KENELM CHILLINGLY did not exaggerate the social position he had acquired when he classed himself amongst the lions of the fashionable world. I dare not count the number of three-cornered notes showered upon him by the fine ladies who grow romantic upon any kind of celebrity; or the carefully sealed envelopes, containing letters from fair Anonymas, who asked if he had a heart, and would be in such a place in the Park at such an hour. What there was in Kenelm Chillingly that should make him thus favoured, especially by the fair sex, it would be difficult to say, unless it was the two-fold reputation of being unlike other people, and of being unaffectedly indifferent to the gain of any reputation at all. He might, had he so pleased, have easily established a proof that the prevalent though vague belief in his talents was not altogether unjustified. For the articles he had sent from abroad to “The Londoner” and by which his travelling expenses were defrayed, had been stamped by that sort of originality in tone and treatment which rarely fails to excite curiosity as to the author, and meets with more general praise than perhaps it deserves.
But Mivers was true to his contract to preserve inviolable the incognito of the author, and Kenelm regarded with profound contempt the articles themselves and the readers who praised them.
Just as misanthropy with some persons grows out of benevolence disappointed, so there are certain natures—and Kenelm Chillingly’s was perhaps one of them—in which indifferentism grows out of earnestness baffled.
He had promised himself pleasure in renewing acquaintance with his old tutor, Mr. Welby,—pleasure in refreshing his own taste for metaphysics and casuistry and criticism. But that accomplished professor of realism had retired from philosophy altogether, and was now enjoying a holiday for life in the business of a public office. A minister in favour of whom, when in opposition, Mr. Welby, in a moment of whim, wrote some very able articles in a leading journal, had, on acceding to power, presented the realist with one of those few good things still left to ministerial patronage,—a place worth about L1,200 a year. His mornings thus engaged in routine work, Mr. Welby enjoyed his evenings in a convivial way.
“Inveni portum,” he said to Kenelm; “I plunge into no troubled waters now. But come and dine with me to-morrow, tete-a-tete. My wife is at St. Leonard’s with my youngest born for the benefit of sea-air.” Kenelm accepted the invitation.
The dinner would have contented a Brillat-Savarin: it was faultless; and the claret was that rare nectar, the Lafitte of 1848.
“I never share this,” said Welby, “with more than one friend at a time.”
Kenelm sought to engage his host in discussion on certain new works in vogue, and which were composed according to purely realistic canons of criticism. “The more realistic; these books pretend to be, the less real they are,” said Kenelm. “I am half inclined to think that the whole school you so systematically sought to build up is a mistake, and that realism in art is a thing impossible.”
“I dare say you are right. I took up that school in earnest because I was in a passion with pretenders to the Idealistic school; and whatever one takes up in earnest is generally a mistake, especially if one is in a passion. I was not in earnest and I was not in a passion when I wrote those articles to which I am indebted for my office.” Mr. Welby here luxuriously stretched his limbs, and lifting his glass to his lips, voluptuously inhaled its bouquet.
“You sadden me,” returned Kenelm. “It is a melancholy thing to find that one’s mind was influenced in youth by a teacher who mocks at his own teachings.”
Welby shrugged his shoulders. “Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn. For the rest, as I have ceased to be a critic, I care little whether I was wrong or right when I played that part. I think I am right now as a placeman. Let the world go its own way, provided the world lets you live upon it. I drain my wine to the lees, and cut down hope to the brief span of life. Reject realism in art if you please, and accept realism in conduct. For the first time in my life I am comfortable: my mind, having worn out its walking-shoes, is now enjoying the luxury of slippers. Who can deny the realism of comfort?”
“Has a man a right,” Kenelm said to himself, as he entered his brougham, “to employ all the brilliancy of a rare wit, all the acquisitions of as rare a scholarship, to the scaring of the young generation out of the safe old roads which youth left to itself would take,—old roads skirted by romantic rivers and bowery trees,—directing them into new paths on long sandy flats, and then, when they are faint and footsore, to tell them that he cares not a pin whether they have worn out their shoes in right paths or wrong paths, for that he has attained the summum bonum of philosophy in the comfort of easy slippers?”
Before he could answer the question he thus put to himself, his brougham stopped at the door of the minister whom Welby had contributed to bring into power.
That night there was a crowded muster of the fashionable world at the great man’s house. It happened to be a very critical moment for the minister. The fate of his cabinet depended on the result of a motion about to be made the following week in the House of Commons. The great man stood at the entrance of the apartments to receive his guests, and among the guests were the framers of the hostile motion and the leaders of the opposition. His smile was not less gracious to them than to his dearest friends and stanchest supporters.
“I suppose this is realism,” said Kenelm to himself; “but it is not truth, and it is not comfort.” Leaning against the wall near the doorway, he contemplated with grave interest the striking countenance of his distinguished host. He detected beneath that courteous smile and that urbane manner the signs of care. The eye was absent, the cheek pinched, the brow furrowed. Kenelm turned away his looks, and glanced over the animated countenances of the idle loungers along commoner thoroughfares in life. Their eyes were not absent; their brows were not furrowed; their minds seemed quite at home in exchanging nothings. Interest many of them had in the approaching struggle, but it was much such an interest as betters of small sums may have on the Derby day,—just enough to give piquancy to the race; nothing to make gain a great joy, or loss a keen anguish.
“Our host is looking ill,” said Mivers, accosting Kenelm. “I detect symptoms of suppressed gout. You know my aphorism, ‘nothing so gouty as ambition,’ especially Parliamentary ambition.”
“You are not one of those friends who press on my choice of life that source of disease; allow me to thank you.”
“Your thanks are misplaced. I strongly advise you to devote yourself to a political career.”
“Despite the gout?”
“Despite the gout. If you could take the world as I do, my advice might be different. But your mind is overcrowded with doubts and fantasies and crotchets, and you have no choice but to give them vent in active life.”
“You had something to do in making me what I am,—an idler; something to answer for as to my doubts, fantasies, and crotchets. It was by your recommendation that I was placed under the tuition of Mr. Welby, and at that critical age in which the bent of the twig forms the shape of the tree.”
“And I pride myself on that counsel. I repeat the reasons for which I gave it: it is an incalculable advantage for a young man to start in life thoroughly initiated into the New Ideas which will more or less influence his generation. Welby was the ablest representative of these ideas. It is a wondrous good fortune when the propagandist of the New Ideas is something more than a bookish philosopher,—when he is a thorough ‘man of the world,’ and is what we emphatically call ‘practical.’ Yes, you owe me much that I secured to you such tuition, and saved you from twaddle and sentiment, the poetry of Wordsworth and the muscular Christianity of Cousin John.”
“What you say that you saved me from might have done me more good than all you conferred on me. I suspect that when education succeeds in placing an old head upon young shoulders the combination is not healthful: it clogs the blood and slackens the pulse. However, I must not be ungrateful; you meant kindly. Yes, I suppose Welby is practical: he has no belief, and he has got a place. But our host, I presume, is also practical; his place is a much higher one than Welby’s, and yet he is surely not without belief?”
“He was born before the new ideas came into practical force; but in proportion as they have done so, his beliefs have necessarily disappeared. I don’t suppose that he believes in much now, except the two propositions: firstly, that if he accept the new ideas he will have power and keep it, and if he does not accept them power is out of the question; and, secondly, that if the new ideas are to prevail he is the best man to direct them safely,—beliefs quite enough for a minister. No wise minister should have more.”
“Does he not believe that the motion he is to resist next week is a bad one?”
“A bad one of course, in its consequences, for if it succeed it will upset him; a good one in itself I am sure he must think it, for he would bring it on himself if he were in opposition.”
“I see that Pope’s definition is still true, ‘Party is the madness of the many for the gain of the few.’”
“No, it is not true. Madness is a wrong word applied to the many: the many are sane enough; they know their own objects, and they make use of the intellect of the few in order to gain their objects. In each party it is the many that control the few who nominally lead them. A man becomes Prime Minister because he seems to the many of his party the fittest person to carry out their views. If he presume to differ from these views, they put him into a moral pillory, and pelt him with their dirtiest stones and their rottenest eggs.”
“Then the maxim should be reversed, and party is rather the madness of the few for the gain of the many?
“Of the two, that is the more correct definition.”
“Let me keep my senses and decline to be one of the few.”
Kenelm moved away from his cousin’s side, and entering one of the less crowded rooms, saw Cecilia Travers seated there in a recess with Lady Glenalvon. He joined them, and after a brief interchange of a few commonplaces, Lady Glenalvon quitted her post to accost a foreign ambassadress, and Kenelm sank into the chair she vacated.
It was a relief to his eye to contemplate Cecilia’s candid brow; to his ear to hearken to the soft voice that had no artificial tones, and uttered no cynical witticisms.
“Don’t you think it strange,” said Kenelm, “that we English should so mould all our habits as to make even what we call pleasure as little pleasurable as possible? We are now in the beginning of June, the fresh outburst of summer, when every day in the country is a delight to eye and ear, and we say, ‘The season for hot rooms is beginning.’ We alone of civilized races spend our summer in a capital, and cling to the country when the trees are leafless and the brooks frozen.”
“Certainly that is a mistake; but I love the country in all seasons, even in winter.”
“Provided the country house is full of London people?”
“No; that is rather a drawback. I never want companions in the country.”
“True; I should have remembered that you differ from young ladies in general, and make companions of books. They are always more conversable in the country than they are in town; or rather, we listen there to them with less distracted attention. Ha! do I not recognize yonder the fair whiskers of George Belvoir? Who is the lady leaning on his arm?”
“Don’t you know?—Lady Emily Belvoir, his wife.”
“Ah! I was told that he had married. The lady is handsome. She will become the family diamonds. Does she read Blue-books?”
“I will ask her if you wish.”
“Nay, it is scarcely worth while. During my rambles abroad I saw but few English newspapers. I did, however, learn that George had won his election. Has he yet spoken in Parliament?”
“Yes; he moved the answer to the Address this session, and was much complimented on the excellent tone and taste of his speech. He spoke again a few weeks afterwards, I fear not so successfully.”
“Coughed down?”
“Something like it.”
“Do him good; he will recover the cough, and fulfil my prophecy of his success.”
“Have you done with poor George for the present? If so, allow me to ask whether you have quite forgotten Will Somers and Jessie Wiles?”
“Forgotten them! no.”
“But you have never asked after them?”
“I took it for granted that they were as happy as could be expected. Pray assure me that they are.”
“I trust so now; but they have had trouble, and have left Graveleigh.”
“Trouble! left Graveleigh! You make me uneasy. Pray explain.”
“They had not been three months married and installed in the home they owed to you, when poor Will was seized with a rheumatic fever. He was confined to his bed for many weeks; and, when at last he could move from it, was so weak as to be still unable to do any work. During his illness Jessie had no heart and little leisure to attend to the shop. Of course I—that is, my dear father—gave them all necessary assistance; but—”
“I understand; they were reduced to objects of charity. Brute that I am, never to have thought of the duties I owed to the couple I had brought together. But pray go on.”
“You are aware that just before you left us my father received a proposal to exchange his property at Graveleigh for some lands more desirable to him?”
“I remember. He closed with that offer.”
“Yes; Captain Stavers, the new landlord of Graveleigh, seems to be a very bad man; and though he could not turn the Somerses out of the cottage so long as they paid rent, which we took care they did pay,—yet out of a very wicked spite he set up a rival shop in one of his other cottages in the village, and it became impossible for these poor young people to get a livelihood at Graveleigh.”
“What excuse for spite against so harmless a young couple could Captain Stavers find or invent?”
Cecilia looked down and coloured. “It was a revengeful feeling against Jessie.”
“Ah, I comprehend.”
“But they have now left the village, and are happily settled elsewhere. Will has recovered his health, and they are prospering much more than they could ever have done at Graveleigh.”
“In that change you were their benefactress, Miss Travers?” said Kenelm, in a more tender voice and with a softer eye than he had ever before evinced towards the heiress.
“No, it is not I whom they have to thank and bless.”
“Who, then, is it? Your father?”
“No. Do not question me. I am bound not to say. They do not themselves know; they rather believe that their gratitude is due to you.”
“To me! Am I to be forever a sham in spite of myself? My dear Miss Travers, it is essential to my honour that I should undeceive this credulous pair; where can I find them?”
“I must not say; but I will ask permission of their concealed benefactor, and send you their address.”
A touch was laid on Kenelm’s arm, and a voice whispered, “May I ask you to present me to Miss Travers?”
“Miss Travers,” said Kenelm, “I entreat you to add to the list of your acquaintances a cousin of mine,—Mr. Chillingly Gordon.”
While Gordon addressed to Cecilia the well-bred conventionalisms with which acquaintance in London drawing-rooms usually commences, Kenelm, obedient to a sign from Lady Glenalvon, who had just re-entered the room, quitted his seat, and joined the marchioness.
“Is not that young man whom you left talking with Miss Travers your clever cousin Gordon?”
“The same.”
“She is listening to him with great attention. How his face brightens up as he talks! He is positively handsome, thus animated.”
“Yes, I could fancy him a dangerous wooer. He has wit and liveliness and audacity; he could be very much in love with a great fortune, and talk to the owner of it with a fervour rarely exhibited by a Chillingly. Well, it is no affair of mine.”
“It ought to be.”
Alas and alas! that “ought to be;” what depths of sorrowful meaning lie within that simple phrase! How happy would be our lives, how grand our actions, how pure our souls, if all could be with us as it ought to be!
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