Kenelm Chillingly — Complete eBook

He came off with flying colours through an examination into his Church orthodoxy instituted by the Parson and Sir Peter.  Amid a cloud of ecclesiastical erudition, his own opinions vanished in those of the Fathers.  In truth, he was a Realist, in religion as in everything else.  He regarded Christianity as a type of existent civilization, which ought to be reverenced, as one might recognize the other types of that civilization; such as the liberty of the press, the representative system, white neckcloths and black coats of an evening, etc.  He belonged, therefore, to what he himself called the school of Eclectical Christiology; and accommodated the reasonings of Deism to the doctrines of the Church, if not as a creed, at least as an institution.  Finally, he united all the Chillingly votes in his favour; and when he departed from the Hall carried off Kenelm for his initiation into the new ideas that were to govern his generation.

CHAPTER XI.

KENELM remained a year and a half with this distinguished preceptor.  During that time he learned much in book-lore; he saw much, too, of the eminent men of the day, in literature, the law, and the senate.  He saw, also, a good deal of the fashionable world.  Fine ladies, who had been friends of his mother in her youth, took him up, counselled and petted him,—­one in especial, the Marchioness of Glenalvon, to whom he was endeared by grateful association, for her youngest son had been a fellow-pupil of Kenelm at Merton School, and Kenelm had saved his life from drowning.  The poor boy died of consumption later, and her grief for his loss made her affection for Kenelm yet more tender.  Lady Glenalvon was one of the queens of the London world.  Though in the fiftieth year she was still very handsome:  she was also very accomplished, very clever, and very kind-hearted, as some of such queens are; just one of those women invaluable in forming the manners and elevating the character of young men destined to make a figure in after-life.  But she was very angry with herself in thinking that she failed to arouse any such ambition in the heir of the Chillinglys.

It may here be said that Kenelm was not without great advantages of form and countenance.  He was tall, and the youthful grace of his proportions concealed his physical strength, which was extraordinary rather from the iron texture than the bulk of his thews and sinews.  His face, though it certainly lacked the roundness of youth, had a grave, sombre, haunting sort of beauty, not artistically regular, but picturesque, peculiar, with large dark expressive eyes, and a certain indescribable combination of sweetness and melancholy in his quiet smile.  He never laughed audibly, but he had a quick sense of the comic, and his eye would laugh when his lips were silent.  He would say queer, droll, unexpected things which passed for humour; but, save for that gleam in the eye, he could not have said them with more seeming innocence of intentional joke if he had been a monk of La Trappe looking up from the grave he was digging in order to utter “memento mori.”