CHAPTER II.
A FAMILY council was held at Exmundham Hall to deliberate on the name
by which this remarkable infant should be admitted into the Christian
community. The junior branches of that ancient house consisted,
first, of the obnoxious heir-at-law--a Scotch branch named Chillingly
Gordon. He was the widowed father of one son, now of the age of
three, and happily unconscious of the injury inflicted on his future
prospects by the advent of the new-born, which could not be truthfully
said of his Caledonian father. Mr. Chillingly Gordon was one of those
men who get on in the world with out our being able to discover why.
His parents died in his infancy and left him nothing; but the family
interest procured him an admission into the Charterhouse School, at
which illustrious academy he obtained no remarkable distinction.
Nevertheless, as soon as he left it the State took him under its
special care, and appointed him to a clerkship in a public office.
From that moment he continued to get on in the world, and was now a
Commissioner of Customs, with a salary of L1500 a year. As soon as he
had been thus enabled to maintain a wife, he selected a wife who
assisted to maintain himself. She was an Irish peer's widow, with a
jointure of L2000 a year.
A few months after his marriage, Chillingly Gordon effected insurances
on his wife's life, so as to secure himself an annuity of L1000 a year
in case of her decease. As she appeared to be a fine healthy woman,
some years younger than her husband, the deduction from his income
effected by the annual payments for the insurance seemed an
over-sacrifice of present enjoyment to future contingencies. The
result bore witness to his reputation for sagacity, as the lady died
in the second year of their wedding, a few months after the birth of
her only child, and of a heart-disease which had been latent to the
doctors, but which, no doubt, Gordon had affectionately discovered
before he had insured a life too valuable not to need some
compensation for its loss. He was now, then, in the possession of
L2500 a year, and was therefore very well off, in the pecuniary sense
of the phrase. He had, moreover, acquired a reputation which gave him
a social rank beyond that accorded to him by a discerning State. He
was considered a man of solid judgment, and his opinion upon all
matters, private and public, carried weight. The opinion itself,
critically examined, was not worth much, but the way he announced it
was imposing. Mr. Fox said that 'No one ever was so wise as Lord
Thurlow looked.' Lord Thurlow could not have looked wiser than Mr.
Chillingly Gordon. He had a square jaw and large red bushy eyebrows,
which he lowered down with great effect when he delivered judgment.
He had another advantage for acquiring grave reputation. He was a
very unpleasant man. He could be rude if you contradicted him; and as
few persons wish to provoke rudeness, so he was seldom contradicted.
Mr. Chillingly Mivers, another cadet of the house, was also
distinguished, but in a different way. He was a bachelor, now about
the age of thirty-five. He was eminent for a supreme well-bred
contempt for everybody and everything. He was the originator and
chief proprietor of a public journal called "The Londoner," which had
lately been set up on that principle of contempt, and we need not say,
was exceedingly popular with those leading members of the community
who admire nobody and believe in nothing. Mr. Chillingly Mivers was
regarded by himself and by others as a man who might have achieved the
highest success in any branch of literature, if he had deigned to
exhibit his talents therein. But he did not so deign, and therefore
he had full right to imply that, if he had written an epic, a drama, a
novel, a history, a metaphysical treatise, Milton, Shakspeare,
Cervantes, Hume, Berkeley would have been nowhere. He held greatly to
the dignity of the anonymous; and even in the journal which he
originated nobody could ever ascertain what he wrote. But, at all
events, Mr. Chillingly Mivers was what Mr. Chillingly Gordon was not;
namely, a very clever man, and by no means an unpleasant one in
general society.
The Rev. John Stalworth Chillingly was a decided adherent to the creed
of what is called "muscular Christianity," and a very fine specimen of
it too. A tall stout man with broad shoulders, and that division of
lower limb which intervenes between the knee and the ankle powerfully
developed. He would have knocked down a deist as soon as looked at
him. It is told by the Sieur de Joinville, in his Memoir of Louis,
the sainted king, that an assembly of divines and theologians convened
the Jews of an Oriental city for the purpose of arguing with them on
the truths of Christianity, and a certain knight, who was at that time
crippled, and supporting himself on crutches, asked and obtained
permission to be present at the debate. The Jews flocked to the
summons, when a prelate, selecting a learned rabbi, mildly put to him
the leading question whether he owned the divine conception of our
Lord. "Certainly not," replied the rabbi; whereon the pious knight,
shocked by such blasphemy, uplifted his crutch and felled the rabbi,
and then flung himself among the other misbelievers, whom he soon
dispersed in ignominious flight and in a very belaboured condition.
The conduct of the knight was reported to the sainted king, with a
request that it should be properly reprimanded; but the sainted king
delivered himself of this wise judgment:--
"If a pious knight is a very learned clerk, and can meet in fair
argument the doctrines of the misbeliever, by all means let him argue
fairly; but if a pious knight is not a learned clerk, and the argument
goes against him, then let the pious knight cut the discussion short
by the edge of his good sword."
The Rev. John Stalworth Chillingly was of the same opinion as Saint
Louis; otherwise, he was a mild and amiable man. He encouraged
cricket and other manly sports among his rural parishioners. He was a
skilful and bold rider, but he did not hunt; a convivial man--and took
his bottle freely. But his tastes in literature were of a refined and
peaceful character, contrasting therein the tendencies some might have
expected from his muscular development of Christianity. He was a
great reader of poetry, but he disliked Scott and Byron, whom he
considered flashy and noisy; he maintained that Pope was only a
versifier, and that the greatest poet in the language was Wordsworth;
he did not care much for the ancient classics; he refused all merit to
the French poets; he knew nothing of the Italian, but he dabbled in
German, and was inclined to bore one about the "Hermann and Dorothea"
of Goethe. He was married to a homely little wife, who revered him in
silence, and thought there would be no schism in the Church if he were
in his right place as Archbishop of Canterbury; in this opinion he
entirely agreed with his wife.
Besides these three male specimens of the Chillingly race, the fairer
sex was represented, in the absence of her ladyship, who still kept
her room, by three female Chillinglys, sisters of Sir Peter, and all
three spinsters. Perhaps one reason why they had remained single was,
that externally they were so like each other that a suitor must have
been puzzled which to choose, and may have been afraid that if he did
choose one, he should be caught next day kissing another one in
mistake. They were all tall, all thin, with long throats--and beneath
the throats a fine development of bone. They had all pale hair, pale
eyelids, pale eyes, and pale complexions. They all dressed exactly
alike, and their favourite colour was a vivid green: they were so
dressed on this occasion.
As there was such similitude in their persons, so, to an ordinary
observer, they were exactly the same in character and mind. Very well
behaved, with proper notions of female decorum: very distant and
reserved in manner to strangers; very affectionate to each other and
their relations or favourites; very good to the poor, whom they looked
upon as a different order of creation, and treated with that sort of
benevolence which humane people bestow upon dumb animals. Their minds
had been nourished on the same books--what one read the others had
read. The books were mainly divided into two classes,--novels, and
what they called "good books." They had a habit of taking a specimen
of each alternately; one day a novel, then a good book, then a novel
again, and so on. Thus if the imagination was overwarmed on Monday,
on Tuesday it was cooled down to a proper temperature; and if
frost-bitten on Tuesday, it took a tepid bath on Wednesday. The
novels they chose were indeed rarely of a nature to raise the
intellectual thermometer into blood heat: the heroes and heroines were
models of correct conduct. Mr. James's novels were then in vogue, and
they united in saying that those "were novels a father might allow his
daughters to read." But though an ordinary observer might have failed
to recognize any distinction between these three ladies, and, finding
them habitually dressed in green, would have said they were as much
alike as one pea is to another, they had their idiosyncratic
differences, when duly examined. Miss Margaret, the eldest, was the
commanding one of the three; it was she who regulated their household
(they all lived together), kept the joint purse, and decided every
doubtful point that arose: whether they should or should not ask Mrs.
So-and-so to tea; whether Mary should or should not be discharged;
whether or not they should go to Broadstairs or to Sandgate for the
month of October. In fact, Miss Margaret was the WILL of the body
corporate.
Miss Sibyl was of milder nature and more melancholy temperament; she
had a poetic turn of mind, and occasionally wrote verses. Some of
these had been printed on satin paper, and sold for objects of
beneficence at charity bazaars. The county newspapers said that the
verses "were characterized by all the elegance of a cultured and
feminine mind." The other two sisters agreed that Sibyl was the
genius of the household, but, like all geniuses, not sufficiently
practical for the world. Miss Sarah Chillingly, the youngest of the
three, and now just in her forty-fourth year, was looked upon by the
others as "a dear thing, inclined to be naughty, but such a darling
that nobody could have the heart to scold her." Miss Margaret said
"she was a giddy creature." Miss Sibyl wrote a poem on her, entitled,
"Warning to a young Lady against the Pleasures of the World." They
all called her Sally; the other two sisters had no diminutive
synonyms. Sally is a name indicative of fastness. But this Sally
would not have been thought fast in another household, and she was now
little likely to sally out of the one she belonged to. These sisters,
who were all many years older than Sir Peter, lived in a handsome,
old-fashioned, red-brick house, with a large garden at the back, in
the principal street of the capital of their native county. They had
each L10,000 for portion; and if he could have married all three, the
heir-at-law would have married them, and settled the aggregate L30,000
on himself. But we have not yet come to recognize Mormonism as legal,
though if our social progress continues to slide in the same grooves
as at present, Heaven only knows what triumphs over the prejudices of
our ancestors may not be achieved by the wisdom of our descendants!
