Kenelm Chillingly, Book 7.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Kenelm Chillingly, Book 7.
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BOOK VII.
CHAPTER I.
KENELM did not return home till dusk, and just as he was sitting down
to his solitary meal there was a ring at the bell, and Mrs. Jones
ushered in Mr. Thomas Bowles.
Though that gentleman had never written to announce the day of his
arrival, he was not the less welcome.
"Only," said Kenelm, "if you preserve the appetite I have lost, I fear
you will find meagre fare to-day. Sit down, man."
"Thank you, kindly, but I dined two hours ago in London, and I really
can eat nothing more."
Kenelm was too well-bred to press unwelcome hospitalities. In a very
few minutes his frugal repast was ended; the cloth removed, the two
men were left alone.
"Your room is here, of course, Tom; that was engaged from the day I
asked you, but you ought to have given me a line to say when to expect
you, so that I could have put our hostess on her mettle as to dinner
or supper. You smoke still, of course: light your pipe."
"Thank you, Mr. Chillingly, I seldom smoke now; but if you will excuse
a cigar," and Tom produced a very smart cigar-case.
"Do as you would at home. I shall send word to Will Somers that you
and I sup there to-morrow. You forgive me for letting out your
secret. All straightforward now and henceforth. You come to their
hearth as a friend, who will grow dearer to them both every year. Ah,
Tom, this love for woman seems to me a very wonderful thing. It may
sink a man into such deeps of evil, and lift a man into such heights
of good."
"I don't know as to the good," said Tom, mournfully, and laying aside
his cigar.
"Go on smoking: I should like to keep you company; can you spare me
one of your cigars?"
Tom offered his case. Kenelm extracted a cigar, lighted it, drew a
few whiffs, and, when he saw that Tom had resumed his own cigar,
recommenced conversation.
"You don't know as to the good; but tell me honestly, do you think if
you had not loved Jessie Wiles, you would be as good a man as you are
now?"
"If I am better than I was, it is not because of my love for the
girl."
"What then?"
"The loss of her."
Kenelm started, turned very pale, threw aside the cigar, rose, and
walked the room to and fro with very quick but very irregular strides.
Tom continued quietly. "Suppose I had won Jessie and married her, I
don't think any idea of improving myself would have entered my head.
My uncle would have been very much offended at my marrying a
day-labourer's daughter, and would not have invited me to Luscombe. I
should have remained at Graveleigh, with no ambition of being more
than a common farrier, an ignorant, noisy, quarrelsome man; and if I
could not have made Jessie as fond of me as I wished, I should not
have broken myself of drinking, and I shudder to think what a brute I
might have been, when I see in the newspapers an account of some
drunken wife-beater. How do we know but what that wife-beater loved
his wife dearly before marriage, and she did not care for him? His
home was unhappy, and so he took to drink and to wife-beating."
"I was right, then," said Kenelm, halting his strides, when I told you
it would be a miserable fate to be married to a girl whom you loved to
distraction, and whose heart you could never warm to you, whose life
you could never render happy."
"So right!"
"Let us drop that part of the subject at present," said Kenelm,
reseating himself, "and talk about your wish to travel. Though
contented that you did not marry Jessie, though you can now, without
anguish, greet her as the wife of another, still there are some
lingering thoughts of her that make you restless; and you feel that
you could more easily wrench yourself from these thoughts in a marked
change of scene and adventure, that you might bury them altogether in
the soil of a strange land. Is it so?"
"Ay, something of that, sir."
Then Kenelm roused himself to talk of foreign lands, and to map out a
plan of travel that might occupy some months. He was pleased to find
that Tom had already learned enough of French to make himself
understood at least upon commonplace matters, and still more pleased
to discover that he had been not only reading the proper guide-books
or manuals descriptive of the principal places in Europe worth
visiting, but that he had acquired an interest in the places; interest
in the fame attached to them by their history in the past, or by the
treasures of art they contained.
So they talked far into the night; and when Tom retired to his room,
Kenelm let himself out of the house noiselessly, and walked with slow
steps towards the old summer-house in which he had sat with Lily. The
wind had risen, scattering the clouds that had veiled the preceding
day, so that the stars were seen in far chasms of the sky
beyond,--seen for a while in one place, and, when the swift clouds
rolled over them there, shining out elsewhere. Amid the varying
sounds of the trees, through which swept the night gusts, Kenelm
fancied he could distinguish the sigh of the willow on the opposite
lawn of Grasmere.
CHAPTER II.
KENELM despatched a note to Will Somers early the next morning,
inviting himself and Mr. Bowles to supper that evening. His tact was
sufficient to make him aware that in such social meal there would be
far less restraint for each and all concerned than in a more formal
visit from Tom during the day-time; and when Jessie, too, was engaged
with customers to the shop.
But he led Tom through the town and showed him the shop itself, with
its pretty goods at the plate-glass windows, and its general air of
prosperous trade; then he carried him off into the lanes and fields of
the country, drawing out the mind of his companion, and impressed with
great admiration of its marked improvement in culture, and in the
trains of thought which culture opens out and enriches.
But throughout all their multiform range of subject Kenelm could
perceive that Tom was still preoccupied and abstracted: the idea of
the coming interview with Jessie weighed upon him.
When they left Cromwell Lodge at nightfall, to repair to the supper at
Will's; Kenelm noticed that Bowles had availed himself of the contents
of his carpet-bag to make some refined alterations in his dress. The
alterations became him.
When they entered the parlour, Will rose from his chair with the
evidence of deep emotion on his face, advanced to Tom, took his hand
and grasped and dropped it without a word. Jessie saluted both guests
alike, with drooping eyelids and an elaborate curtsy. The old mother
alone was perfectly self-possessed and up to the occasion.
"I am heartily glad to see you, Mr. Bowles," said she, "and so all
three of us are, and ought to be; and if baby was older, there would
be four."
"And where on earth have you hidden baby?" cried Kenelm. "Surely he
might have been kept up for me to-night, when I was expected; the last
time I supped here I took you by surprise, and therefore had no right
to complain of baby's want of respect to her parents' friends."
Jessie raised the window-curtain, and pointed to the cradle behind it.
Kenelm linked his arm in Tom's, led him to the cradle, and, leaving
him alone to gaze on the sleeping inmate, seated himself at the table,
between old Mrs. Somers and Will. Will's eyes were turned away
towards the curtain, Jessie holding its folds aside, and the
formidable Tom, who had been the terror of his neighbourhood, bending
smiling over the cradle: till at last he laid his large hand on the
pillow, gently, timidly, careful not to awake the helpless sleeper,
and his lips moved, doubtless with a blessing; then he, too, came to
the table, seating himself, and Jessie carried the cradle upstairs.
Will fixed his keen, intelligent eyes on his bygone rival; and
noticing the changed expression of the once aggressive countenance,
the changed costume in which, without tinge of rustic foppery, there
was the token of a certain gravity of station scarcely compatible with
a return to old loves and old habits in the village world, the last
shadow of jealousy vanished from the clear surface of Will's
affectionate nature.
"Mr. Bowles," he exclaimed, impulsively, "you have a kind heart, and a
good heart, and a generous heart. And your corning here to-night on
this friendly visit is an honour which--which"--"Which," interrupted
Kenelm, compassionating Will's embarrassment, "is on the side of us
single men. In this free country a married man who has a male baby
may be father to the Lord Chancellor or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But--well, my friends, such a meeting as we have to-night does not
come often; and after supper let us celebrate it with a bowl of punch.
If we have headaches the next morning none of us will grumble."
Old Mrs. Somers laughed out jovially. "Bless you, sir, I did not
think of the punch; I will go and see about it," and, baby's socks
still in her hands, she hastened from the room.
What with the supper, what with the punch, and what with Kenelm's art
of cheery talk on general subjects, all reserve, all awkwardness, all
shyness between the convivialists, rapidly disappeared. Jessie
mingled in the talk; perhaps (excepting only Kenelm) she talked more
than the others, artlessly, gayly, no vestige of the old coquetry;
but, now and then, with a touch of genteel finery, indicative of her
rise in life, and of the contact of the fancy shopkeeper with noble
customers. It was a pleasant evening; Kenelm had resolved that it
should be so. Not a hint of the obligations to Mr. Bowles escaped
until Will, following his visitor to the door, whispered to Tom, "You
don't want thanks, and I can't express them. But when we say our
prayers at night, we have always asked God to bless him who brought us
together, and has since made us so prosperous,--I mean Mr. Chillingly.
To-night there will be another besides him, for whom we shall pray,
and for whom baby, when he is older, will pray too."
Therewith Will's voice thickened; and he prudently receded, with no
unreasonable fear lest the punch might make him too demonstrative of
emotion if he said more.
Tom was very silent on the return to Cromwell Lodge; it did not seem
the silence of depressed spirits, but rather of quiet meditation, from
which Kenelm did not attempt to rouse him.
It was not till they reached the garden pales of Grasmere that Tom,
stopping short, and turning his face to Kenelm, said, "I am very
grateful to you for this evening,--very."
"It has revived no painful thoughts then?"
"No; I feel so much calmer in mind than I ever believed I could have
been, after seeing her again."
"Is it possible!" said Kenelm, to himself. "How should I feel if I
ever saw in Lily the wife of another man, the mother of his child?"
At that question he shuddered, and an involuntary groan escaped from
his lips. Just then having, willingly in those precincts, arrested
his steps when Tom paused to address him, something softly touched the
arm which he had rested on the garden pale. He looked, and saw that
it was Blanche. The creature, impelled by its instincts towards
night-wanderings, had, somehow or other, escaped from its own bed
within the house, and hearing a voice that had grown somewhat familiar
to its ear, crept from among the shrubs behind upon the edge of the
pale. There it stood, with arched back, purring low as in pleased
salutation.
Kenelm bent down and covered with kisses the blue ribbon which Lily's
hand had bound round the favourite's neck. Blanche submitted to the
caress for a moment, and then catching a slight rustle among the
shrubs made by some awaking bird, sprang into the thick of the
quivering leaves and vanished.
Kenelm moved on with a quick impatient stride, and no further words
were exchanged between him and his companion till they reached their
lodging and parted for the night.
CHAPTER III.
THE next day, towards noon, Kenelm and his visitor, walking together
along the brook-side, stopped before Izaak Walton's summer-house, and,
at Kenelm's suggestion, entered therein to rest, and more at their
ease to continue the conversation they had begun.
"You have just told me," said Kenelm, "that you feel as if a load were
taken off your heart, now that you have again met Jessie Somers, and
that you find her so changed that she is no longer the woman you
loved. As to the change, whatever it be, I own, it seems to me for
the better, in person, in manners, in character; of course I should
not say this, if I were not convinced of your perfect sincerity when
you assured me that you are cured of the old wound. But I feel so
deeply interested in the question how a fervent love, once entertained
and enthroned in the heart of a man so earnestly affectionate and so
warm-blooded as yourself, can be, all of a sudden, at a single
interview, expelled or transferred into the calm sentiment of
friendship, that I pray you to explain."
"That is what puzzles me, sir," answered Tom, passing his hand over
his forehead. "And I don't know if I can explain it.
"Think over it, and try."
Tom mused for some moments and then began. "You see, sir, that I was
a very different man myself when I fell in love with Jessie Wiles, and
said, 'Come what may, that girl shall be my wife. Nobody else shall
have her.'"
"Agreed; go on."
"But while I was becoming a different man, when I thought of her--and
I was always thinking of her--I still pictured her to myself as the
same Jessie Wiles; and though, when I did see her again at Graveleigh,
after she had married--the day--"
"You saved her from the insolence of the Squire."
"She was but very recently married. I did not realize her as married.
I did not see her husband, and the difference within myself was only
then beginning. Well, so all the time I was reading and thinking, and
striving to improve my old self at Luscombe, still Jessie Wiles
haunted me as the only girl I had ever loved, ever could love; I could
not believe it possible that I could ever marry any one else. And
lately I have been much pressed to marry some one else; all my family
wish it: but the face of Jessie rose up before me, and I said to
myself, 'I should be a base man if I married one woman, while I could
not get another woman out of my head.' I must see Jessie once more,
must learn whether her face is now really the face that haunts me when
I sit alone; and I have seen her, and it is not that face: it may be
handsomer, but it is not a girl's face, it is the face of a wife and a
mother. And, last evening, while she was talking with an
open-heartedness which I had never found in her before, I became
strangely conscious of the difference in myself that had been silently
at work within the last two years or so. Then, sir, when I was but an
ill-conditioned, uneducated, petty village farrier, there was no
inequality between me and a peasant girl; or, rather, in all things
except fortune, the peasant girl was much above me. But last evening
I asked myself, watching her and listening to her talk, 'If Jessie
were now free, should I press her to be my wife?' and I answered
myself, 'No.'"
Kenelm listened with rapt attention, and exclaimed briefly, but
passionately, "Why?"
"It seems as if I were giving myself airs to say why. But, sir,
lately I have been thrown among persons, women as well as men, of a
higher class than I was born in; and in a wife I should want a
companion up to their mark, and who would keep me up to mine; and ah,
sir, I don't feel as if I could find that companion in Mrs. Somers."
"I understand you now, Tom. But you are spoiling a silly romance of
mine. I had fancied the little girl with the flower face would grow
up to supply the loss of Jessie; and, I am so ignorant of the human
heart, I did think it would take all the years required for the little
girl to open into a woman, before the loss of the old love could be
supplied. I see now that the poor little child with the flower face
has no chance."
"Chance? Why, Mr. Chillingly," cried Tom, evidently much nettled,
"Susey is a dear little thing, but she is scarcely more than a mere
charity girl. Sir, when I last saw you in London you touched on that
matter as if I were still the village farrier's son, who might marry a
village labourer's daughter. But," added Tom, softening down his
irritated tone of voice, "even if Susey were a lady born I think a man
would make a very great mistake, if he thought he could bring up a
little girl to regard him as a father; and then, when she grew up,
expect her to accept him as a lover."
"Ah, you think that!" exclaimed Kenelm, eagerly, and turning eyes that
sparkled with joy towards the lawn of Grasmere. "You think that; it
is very sensibly said,--well, and you have been pressed to marry, and
have hung back till you had seen again Mrs. Somers. Now you will be
better disposed to such a step; tell me about it?"
"I said, last evening, that one of the principal capitalists at
Luscombe, the leading corn-merchant, had offered to take me into
partnership. And, sir, he has an only daughter, she is a very amiable
girl, has had a first-rate education, and has such pleasant manners
and way of talk, quite a lady. If I married her I should soon be the
first man in Luscombe, and Luscombe, as you are no doubt aware,
returns two members to Parliament; who knows, but that some day the
farrier's son might be--" Tom stopped abruptly, abashed at the
aspiring thought which, while speaking, had deepened his hardy colour
and flashed from his honest eyes.
"Ah!" said Kenelm, almost mournfully, "is it so? must each man in his
life play many parts? Ambition succeeds to love, the reasoning brain
to the passionate heart. True, you are changed; my Tom Bowles is
gone."
"Not gone in his undying gratitude to you, sir," said Tom, with great
emotion. "Your Tom Bowles would give up all his dreams of wealth or
of rising in life, and go through fire and water to serve the friend
who first bid him be a new Tom Bowles! Don't despise me as your own
work: you said to me that terrible day, when madness was on my brow
and crime within my heart, 'I will be to you the truest friend man
ever found in man.' So you have been. You commanded me to read; you
commanded me to think; you taught me that body should be the servant
of mind."
"Hush, hush, times are altered; it is you who can teach me now. Teach
me, teach me; how does ambition replace love? How does the desire to
rise in life become the all-mastering passion, and, should it prosper,
the all-atoning consolation of our life? We can never be as happy,
though we rose to the throne of the Caesars, as we dream that we could
have been, had Heaven but permitted us to dwell in the obscurest
village, side by side with the woman we love."
Tom was exceedingly startled by such a burst of irrepressible passion
from the man who had told him that, though friends were found only
once in a life, sweethearts were as plentiful as blackberries.
Again he swept his hand over his forehead, and replied hesitatingly: I
can't pretend to say what maybe the case with others. But to judge by
my own case, it seems to me this: a young man who, out of his own
business, has nothing to interest or excite him, finds content,
interest, and excitement when he falls in love; and then, whether for
good or ill, he thinks there is nothing like love in the world, he
don't care a fig for ambition then. Over and over again did my poor
uncle ask me to come to him at Luscombe, and represent all the worldly
advantage it would be to me; but I could not leave the village in
which Jessie lived, and, besides, I felt myself unfit to be anything
higher than I was. But when I had been some time at Luscombe, and
gradually got accustomed to another sort of people, and another sort
of talk, then I began to feel interest in the same objects that
interested those about me; and when, partly by mixing with better
educated men, and partly by the pains I took to educate myself, I felt
that I might now more easily rise above my uncle's rank of life than
two years ago I could have risen above a farrier's forge, then the
ambition to rise did stir in me, and grew stronger every day. Sir, I
don't think you can wake up a man's intellect but what you wake with
it emulation. And, after all, emulation is ambition."
"Then, I suppose, I have no emulation in me, for certainly I have no
ambition."
"That I can't believe, sir; other thoughts may cover it over and keep
it down for a time. But sooner or later, it will force its way to the
top, as it has done with me. To get on in life, to be respected by
those who know you, more and more as you grow older, I call that a
manly desire. I am sure it comes as naturally to an Englishman
as--as--"
"As the wish to knock down some other Englishman who stands in his way
does. I perceive now that you were always a very ambitious man, Tom;
the ambition has only taken another direction. Caesar might have been
"'But the first wrestler on the green.'
"And now, I suppose, you abandon the idea of travel: you will return to
Luscombe, cured of all regret for the loss of Jessie; you will marry
the young lady you mention, and rise, through progressive steps of
alderman and mayor, into the rank of member for Luscombe."
"All that may come in good time," answered Tom, not resenting the tone
of irony in which he was addressed, "but I still intend to travel: a
year so spent must render me all the more fit for any station I aim
at. I shall go back to Luscombe to arrange my affairs, come to terms
with Mr. Leland the corn-merchant, against my return, and--"
"The young lady is to wait till then."
"Emily--"
"Oh, that is the name? Emily! a much more elegant name than Jessie."
"Emily," continued Tom, with an unruffled placidity,--which,
considering the aggravating bitterness for which Kenelm had exchanged
his wonted dulcitudes of indifferentism, was absolutely saintlike,
"Emily knows that if she were my wife I should be proud of her, and
will esteem me the more if she feels how resolved I am that she shall
never be ashamed of me."
"Pardon me, Tom," said Kenelm softened, and laying his hand on his
friend's shoulder with brotherlike tenderness. "Nature has made you a
thorough gentleman; and you could not think and speak more nobly if
you had come into the world as the head of all the Howards."
CHAPTER IV.
TOM went away the next morning. He declined to see Jessie again,
saying curtly, "I don't wish the impression made on me the other
evening to incur a chance of being weakened."
Kenelm was in no mood to regret his friend's departure. Despite all
the improvement in Tom's manners and culture, which raised him so much
nearer to equality with the polite and instructed heir of the
Chillinglys, Kenelm would have felt more in sympathy and rapport with
the old disconsolate fellow-wanderer who had reclined with him on the
grass, listening to the minstrel's talk or verse, than he did with the
practical, rising citizen of Luscombe. To the young lover of Lily
Mordaunt there was a discord, a jar, in the knowledge that the human
heart admits of such well-reasoned, well-justified transfers of
allegiance; a Jessie to-day, or an Emily to-morrow; "La reine est
morte: vive la reine"
An hour or two after Tom had gone, Kenelm found himself almost
mechanically led towards Braefieldville. He had instinctively divined
Elsie's secret wish with regard to himself and Lily, however skilfully
she thought she had concealed it.
At Braefieldville he should hear talk of Lily, and in the scenes where
Lily had been first beheld.
He found Mrs. Braefield alone in the drawing-room, seated by a table
covered with flowers, which she was assorting and intermixing for the
vases to which they were destined.
It struck him that her manner was more reserved than usual and
somewhat embarrassed; and when, after a few preliminary matters of
small talk, he rushed boldly /in medias res/ and asked if she had seen
Mrs. Cameron lately, she replied briefly, "Yes, I called there the
other day," and immediately changed the conversation to the troubled
state of the Continent.
Kenelm was resolved not to be so put off, and presently returned to
the charge.
"The other day you proposed an excursion to the site of the Roman
villa, and said you would ask Mrs. Cameron to be of the party.
Perhaps you have forgotten it?"
"No; but Mrs. Cameron declines. We can ask the Emlyns instead. He
will be an excellent /cicerone/."
"Excellent! Why did Mrs. Cameron decline?"
Elsie hesitated, and then lifted her clear brown eyes to his face,
with a sudden determination to bring matters to a crisis.
"I cannot say why Mrs. Cameron declined, but in declining she acted
very wisely and very honourably. Listen to me, Mr. Chillingly. You
know how highly I esteem, and how cordially I like you, and judging by
what I felt for some weeks, perhaps longer, after we parted at Tor
Hadham--" Here again she hesitated, and, with a half laugh and a
slight blush, again went resolutely on. "If I were Lily's aunt or
elder sister, I should do as Mrs. Cameron does; decline to let Lily
see much more of a young gentleman too much above her in wealth and
station for--"