KENELM went with somewhat rapid pace from Mrs. Braefield's to the shop
in the High Street kept by Will Somers. Jessie was behind the
counter, which was thronged with customers. Kenelm gave her a brief
direction about his portmanteau, and then passed into the back
parlour, where her husband was employed on his baskets,--with the
baby's cradle in the corner, and its grandmother rocking it
mechanically, as she read a wonderful missionary tract full of tales
of miraculous conversions: into what sort of Christians we will not
pause to inquire.
"And so you are happy, Will?" said Kenelm, seating himself between the
basket-maker and the infant; the dear old mother beside him, reading
the tract which linked her dreams of life eternal with life just
opening in the cradle that she rocked. He not happy! How he pitied
the man who could ask such a question.
"Happy, sir! I should think so, indeed. There is not a night on
which Jessie and I, and mother too, do not pray that some day or other
you may be as happy. By and by the baby will learn to pray 'God bless
papa, and mamma, grandmamma, and Mr. Chillingly.'"
"There is some one else much more deserving of prayers than I, though
needing them less. You will know some day: pass it by now. To return
to the point: you are happy; if I asked why, would you not say,
'Because I have married the girl I love, and have never repented'?"
"Well, sir, that is about it; though, begging your pardon, I think it
could be put more prettily somehow."
"You are right there. But perhaps love and happiness never yet found
any words that could fitly express them. Good-bye, for the present."
Ah! if it were as mere materialists, or as many middle-aged or elderly
folks, who, if materialists, are so without knowing it, unreflectingly
say, "The main element of happiness is bodily or animal health and
strength," that question which Chillingly put would appear a very
unmeaning or a very insulting one addressed to a pale cripple, who
however improved of late in health, would still be sickly and ailing
all his life,--put, too, by a man of the rarest conformation of
physical powers that nature can adapt to physical enjoyment,--a man
who, since the age in which memory commences, had never known what it
was to be unwell, who could scarcely understand you if you talked of a
finger-ache, and whom those refinements of mental culture which
multiply the delights of the senses had endowed with the most
exquisite conceptions of such happiness as mere nature and its
instincts can give! But Will did not think the question unmeaning or
insulting. He, the poor cripple, felt a vast superiority on the scale
of joyous being over the young Hercules, well born, cultured, and
wealthy, who could know so little of happiness as to ask the crippled
basket-maker if he were happy.--he, blessed husband and father!