Kenelm Chillingly — Complete eBook

his daughter.  But one morning he appeared in his fields as usual, and from that day resumed his old habits, and gradually renewed that cordial interchange of hospitalities which had popularly distinguished him since his accession to wealth.  Still people felt that the man was changed; he was more taciturn, more grave:  if always just in his dealings, he took the harder side of justice, where in his wife’s time he had taken the gentler.  Perhaps, to a man of strong will, the habitual intercourse with an amiable woman is essential for those occasions in which Will best proves the fineness of its temper by the facility with which it can be bent.

It may be said that Leopold Travers might have found such intercourse in the intimate companionship of his own daughter.  But she was a mere child when his wife died, and she grew up to womanhood too insensibly for him to note the change.  Besides, where a man has found a wife his all-in-all, a daughter can never supply her place.  The very reverence due to children precludes unrestrained confidence; and there is not that sense of permanent fellowship in a daughter which a man has in a wife,—­any day a stranger may appear and carry her off from him.  At all events Leopold did not own in Cecilia the softening influence to which he had yielded in her mother.  He was fond of her, proud of her, indulgent to her; but the indulgence had its set limits.  Whatever she asked solely for herself he granted; whatever she wished for matters under feminine control—­the domestic household, the parish school, the alms-receiving poor—­obtained his gentlest consideration.  But when she had been solicited by some offending out-of-door dependant or some petty defaulting tenant to use her good offices in favour of the culprit, Mr.

Travers checked her interference by a firm “No,” though uttered in a mild accent, and accompanied with a masculine aphorism to the effect that “there would be no such things as strict justice and disciplined order in the world if a man yielded to a woman’s pleadings in any matter of business between man and man.”  From this it will be seen that Mr. Lethbridge had overrated the value of Cecilia’s alliance in the negotiation respecting Mrs. Bawtrey’s premium and shop.

CHAPTER III.

IF, having just perused what has thus been written on the biographical antecedents and mental characteristics of Leopold Travers, you, my dear reader, were to be personally presented to that gentleman as he now stands, the central figure of the group gathered round him, on his terrace, you would probably be surprised,—­nay, I have no doubt you would say to yourself, “Not at all the sort of man I expected.”  In that slender form, somewhat below the middle height; in that fair countenance which still, at the age of forty-eight, retains a delicacy of feature and of colouring which is of almost womanlike beauty, and, from the quiet placidity of its expression, conveys at first glance the notion of almost womanlike mildness,—­it would be difficult to recognize a man who in youth had been renowned for reckless daring, in maturer years more honourably distinguished for steadfast prudence and determined purpose, and who, alike in faults or in merits, was as emphatically masculine as a biped in trousers can possibly be.