He had said somewhat vaguely in his letter to Sir
Peter, that “sometimes he felt as if his indifference
to love, as to ambition, was because he had some impossible
ideal in each.” Taking that conjecture
to task, he could not honestly persuade himself that
he had formed any ideal of woman and wife with which
the reality of Cecilia Travers was at war. On
the contrary, the more he thought over the characteristics
of Cecilia, the more they seemed to correspond to any
ideal that had floated before him in the twilight
of dreamy revery; and yet he knew that he was not
in love with her, that his heart did not respond to
his reason; and mournfully he resigned himself to the
conviction that nowhere in this planet, from the normal
pursuits of whose inhabitants he felt so estranged,
was there waiting for him the smiling playmate, the
earnest helpmate. As this conviction strengthened,
so an increased weariness of the artificial life of
the metropolis, and of all its objects and amusements,
turned his thoughts with an intense yearning towards
the Bohemian freedom and fresh excitements of his
foot ramblings. He often thought with envy of
the wandering minstrel, and wondered whether, if he
again traversed the same range of country, he might
encounter again that vagrant singer.
CHAPTER IX.
IT is nearly a week since Kenelm had met Cecilia,
and he is sitting in his rooms with Lord Thetford
at that hour of three in the afternoon which is found
the most difficult to dispose of by idlers about town.
Amongst young men of his own age and class with whom
Kenelm assorted in the fashionable world, perhaps
the one whom he liked the best, and of whom he saw
the most, was this young heir of the Beaumanoirs; and
though Lord Thetford has nothing to do with the direct
stream of my story, it is worth pausing a few minutes
to sketch an outline of one of the best whom the last
generation has produced for a part that, owing to
accidents of birth and fortune, young men like Lord
Thetford must play on that stage from which the curtain
is not yet drawn up. Destined to be the head
of a family that unites with princely possessions
and a historical name a keen though honourable ambition
for political power, Lord Thetford has been care fully
educated, especially in the new ideas of his time.
His father, though a man of no ordinary talents,
has never taken a prominent part in public life.
He desires his eldest son to do so. The Beaumanoirs
have been Whigs from the time of William III.
They have shared the good and the ill fortunes of
a party which, whether we side with it or not, no
politician who dreads extremes in the government of
a State so pre-eminently artificial that a prevalent
extreme at either end of the balance would be fatal
to equilibrium, can desire to become extinct or feeble
so long as a constitutional monarchy exists in England.
From the reign of George I.
to the death of George
IV., the Beaumanoirs were in the ascendant.
Copyrights
Kenelm Chillingly — Volume 04 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
