Mr. Kendal

“ There was a war of supremacy in the Kendal household. Albinia and her son were Greek to Greek, and if physical force were on her side, her own tenderness was against her. As to allies, Maurice had by far the majority of the household; the much-tormented Susan was her mistress’s sole supporter; Mr. Kendal and Sophy might own it inexpedient to foster his outrecuidance, but they so loved to do his bidding, so hated to thwart him, and so grieved at his being punished, that they were little better than Gilbert, Lucy, grandmamma, or any of the maids or men. ”

“ Janet laughed. "Well, if nearly all our poets are dead and our novelists in the colonies, I can't help it, can I! Here is Mr. Kendal, at all events."
Kendal came up, with his perfect manners, and immediately it seemed to Elfrida that their little group became distinct from the rest, more important, more worthy of observation. Kendal never added anything to the unities of their conversation when he joined these two; he seemed rather to break up what they had to say to each other and attract it to himself. He always gave an accent to the life and energy of their talk ”

“ Mr. Kendal’s first impulse always was to find a sufficient plea for doing nothing. If Gilbert was to go to India, it was not worth while to give him a classical education.
‘Is he to go to India? Albinia had not told me so.’
‘I thought she was aware of it; but possibly I may not have mentioned it. It has been an understood thing ever since I came home. He will have a good deal of the property in this place, but he had better have seen something of the world. Bayford is no place for a man to settle down in too young.’
‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Ferrars, repressing a smile. ”

“ She spoke with a pretty humility, evidently meaning what she said, and yet there was such a delightful young triumph in her manner, such an invulnerable consciousness of artistic success, that Kendal felt a secret stir of amusement as he recalled the criticisms which among his own set he had most commonly heard applied to her.
'Yes, indeed,' he answered pleasantly. 'I suppose every artist feels the same. We all do if we are good for anything—we who scribble as well as you who act.'
'Oh yes,' she said, with kindly, questioning eyes, 'you write a great deal? I know; Mr. Wallace told me. ”

“ James's. We never expected anything at first, but the reading ended in our taking the play immediately, though we scarcely knew what we should do with it, seeing it was a two-act play. We found an opportunity, however, and you know the success it was. It was called 'The Money Spinner.'"
Mr. Kendal is a striking-looking man—the very ideal of a picturesque soldier, with a constitution of steel. He talks to you frankly, easily, for there is not two penny-worth of presumption about him. He lives and labours very quietly—he enjoys his days, and a good cigar. ”

“ After some experience at Birmingham and elsewhere, he joined the Haymarket company in London in 1866, acting everything from burlesque to Romeo. In 1869 he married Margaret (Madge) Shafto Robertson (b. 1849) , sister of the dramatist, T. W. Robertson. As “Mr and Mrs Kendal” their professional careers then became inseparable. Mrs Kendal’s first stage appearance was as Marie, “a child,” in The Orphan of the Frozen Sea in 1854 in London. She soon showed such talent both as actress and singer that she secured numerous engagements, and by 1865 was playing Ophelia and Desdemona. ”

“ During the hour they smoked and talked together Elfrida was wholly delightful, and only one thing occurred to mar the enjoyment of the evening as Kendal remembered it. That was Mr. Golightly Ticke, who came up and smoked too, and seemed to have an extraordinary familiarity, for such an utterly impossible person, with Miss Bell's literary engagements. On his way home Kendal reflected that it was doubtless a question of time; she would take to the customs of civilization by degrees, and the sooner the better. ”

“ JAMES PATRICK OF KENDAL,
WHO DIED MARCH 2D, 1787, AGED 71 YEARS.
"When staying in Kendal, with his friend Mr. Thomas Cookson, Mr. Wordsworth himself was an occasional worshipper, along with the family, at this chapel; and thus became acquainted with the minister, the Reverend John Harrison, and [392] with one of his congregation, the well-known blind mathematician and botanist, Mr. John Gough, with the delineation of whose remarkable powers and character the poet has enriched his Excursion ”

“ The literary part of the work, comprising very careful and particular accounts of these events, is excellently written—so compactly and perspicuously, with so thorough a knowledge and so pure a taste, as to be deserving of applause among models in military history. Mr. Kendall passed about two years in Europe for the purpose of superintending its publication, and its success must have amply satisfied the most sanguine anticipations with which he entered upon its composition. ”

“ The Young Engineer OF THE TIOGA IRON WORKS. BY ERNEST A. YOUNG CHAPTER I. THE GREAT ENGINE.
Larry Kendall leaped out of bed and dressed with more than his customary haste. His father's voice had called him upon this morning, which was a most uncommon circumstance, for Mr. Kendall was usually off to his work before his son had finished his morning dreams.
"Must be that something is the matter," reasoned Larry, as he hurried down stairs. ”

“ Which good men take with them from earth to heaven.
The Annals of Kendal—an octavo volume containing information on all subjects of historical or antiquarian interest connected with the town—contains no reference to Mr. Murfitt, except a copy of the inscription on his monument. He was instituted vicar of Kendal in 1806, and died on the 7th November 1814. The following is a copy of the inscription. ”

“ Amos Kendall, who, according to the account of the opposition, has governed the country for the last six or eight years, and against whose genius their united [Pg 324] talents were unable to prevail. Mr. Kendall is a native of Massachusetts, and a graduate of Dartmouth College. He emigrated to Kentucky, where, like many New-Englanders, he was for a time employed as an instructor, and for a short time engaged as private tutor in Mr. ”

“ I am sure I pity the poor man heartily, but to see her at three-and-twenty, with her sweet face and high spirits, give herself away to a man who looks but half alive, and cannot, if he would, return that full first love—have the charge of a tribe of children, be spied and commented on by the first wife’s relations—Maurice, I cannot bear it.’
‘It is not what we should have chosen,’ said her husband, ‘but it has a bright side. Kendal is a most right-minded, superior man, and she appreciates him thoroughly. ”

“ All his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest fears, the most hopeless despondency. Marie dead,—what would the world hold for him! Books, thought, ideas—were they enough? Could a man live by them if all else were gone? For the first time Kendal felt a doubt which seemed to shake his nature to its depths. ”

“ The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”
Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and comes home only for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”
General Kendal, known as Puppa, and Mrs. Kendal—Mumma—also “struggle along somehow.”
When they were told about Sallie’s new game, Dolly and Aileen Kendal looked horribly distrustful. ”

“ There were some, indeed, who maintained that the smallness and delicacy of her features was out of keeping with her stature and her ample gliding motions. But here, again, the impression of delicacy was transformed half way into one of brilliancy by the large hazel eyes and the vivid whiteness of the skin. Kendal watched her from his corner, where his conversation with two musical young ladies had been suddenly suspended by the arrival of the actress, and thought that his impression of the week before had been, if anything, below the truth. ”

“ But I wish she had had a trifle more education and something worth calling a training. Her manager, Robinson, talks of her attempting all the great parts; but it's absurd. She talks very naïvely and prettily about "her art"; but really she knows no more about it than a baby, and it is perhaps part of her charm that she is so unconscious of her ignorance.'
'It is strange how little critical English audiences are,' said Kendal. 'I believe we are the simplest people in the world. All that we ask is that our feelings should be touched a little, but whether by the art or the artist doesn't matter. ”

“ Kendal was in that condition which is proper to men possessed of the true literary temperament, when the first fervour of youth for mere living is gone, when the first crude difficulties of accumulation are over, and when the mind, admitted to regions of an ampler ether and diviner air than any she has inhabited before, feels the full charm and spell of man's vast birthright of knowledge, and is seized with subtler curiosities and further-reaching desires than anything she has yet been conscious of. ”

“ The instant Harry Kendal sprang toward the veiled woman she sprang backward, as though anticipating the movement, and quick as a flash she overturned the candle, just as he tore the veil from her face.
A low, taunting laugh broke from her lips through the inky darkness of the room. In a trice she had torn herself free from his grasp, and like a flash she had sped from the room and down the narrow hall and stairway, like a storm-driven swallow, leaving her companion stumbling about the place, and giving vent to curses loud and deep as he fumbled about his vest pocket for matches. ”

“ The turbulent people of Kendal no doubt acquired their character from the old-time circumstances of the place, ever subject to incursions of Scottish raiders. Sturdy independence, and a readiness to hold their own, thus become traits in these men of the dales and fells. Something of the ancient trials of Kendal town may yet be seen, behind the modern smug facing of shops in the older streets, where houses and cottages are built around courtyards approached only by narrow alleys easily to be defended, in case of attack. ”

“ It is easy to ask, but to wait patiently for the answer, is a far more difficult duty. However, when I had carefully arranged in the places indicated our household treasures of napery, clothing, silver, and so forth, I wished I could go to Kendal. But I saw Robert’s face change as soon as I mentioned Kendal.
“We made a plan for our movements, Milly,” he said, “and I do not wish a single point altered. It might disarrange all I have been working for.” ”

“ I hoped you had forgotten that piece of pedantry on my part.'
'One does not forget the turning-points of one's life,' she answered with a sudden gravity.
Kendal had been keeping an iron grip upon himself during the past hours, but, as she said this, standing close beside him, it seemed to him impossible that his self-restraint should hold much longer. Those wonderful eyes of hers were full upon him; there was emotion in them,—evidently the Nuneham scene was in her mind, as it was in his,—and a great friendliness, even gratitude, seemed to look out through them. ”

“ Fortunately, the amiable people included some very young people, so young that they could properly compel Kendal to go into the fields with them and make cowslip balls, and some robust girls of eighteen and twenty, who mutely demanded the pleasure of beating him at tennis every afternoon. He was able in this way to work off the depression that visited him daily with the damp odor of London art, criticism, quite independently of its bias toward himself. ”

“ Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful as a woman,—had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience; but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of incompetence? After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them. Kendal was far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own person. ”

“ But it was making its way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,—it found a hundred other interests in possession;—it had a strange impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with. Kendal had been accustomed to live in other men's lives. ”

“ Kendal said. "If I could reproduce Barrie on canvas, I'd go, like a shot. By the way, Miss Bell, there's somebody you are, interested in—do you see a middle-aged man, rather bald, thick-set, coming this way?—George Jasper."
"Really!" Elfrida exclaimed, jumping to her feet "Oh, thank you! The most consummate artist in human nature that the time has given!" she added, with intensity. "There can be no question. Oh, I am so happy to have seen him!"
"I'm not altogether sure," Kendal began, and then he stopped, looking at Janet in astonished question. ”