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Kenelm Chillingly, Book 3.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Kenelm Chillingly, Book 3.




"Pardon me: you forget that I added, 'if life were always young, and
the seasons were always summer.'"

"I do not forget. But if youth and summer fade for you, you leave
youth and summer behind you as you pass along,--behind in hearts which
mere realism would make always old, and counting their slothful beats
under the gray of a sky without sun or stars; wherefore I pray you to
consider how magnificent a mission the singer's is,--to harmonize your
life with your song, and toss your flowers, as your child does,
heavenward, with heavenward eyes. Think only of this when you talk
with my sorrowing friend, and you will do him good, as you have done
me, without being able to guess how a seeker after the Beautiful, such
as you, carries us along with him on his way; so that we, too, look
out for beauty, and see it in the wild-flowers to which we had been
blind before."

Here Tom entered the little sanded parlour where this dialogue had
been held, and the three men sallied forth, taking the shortest cut
from the town into the fields and woodlands.



CHAPTER XIII.

WHETHER or not his spirits were raised by Kenelm's praise and
exhortations, the minstrel that day talked with a charm that
spellbound Tom, and Kenelm was satisfied with brief remarks on his
side tending to draw out the principal performer.

The talk was drawn from outward things, from natural objects,--objects
that interest children, and men who, like Tom Bowles, have been
accustomed to view surroundings more with the heart's eye than the
mind's eye. This rover about the country knew much of the habits of
birds and beasts and insects, and told anecdotes of them with a
mixture of humour and pathos, which fascinated Tom's attention, made
him laugh heartily, and sometimes brought tears into his big blue
eyes.

They dined at an inn by the wayside, and the dinner was mirthful; then
they wended their way slowly back. By the declining daylight their
talk grew somewhat graver, and Kenelm took more part in it. Tom
listened mute,--still fascinated. At length, as the town came in
sight, they agreed to halt a while, in a bosky nook soft with mosses
and sweet with wild thyme.

There, as they lay stretched at their ease, the birds hymning vesper
songs amid the boughs above, or dropping, noiseless and fearless, for
their evening food on the swards around them, the wanderer said to
Kenelm, "You tell me that you are no poet, yet I am sure you have a
poet's perception: you must have written poetry?"

"Not I; as I before told you, only school verses in dead languages:
but I found in my knapsack this morning a copy of some rhymes, made by
a fellow-collegian, which I put into my pocket meaning to read them to
you both. They are not verses like yours, which evidently burst from
you spontaneously, and are not imitated from any other poets. These
verses were written by a Scotchman, and smack of imitation from the
old ballad style. There is little to admire in the words themselves,
but there is something in the idea which struck me as original, and
impressed me sufficiently to keep a copy, and somehow or other it got
into the leaves of one of the two books I carried with me from home."

"What are those books? Books of poetry both, I will venture to
wager--"

"Wrong! Both metaphysical, and dry as a bone. Tom, light your pipe,
and you, sir, lean more at ease on your elbow; I should warn you that
the ballad is long. Patience!"

"Attention!" said the minstrel.

"Fire!" added Tom.

Kenelm began to read,--and he read well.


LORD RONALD'S BRIDE.

PART I.

"WHY gathers the crowd in the market-place
Ere the stars have yet left the sky?"
"For a holiday show and an act of grace,--
At the sunrise a witch shall die."

"What deed has she done to deserve that doom?
Has she blighted the standing corn,
Or rifled for philters a dead man's tomb,
Or rid mothers of babes new-born?"

"Her pact with the fiend was not thus revealed,
She taught sinners the Word to hear;
The hungry she fed, and the sick she healed,
And was held as a Saint last year.

"But a holy man, who at Rome had been,
Had discovered, by book and bell,
That the marvels she wrought were through arts unclean,
And the lies of the Prince of Hell.

"And our Mother the Church, for the dame was rich,
And her husband was Lord of Clyde,
Would fain have been mild to this saint-like witch
If her sins she had not denied.

"But hush, and come nearer to see the sight,
Sheriff, halberds, and torchmen,--look!
That's the witch standing mute in her garb of white,
By the priest with his bell and book."

So the witch was consumed on the sacred pyre,
And the priest grew in power and pride,
And the witch left a son to succeed his sire
In the halls and the lands of Clyde.

And the infant waxed comely and strong and brave,
But his manhood had scarce begun,
When his vessel was launched on the northern wave
To the shores which are near the sun.

PART II.

Lord Ronald has come to his halls in Clyde
With a bride of some unknown race;
Compared with the man who would kiss that bride
Wallace wight were a coward base.

Her eyes had the glare of the mountain-cat
When it springs on the hunter's spear,
At the head of the board when that lady sate
Hungry men could not eat for fear.

And the tones of her voice had that deadly growl
Of the bloodhound that scents its prey;
No storm was so dark as that lady's scowl
Under tresses of wintry gray.

"Lord Ronald! men marry for love or gold,
Mickle rich must have been thy bride!"
"Man's heart may be bought, woman's hand be sold,
On the banks of our northern Clyde.

"My bride is, in sooth, mickle rich to me
Though she brought not a groat in dower,
For her face, couldst thou see it as I do see,
Is the fairest in hall or bower!"

Quoth the bishop one day to our lord the king,
"Satan reigns on the Clyde alway,
And the taint in the blood of the witch doth cling
To the child that she brought to day.

"Lord Ronald hath come from the Paynim land
With a bride that appals the sight;
Like his dam she hath moles on her dread right hand,
And she turns to a snake at night.

"It is plain that a Scot who can blindly dote
On the face of an Eastern ghoul,
And a ghoul who was worth not a silver groat,
Is a Scot who has lost his soul.

"It were wise to have done with this demon tree
Which has teemed with such caukered fruit;
Add the soil where it stands to my holy See,
And consign to the flames its root."

"Holy man!" quoth King James, and he laughed, "we know
That thy tongue never wags in vain,
But the Church cist is full, and the king's is low,
And the Clyde is a fair domain.

"Yet a knight that's bewitched by a laidly fere
Needs not much to dissolve the spell;
We will summon the bride and the bridegroom here
Be at hand with thy book and bell."

PART III.

Lord Ronald stood up in King James's court,
And his dame by his dauntless side;
The barons who came in the hopes of sport
Shook with fright when they saw the bride.

The bishop, though armed with his bell and book,
Grew as white as if turned to stone;
It was only our king who could face that look,
But he spoke with a trembling tone.

"Lord Ronald, the knights of thy race and mine
Should have mates in their own degree;
What parentage, say, hath that bride of thine
Who hath come from the far countree?

"And what was her dowry in gold or land,
Or what was the charm, I pray,
That a comely young gallant should woo the hand
Of the ladye we see to-day?"

And the lords would have laughed, but that awful dame
Struck them dumb with her thunder-frown:
"Saucy king, did I utter my father's name,
Thou wouldst kneel as his liegeman down.

"Though I brought to Lord Ronald nor lands nor gold,
Nor the bloom of a fading cheek;
Yet, were I a widow, both young and old
Would my hand and my dowry seek.

"For the wish that he covets the most below,
And would hide from the saints above,
Which he dares not to pray for in weal or woe,
Is the dowry I bring my love.

"Let every man look in his heart and see
What the wish he most lusts to win,
And then let him fasten his eyes on me
While he thinks of his darling sin."

And every man--bishop, and lord, and king
Thought of what he most wished to win,
And, fixing his eye on that grewsome thing,
He beheld his own darling sin.

No longer a ghoul in that face he saw;
It was fair as a boy's first love:
The voice that had curdled his veins with awe
Was the coo of the woodland dove.

Each heart was on flame for the peerless dame
At the price of the husband's life;
Bright claymores flash out, and loud voices shout,
"In thy widow shall be my wife."

Then darkness fell over the palace hall,
More dark and more dark it fell,
And a death-groan boomed hoarse underneath the pall,
And was drowned amid roar and yell.

When light through the lattice-pane stole once more,
It was gray as a wintry dawn,
And the bishop lay cold on the regal floor,
With a stain on his robes of lawn.

Lord Ronald was standing beside the dead,
In the scabbard he plunged his sword,
And with visage as wan as the corpse, he said,
"Lo! my ladye hath kept her word.

"Now I leave her to others to woo and win,
For no longer I find her fair;
Could I look on the face of my darling sin,
I should see but a dead man's there.

"And the dowry she brought me is here returned,
For the wish of my heart has died,
It is quenched in the blood of the priest who burned
My sweet mother, the Saint of Clyde."

Lord Ronald strode over the stony floor,
Not a hand was outstretched to stay;
Lord Ronald has passed through the gaping door,
Not an eye ever traced the way.

And the ladye, left widowed, was prized above
All the maidens in hall and bower,
Many bartered their lives for that ladye's love,
And their souls for that ladye's dower.

God grant that the wish which I dare not pray
Be not that which I lust to win,
And that ever I look with my first dismay
On the face of my darling sin!


As he ceased, Kenelm's eye fell on Tom's face upturned to his own,
with open lips, an intent stare, and paled cheeks, and a look of that
higher sort of terror which belongs to awe. The man, then recovering
himself, tried to speak, and attempted a sickly smile, but neither
would do. He rose abruptly and walked away, crept under the shadow of
a dark beech-tree, and stood there leaning against the trunk.

"What say you to the ballad?" asked Kenelm of the singer.

"It is not without power," answered he.

"Ay, of a certain kind."

The minstrel looked hard at Kenelm, and dropped his eyes, with a
heightened glow on his cheek.

"The Scotch are a thoughtful race. The Scot who wrote this thing may
have thought of a day when he saw beauty in the face of a darling sin;
but, if so, it is evident that his sight recovered from that glamoury.
Shall we walk on? Come, Tom."

The minstrel left them at the entrance of the town, saying, "I regret
that I cannot see more of either of you, as I quit Luscombe at
daybreak. Here, by the by, I forgot to give it before, is the address
you wanted."

KENELM.--"Of the little child. I am glad you remembered her."

The minstrel again looked hard at Kenelm, this time without dropping
his eyes. Kenelm's expression of face was so simply quiet that it
might be almost called vacant.

Kenelm and Tom continued to walk on towards the veterinary surgeon's
house, for some minutes silently. Then Tom said in a whisper, "Did
you not mean those rhymes to hit me here--/here/?" and he struck his
breast.

"The rhymes were written long before I saw you, Tom; but it is well if
their meaning strike us all. Of you, my friend, I have no fear now.
Are you not already a changed man?"

"I feel as if I were going through a change," answered Tom, in slow,
dreary accents. "In hearing you and that gentleman talk so much of
things that I never thought of, I felt something in me,--you will
laugh when I tell you,--something like a bird."

"Like a bird,--good!--a bird has wings."

"Just so."

"And you felt wings that you were unconscious of before, fluttering
and beating themselves as against the wires of a cage. You were true
to your instincts then, my dear fellow-man,--instincts of space and
Heaven. Courage!--the cage-door will open soon. And now, practically
speaking, I give you this advice in parting: You have a quick and
sensitive mind which you have allowed that strong body of yours to
incarcerate and suppress. Give that mind fair play. Attend to the
business of your calling diligently; the craving for regular work is
the healthful appetite of mind: but in your spare hours cultivate the
new ideas which your talk with men who have been accustomed to
cultivate the mind more than the body has sown within you. Belong to
a book-club, and interest yourself in books. A wise man has said,
'Books widen the present by adding to it the past and the future.'
Seek the company of educated men and educated women too; and when you
are angry with another, reason with him: don't knock him down; and
don't be knocked down yourself by an enemy much stronger than
yourself,--Drink. Do all this, and when I see you again you will
be--"

"Stop, sir,--you will see me again?"

"Yes, if we both live, I promise it."

"When?"

"You see, Tom, we have both of us something in our old selves which we
must work off. You will work off your something by repose, and I must
work off mine, if I can, by moving about. So I am on my travels. May
we both have new selves better than the old selves, when we again
shake hands! For your part try your best, dear Tom, and Heaven
prosper you."

"And Heaven bless you!" cried Tom, fervently, with tears rolling
unheeded from his bold blue eyes.



CHAPTER XIV.

THOUGH Kenelm left Luscombe on Tuesday morning, he did not appear at
Neesdale Park till the Wednesday, a little before the dressing-bell
for dinner. His adventures in the interim are not worth repeating.
He had hoped he might fall in again with the minstrel, but he did not.

His portmanteau had arrived, and he heaved a sigh as he cased himself
in a gentleman's evening dress. "Alas! I have soon got back again
into my own skin."

There were several other guests in the house, though not a large
party,--they had been asked with an eye to the approaching
election,--consisting of squires and clergy from remoter parts of the
county. Chief among the guests in rank and importance, and rendered
by the occasion the central object of interest, was George Belvoir.

Kenelm bore his part in this society with a resignation that partook
of repentance.

The first day he spoke very little, and was considered a very dull
young man by the lady he took in to dinner. Mr. Travers in vain tried
to draw him out. He had anticipated much amusement from the
eccentricities of his guest, who had talked volubly enough in the
fernery, and was sadly disappointed. "I feel," he whispered to Mrs.
Campion, "like poor Lord Pomfret, who, charmed with Punch's lively
conversation, bought him, and was greatly surprised that, when he had
once brought him home, Punch would not talk."

"But your Punch listens," said Mrs. Campion, "and he observes."

George Belvoir, on the other hand, was universally declared to be very
agreeable. Though not naturally jovial, he forced himself to appear
so,--laughing loud with the squires, and entering heartily with their
wives and daughters into such topics as county-balls and
croquet-parties; and when after dinner he had, Cato-like, 'warmed his
virtue with wine,' the virtue came out very lustily in praise of good
men,--namely, men of his own party,--and anathemas on bad
men,--namely, men of the other party.

Now and then he appealed to Kenelm, and Kenelm always returned the
same answer, "There is much in what you say."

The first evening closed in the usual way in country houses. There
was some lounging under moonlight on the terrace before the house;
then there was some singing by young lady amateurs, and a rubber of
whist for the elders; then wine-and-water, hand-candlesticks, a
smoking-room for those who smoked, and bed for those who did not.

In the course of the evening, Cecilia, partly in obedience to the
duties of hostess and partly from that compassion for shyness which
kindly and high-bred persons entertain, had gone a little out of her
way to allure Kenelm forth from the estranged solitude he had
contrived to weave around him. In vain for the daughter as for the
father. He replied to her with the quiet self-possession which should
have convinced her that no man on earth was less entitled to
indulgence for the gentlemanlike infirmity of shyness, and no man less
needed the duties of any hostess for the augmentation of his comforts,
or rather for his diminished sense of discomfort; but his replies were
in monosyllables, and made with the air of a man who says in his
heart, "If this creature would but leave me alone!"

Cecilia, for the first time in her life, was piqued, and, strange to
say, began to feel more interest about this indifferent stranger than
about the popular, animated, pleasant George Belvoir, who she knew by
womanly instinct was as much in love with her as he could be.

Cecilia Travers that night on retiring to rest told her maid,
smilingly, that she was too tired to have her hair done; and yet, when
the maid was dismissed, she looked at herself in the glass more
gravely and more discontentedly than she had ever looked there before;
and, tired though she was, stood at the window gazing into the moonlit
night for a good hour after the maid left her.



CHAPTER XV.

KENELM CHILLINGLY has now been several days a guest at Neesdale Park.
He has recovered speech; the other guests have gone, including George
Belvoir. Leopold Travers has taken a great fancy to Kenelm. Leopold
was one of those men, not uncommon perhaps in England, who, with great
mental energies, have little book-knowledge, and when they come in
contact with a book-reader who is not a pedant feel a pleasant
excitement in his society, a source of interest in comparing notes
with him, a constant surprise in finding by what venerable authorities
the deductions which their own mother-wit has drawn from life are
supported, or by what cogent arguments derived from books those
deductions are contravened or upset. Leopold Travers had in him that
sense of humour which generally accompanies a strong practical
understanding (no man, for instance, has more practical understanding
than a Scot, and no man has a keener susceptibility to humour), and
not only enjoyed Kenelm's odd way of expressing himself, but very
often mistook Kenelm's irony for opinion spoken in earnest.

Since his early removal from the capital and his devotion to
agricultural pursuits, it was so seldom that Leopold Travers met a man
by whose conversation his mind was diverted to other subjects than
those which were incidental to the commonplace routine of his life
that he found in Kenelm's views of men and things a source of novel
amusement, and a stirring appeal to such metaphysical creeds of his
own as had been formed unconsciously, and had long reposed unexamined
in the recesses of an intellect shrewd and strong, but more accustomed
to dictate than to argue. Kenelm, on his side, saw much in his host
to like and to admire; but, reversing their relative positions in
point of years, he conversed with Travers as with a mind younger than
his own. Indeed, it was one of his crotchety theories that each
generation is in substance mentally older than the generation
preceding it, especially in all that relates to science; and, as he
would say, "The study of life is a science, and not an art."

But Cecilia,--what impression did she create upon the young visitor?
Was he alive to the charm of her rare beauty, to the grace of a mind
sufficiently stored for commune with those who love to think and to
imagine, and yet sufficiently feminine and playful to seize the
sportive side of realities, and allow their proper place to the
trifles which make the sum of human things? An impression she did
make, and that impression was new to him and pleasing. Nay, sometimes
in her presence and sometimes when alone, he fell into abstracted
consultations with himself, saying, "Kenelm Chillingly, now that thou
hast got back into thy proper skin, dost thou not think that thou
hadst better remain there? Couldst thou not be contented with thy lot
as erring descendant of Adam, if thou couldst win for thy mate so
faultless a descendant of Eve as now flits before thee?" But he could
not abstract from himself any satisfactory answer to the question he
had addressed to himself.

Once he said abruptly to Travers, as, on their return from their
rambles, they caught a glimpse of Cecilia's light form bending over
the flower-beds on the lawn, "Do you admire Virgil?"

"To say truth I have not read Virgil since I was a boy; and, between
you and me, I then thought him rather monotonous."

"Perhaps because his verse is so smooth in its beauty?"

"Probably. When one is very young one's taste is faulty; and if a
poet is not faulty, we are apt to think he wants vivacity and fire."

"Thank you for your lucid explanation," answered Kenelm, adding
musingly to himself, "I am afraid I should yawn very often if I were
married to a Miss Virgil."



CHAPTER XVI.

THE house of Mr. Travers contained a considerable collection of family
portraits, few of them well painted, but the Squire was evidently
proud of such evidences of ancestry. They not only occupied a
considerable space on the walls of the reception rooms, but swarmed
into the principal sleeping-chambers, and smiled or frowned on the
beholder from dark passages and remote lobbies. One morning, Cecilia,
on her way to the china closet, found Kenelm gazing very intently upon
a female portrait consigned to one of those obscure receptacles by
which through a back staircase he gained the only approach from the
hall to his chamber.

"I don't pretend to be a good judge of paintings," said Kenelm, as
Cecilia paused beside him; "but it strikes me that this picture is
very much better than most of those to which places of honour are
assigned in your collection. And the face itself is so lovely that it
would add an embellishment to the princeliest galleries."

"Yes," said Cecilia, with a half-sigh. "The face is lovely, and the
portrait is considered one of Lely's rarest masterpieces. It used to
hang over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. My father had it
placed here many years ago."

"Perhaps because he discovered it was not a family portrait?"

"On the contrary,--because it grieves him to think it is a family
portrait. Hush! I hear his footstep: don't speak of it to him; don't
let him see you looking at it. The subject is very painful to him."

Here Cecilia vanished into the china closet and Kenelm turned off to
his own room.

What sin committed by the original in the time of Charles II. but only
discovered in the reign of Victoria could have justified Leopold
Travers in removing the most pleasing portrait in the house from the
honoured place it had occupied, and banishing it to so obscure a
recess? Kenelm said no more on the subject, and indeed an hour
afterwards had dismissed it from his thoughts. The next day he rode
out with Travers and Cecilia. Their way passed through quiet shady
lanes without any purposed direction, when suddenly, at the spot where
three of those lanes met on an angle of common ground, a lonely gray
tower, in the midst of a wide space of grass-land which looked as if
it had once been a park, with huge boles of pollarded oak dotting the
space here and there, rose before them.

"Cissy!" cried Travers, angrily reining in his horse and stopping
short in a political discussion which he had forced upon Kenelm,
"Cissy! How comes this? We have taken the wrong turn! No matter, I
see there," pointing to the right, "the chimney-pots of old Mondell's
homestead. He has not yet promised his vote to George Belvoir. I'll
go and have a talk with him. Turn back, you and Mr. Chillingly,--meet
me at Terner's Green, and wait for me there till I come. I need not
excuse myself to you, Chillingly. A vote is a vote." So saying, the
Squire, whose ordinary riding-horse was an old hunter, halted, turned,
and, no gate being visible, put the horse over a stiff fence and
vanished in the direction of old Mondell's chimney-pots. Kenelm,
scarcely hearing his host's instructions to Cecilia and excuses to
himself, remained still and gazing on the old tower thus abruptly
obtruded on his view.

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