Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

“And, besides, I feel pretty sure that the dear girl has already a regard for Kenelm which allows no room for a rival. However, I shall not forget your hint, but keep a sharp lookout; and, if I see the young man wants to be too sweet on Cecilia, I shall cut short his visit.”

“Give yourself no trouble in the matter; it will do no good. Marriages are made in heaven. Heaven’s will be done. If I can get away I will run down to you for a day or two. Perhaps in that case you can ask Lady Glenalvon. I like her, and she likes Kenelm. Have you finished? I see the brougham is at the door, and we have to call at your hotel to take up your carpet-bag.”

Mivers was deliberately sealing his notes while he thus spoke. He now rang for his servant, gave orders for their delivery, and then followed Sir Peter down stairs and into the brougham. Not a word would he say more about Gordon, and Sir Peter shrank from telling him about the L20,000. Chillingly Mivers was perhaps the last person to whom Sir Peter would be tempted to parade an act of generosity. Mivers might not unfrequently do a generous act himself, provided it was not divulged; but he had always a sneer for the generosity of others.

CHAPTER II

WANDERING back towards Moleswich, Kenelm found himself a little before sunset on the banks of the garrulous brook, almost opposite to the house inhabited by Lily Mordaunt. He stood long and silently by the grassy margin, his dark shadow falling over the stream, broken into fragments by the eddy and strife of waves, fresh from their leap down the neighbouring waterfall. His eyes rested on the house and the garden lawn in the front. The upper windows were open. “I wonder which is hers,” he said to himself. At last he caught a glimpse of the gardener, bending over a flower border with his watering-pot, and then moving slowly through the little shrubbery, no doubt to his own cottage. Now the lawn was solitary, save that a couple of thrushes dropped suddenly on the sward.

“Good evening, sir,” said a voice. “A capital spot for trout this.”

Kenelm turned his head, and beheld on the footpath, just behind him, a respectable elderly man, apparently of the class of a small retail tradesman, with a fishing-rod in his hand and a basket belted to his side.

“For trout,” replied Kenelm; “I dare say. A strangely attractive spot indeed.”

“Are you an angler, sir, if I may make bold to inquire?” asked the elderly man, somewhat perhaps puzzled as to the rank of the stranger; noticing, on the one hand, his dress and his mien, on the other, slung to his shoulders, the worn and shabby knapsack which Kenelm had carried, at home and abroad, the preceding year.

“Ay, I am an angler.”

“Then this is the best place in the whole stream. Look, sir, there is Izaak Walton’s summer-house; and further down you see that white, neat-looking house. Well, that is my house, sir, and I have an apartment which I let to gentleman anglers. It is generally occupied throughout the summer months. I expect every day to have a letter to engage it, but it is vacant now. A very nice apartment, sir,—sitting-room and bedroom.”

“Descende ceolo, et dic age tibia,” said Kenelm.

“Sir?” said the elderly man.

“I beg you ten thousand pardons. I have had the misfortune to have been at the university, and to have learned a little Latin, which sometimes comes back very inopportunely. But, speaking in plain English, what I meant to say is this: I invoked the Muse to descend from heaven and bring with her—the original says a fife, but I meant—a fishing-rod. I should think your apartment would suit me exactly; pray show it to me.”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said the elderly man. “The Muse need not bring a fishing-rod! we have all sorts of tackle at your service, and a boat too, if you care for that. The stream hereabouts is so shallow and narrow that a boat is of little use till you get farther down.”

“I don’t want to get farther down; but should I want to get to the opposite bank, without wading across, would the boat take me or is there a bridge?”

“The boat can take you. It is a flat-bottomed punt, and there is a bridge too for foot-passengers, just opposite my house; and between this and Moleswich, where the stream widens, there is a ferry. The stone bridge for traffic is at the farther end of the town.”

“Good. Let us go at once to your house.”

The two men walked on.

“By the by,” said Kenelm, as they walked, “do you know much of the family that inhabit the pretty cottage on the opposite side, which we have just left behind?”

“Mrs. Cameron’s. Yes, of course, a very good lady; and Mr. Melville, the painter. I am sure I ought to know, for he has often lodged with me when he came to visit Mrs. Cameron. He recommends my apartment to his friends, and they are my best lodgers. I like painters, sir, though I don’t know much about paintings. They are pleasant gentlemen, and easily contented with my humble roof and fare.”

“You are quite right. I don’t know much about paintings myself; but I am inclined to believe that painters, judging not from what I have seen of them, for I have not a single acquaintance among them personally, but from what I have read of their lives, are, as a general rule, not only pleasant but noble gentlemen. They form within themselves desires to beautify or exalt commonplace things, and they can only accomplish their desires by a constant study of what is beautiful and what is exalted. A man constantly so engaged ought to be a very noble gentleman, even though he may be the son of a shoeblack. And living in a higher world than we do, I can conceive that he is, as you say, very well contented with humble roof and fare in the world we inhabit.”

“Exactly, sir; I see—I see now, though you put it in a way that never struck me before.”

“And yet,” said Kenelm, looking benignly at the speaker, “you seem to me a well-educated and intelligent man; reflective on things in general, without being unmindful of your interests in particular, especially when you have lodgings to let. Do not be offended. That sort of man is not perhaps born to be a painter, but I respect him highly. The world, sir, requires the vast majority of its inhabitants to live in it,—to live by it. ‘Each for himself, and God for us all.’ The greatest happiness of the greatest number is best secured by a prudent consideration for Number One.”

Somewhat to Kenelm’s surprise (allowing that he had now learned enough of life to be occasionally surprised) the elderly man here made a dead halt, stretched out his hand cordially, and cried, “Hear, hear! I see that, like me, you are a decided democrat.”

“Democrat! Pray, may I ask, not why you are one,—that would be a liberty, and democrats resent any liberty taken with themselves; but why you suppose I am?”

“You spoke of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That is a democratic sentiment surely! Besides, did not you say, sir, that painters,—painters, sir, painters, even if they were the sons of shoeblacks, were the true gentlemen,—the true noblemen?”

“I did not say that exactly, to the disparagement of other gentlemen and nobles. But if I did, what then?”

“Sir, I agree with you. I despise rank; I despise dukes and earls and aristocrats. ‘An honest man’s the noblest work of God.’ Some poet says that. I think Shakspeare. Wonderful man, Shakspeare. A tradesman’s son,—butcher, I believe. Eh! My uncle was a butcher, and might have been an alderman. I go along with you heartily, heartily. I am a democrat, every inch of me. Shake hands, sir, shake hands; we are all equals. ‘Each man for himself, and God for us all.’”

“I have no objection to shake hands,” said Kenelm; “but don’t let me owe your condescension to false pretences. Though we are all equal before the law, except the rich man, who has little chance of justice as against a poor man when submitted to an English jury, yet I utterly deny that any two men you select can be equals. One must beat the other in something; and, when one man beats another, democracy ceases and aristocracy begins.”

“Aristocracy! I don’t see that. What do you mean by aristocracy?”

“The ascendency of the better man. In a rude State the better man is the stronger; in a corrupt State, perhaps the more roguish; in modern republics the jobbers get the money and the lawyers get the power. In well-ordered States alone aristocracy appears at its genuine worth: the better man in birth, because respect for ancestry secures a higher standard of honour; the better man in wealth, because of the immense uses to enterprise, energy, and the fine arts, which rich men must be if they follow their natural inclinations; the better man in character, the better man in ability, for reasons too obvious to define; and these two last will beat the others in the government of the State, if the State be flourishing and free. All these four classes of better men constitute true aristocracy; and when a better government than a true aristocracy shall be devised by the wit of man, we shall not be far off from the Millennium and the reign of saints. But here we are at the house,—yours, is it not? I like the look of it extremely.”

The elderly man now entered the little porch, over which clambered honeysuckle and ivy intertwined, and ushered Kenelm into a pleasant parlour, with a bay window, and an equally pleasant bedroom behind it.

“Will it do, sir?”

“Perfectly. I take it from this moment. My knapsack contains all I shall need for the night. There is a portmanteau of mine at Mr. Somers’s shop, which can be sent here in the morning.”

“But we have not settled about the terms,” said the elderly man, beginning to feel rather doubtful whether he ought thus to have installed in his home a stalwart pedestrian of whom he knew nothing, and who, though talking glibly enough on other things, had preserved an ominous silence on the subject of payment.

“Terms? true, name them.”

“Including board?”

“Certainly. Chameleons live on air; democrats on wind bags. I have a more vulgar appetite, and require mutton.”

“Meat is very dear now-a-days,” said the elderly man, “and I am afraid, for board and lodging I cannot charge you less than L3 3s.,—say L3 a week. My lodgers usually pay a week in advance.”

“Agreed,” said Kenelm, extracting three sovereigns from his purse. “I have dined already: I want nothing more this evening; let me detain you no further. Be kind enough to shut the door after you.”

When he was alone, Kenelm seated himself in the recess of the bay window, against the casement, and looked forth intently. Yes; he was right: he could see from thence the home of Lily. Not, indeed, more than a white gleam of the house through the interstices of trees and shrubs, but the gentle lawn sloping to the brook, with the great willow at the end dipping its boughs into the water, and shutting out all view beyond itself by its bower of tender leaves. The young man bent his face on his hands and mused dreamily: the evening deepened; the stars came forth; the rays of the moon now peered aslant through the arching dips of the willow, silvering their way as they stole to the waves below.

“Shall I bring lights, sir? or do you prefer a lamp or candles?” asked a voice behind,—the voice of the elderly man’s wife. “Do you like the shutters closed?”

The question startled the dreamer. They seemed mocking his own old mockings on the romance of love. Lamp or candles, practical lights for prosaic eyes, and shutters closed against moon and stars!

“Thank you, ma’am, not yet,” he said; and rising quietly he placed his hand on the window-sill, swung himself through the open casement, and passed slowly along the margin of the rivulet, by a path checkered alternately with shade and starlight; the moon yet more slowly rising above the willows, and lengthening its track along the wavelets.

CHAPTER III

THOUGH Kenelm did not think it necessary at present to report to his parents or his London acquaintances his recent movements and his present resting-place, it never entered into his head to lurk perdu in the immediate vicinity of Lily’s house, and seek opportunities of meeting her clandestinely. He walked to Mrs. Braefield’s the next morning, found her at home, and said in rather a more off-hand manner than was habitual to him, “I have hired a lodging in your neighbourhood, on the banks of the brook, for the sake of its trout-fishing. So you will allow me to call on you sometimes, and one of these days I hope you will give me the dinner I so unceremoniously rejected some days ago. I was then summoned away suddenly, much against my will.”

“Yes; my husband said that you shot off from him with a wild exclamation about duty.”

“Quite true; my reason, and I may say my conscience, were greatly perplexed upon a matter extremely important and altogether new to me. I went to Oxford,—the place above all others in which questions of reason and conscience are most deeply considered, and perhaps least satisfactorily solved. Relieved in my mind by my visit to a distinguished ornament of that university, I felt I might indulge in a summer holiday, and here I am.”

“Ah! I understand. You had religious doubts,—thought perhaps of turning Roman Catholic. I hope you are not going to do so?”

“My doubts were not necessarily of a religious nature. Pagans have entertained them.”

“Whatever they were I am pleased to see they did not prevent your return,” said Mrs. Braefield, graciously. “But where have you found a lodging; why not have come to us? My husband would have been scarcely less glad than myself to receive you.”

“You say that so sincerely, and so cordially, that to answer by a brief ‘I thank you’ seems rigid and heartless. But there are times in life when one yearns to be alone,—to commune with one’s own heart, and, if possible, be still; I am in one of those moody times. Bear with me.”

Mrs. Braefield looked at him with affectionate, kindly interest. She had gone before him through the solitary road of young romance. She remembered her dreamy, dangerous girlhood, when she, too, had yearned to be alone.

“Bear with you; yes, indeed. I wish, Mr. Chillingly, that I were your sister, and that you would confide in me. Something troubles you.”

“Troubles me,—no. My thoughts are happy ones, and they may sometimes perplex me, but they do not trouble.”

Kenelm said this very softly; and in the warmer light of his musing eyes, the sweeter play of his tranquil smile, there was an expression which did not belie his words.

“You have not told me where you have found a lodging,” said Mrs. Braefield, somewhat abruptly.

“Did I not?” replied Kenelm, with an unconscious start, as from an abstracted reverie. “With no undistinguished host, I presume, for when I asked him this morning for the right address of this cottage, in order to direct such luggage as I have to be sent there, he gave me his card with a grand air, saying, ‘I am pretty well known at Moleswich, by and beyond it.’ I have not yet looked at his card. Oh, here it is,—‘Algernon Sidney Gale Jones, Cromwell Lodge;’ you laugh. What do you know of him?”

“I wish my husband were here; he would tell you more about him. Mr. Jones is quite a character.”

“So I perceive.”

“A great radical,—very talkative and troublesome at the vestry; but our vicar, Mr. Emlyn, says there is no real harm in him, that his bark is worse than his bite, and that his republican or radical notions must be laid to the door of his godfathers! In addition to his name of Jones, he was unhappily christened Gale; Gale Jones being a noted radical orator at the time of his birth. And I suppose Algernon Sidney was prefixed to Gale in order to devote the new-born more emphatically to republican principles.”

“Naturally, therefore, Algernon Sidney Gale Jones baptizes his house Cromwell Lodge, seeing that Algernon Sidney held the Protectorate in especial abhorrence, and that the original Gale Jones, if an honest radical, must have done the same, considering what rough usage the advocates of Parliamentary Reform met with at the hands of his Highness. But we must be indulgent to men who have been unfortunately christened before they had any choice of the names that were to rule their fate. I myself should have been less whimsical had I not been named after a Kenelm who believed in sympathetic powders. Apart from his political doctrines, I like my landlord: he keeps his wife in excellent order. She seems frightened at the sound of her own footsteps, and glides to and fro, a pallid image of submissive womanhood in list slippers.”

“Great recommendations certainly, and Cromwell Lodge is very prettily situated. By the by, it is very near Mrs. Cameron’s.”

“Now I think of it, so it is,” said Kenelm, innocently. Ah! my friend Kenelm, enemy of shams, and truth-teller, par excellence, what hast thou come to? How are the mighty fallen! “Since you say you will dine with us, suppose we fix the day after to-morrow, and I will ask Mrs. Cameron and Lily.”

“The day after to-morrow: I shall be delighted.”

“An early hour?”

“The earlier the better.”

“Is six o’clock too early?”

“Too early! certainly not; on the contrary. Good-day: I must now go to Mrs. Somers; she has charge of my portmanteau.”

Then Kenelm rose.

“Poor dear Lily!” said Mrs. Braefield; “I wish she were less of a child.”

Kenelm reseated himself.

“Is she a child? I don’t think she is actually a child.”

“Not in years; she is between seventeen and eighteen: but my husband says that she is too childish to talk to, and always tells me to take her off his hands; he would rather talk with Mrs. Cameron.”

“Indeed!”

“Still I find something in her.”

“Indeed!”

“Not exactly childish, nor quite womanish.”

“What then?”

“I can’t exactly define. But you know what Mr. Melville and Mrs. Cameron call her as a pet name?”

“No.”

“Fairy! Fairies have no age; fairy is neither child nor woman.”

“Fairy. She is called fairy by those who know her best? Fairy!”

“And she believes in fairies.”

“Does she?—so do I. Pardon me, I must be off. The day after to-morrow,—six o’clock.”

“Wait one moment,” said Elsie, going to her writing-table. “Since you pass Grasmere on your way home, will you kindly leave this note?”

“I thought Grasmere was a lake in the north?”

“Yes; but Mr. Melville chose to call the cottage by the name of the lake. I think the first picture he ever sold was a view of Wordsworth’s house there. Here is my note to ask Mrs. Cameron to meet you; but if you object to be my messenger—”

“Object! my dear Mrs. Braefield. As you say, I pass close by the cottage.”

CHAPTER IV

KENELM went with somewhat rapid pace from Mrs. Braefield’s to the shop in the High Street kept by Will Somers. Jessie was behind the counter, which was thronged with customers. Kenelm gave her a brief direction about his portmanteau, and then passed into the back parlour, where her husband was employed on his baskets,—with the baby’s cradle in the corner, and its grandmother rocking it mechanically, as she read a wonderful missionary tract full of tales of miraculous conversions: into what sort of Christians we will not pause to inquire.

“And so you are happy, Will?” said Kenelm, seating himself between the basket-maker and the infant; the dear old mother beside him, reading the tract which linked her dreams of life eternal with life just opening in the cradle that she rocked. He not happy! How he pitied the man who could ask such a question.

“Happy, sir! I should think so, indeed. There is not a night on which Jessie and I, and mother too, do not pray that some day or other you may be as happy. By and by the baby will learn to pray ‘God bless papa, and mamma, grandmamma, and Mr. Chillingly.’”

“There is some one else much more deserving of prayers than I, though needing them less. You will know some day: pass it by now. To return to the point: you are happy; if I asked why, would you not say, ‘Because I have married the girl I love, and have never repented’?”

“Well, sir, that is about it; though, begging your pardon, I think it could be put more prettily somehow.”

“You are right there. But perhaps love and happiness never yet found any words that could fitly express them. Good-bye, for the present.”

Ah! if it were as mere materialists, or as many middle-aged or elderly folks, who, if materialists, are so without knowing it, unreflectingly say, “The main element of happiness is bodily or animal health and strength,” that question which Chillingly put would appear a very unmeaning or a very insulting one addressed to a pale cripple, who however improved of late in health, would still be sickly and ailing all his life,—put, too, by a man of the rarest conformation of physical powers that nature can adapt to physical enjoyment,—a man who, since the age in which memory commences, had never known what it was to be unwell, who could scarcely understand you if you talked of a finger-ache, and whom those refinements of mental culture which multiply the delights of the senses had endowed with the most exquisite conceptions of such happiness as mere nature and its instincts can give! But Will did not think the question unmeaning or insulting. He, the poor cripple, felt a vast superiority on the scale of joyous being over the young Hercules, well born, cultured, and wealthy, who could know so little of happiness as to ask the crippled basket-maker if he were happy.—he, blessed husband and father!

CHAPTER V

LILY was seated on the grass under a chestnut-tree on the lawn. A white cat, not long emerged from kittenhood, curled itself by her side. On her lap was an open volume, which she was reading with the greatest delight.

Mrs. Cameron came from the house, looked round, perceived the girl, and approached; and either she moved so gently, or Lily was so absorbed in the book, that the latter was not aware of her presence till she felt a light hand on her shoulder, and, looking up, recognized her aunt’s gentle face.

“Ah! Fairy, Fairy, that silly book, when you ought to be at your French verbs. What will your guardian say when he comes and finds you have so wasted time?”

“He will say that fairies never waste their time; and he will scold you for saying so.” Therewith Lily threw down the book, sprang to her feet, wound her arm round Mrs. Cameron’s neck, and kissed her fondly. “There! is that wasting time? I love you so, aunty. In a day like this I think I love everybody and everything!” As she said this, she drew up her lithe form, looked into the blue sky, and with parted lips seemed to drink in air and sunshine. Then she woke up the dozing cat, and began chasing it round the lawn.

Mrs. Cameron stood still, regarding her with moistened eyes. Just at that moment Kenelm entered through the garden gate. He, too, stood still, his eyes fixed on the undulating movements of Fairy’s exquisite form. She had arrested her favourite, and was now at play with it, shaking off her straw hat, and drawing the ribbon attached to it tantalizingly along the smooth grass. Her rich hair, thus released and dishevelled by the exercise, fell partly over her face in wavy ringlets; and her musical laugh and words of sportive endearment sounded on Kenelm’s ear more joyously than the thrill of the skylark, more sweetly than the coo of the ring-dove.

He approached towards Mrs. Cameron. Lily turned suddenly and saw him. Instinctively she smoothed back her loosened tresses, replaced the straw hat, and came up demurely to his side just as he had accosted her aunt.