KENELM."Happy, as mortals go, I ought to be. I do not think I am unhappy. If my temper be melancholic, melancholy has a happiness of its own. Milton shows that there are as many charms in life to be found on the /Penseroso/ side of it as there are on the /Allegro/."
LADY GLENALVON."Kenelm, you saved the life of my poor son, and when, later, he was taken from me, I felt as if he had commended you to my care. When at the age of sixteen, with a boy's years and a man's heart, you came to London, did I not try to be to you almost as a mother? and did you not often tell me that you could confide to me the secrets of your heart more readily than to any other?"
"You were to me," said Kenelm, with emotion, "that most precious and sustaining good genius which a youth can find at the threshold of life,a woman gently wise, kindly sympathizing, shaming him by the spectacle of her own purity from all grosser errors, elevating him from mean tastes and objects by the exquisite, ineffable loftiness of soul which is only found in the noblest order of womanhood. Come, I will open my heart to you still. I fear it is more wayward than ever. It still feels estranged from the companionship and pursuits natural to my age and station. However, I have been seeking to brace and harden my nature, for the practical ends of life, by travel and adventure, chiefly among rougher varieties of mankind than we meet in drawing-rooms. Now, in compliance with the duty I owe to my dear father's wishes, I come back to these circles, which under your auspices I entered in boyhood, and which even then seemed to me so inane and artificial. Take a part in the world of these circles; such is your wish. My answer is brief. I have been doing my best to acquire a motive power, and have not succeeded. I see nothing that I care to strive for, nothing that I care to gain. The very times in which we live are to me, as to Hamlet, out of joint; and I am not born like Hamlet to set them right. Ah! if I could look on society through the spectacles with which the poor hidalgo in 'Gil Blas' looked on his meagre board,spectacles by which cherries appear the size of peaches, and tomtits as large as turkeys! The imagination which is necessary to ambition is a great magnifier."
"I have known more than one man, now very eminent, very active, who at your age felt the same estrangement from the practical pursuits of others."
"And what reconciled those men to such pursuits?"
"That diminished sense of individual personality, that unconscious fusion of one's own being into other existences, which belong to home and marriage."
"I don't object to home, but I do to marriage."
"Depend on it there is no home for man where there is no woman."
"Prettily said. In that case I resign the home."
"Do you mean seriously to tell me that you never see the woman you could love enough to make her your wife, and never enter any home that you do not quit with a touch of envy at the happiness of married life?"
"Seriously, I never see such a woman; seriously, I never enter such a home."
"Patience, then; your time will come, and I hope it is at hand. Listen to me. It was only yesterday that I felt an indescribable longing to see you again,to know your address that I might write to you; for yesterday, when a certain young lady left my house after a week's visit, I said this girl would make a perfect wife, and, above all, the exact wife to suit Kenelm Chillingly."
"Kenelm Chillingly is very glad to hear that this young lady has left your house."
"But she has not left London: she is here to-night. She only stayed with me till her father came to town, and the house he had taken for the season was vacant; those events happened yesterday."
"Fortunate events for me: they permit me to call on you without danger."
"Have you no curiosity to know, at least, who and what is the young lady who appears to me so well suited to you?"
"No curiosity, but a vague sensation of alarm."
"Well, I cannot talk pleasantly with you while you are in this irritating mood, and it is time to quit the hermitage. Come, there are many persons here, with some of whom you should renew old acquaintance, and to some of whom I should like to make you known."
"I am prepared to follow Lady Glenalvon wherever she deigns to lead me,except to the altar with another."
CHAPTER III
THE rooms were now full,not overcrowded, but full,and it was rarely even in that house that so many distinguished persons were collected together. A young man thus honoured by so /grande/ a dame as Lady Glenalvon could not but be cordially welcomed by all to whom she presented him, Ministers and Parliamentary leaders, ball-givers, and beauties in vogue,even authors and artists; and there was something in Kenelm Chillingly, in his striking countenance and figure, in that calm ease of manner natural to his indifference to effect, which seemed to justify the favour shown to him by the brilliant princess of fashion and mark him out for general observation.
That first evening of his reintroduction to the polite world was a success which few young men of his years achieve. He produced a sensation. Just as the rooms were thinning, Lady Glenalvon whispered to Kenelm,
"Come this way: there is one person I must reintroduce you to; thank me for it hereafter."
Kenelm followed the marchioness, and found himself face to face with Cecilia Travers. She was leaning on her father's arm, looking very handsome, and her beauty was heightened by the blush which overspread her cheeks as Kenelm Chillingly approached.
Travers greeted him with great cordiality; and Lady Glenalvon asking him to escort her to the refreshment-room, Kenelm had no option but to offer his arm to Cecilia.
Kenelm felt somewhat embarrassed. "Have you been long in town, Miss Travers?"
"A little more than a week, but we only settled into our house yesterday."
"Ah, indeed! were you then the young lady who" He stopped short, and his face grew gentler and graver in its expression.
"The young lady whowhat?" asked Cecilia with a smile.
"Who has been staying with Lady Glenalvon?"
"Yes; did she tell you?"
"She did not mention your name, but praised that young lady so justly that I ought to have guessed it."
Cecilia made some not very audible answer, and on entering the refreshment-room other young men gathered round her, and Lady Glenalvon and Kenelm remained silent in the midst of a general small-talk. When Travers, after giving his address to Kenelm, and, of course, pressing him to call, left the house with Cecilia, Kenelm said to Lady Glenalvon, musingly, "So that is the young lady in whom I was to see my fate: you knew that we had met before?"
"Yes, she told me when and where. Besides, it is not two years since you wrote to me from her father's house. Do you forget?"
"Ah," said Kenelm, so abstractedly that he seemed to be dreaming, "no man with his eyes open rushes on his fate: when he does so his sight is gone. Love is blind. They say the blind are very happy, yet I never met a blind man who would not recover his sight if he could."
CHAPTER IV
Mr. CHILLINGLY MIVERS never gave a dinner at his own rooms. When he did give a dinner it was at Greenwich or Richmond. But he gave breakfast-parties pretty often, and they were considered pleasant. He had handsome bachelor apartments in Grosvenor Street, daintily furnished, with a prevalent air of exquisite neatness, a good library stored with books of reference, and adorned with presentation copies from authors of the day, very beautifully bound. Though the room served for the study of the professed man of letters, it had none of the untidy litter which generally characterizes the study of one whose vocation it is to deal with books and papers. Even the implements for writing were not apparent, except when required. They lay concealed in a vast cylinder bureau, French made, and French polished. Within that bureau were numerous pigeon-holes and secret drawers, and a profound well with a separate patent lock. In the well were deposited the articles intended for publication in "The Londoner," proof-sheets, etc.; pigeon-holes were devoted to ordinary correspondence; secret drawers to confidential notes, and outlines of biographies of eminent men now living, but intended to be completed for publication the day after their death.
No man wrote such funeral compositions with a livelier pen than that of Chillingly Mivers; and the large and miscellaneous circle of his visiting acquaintances allowed him to ascertain, whether by authoritative report or by personal observation, the signs of mortal disease in the illustrious friends whose dinners he accepted, and whose failing pulses he instinctively felt in returning the pressure of their hands; so that he was often able to put the finishing-stroke to their obituary memorials days, weeks, even months, before their fate took the public by surprise. That cylinder bureau was in harmony with the secrecy in which this remarkable man shrouded the productions of his brain. In his literary life Mivers had no "I," there he was ever the inscrutable, mysterious "We." He was only "I" when you met him in the world, and called him Mivers.