Kenelm Chillingly, Book 5.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Kenelm Chillingly, Book 5.
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BOOK V.
CHAPTER I.
TWO days after the interview recorded in the last chapter of the
previous Book, Travers, chancing to call at Kenelm's lodgings, was
told by his servant that Mr. Chillingly had left London, alone, and
had given no orders as to forwarding letters. The servant did not
know where he had gone, or when he would return.
Travers repeated this news incidentally to Cecilia, and she felt
somewhat hurt that he had not written her a line respecting Tom's
visit. She, however, guessed that he had gone to see the Somerses,
and would return to town in a day or so. But weeks passed, the season
drew to its close, and of Kenelm Chillingly she saw or heard nothing:
he had wholly vanished from the London world. He had but written a
line to his servant, ordering him to repair to Exmundham and await him
there, and enclosing him a check to pay outstanding bills.
We must now follow the devious steps of the strange being who has
grown into the hero of this story. He had left his apartment at
daybreak long before his servant was up, with his knapsack, and a
small portmanteau, into which he had thrust--besides such additional
articles of dress as he thought he might possibly require, and which
his knapsack could not contain--a few of his favourite books. Driving
with these in a hack-cab to the Vauxhall station, he directed the
portmanteau to be forwarded to Moleswich, and flinging the knapsack on
his shoulders, walked slowly along the drowsy suburbs that stretched
far into the landscape, before, breathing more freely, he found some
evidences of rural culture on either side of the high road. It was
not, however, till he had left the roofs and trees of pleasant
Richmond far behind him that he began to feel he was out of reach of
the metropolitan disquieting influences. Finding at a little inn,
where he stopped to breakfast, that there was a path along fields, and
in sight of the river, through which he could gain the place of his
destination, he then quitted the high road, and traversing one of the
loveliest districts in one of our loveliest counties, he reached
Moleswich about noon.
CHAPTER II.
ON entering the main street of the pretty town, the name of Somers, in
gilt capitals, was sufficiently conspicuous over the door of a very
imposing shop. It boasted two plate-glass windows, at one of which
were tastefully exhibited various articles of fine stationery,
embroidery patterns, etc.; at the other, no less tastefully, sundry
specimens of ornamental basket-work.
Kenelm crossed the threshold and recognized behind the counter--fair
as ever, but with an expression of face more staid, and a figure more
rounded and matron-like--his old friend Jessie. There were two or
three customers before her, between whom she was dividing her
attention. While a handsome young lady, seated, was saying, in a
somewhat loud but cheery and pleasant voice, "Do not mind me, Mrs.
Somers: I can wait," Jessie's quick eye darted towards the stranger,
but too rapidly to distinguish his features, which, indeed, he turned
away, and began to examine the baskets.
In a minute or so the other customers were served and had departed;
and the voice of the lady was again heard, "Now, Mrs. Somers, I want
to see your picture-books and toys. I am giving a little children's
party this afternoon, and I want to make them as happy as possible."
"Somewhere or other, on this planet, or before my Monad was whisked
away to it, I have heard that voice," muttered Kenelm. While Jessie
was alertly bringing forth her toys and picture-books, she said, "I am
sorry to keep you waiting, sir; but if it is the baskets you come
about, I can call my husband."
"Do," said Kenelm.
"William, William," cried Mrs. Somers; and after a delay long enough
to allow him to slip on his jacket, William Somers emerged from the
back parlour.
His face had lost its old trace of suffering and ill health; it was
still somewhat pale, and retained its expression of intellectual
refinement.
"How you have improved in your art!" said Kenelm, heartily.
William started, and recognized Kenelm at once. He sprang forward and
took Kenelm's outstretched hand in both his own, and, in a voice
between laughing and crying, exclaimed, "Jessie, Jessie, it is he!--he
whom we pray for every night. God bless you! God bless and make you
as happy as He permitted you to make me!"
Before this little speech was faltered out, Jessie was by her
husband's side, and she added, in a lower voice, but tremulous with
deep feeling, "And me too!"
"By your leave, Will," said Kenelm, and he saluted Jessie's white
forehead with a kiss that could not have been kindlier or colder if it
had been her grandfather's.
Meanwhile the lady had risen noiselessly and unobserved, and stealing
up to Kenelm, looked him full in the face.
"You have another friend here, sir, who has also some cause to thank
you--"
"I thought I remembered your voice," said Kenelm, looking puzzled.
"But pardon me if I cannot recall your features. Where have we met
before?"
"Give me your arm when we go out, and I will bring myself to your
recollection. But no: I must not hurry you away now. I will call
again in half an hour. Mrs. Somers, meanwhile put up the things I
have selected. I will take them away with me when I come back from
the vicarage, where I have left the pony-carriage." So, with a
parting nod and smile to Kenelm, she turned away, and left him
bewildered.
"But who is that lady, Will?"
"A Mrs. Braefield. She is a new comer."
"She may well be that, Will," said Jessie, smiling, "for she has only
been married six months."
"And what was her name before she married?"
"I am sure I don't know, sir. It is only three months since we came
here, and she has been very kind to us and an excellent customer.
Everybody likes her. Mr. Braefield is a city gentleman and very rich;
and they live in the finest house in the place, and see a great deal
of company."
"Well, I am no wiser than I was before," said Kenelm. "People who ask
questions very seldom are."
"And how did you find us out, sir?" said Jessie. "Oh! I guess," she
added, with an arch glance and smile. "Of course, you have seen Miss
Travers, and she told you."
"You are right. I first learned your change of residence from her,
and thought I would come and see you, and be introduced to the
baby,--a boy, I understand? Like you, Will?"
"No, sir, the picture of Jessie."
"Nonsense, Will; it is you all over, even to its little hands."
"And your good mother, Will, how did you leave her?"
"Oh, sir!" cried Jessie, reproachfully; "do you think we could have
the heart to leave Mother,--so lone and rheumatic too? She is tending
baby now,--always does while I am in the shop."
Here Kenelm followed the young couple into the parlour, where, seated
by the window, they found old Mrs. Somers reading the Bible and
rocking the baby, who slept peacefully in its cradle.
"Will," said Kenelm, bending his dark face over the infant, "I will
tell you a pretty thought of a foreign poet's, which has been thus
badly translated:
"'Blest babe, a boundless world this bed so narrow seems to thee;
Grow man, and narrower than this bed the boundless world shall
be.'"[1]
[1] Schiller.
"I don't think that is true, sir," said Will, simply; "for a happy
home is a world wide enough for any man."
Tears started into Jessie's eyes; she bent down and kissed--not the
baby, but the cradle. "Will made it." She added blushing, "I mean
the cradle, sir."
Time flew past while Kenelm talked with Will and the old mother, for
Jessie was soon summoned back to the shop; and Kenelm was startled
when he found the half-hour's grace allowed to him was over, and
Jessie put her head in at the door and said, "Mrs. Braefield is
waiting for you."
"Good-by, Will; I shall come to see you again soon; and my mother
gives me a commission to buy I don't know how many specimens of your
craft."
CHAPTER III.
A SMART pony-phaeton, with a box for a driver in livery equally smart,
stood at the shop-door.
"Now, Mr. Chillingly," said Mrs. Braefield, "it is my turn to run away
with you; get in!"
"Eh!" murmured Kenelm, gazing at her with large dreamy eyes. "Is it
possible?"
"Quite possible; get in. Coachman, home! Yes, Mr. Chillingly, you
meet again that giddy creature whom you threatened to thrash; it would
have served her right. I ought to feel so ashamed to recall myself to
your recollection, and yet I am not a bit ashamed. I am proud to show
you that I have turned out a steady, respectable woman, and, my
husband tells me, a good wife."
"You have only been six months married, I hear," said Kenelm, dryly.
"I hope your husband will say the same six years hence."
"He will say the same sixty years hence, if we live as long."
"How old is he now?"
"Thirty-eight."
"When a man wants only two years of his hundredth, he probably has
learned to know his own mind; but then, in most cases, very little
mind is left to him to know."
"Don't be satirical, sir; and don't talk as if you were railing at
marriage, when you have just left as happy a young couple as the sun
ever shone upon; and owing,--for Mrs. Somers has told me all about her
marriage,--owing their happiness to you."
"Their happiness to me! not in the least. I helped them to marry, and
in spite of marriage they helped each other to be happy."
"You are still unmarried yourself?"
"Yes, thank Heaven!"
"And are you happy?"
"No; I can't make myself happy: myself is a discontented brute."
"Then why do you say 'thank Heaven'?"
"Because it is a comfort to think I am not making somebody else
unhappy."
"Do you believe that if you loved a wife who loved you, you should
make her unhappy?"
"I am sure I don't know; but I have not seen a woman whom I could love
as a wife. And we need not push our inquiries further. What has
become of that ill-treated gray cob?"
"He was quite well, thank you, when I last heard of him."
"And the uncle who would have inflicted me upon you, if you had not so
gallantly defended yourself?"
"He is living where he did live, and has married his housekeeper. He
felt a delicate scruple against taking that step till I was married
myself and out of the way."
Here Mrs. Braefield, beginning to speak very hurriedly, as women who
seek to disguise emotion often do, informed Kenelm how unhappy she had
felt for weeks after having found an asylum with her aunt,--how she
had been stung by remorse and oppressed by a sense of humiliation at
the thought of her folly and the odious recollection of Mr.
Compton,--how she had declared to herself that she would never marry
any one now--never! How Mr. Braefield happened to be on a visit in
the neighbourhood, and saw her at church,--how he had sought an
introduction to her,--and how at first she rather disliked him than
not; but he was so good and so kind, and when at last he proposed--and
she had frankly told him all about her girlish flight and
infatuation--how generously he had thanked her for a candour which had
placed her as high in his esteem as she had been before in his love.
"And from that moment," said Mrs. Braefield, passionately, "my whole
heart leaped to him. And now you know all; and here we are at the
Lodge."
The pony-phaeton went with great speed up a broad gravel-drive,
bordered with rare evergreens, and stopped at a handsome house with a
portico in front, and a long conservatory at the garden side,--one of
those houses which belong to "city gentlemen," and often contain more
comfort and exhibit more luxury than many a stately manorial mansion.
Mrs. Braefield evidently felt some pride as she led Kenelm through the
handsome hall, paved with Malvern tiles and adorned with Scagliola
columns, and into a drawing-room furnished with much taste and opening
on a spacious flower-garden.
"But where is Mr. Braefield?" asked Kenelm.
"Oh, he has taken the rail to his office; but he will be back long
before dinner, and of course you dine with us."
"You're very hospitable, but--"
"No buts: I will take no excuse. Don't fear that you shall have only
mutton-chops and a rice-pudding; and, besides, I have a children's
party coming at two o'clock, and there will be all sorts of fun. You
are fond of children, I am sure?"
"I rather think I am not. But I have never clearly ascertained my own
inclinations upon that subject."
"Well, you shall have ample opportunity to do so to-day. And oh! I
promise you the sight of the loveliest face that you can picture to
yourself when you think of your future wife."
"My future wife, I hope, is not yet born," said Kenelm, wearily, and
with much effort suppressing a yawn. "But at all events, I will stay
till after two o'clock; for two o'clock, I presume, means luncheon."
"Mrs. Braefield laughed. "You retain your appetite?"
"Most single men do, provided they don't fall in love and become
doubled up."
At this abominable attempt at a pun, Mrs. Braefield disdained to
laugh; but turning away from its perpetrator she took off her hat and
gloves and passed her hands lightly over her forehead, as if to smooth
back some vagrant tress in locks already sufficiently sheen and trim.
She was not quite so pretty in female attire as she had appeared in
boy's dress, nor did she look quite as young. In all other respects
she was wonderfully improved. There was a serener, a more settled
intelligence in her frank bright eyes, a milder expression in the play
of her parted lips. Kenelm gazed at her with pleased admiration. And
as now, turning from the glass, she encountered his look, a deeper
colour came into the clear delicacy of her cheeks, and the frank eyes
moistened. She came up to him as he sat, and took his hand in both
hers, pressing it warmly. "Ah, Mr. Chillingly," she said, with
impulsive tremulous tones, "look round, look round this happy,
peaceful home!--the life so free from a care, the husband whom I so
love and honour; all the blessings that I might have so recklessly
lost forever had I not met with you, had I been punished as I
deserved. How often I thought of your words, that 'you would be proud
of my friendship when we met again'! What strength they gave me in my
hours of humbled self-reproach!" Her voice here died away as if in
the effort to suppress a sob.
She released his hand, and, before he could answer, passed quickly
through the open sash into the garden.
CHAPTER IV.
THE children have come,--some thirty of them, pretty as English
children generally are, happy in the joy of the summer sunshine, and
the flower lawns, and the feast under cover of an awning suspended
between chestnut-trees, and carpeted with sward.
No doubt Kenelm held his own at the banquet, and did his best to
increase the general gayety, for whenever he spoke the children
listened eagerly, and when he had done they laughed mirthfully.
"The fair face I promised you," whispered Mrs. Braefield, "is not here
yet. I have a little note from the young lady to say that Mrs.
Cameron does not feel very well this morning, but hopes to recover
sufficiently to come later in the afternoon."
"And pray who is Mrs. Cameron?"
"Ah! I forgot that you are a stranger to the place. Mrs. Cameron is
the aunt with whom Lily resides. Is it not a pretty name, Lily?"
"Very! emblematic of a spinster that does not spin, with a white head
and a thin stalk."
"Then the name belies my Lily, as you will see."
The children now finished their feast, and betook themselves to
dancing in an alley smoothed for a croquet-ground, and to the sound of
a violin played by the old grandfather of one of the party. While
Mrs. Braefield was busying herself with forming the dance, Kenelm
seized the occasion to escape from a young nymph of the age of twelve
who had sat next him at the banquet, and taken so great a fancy to him
that he began to fear she would vow never to forsake his side, and
stole away undetected.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially
the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet
mood. Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which, though the lilacs
were faded, the laburnum still retained here and there the waning gold
of its clusters, Kenelm came into a recess which bounded his steps and
invited him to repose. It was a circle, so formed artificially by
slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and
flowers. In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring
sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of
stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out
all horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant
passions--love, ambition, desire of power or gold or fame or
knowledge--form the proud background to the brief-lived flowerets of
our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom, catch the
glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet, and yet, exclude our sight from
the lengths and the widths of the space which extends behind and
beyond them.
Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain. From afar came
the whoop and the laugh of the children in their sports or their
dance. At the distance their joy did not sadden him,--he marvelled
why; and thus, in musing revcry, thought to explain the why to
himself.
"The poet," so ran his lazy thinking, "has told us that 'distance
lends enchantment to the view,' and thus compares to the charm of
distance the illusion of hope. But the poet narrows the scope of his
own illustration. Distance lends enchantment to the ear as well as to
the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone. Memory no less than hope
owes its charm to 'the far away.'
"I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the midst of young
noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here, subdued and
mellowed, and knowing, thank Heaven, that the urchins are not within
reach of me, I could readily dream myself back into childhood, and
into sympathy with the lost playfields of school.
"So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible agony for
a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret for one who
disappeared into Heaven years ago! So with the art of poetry: how
imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it
must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to
elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws!
Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise
gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have
killed his father and married his mother. But when Oedipus commits
those unhappy mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth
century is a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand
years ago.
"And," continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical
criticism, "even where the poet deals with persons and things close
upon our daily sight,--if he would give them poetic charm he must
resort to a sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they
are to us in external circumstance, the farther they must be in some
internal peculiarities. Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as
contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest
details of apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our
daily lives by their idiosyncrasies and their fates. We know that
while Werter and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize
with them as friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us
in the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged
to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very
pain which their fate inflicts on us. Thus, I suppose, it must be in
love. If the love we feel is to have the glamour of poetry, it must
be love for some one morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual
selves; in short, differing from us in attributes which, however near
we draw to the possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in
attributes of our own; so that there is something in the loved one
that always remains an ideal,--a mystery,--'a sun-bright summit
mingling with the sky'!"
Herewith the soliloquist's musings glided vaguely into mere revery.
He closed his eyes drowsily, not asleep, nor yet quite awake; as
sometimes in bright summer days when we recline on the grass we do
close our eyes, and yet dimly recognize a golden light bathing the
drowsy lids; and athwart that light images come and go like dreams,
though we know that we are not dreaming.
CHAPTER V.
FROM this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was roused
slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek,--again a
little less softly; he opened his eyes, they fell first upon two tiny
rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen on his breast; and
then looking up, he saw before him, in an opening of the trellised
circle, a female child's laughing face. Her hand was still uplifted
charged with another rosebud, but behind the child's figure, looking
over her shoulder and holding back the menacing arm, was a face as
innocent but lovelier far,--the face of a girl in her first youth,
framed round with the blossoms that festooned the trellise. How the
face became the flowers! It seemed the fairy spirit of them.
Kenelm started and rose to his feet. The child, the one whom he had
so ungallantly escaped from ran towards him through a wicket in the
circle. Her companion disappeared.
"Is it you?" said Kenelm to the child, "you who pelted me so cruelly?
Ungrateful creature! Did I not give you the best strawberries in the
dish and all my own cream?"
"But why did you run away and hide yourself when you ought to be
dancing with me?" replied the young lady, evading, with the instinct
of her sex, all answer to the reproach she had deserved.
"I did not run away, and it is clear that I did not mean to hide
myself, since you so easily found me out. But who was the young lady
with you? I suspect she pelted me too, for she seems to have run away
to hide herself."
"No, she did not pelt you; she wanted to stop me, and you would have
had another rosebud--oh, so much bigger!--if she had not held back my
arm. Don't you know her,--don't you know Lily?"
"No; so that is Lily? You shall introduce me to her."
By this time they had passed out of the circle through the little
wicket opposite the path by which Kenelm had entered, and opening at
once on the lawn. Here at some distance the children were grouped,
some reclined on the grass, some walking to and fro, in the interval
of the dance.
In the space between the group and the trellise Lily was walking alone
and quickly. The child left Kenelm's side and ran after her friend,
soon overtook, but did not succeed in arresting her steps. Lily did
not pause till she had reached the grassy ball-room, and here all the
children came round her and shut out her delicate form from Kenelm's
sight.
Before he had reached the place, Mrs. Braefield met him.
"Lily is come!"
"I know it: I have seen her."
"Is not she beautiful?"
"I must see more of her if I am to answer critically; but before you
introduce me, may I be permitted to ask who and what is Lily?"
Mrs. Braefield paused a moment before she answered, and yet the answer
was brief enough not to need much consideration. "She is a Miss
Mordaunt, an orphan; and, as I before told you, resides with her aunt,
Mrs. Cameron, a widow. They have the prettiest cottage you ever saw
on the banks of the river, or rather rivulet, about a mile from this
place. Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple-hearted woman. As to
Lily, I can praise her beauty only with safe conscience, for as yet
she is a mere child,--her mind quite unformed."
"Did you ever meet any man, much less any woman, whose mind was
formed?" muttered Kenelm. "I am sure mine is not, and never will be
on this earth."
Mrs. Braefield did not hear this low-voiced observation. She was
looking about for Lily; and perceiving her at last as the children who
surrounded her were dispersing to renew the dance, she took Kenelm's
arm, led him to the young lady, and a formal introduction took place.
Formal as it could be on those sunlit swards, amidst the joy of summer
and the laugh of children. In such scene and such circumstance
formality does not last long. I know not how it was, but in a very
few minutes Kenelm and Lily had ceased to be strangers to each other.
They found themselves seated apart from the rest of the merry-makers,
on the bank shadowed by lime-trees; the man listening with downcast
eyes, the girl with mobile shifting glances now on earth, now on
heaven, and talking freely; gayly,--like the babble of a happy stream,
with a silvery dulcet voice and a sparkle of rippling smiles.
No doubt this is a reversal of the formalities of well-bred life, and
conventional narrating thereof. According to them, no doubt, it is
for the man to talk and the maid to listen; but I state the facts as
they were, honestly. And Lily knew no more of the formalities of
drawing-room life than a skylark fresh from its nest knows of the
song-teacher and the cage. She was still so much of a child. Mrs.
Braefield was right: her mind was still so unformed.