Kenelm Chillingly — Complete eBook

your delicacy prevented your naming to me, that I, to whom the fee-simple descends, should join with you in cutting off the entail and resettling the estate.  He showed me what an advantage this would be to the property, because it would leave your hands free for many improvements in which I heartily go with the progress of the age, for which, as merely tenant for life, you could not raise the money except upon ruinous terms; new cottages for labourers, new buildings for tenants, the consolidation of some old mortgages and charges on the rent-roll, etc.  And allow me to add that I should like to make a large increase to the jointure of my dear mother.  Vining says, too, that there is a part of the outlying land which, as being near a town, could be sold to considerable profit if the estate were resettled.

Let us hasten to complete the necessary deeds, and so obtain the L20,000 required for the realization of your noble and, let me add, your just desire to do something for Chillingly Gordon.  In the new deeds of settlement we could insure the power of willing the estate as we pleased, and I am strongly against devising it to Chillingly Gordon.  It may be a crotchet of mine, but one which I think you share, that the owner of English soil should have a son’s love for the native land, and Gordon will never have that.  I think, too, that it will be best for his own career, and for the establishment of a frank understanding between us and himself, that he should be fairly told that he would not be benefited in the event of our death.  Twenty thousand pounds given to him now would be a greater boon to him than ten times the sum twenty years later.  With that at his command, he can enter Parliament, and have an income, added to what he now possesses, if modest, still sufficient to make him independent of a minister’s patronage.

Pray humour me, my dearest father, in the proposition I venture to submit to you.

   Your affectionate son, KENELM.

FROM SIR PETER CHILLINGLY TO KENELM CHILLINGLY.

MY DEAR BOY,—­You are not worthy to be a Chillingly; you are decidedly warm-blooded:  never was a load lifted off a man’s mind with a gentler hand.  Yes, I have wished to cut off the entail and resettle the property; but, as it was eminently to my advantage to do so, I shrank from asking it, though eventually it would be almost as much to your own advantage.  What with the purchase I made of the Faircleuch lands—­which I could only effect by money borrowed at high interest on my personal security, and paid off by yearly instalments, eating largely into income—­and the old mortgages, etc., I own I have been pinched of late years.  But what rejoices me the most is the power to make homes for our honest labourers more comfortable, and nearer to their work, which last is the chief point, for the old cottages in themselves are not bad; the misfortune is, when you build an extra room for the children, the silly people let it out to a lodger.