Leopold Travers felt much relieved after he had written
his reply to George. He had not been quite so
ingenuous in his revelation to Chillingly as he may
have seemed. Conscious, like all proud and fond
fathers, of his daughter’s attractions, he was
not without some apprehension that Kenelm himself
might entertain an ambition at variance with that
of George Belvoir: if so, he deemed it well to
put an end to such ambition while yet in time:
partly because his interest was already pledged to
George; partly because, in rank and fortune, George
was the better match; partly because George was of
the same political party as himself,—while
Sir Peter, and probably Sir Peter’s heir, espoused
the opposite side; and partly also because, with all
his personal liking to Kenelm, Leopold Travers, as
a very sensible, practical man of the world, was not
sure that a baronet’s heir who tramped the country
on foot in the dress of a petty farmer, and indulged
pugilistic propensities in martial encounters with
stalwart farriers, was likely to make a safe husband
and a comfortable son-in-law. Kenelm’s
words, and still more his manner, convinced Travers
that any apprehensions of rivalry that he had previously
conceived were utterly groundless.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE same evening, after dinner (during that lovely
summer month they dined at Neesdale Park at an unfashionably
early hour), Kenelm, in company with Travers and Cecilia,
ascended a gentle eminence at the back of the gardens,
on which there were some picturesque ivy-grown ruins
of an ancient priory, and commanding the best view
of a glorious sunset and a subject landscape of vale
and wood, rivulet and distant hills.
“Is the delight in scenery,” said Kenelm,
“really an acquired gift, as some philosophers
tell us? Is it true that young children and rude
savages do not feel it; that the eye must be educated
to comprehend its charm, and that the eye can be only
educated through the mind?”
“I should think your philosophers are right,”
said Travers. “When I was a schoolboy,
I thought no scenery was like the flat of a cricket
ground; when I hunted at Melton, I thought that unpicturesque
country more beautiful than Devonshire. It is
only of late years that I feel a sensible pleasure
in scenery for its own sake, apart from associations
of custom or the uses to which we apply them.”
“And what say you, Miss Travers?”
“I scarcely know what to say,” answered
Cecilia, musingly. “I can remember no
time in my childhood when I did not feel delight in
that which seemed to me beautiful in scenery, but
I suspect that I vaguely distinguished one kind of
beauty from another. A common field with daisies
and buttercups was beautiful to me then, and I doubt
if I saw anything more beautiful in extensive landscapes.”
“True,” said Kenelm: “it is
not in early childhood that we carry the sight into
distance: as is the mind so is the eye; in early
childhood the mind revels in the present, and the
eye rejoices most in the things nearest to it.
I don’t think in childhood that we—
Copyrights
Kenelm Chillingly — Volume 03 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
