the mistake of supposing that ‘the old governor’
is a synonymous expression for ‘father.’
In the second place, since you pretend to the superior
enlightenment which results from a superior education,
learn to know better your own self before you set
up as a teacher of mankind. Excuse the liberty
I take, as your sincere well-wisher, when I tell you
that you are at present a conceited fool,—in
short, that which makes one boy call another an ‘ass.’
But when one has a poor head he may redeem the average
balance of humanity by increasing the wealth of the
heart. Try and increase yours. Your father
consents to your choice of your lot at the sacrifice
of all his own inclinations. This is a sore trial
to a father’s pride, a father’s affection;
and few fathers make such sacrifices with a good grace.
I have thus kept my promise to you, and enforced your
wishes on Mr. Saunderson’s judgment, because
I am sure you would have been a very bad farmer.
It now remains for you to show that you can be a very
good tradesman. You are bound in honour to me
and to your father to try your best to be so; and
meanwhile leave the task of upsetting the world to
those who have no shop in it, which would go crash
in the general tumble. And so good-night to you.”
To these admonitory words, sacro digna silentio,
Saunderson junior listened with a dropping jaw and
fascinated staring eyes. He felt like an infant
to whom the nurse has given a hasty shake, and who
is too stupefied by that operation to know whether
he is hurt or not.
A minute after Kenelm had quitted the room he reappeared
at the door, and said in a conciliatory whisper, “Don’t
take it to heart that I called you a conceited fool
and an ass. These terms are no doubt just as
applicable to myself. But there is a more conceited
fool and a greater ass than either of us; and that
is the Age in which we have the misfortune to be born,—an
Age of Progress, Mr. Saunderson, junior!—an
Age of Prigs.”
IF there were a woman in the world who might be formed
and fitted to reconcile Kenelm Chillingly to the sweet
troubles of love and the pleasant bickerings of wedded
life, one might reasonably suppose that that woman
could be found in Cecilia Travers. An only daughter
and losing her mother in childhood, she had been raised
to the mistress-ship of a household at an age in which
most girls are still putting their dolls to bed; and
thus had early acquired that sense of responsibility,
accompanied with the habits of self-reliance, which
seldom fails to give a certain nobility to character;
though almost as often, in the case of women, it steals
away the tender gentleness which constitutes the charm
of their sex.
It had not done so in the instance of Cecilia Travers,
because she was so womanlike that even the exercise
of power could not make her manlike. There was
in the depth of her nature such an instinct of sweetness
that wherever her mind toiled and wandered it gathered
and hoarded honey.
