you again in the character
of Hobnail. Hist! let us keep each other’s secret. I am known hereabouts
by no other designation than that of the ‘Wandering Minstrel.’”

“It is in the capacity of minstrel that I address you. If it be not an
impertinent question, do you know any songs which take the other side of
the case?”

“What case? I don’t understand you, sir.”

“The song I heard seemed in praise of that sham called love. Don’t you
think you could say something more new and more true, treating that
aberration from reason with the contempt it deserves?”

“Not if I am to get my travelling expenses paid.”

“What! the folly is so popular?”

“Does not your own heart tell you so?”

“Not a bit of it,--rather the contrary. Your audience at present
seem folks who live by work, and can have little time for such idle
phantasies; for, as it is well observed by Ovid, a poet who wrote much
on that subject, and professed the most intimate acquaintance with it,
‘Idleness is the parent of love.’ Can’t you sing something in praise of
a good dinner? Everybody who works hard has an appetite for food.”

The singer again fixed on Kenelm his inquiring eye, but not detecting a
vestige of humour in the grave face he contemplated, was rather puzzled
how to reply, and therefore remained silent.

“I perceive,” resumed Kenelm, “that my observations surprise you: the
surprise will vanish on reflection. It has been said by another poet,
more reflective than Ovid, that ‘the world is governed by love and
hunger.’ But hunger certainly has the lion’s share of the government;
and if a poet is really to do what he pretends to do,--namely, represent
nature,--the greater part of his lays should be addressed to the
stomach.” Here, warming with his subject, Kenelm familiarly laid his
hand on the musician’s shoulder, and his voice took a tone bordering on
enthusiasm. “You will allow that a man in the normal condition of health
does not fall in love every day. But in the normal condition of health
he is hungry every day. Nay, in those early years when you poets say he
is most prone to love, he is so especially disposed to hunger that
less than three meals a day can scarcely satisfy his appetite. You may
imprison a man for months, for years, nay, for his whole life,--from
infancy to any age which Sir Cornewall Lewis may allow him to
attain,--without letting him be in love at all. But if you shut him up
for a week without putting something into his stomach, you will find him
at the end of it as dead as a door-nail.”

Here the singer, who had gradually retreated before the energetic
advance of the orator, sank into the seat by the elm-tree and said
pathetically, “Sir, you have fairly argued me down. Will you please to
come to the conclusion which you deduce from your premises?”

“Simply this, that where you find one human being who cares about love,
you will find a thousand susceptible to the charms of a dinner; and if
you wish to be the popular minne-singer or troubadour of the age, appeal
to nature, sir,--appeal to nature; drop all hackneyed rhapsodies about a
rosy cheek, and strike your lyre to the theme of a beefsteak.”

The dog had for some minutes regained his master’s side, standing on
his hind legs, with the tray, tolerably well filled with copper coins,
between his teeth; and now, justly aggrieved by the inattention which
detained him in that artificial attitude, dropped the tray and growled
at Kenelm.

At the same time there came an impatient sound from the audience in the
tea-garden. They wanted another song for their money.

The singer rose, obedient to the summons. “Excuse me, sir; but I am
called upon to--”

“To sing again?”

“Yes.”

“And on the subject I suggest?”

“No, indeed.”

“What! love, again?”

“I am afraid so.”

“I wish you good evening then. You seem a well-educated man,--more shame
to you. Perhaps we may meet once more in our rambles, when the question
can be properly argued out.”

Kenelm lifted his hat, and turned on his heel. Before he reached the
street, the sweet voice of the singer again smote his ears; but the only
word distinguishable in the distance, ringing out at the close of the
refrain, was “love.”

“Fiddle-de-dee,” said Kenelm.



CHAPTER VI.

AS Kenelm regained the street dignified by the edifice of the Temperance
Hotel, a figure, dressed picturesquely in a Spanish cloak, brushed
hurriedly by him, but not so fast as to be unrecognized as the
tragedian. “Hem!” muttered Kenelm, “I don’t think there is much triumph
in that face. I suspect he has been scolded.”

The boy--if Kenelm’s travelling companion is still to be so
designated--was leaning against the mantelpiece as Kenelm re-entered
the dining-room. There was an air of profound dejection about the boy’s
listless attitude and in the drooping tearless eyes.

“My dear child,” said Kenelm, in the softest tones of his plaintive
voice, “do not honour me with any confidence that may be painful. But
let me hope that you have dismissed forever all thoughts of going on the
stage.”

“Yes,” was the scarce audible answer.

“And now only remains the question, ‘What is to be done?’”

“I am sure I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“Then you leave it to me to know and to care; and assuming for the
moment as a fact that which is one of the greatest lies in this
mendacious world--namely, that all men are brothers--you will consider
me as an elder brother, who will counsel and control you as he would
an imprudent young--sister. I see very well how it is. Somehow or other
you, having first admired Mr. Compton as Romeo or Richard III., made his
acquaintance as Mr. Compton. He allowed you to believe him a single
man. In a romantic moment you escaped from your home, with the design of
adopting the profession of the stage and of becoming Mrs. Compton.”

“Oh,” broke out the girl, since her sex must now be declared, “oh,” she
exclaimed, with a passionate sob, “what a fool I have been! Only do not
think worse of me than I deserve. The man did deceive me; he did not
think I should take him at his word, and follow him here, or his wife
would not have appeared. I should not have known he had one and--and--”
 here her voice was choked under her passion.

“But now you have discovered the truth, let us thank Heaven that you are
saved from shame and misery. I must despatch a telegram to your uncle:
give me his address.”

“No, no.”

“There is not a ‘No’ possible in this case, my child. Your reputation
and your future must be saved. Leave me to explain all to your uncle.
He is your guardian. I must send for him; nay, nay, there is no option.
Hate me now for enforcing your will: you will thank me hereafter. And
listen, young lady; if it does pain you to see your uncle, and encounter
his reproaches, every fault must undergo its punishment. A brave nature
undergoes it cheerfully, as a part of atonement. You are brave. Submit,
and in submitting rejoice!”

There was something in Kenelm’s voice and manner at once so kindly and
so commanding that the wayward nature he addressed fairly succumbed.
She gave him her uncle’s address, “John Bovill, Esq., Oakdale, near
Westmere.” And after giving it, she fixed her eyes mournfully upon her
young adviser, and said with a simple, dreary pathos, “Now, will you
esteem me more, or rather despise me less?”

She looked so young, nay, so childlike, as she thus spoke, that Kenelm
felt a parental inclination to draw her on his lap and kiss away
her tears. But he prudently conquered that impulse, and said, with a
melancholy half-smile,--

“If human beings despise each other for being young and foolish, the
sooner we are exterminated by that superior race which is to succeed us
on earth the better it will be. Adieu, till your uncle comes.”

“What! you leave me here--alone?”

“Nay, if your uncle found me under the same roof, now that I know you
are his niece, don’t you think he would have a right to throw me out
of the window? Allow me to practise for myself the prudence I preach
to you. Send for the landlady to show you your room, shut yourself in
there, go to bed, and don’t cry more than you can help.”

Kenelm shouldered the knapsack he had deposited in a corner of the room,
inquired for the telegraph-office, despatched a telegram to Mr. Bovill,
obtained a bedroom at the Commercial Hotel, and fell asleep, muttering
these sensible words,--

“Rouchefoucauld was perfectly right when he said, ‘Very few people would
fall in love if they had not heard it so much talked about.’”



CHAPTER VII.

KENELM CHILLINGLY rose with the sun, according to his usual custom, and
took his way to the Temperance Hotel. All in that sober building seemed
still in the arms of Morpheus. He turned towards the stables in which he
had left the gray cob, and had the pleasure to see that ill-used animal
in the healthful process of rubbing down.

“That’s right,” said he to the hostler. “I am glad to see you are so
early a riser.”

“Why,” quoth the hostler, “the gentleman as owns the pony knocked me
up at two o’clock in the morning, and pleased enough he was to see the
creature again lying down in the clean straw.”

“Oh, he has arrived at the hotel, I presume?--a stout gentleman?”

“Yes, stout enough; and a passionate gentleman too. Came in a yellow and
two posters, knocked up the Temperance and then knocked up me to see
for the pony, and was much put out as he could not get any grog at the
Temperance.”

“I dare say he was. I wish he had got his grog: it might have put him in
better humour. Poor little thing!” muttered Kenelm, turning away; “I am
afraid she is in for a regular vituperation. My turn next, I suppose.
But he must be a good fellow to have come at once for his niece in the
dead of the night.”

About nine o’clock Kenelm presented himself again at the Temperance
Hotel, inquired for Mr. Bovill, and was shown by the prim maid-servant
into the drawing-room, where he found Mr. Bovill seated amicably at
breakfast with his niece, who of course was still in boy’s clothing,
having no other costume at hand. To Kenelm’s great relief, Mr. Bovill
rose from the table with a beaming countenance, and extending his hand
to Kenelm, said,--

“Sir, you are a gentleman; sit down, sit down and take breakfast.”

Then, as soon as the maid was out of the room, the uncle continued,--

“I have heard all your good conduct from this young simpleton. Things
might have been worse, sir.”

Kenelm bowed his head, and drew the loaf towards him in silence. Then,
considering that some apology was due to his entertainer, he said,--

“I hope you forgive me for that unfortunate mistake, when--”

“You knocked me down, or rather tripped me up. All right now. Elsie,
give the gentleman a cup of tea. Pretty little rogue, is she not? and a
good girl, in spite of her nonsense. It was all my fault letting her go
to the play and be intimate with Miss Lockit, a stage-stricken, foolish
old maid, who ought to have known better than to lead her into all this
trouble.”

“No, uncle,” cried the girl, resolutely; “don’t blame her, nor any one
but me.”

Kenelm turned his dark eyes approvingly towards the girl, and saw that
her lips were firmly set; there was an expression, not of grief nor
shame, but compressed resolution in her countenance. But when her eyes
met his they fell softly, and a blush mantled over her cheeks up to her
very forehead.

“Ah!” said the uncle, “just like you, Elsie; always ready to take
everybody’s fault on your own shoulders. Well, well, say no more about
that. Now, my young friend, what brings you across the country tramping
it on foot, eh? a young man’s whim?” As he spoke, he eyed Kenelm very
closely, and his look was that of an intelligent man not unaccustomed to
observe the faces of those he conversed with. In fact a more shrewd man
of business than Mr. Bovill is seldom met with on ‘Change or in market.

“I travel on foot to please myself, sir,” answered Kenelm, curtly, and
unconsciously set on his guard.

“Of course you do,” cried Mr. Bovill, with a jovial laugh. “But it seems
you don’t object to a chaise and pony whenever you can get them for
nothing,--ha, ha!--excuse me,--a joke.”

Herewith Mr. Bovill, still in excellent good-humour, abruptly changed
the conversation to general matters,--agricultural prospects, chance of
a good harvest, corn trade, money market in general, politics, state of
the nation. Kenelm felt there was an attempt to draw him out, to sound,
to pump him, and replied only by monosyllables, generally significant
of ignorance on the questions broached; and at the close, if the
philosophical heir of the Chillinglys was in the habit of allowing
himself to be surprised he would certainly have been startled when Mr.
Bovill rose, slapped him on the shoulder, and said in a tone of great
satisfaction, “Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these
matters: you are a gentleman born and bred; your clothes can’t disguise
you, sir. Elsie was right. My dear, just leave us for a few minutes: I
have something to say to our young friend. You can get ready meanwhile
to go with me.” Elsie left the table and walked obediently towards the
doorway. There she halted a moment, turned round, and looked timidly
towards Kenelm. He had naturally risen from his seat as she rose, and
advanced some paces as if to open the door for her. Thus their looks
encountered. He could not interpret that shy gaze of hers: it was
tender, it was deprecating, it was humble, it was pleading; a man
accustomed to female conquests might have thought it was something more,
something in which was the key to all. But that something more was an
unknown tongue to Kenelm Chillingly.

When the two men were alone, Mr. Bovill reseated himself and motioned to
Kenelm to do the same. “Now, young sir,” said the former, “you and I can
talk at our ease. That adventure of yours yesterday may be the luckiest
thing that could happen to you.”

“It is sufficiently lucky if I have been of any service to your niece.
But her own good sense would have been her safeguard if she had been
alone, and discovered, as she would have done, that Mr. Compton had,
knowingly or not, misled her to believe that he was a single man.”

“Hang Mr. Compton! we have done with him. I am a plain man, and I come
to the point. It is you who have carried off my niece; it is with you
that she came to this hotel. Now when Elsie told me how well you
had behaved, and that your language and manners were those of a real
gentleman, my mind was made up. I guess pretty well what you are; you
are a gentleman’s son; probably a college youth; not overburdened with
cash; had a quarrel with your governor, and he keeps you short. Don’t
interrupt me. Well, Elsie is a good girl and a pretty girl, and will
make a good wife, as wives go; and, hark ye, she has L20,000. So just
confide in me; and if you don’t like your parents to know about it till
the thing’s done and they be only got to forgive and bless you, why, you
shall marry Elsie before you can say Jack Robinson.”

For the first time in his life Kenelm Chillingly was seized with
terror,--terror and consternation. His jaw dropped; his tongue was
palsied. If hair ever stands on end, his hair did. At last, with
superhuman effort, he gasped out the word, “Marry!”

“Yes; marry. If you are a gentleman you are bound to it. You have
compromised my niece,--a respectable, virtuous girl, sir; an orphan, but
not unprotected. I repeat, it is you who have plucked her from my very
arms, and with violence and assault eloped with her; and what would the
world say if it knew? Would it believe in your prudent conduct?--conduct
only to be explained by the respect you felt due to your future wife.
And where will you find a better? Where will you find an uncle who will
part with his ward and L20,000 without asking if you have a sixpence?
and the girl has taken a fancy to you; I see it: would she have given up
that player so easily if you had not stolen her heart? Would you break
that heart? No, young man: you are not a villain. Shake hands on it!”

“Mr. Bovill,” said Kenelm, recovering his wonted equanimity, “I am
inexpressibly flattered by the honour you propose to me, and I do not
deny that Miss Elsie is worthy of a much better man than myself. But
I have inconceivable prejudices against the connubial state. If it be
permitted to a member of the Established Church to cavil at any sentence
written by Saint Paul,--and I think that liberty may be permitted to a
simple layman, since eminent members of the clergy criticise the whole
Bible as freely as if it were the history of Queen Elizabeth by Mr.
Froude,--I should demur at the doctrine that it is better to marry than
to burn: I myself should prefer burning. With these sentiments it would
ill become any one entitled to that distinction of ‘gentleman’ which you
confer on me to lead a fellow-victim to the sacrificial altar. As for
any reproach attached to Miss Elsie, since in my telegram I directed you
to ask for a young gentleman at this hotel, her very sex is not known in
this place unless you divulge it. And--”

Here Kenelm was interrupted by a violent explosion of rage from the
uncle. He stamped his feet; he almost foamed at the mouth; he doubled
his fist, and shook it in Kenelm’s face.

“Sir, you are mocking me: John Bovill is not a man to be jeered in this
way. You _shall_ marry the girl. I’ll not have her thrust back upon me
to be the plague of my life with her whims and tantrums. You have taken
her, and you shall keep her, or I’ll break every bone in your skin.”

“Break them,” said Kenelm, resignedly, but at the same time falling back
into a formidable attitude of defence, which cooled the pugnacity of his
accuser. Mr. Bovill sank into his chair, and wiped his forehead. Kenelm
craftily pursued the advantage he had gained, and in mild accents
proceeded to reason,--

“When you recover your habitual serenity of humour, Mr. Bovill, you
will see how much your very excusable desire to secure your niece’s
happiness, and, I may add, to reward what you allow to have been
forbearing and well-bred conduct on my part, has hurried you into an
error of judgment. You know nothing of me. I may be, for what you know,
an impostor or swindler; I may have every bad quality, and yet you are
to be contented with my assurance, or rather your own assumption, that
I am born a gentleman, in order to give me your niece and her L20,000.
This is temporary insanity on your part. Allow me to leave you to
recover from your excitement.”

“Stop, sir,” said Mr. Bovill, in a changed and sullen tone; “I am not
quite the madman you think me. But I dare say I have been too hasty and
too rough. Nevertheless the facts are as I have stated them, and I do
not see how, as a man of honour, you can get off marrying my niece. The
mistake you made in running away with her was, no doubt, innocent on
your part: but still there it is; and supposing the case came before a
jury, it would be an ugly one for you and your family. Marriage alone
could mend it. Come, come, I own I was too business-like in rushing to
the point at once, and I no longer say, ‘Marry my niece off-hand.’ You
have only seen her disguised and in a false position. Pay me a visit at
Oakdale; stay with me a month; and if at the end of that time you do not
like her well enough to propose, I’ll let you off and say no more about
it.”

While Mr. Bovill thus spoke, and Kenelm listened, neither saw that the
door had been noiselessly opened and that Elsie stood at the threshold.
Now, before Kenelm could reply, she advanced into the middle of the
room, and, her small figure drawn up to its fullest height, her cheeks
glowing, her lips quivering, exclaimed,--

“Uncle, for shame!” Then addressing Kenelm in a sharp tone of anguish,
“Oh, do not believe I knew anything of this!” she covered her face with
both hands and stood mute.

All of chivalry that Kenelm had received with his baptismal appellation
was aroused. He sprang up, and, bending his knee as he drew one of her
hands into his own, he said,--

“I am as convinced that your uncle’s words are abhorrent to you as I am
that you are a pure-hearted and high-spirited woman, of whose friendship
I shall be proud. We meet again.” Then releasing her hand, he addressed
Mr. Bovill: “Sir, you are unworthy the charge of your niece. Had you not
been so, she would have committed no imprudence. If she have any female
relation, to that relation transfer your charge.”

“I have! I have!” cried Elsie; “my lost mother’s sister: let me go to
her.”

“The woman who keeps a school!” said Mr. Bovill sneeringly.

“Why not?” asked Kenelm.

“She never would go there. I proposed it to her a year ago. The minx
would not go into a school.”

“I will now, Uncle.”

“Well, then, you shall at once; and I hope you’ll be put on bread and
water. Fool! fool! you have spoilt your own game. Mr. Chillingly, now
that Miss Elsie has turned her back on herself, I can convince you that
I am not the mad man you thought me. I was at the festive meeting held
when you came of age: my brother is one of your father’s tenants. I did
not recognize your face immediately in the excitement of our encounter
and in your change of dress; but in walking home it struck me that I had
seen it before, and I knew it at once when you entered the room to-day.
It has been a tussle between us which should beat the other. You have
beat me; and thanks to that idiot! If she had not put her spoke into my
wheel, she would have lived to be ‘my lady.’ Now good-day, sir.”

“Mr. Bovill, you offered to shake hands: shake hands now, and promise
me, with the good grace of one honourable combatant to another, that
Miss Elsie shall go to her aunt the schoolmistress at once if she wishes
it. Hark ye, my friend” (this in Mr. Bovill’s ear): “a man can never
manage a woman. Till a woman marries, a prudent man leaves her to women;
when she does marry, she manages her husband, and there’s an end of it.”

Kenelm was gone.

“Oh, wise young man!” murmured the uncle. “Elsie, dear, how can you go
to your aunt’s while you are in that dress?”

Elsie started as from a trance, her eyes directed towards the
doorway through which Kenelm had vanished. “This dress,” she said
contemptuously, “this dress; is not that easily altered with shops in
the town?”

“Gad!” muttered Mr. Bovill, “that youngster is a second Solomon; and if
I can’t manage Elsie, she’ll manage a husband--whenever she gets one.”



CHAPTER VIII.

“BY the powers that guard innocence and celibacy,” soliloquized Kenelm
Chillingly, “but I have had a narrow escape! and had that amphibious
creature been in girl’s clothes instead of boy’s, when she intervened
like the deity of the ancient drama, I might have plunged my armorial
Fishes into hot water. Though, indeed, it is hard to suppose that a
young lady head-over-ears in love with Mr. Compton yesterday could have
consigned her affections to me to-day. Still she looked as if she could,
which proves either that one is never to trust a woman’s heart or never
to trust a woman’s looks. Decimus Roach is right. Man must never relax
his flight from the women, if he strives to achieve an ‘Approach to the
Angels.’”

These reflections were made by Kenelm Chillingly as, having turned his
back upon the town in which such temptations and trials had befallen
him, he took his solitary way along a footpath that wound through meads
and cornfields, and shortened by three miles the distance to a cathedral
town at which he proposed to rest for the night.

He had travelled for some hours, and the sun was beginning to slope
towards a range of blue hills in the west, when he came to the margin
of a fresh rivulet, overshadowed by feathery willows and the quivering
leaves of silvery Italian poplars. Tempted by the quiet and cool of
this pleasant spot, he flung himself down on the banks, drew from his
knapsack some crusts of bread with which he had wisely provided himself,
and, dipping them into the pure lymph as it rippled over its pebbly bed,
enjoyed one of those luxurious repasts for which epicures would exchange
their banquet in return for the appetite of youth. Then, reclining along
the bank, and crushing the wild thyme that grows best and sweetest in
wooded coverts, provided they be neighboured by water, no matter whether
in pool or rill, he resigned himself to that intermediate state between
thought and dream-land which we call “revery.” At a little distance he
heard the low still sound of the mower’s scythe, and the air came to his
brow sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay.

He was roused by a gentle tap on the shoulder, and turning lazily round,
saw a good-humoured jovial face upon a pair of massive shoulders, and
heard a hearty and winning voice say,--

“Young man, if you are not too tired, will you lend a hand to get in
my hay? We are very short of hands, and I am afraid we shall have rain
pretty soon.”

Kenelm rose and shook himself, gravely contemplated the stranger, and
replied in his customary sententious fashion, “Man is born to help his
fellow-man,--especially to get in hay while the sun shines. I am at your
service.”

“That’s a good fellow, and I’m greatly obliged to you. You see I had
counted on a gang of roving haymakers, but they were bought up
by another farmer. This way;” and leading on through a gap in the
brushwood, he emerged, followed by Kenelm, into a large meadow,
one-third of which was still under the scythe, the rest being occupied
with persons of both sexes, tossing and spreading the cut grass. Among
the latter, Kenelm, stripped to his shirt-sleeves, soon found himself
tossing and spreading like the rest, with his usual melancholy
resignation of mien and aspect. Though a little awkward at first in
the use of his unfamiliar implements, his practice in all athletic
accomplishments bestowed on him that invaluable quality which is termed
“handiness,” and he soon distinguished himself by the superior activity
and neatness with which he performed his work. Something--it might be in
his countenance or in the charm of his being a stranger--attracted the
attention of the feminine section of haymakers, and one very pretty girl
who was nearer to him than the rest attempted to commence conversation.

“This is new to you,” she said smiling.

“Nothing is new to me,” answered Kenelm, mournfully. “But allow me to
observe that to do things well you should only do one thing at a time. I
am here to make hay and not conversation.”

“My!” said the girl, in amazed ejaculation, and turned off with a toss
of her pretty head.

“I wonder if that jade has got an uncle,” thought Kenelm. The farmer,
who took his share of work with the men, halting now and then to look
round, noticed Kenelm’s vigorous application with much approval, and at
the close of the day’s work shook him heartily by the hand, leaving a
two-shilling piece in his palm. The heir of the Chillinglys gazed on
that honorarium, and turned it over with the finger and thumb of the
left hand.

“Be n’t it eno’?” said the farmer, nettled.

“Pardon me,” answered Kenelm. “But, to tell you the truth, it is the
first money I ever earned by my own bodily labour; and I regard it with
equal curiosity and respect. But if it would not offend you, I would
rather that, instead of the money, you had offered me some supper; for I
have tasted nothing but bread and water since the morning.”

“You shall have the money and supper both, my lad,” said the farmer,
cheerily. “And if you will stay and help till I have got in the hay, I
dare say my good woman can find you a better bed than you’ll get in the
village inn; if, indeed, you can get one there at all.”

“You are very kind. But before I accept your hospitality excuse one
question: have you any nieces about you?”

“Nieces!” echoed the farmer, mechanically thrusting his hands into his
breeches-pockets as if in search of something there, “nieces about me!
what do you mean? Be that a newfangled word for coppers?”

“Not for coppers, though perhaps for brass. But I spoke without
metaphor. I object to nieces upon abstract principle, confirmed by the
test of experience.”

The farmer stared, and thought his new friend not quite so sound in his
mental as he evidently was in his physical conformation, but replied,
with a laugh, “Make yourself easy, then. I have only one niece, and she
is married to an iron-monger and lives in Exeter.”

On entering the farmhouse, Kenelm’s host conducted him straight into the
kitchen, and cried out, in a hearty voice, to a comely middle-aged dame,
who, with a stout girl, was intent on culinary operations, “Hulloa! old
woman, I have brought you a guest who has well earned his supper, for he
has done the work of two, and I have promised him a bed.”

The farmer’s wife turned sharply round. “He is heartily welcome to
supper. As to a bed,” she said doubtfully, “I don’t know.” But here her
eyes settled on Kenelm; and there was something in his aspect so
unlike what she expected to see in an itinerant haymaker, that she
involuntarily dropped a courtesy, and resumed, with a change of tone,
“The gentleman shall have the guest-room: but it will take a little time
to get ready; you know, John, all the furniture is covered up.”

“Well, wife, there will be leisure eno’ for that. He don’t want to go to
roost till he has supped.”

“Certainly not,” said Kenelm, sniffing a very agreeable odour.

“Where are the girls?” asked the farmer.

“They have been in these five minutes, and gone upstairs to tidy
themselves.”

“What girls?” faltered Kenelm, retreating towards the door. “I thought
you said you had no nieces.”

“But I did not say I had no daughters. Why, you are not afraid of them,
are you?”

“Sir,” replied Kenelm, with a polite and politic evasion of that
question, “if your daughters are like their mother, you can’t say that
they are not dangerous.”

“Come,” cried the farmer, looking very much pleased, while his dame
smiled and blushed, “come, that’s as nicely said as if you were
canvassing the county. ‘Tis not among haymakers that you learned
manners, I guess; and perhaps I have been making too free with my
betters.”

“What!” quoth the courteous Kenelm, “do you mean to imply that you were
too free with your shillings? Apologize for that, if you like, but I
don’t think you’ll get back the shillings. I have not seen so much of
this life as you have, but, according to my experience, when a man once
parts with his money, whether to his betters or his worsers, the chances
are that he’ll never see it again.”

At this aphorism the farmer laughed ready to kill himself, his wife
chuckled, and even the maid-of-all-work grinned. Kenelm, preserving his
unalterable gravity, said to himself,--

“Wit consists in the epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and
the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful
appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women.
Certainly I am a wit without knowing it.”

Here the farmer touched him on the shoulder--touched it, did not slap
it, as he would have done ten minutes before--and said,--

“We must not disturb the Missis or we shall get no supper. I’ll just go
and give a look into the cow-sheds. Do you know much about cows?”

“Yes, cows produce cream and butter. The best cows are those which
produce at the least cost the best cream and butter. But how the best
cream and butter can be produced at a price which will place them free
of expense on a poor man’s breakfast-table is a question to be settled
by a Reformed Parliament and a Liberal Administration. In the meanwhile
let us not delay the supper.”

The farmer and his guest quitted the kitchen and entered the farmyard.

“You are quite a stranger in these parts?”

“Quite.”

“You don’t even know my name?”

“No, except that I heard your wife call you John.”

“My name is John Saunderson.”

“Ah! you come from the North, then? That’s why you are so sensible and
shrewd. Names that end in ‘son’ are chiefly borne by the descendants of
the Danes, to whom King Alfred, Heaven bless him! peacefully assigned
no less than sixteen English counties. And when a Dane was called
somebody’s son, it is a sign that he was the son of a somebody.”

“By gosh! I never heard that before.”

“If I thought you had I should not have said it.”

“Now I have told you my name, what is yours?”

“A wise man asks questions and a fool answers them. Suppose for a moment
that I am not a fool.”

Farmer Saunderson scratched his head, and looked more puzzled than
became the descendant of a Dane settled by King Alfred in the north of
England.

“Dash it,” said he at last, “but I think you are Yorkshire too.”

“Man, who is the most conceited of all animals, says that he alone has
the prerogative of thought, and condemns the other animals to the meaner
mechanical operation which he calls instinct. But as instincts are
unerring and thoughts generally go wrong, man has not much to boast of
according to his own definition. When you say you think, and take it
for granted, that I am Yorkshire, you err. I am not Yorkshire. Confining
yourself to instinct, can you divine when we shall sup? The cows you are
about to visit divine to a moment when they shall be fed.”

Said the farmer, recovering his sense of superiority to the guest whom
he obliged with a supper, “In ten minutes.” Then, after a pause, and
in a tone of deprecation, as if he feared he might be thought fine, he
continued, “We don’t sup in the kitchen. My father did, and so did I
till I married; but my Bess, though she’s as good a farmer’s wife as
ever wore shoe-leather, was a tradesman’s daughter, and had been brought
up different. You see she was not without a good bit of money: but even
if she had been, I should not have liked her folks to say I had lowered
her; so we sup in the parlour.”

Quoth Kenelm, “The first consideration is to sup at all. Supper
conceded, every man is more likely to get on in life who would rather
sup in his parlour than his kitchen. Meanwhile, I see a pump; while you
go to the cows I will stay here and wash my hands of them.”

“Hold! you seem a sharp fellow, and certainly no fool. I have a son,
a good smart chap, but stuck up; crows it over us all; thinks no small
beer of himself. You’d do me a service, and him too, if you’d let him
down a peg or two.”

Kenelm, who was now hard at work at the pump-handle, only replied by a
gracious nod. But as he seldom lost an opportunity for reflection, he
said to himself, while he laved his face in the stream from the spout,
“One can’t wonder why every small man thinks it so pleasant to let down
a big one, when a father asks a stranger to let down his own son for
even fancying that he is not small beer. It is upon that principle in
human nature that criticism wisely relinquishes its pretensions as an
analytical science, and becomes a lucrative profession. It relies on the
pleasure its readers find in letting a man down.”



CHAPTER IX.

IT was a pretty, quaint farmhouse, such as might well go with two or
three hundred acres of tolerably good land, tolerably well farmed by an
active old-fashioned tenant, who, though he did not use mowing-machines
nor steam-ploughs nor dabble in chemical experiments, still brought
an adequate capital to his land and made the capital yield a very fair
return of interest. The supper was laid out in a good-sized though
low-pitched parlour with a glazed door, now wide open, as were all the
latticed windows, looking into a small garden, rich in those straggling
old English flowers which are nowadays banished from gardens more
pretentious and; infinitely less fragrant. At one corner was an arbour
covered with honeysuckle, and opposite to it a row of beehives. The room
itself had an air of comfort, and that sort of elegance which indicates
the presiding genius of feminine taste. There were shelves suspended
to the wall by blue ribbons, and filled with small books neatly bound;
there were flower-pots in all the window-sills; there was a small
cottage piano; the walls were graced partly with engraved portraits of
county magnates and prize oxen; partly with samplers in worsted-work,
comprising verses of moral character and the names and birthdays of
the farmer’s grandmother, mother, wife, and daughters. Over the
chimney-piece was a small mirror, and above that the trophy of a fox’s
brush; while niched into an angle in the room was a glazed cupboard,
rich with specimens of old china, Indian and English.

The party consisted of the farmer, his wife, three buxom daughters, and
a pale-faced slender lad of about twenty, the only son, who did not take
willingly to farming: he had been educated at a superior grammar school,
and had high notions about the March of Intellect and the Progress of
the Age.

Kenelm, though among the gravest of mortals, was one of the least shy.
In fact shyness is the usual symptom of a keen _amour propre_; and of
that quality the youthful Chillingly scarcely possessed more than did
the three Fishes of his hereditary scutcheon. He felt himself perfectly
at home with his entertainers; taking care, however, that his attentions
were so equally divided between the three daughters as to prevent all
suspicion of a particular preference. “There is safety in numbers,”
 thought he, “especially in odd numbers. The three Graces never married,
neither did the nine Muses.”

“I presume, young ladies, that you are fond of music,” said Kenelm,
glancing at the piano.

“Yes, I love it dearly,” said the eldest girl, speaking for the others.

Quoth the farmer, as he heaped the stranger’s plate with boiled beef and
carrots, “Things are not what they were when I was a boy; then it was
only great tenant-farmers who had their girls taught the piano, and
sent their boys to a good school. Now we small folks are for helping our
children a step or two higher than our own place on the ladder.”

“The schoolmaster is abroad,” said the son, with the emphasis of a sage
adding an original aphorism to the stores of philosophy.

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