I said, the other day at dinner, before one of my brother’s sons, but playfully, “I and my brother are fonder of each other than we are of our own children; but we have known each other longer than we have known them.”
A child to be healthy should not be too clever; he should only have receptive power and humour. How grown-up children even differ in this respect!
IV.
Soon after I was seven I went away to school. My mother had inherited a small income in bank-stock, and was able to go where she liked, which she did freely. It was now Exmouth, now Teignmouth, Dawlish, Budleigh Salterton, Tiverton, and other places, but she never found peace of mind in any. She was throughout a long life in search of the Ideal which she never found, and she handed the passion with the same result down to me. She had a married sister, named Wallinger, at Gainsborough; so she took us there. This sister, a year younger than herself, played the great lady throughout as long a life as my mother’s: her husband, Captain Wallinger, was the son of the Wallinger of Hare Hall in Essex, a county family; he had been in the Dragoon Guards, and at a venture might be called the finest and handsomest man of his time.
I remember the house where we lived at Gainsborough, and that of the Wallingers, so well, that I could describe both to the satisfaction of an artist, together with the surroundings, and the roads leading to them, not forgetting a white wooden bridge that spanned the Trent, and which we crossed in due time in a post-chaise into Yorkshire, where we visited relations, the Rimingtons of Hillsborough, near Sheffield, the beautiful grounds of which are now, perhaps, cut up for buildings by a knife-grinding population. A descendant of this family is Rimington Wilson of Bromhead, a famed grouse manor; another is Lord Ranfurly. I remember even sitting on the left side of the carriage, and looking out of the window at the water as we crossed the Trent.
One does not read faces from an early age, but I have a good recollection of certain features; for instance, I can recall our “cousin” Rimington’s powdered head. But after I was seven, I never forgot a face, and often knew schoolfellows again, despite the changes time had worked, whom I had not met for half a century.
It is not the features one recollects, but the demeanour and general expression. One does not, as a rule, observe the features of others. A man who had seen me every day for a year, said, “Well, I always imagined your eyes were blue, but I now observe that they are hazel.”
In his novel of “Coningsby” Disraeli has introduced the character of Sir Joseph Wallinger, the same Christian name as my uncle’s. There being no other family of that name, I have often felt curious to learn what circumstance led him to its selection. He may have been a visitor at Hare Hall in his younger days. I shall have occasion to revert frequently to the Wallingers.