I admire Leopold Travers very much. After all,
how much of self-balance there is in a true English
gentleman! Toss him up and down where you will,
and he always alights on his feet,—a gentleman.
He has one child, a daughter named Cecilia,—handsome
enough to allure into wedlock any mortal whom Decimus
Roach had not convinced that in celibacy lay the right
“Approach to the Angels.” Moreover,
she is a girl whom one can talk with. Even you
could talk with her. Travers wishes her to marry
a very respectable, good-looking, promising gentleman,
in every way “suitable,” as they say.
And if she does, she will rival that pink and perfection
of polished womanhood, Lady Glenalvon. I send
you back my portmanteau. I have pretty well exhausted
my experience-money, but have not yet encroached on
my monthly allowance. I mean still to live upon
that, eking it out, if necessary, by the sweat of
my brow or brains. But if any case requiring
extra funds should occur,—a case in which
that extra would do such real good to another that
I feel you would do it,—why, I must
draw a check on your bankers. But understand that
is your expense, not mine, and it is you who
are to be repaid in Heaven. Dear father, how
I do love and honour you every day more and more!
Promise you not to propose to any young lady till I
come first to you for consent!—oh, my dear
father, how could you doubt it? how doubt that I could
not be happy with any wife whom you could not love
as a daughter? Accept that promise as sacred.
But I wish you had asked me something in which obedience
was not much too facile to be a test of duty.
I could not have obeyed you more cheerfully if you
had asked me to promise never to propose to any young
lady at all. Had you asked me to promise that
I would renounce the dignity of reason for the frenzy
of love, or the freedom of man for the servitude of
husband, then I might have sought to achieve the impossible;
but I should have died in the effort!—and
thou wouldst have known that remorse which haunts
the bed of the tyrant.
Your affectionate son,
K. C.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE next morning Kenelm surprised the party at breakfast
by appearing in the coarse habiliments in which he
had first made his host’s acquaintance.
He did not glance towards Cecilia when he announced
his departure; but, his eye resting on Mrs. Campion,
he smiled, perhaps a little sadly, at seeing her countenance
brighten up and hearing her give a short sigh of relief.
Travers tried hard to induce him to stay a few days
longer, but Kenelm was firm. “The summer
is wearing away,” said he, “and I have
far to go before the flowers fade and the snows fall.
On the third night from this I shall sleep on foreign
soil.”
“You are going abroad, then?” asked Mrs.
Campion.
“Yes.”
“A sudden resolution, Mr. Chillingly. The
other day you talked of visiting the Scotch lakes.”
Copyrights
Kenelm Chillingly — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
