IF I could not venture to place upon paper the exact words of an
eloquent coveter of fame, the earth-born, still less can I dare to
place upon paper all that passed through the voiceless heart of a
coveter of love, the heaven-born.
From the hour in which Kenelm Chillingly had parted from Walter
Melville until somewhere between sunrise and noon the next day, the
summer joyousness of that external Nature which does now and then,
though, for the most part, deceitfully, address to the soul of man
questions and answers all her soulless own, laughed away the gloom of
his misgivings.
No doubt this Walter Melville was the beloved guardian of Lily; no
doubt it was Lily whom he designated as reserved and reared to become
his bride. But on that question Lily herself had the sovereign voice.
It remained yet to be seen whether Kenelm had deceived himself in the
belief that had made the world so beautiful to him since the hour of
their last parting. At all events it was due to her, due even to his
rival, to assert his own claim to her choice. And the more he
recalled all that Lily had ever said to him of her guardian, so
openly, so frankly, proclaiming affection, admiration, gratitude, the
more convincingly his reasonings allayed his fears, whispering, "So
might a child speak of a parent: not so does the maiden speak of the
man she loves; she can scarcely trust herself to praise."
In fine, it was not in despondent mood, nor with dejected looks, that,
a little before noon, Kenelm crossed the bridge and re-entered the
enchanted land of Grasmere. In answer to his inquiries, the servant
who opened the door said that neither Mr. Melville nor Miss Mordaunt
were at home; they had but just gone out together for a walk. He was
about to turn back, when Mrs. Cameron came into the hall, and, rather
by gesture than words, invited him to enter. Kenelm followed her into
the drawing-room, taking his seat beside her. He was about to speak,
when she interrupted him in a tone of voice so unlike its usual
languor, so keen, so sharp, that it sounded like a cry of distress.
"I was just about to come to you. Happily, however, you find me
alone, and what may pass between us will be soon over. But first tell
me: you have seen your parents; you have asked their consent to wed a
girl such as I described; tell me, oh tell me that that consent is
refused!"
"On the contrary, I am here with their full permission to ask the hand
of your niece."
Mrs. Cameron sank back in her chair, rocking herself to and fro in the
posture of a person in great pain.
"I feared that. Walter said he had met you last evening; that you,
like himself, entertained the thought of marriage. You, of course
when you learned his name, must have known with whom his thought was
connected. Happily, he could not divine what was the choice to which
your youthful fancy had been so blindly led."
"My dear Mrs. Cameron," said Kenelm, very mildly, but very firmly,
"you were aware of the purpose for which I left Moleswich a few days
ago, and it seems to me that you might have forestalled my intention,
the intention which brings me; thus early to your house. I come to
say to Miss Mordaunt's guardian, 'I ask the hand of your ward. If you
also woo her, I have a very noble rival. With both of us no
consideration for our own happiness can be comparable to the duty of
consulting hers. Let her choose between the two.'"
"Impossible!" exclaimed Mrs. Cameron; "impossible. You know not what
you say; know not, guess not, how sacred are the claims of Walter
Melville to all that the orphan whom he has protected from her very
birth can give him in return. She has no right to a preference for
another: her heart is too grateful to admit of one. If the choice
were given to her between him and you, it is he whom she would choose.
Solemnly I assure you of this. Do not, then, subject her to the pain
of such a choice. Suppose, if you will, that you had attracted her
fancy, and that now you proclaimed your love and urged your suit, she
would not, must not, the less reject your hand, but you might cloud
her happiness in accepting Melville's. Be generous. Conquer your own
fancy; it can be but a passing one. Speak not to her, nor to Mr.
Melville, of a wish which can never be realized. Go hence, silently,
and at once."
The words and the manner of the pale imploring woman struck a vague
awe into the heart of her listener. But he did not the less
resolutely answer, "I cannot obey you. It seems to me that my honour
commands me to prove to your niece that, if I mistook the nature of
her feelings towards me, I did not, by word or look, lead her to
believe mine towards herself were less in earnest than they are; and
it seems scarcely less honourable towards my worthy rival to endanger
his own future happiness, should he discover later that his bride
would have been happier with another. Why be so mysteriously
apprehensive? If, as you say, with such apparent conviction, there is
no doubt of your niece's preference for another, at a word from her
own lips I depart, and you will see me no more. But that word must be
said by her; and if you will not permit me to ask for it in your own
house, I will take my chance of finding her now, on her walk with Mr.
Melville; and, could he deny me the right to speak to her alone, that
which I would say can be said in his presence. Ah! madam, have you no
mercy for the heart that you so needlessly torture? If I must bear
the worst, let me learn it, and at once."
"Learn it, then, from my lips," said Mrs. Cameron, speaking with voice
unnaturally calm, and features rigidly set into stern composure. "And
I place the secret you wring from me under the seal of that honour
which you so vauntingly make your excuse for imperilling the peace of
the home I ought never to have suffered you to enter. An honest
couple, of humble station and narrow means, had an only son, who
evinced in early childhood talents so remarkable that they attracted
the notice of the father's employer, a rich man of very benevolent
heart and very cultivated taste. He sent the child, at his expense,
to a first-rate commercial school, meaning to provide for him later in
his own firm. The rich man was the head partner of an eminent bank;
but very infirm health, and tastes much estranged from business, had
induced him to retire from all active share in the firm, the
management of which was confined to a son whom he idolized. But the
talents of the protege he had sent to school took there so passionate
a direction towards art and estranged from trade, and his designs in
drawing when shown to connoisseurs were deemed so promising of future
excellence, that the patron changed his original intention, entered
him as a pupil in the studio of a distinguished French painter, and
afterwards bade him perfect his taste by the study of Italian and
Flemish masterpieces.
"He was still abroad, when--" here Mrs. Cameron stopped, with visible
effort, suppressed a sob, and went on, whisperingly, through teeth
clenched together--"when a thunderbolt fell on the house of the
patron, shattering his fortunes, blasting his name. The son, unknown
to the father, had been decoyed into speculations which proved
unfortunate: the loss might have been easily retrieved in the first
instance; unhappily he took the wrong course to retrieve it, and
launched into new hazards. I must be brief. One day the world was
startled by the news that a firm, famed for its supposed wealth and
solidity, was bankrupt. Dishonesty was alleged, was proved, not
against the father,--he went forth from the trial, censured indeed for
neglect, not condemned for fraud, but a penniless pauper. The--son,
the son, the idolized son, was removed from the prisoner's dock, a
convicted felon, sentenced to penal servitude; escaped that sentence
by--by--you guess--you guess. How could he escape except through
death?--death by his own guilty deed?"
Almost as much overpowered by emotion as Mrs. Cameron herself, Kenelm
covered his bended face with one hand, stretching out the other
blindly to clasp her own, but she would not take it.
A dreary foreboding. Again before his eyes rose the old gray
tower,--again in his ears thrilled the tragic tale of the Fletwodes.
What was yet left untold held the young man in spell-bound silence.
Mrs. Cameron resumed,--
"I said the father was a penniless pauper; he died lingeringly
bedridden. But one faithful friend did not desert that bed,--the
youth to whose genius his wealth had ministered. He had come from
abroad with some modest savings from the sale of copies or sketches
made in Florence. These savings kept a roof over the heads of the old
man and the two helpless, broken-hearted women,--paupers like
himself,--his own daughter and his son's widow. When the savings were
gone, the young man stooped from his destined calling, found
employment somehow, no matter how alien to his tastes, and these three
whom his toil supported never wanted a home or food. Well, a few
weeks after her husband's terrible death, his young widow (they had
not been a year married) gave birth to a child,--a girl. She did not
survive the exhaustion of her confinement many days. The shock of her
death snapped the feeble thread of the poor father's life. Both were
borne to the grave on the same day. Before they died, both made the
same prayer to their sole two mourners, the felon's sister, the old
man's young benefactor. The prayer was this, that the new-born infant
should be reared, however humbly, in ignorance of her birth, of a
father's guilt and shame. She was not to pass a suppliant for charity
to rich and high-born kinsfolk, who had vouchsafed no word even of
pity to the felon's guiltless father and as guiltless wife. That
promise has been kept till now. I am that daughter. The name I bear,
and the name which I gave to my niece, are not ours, save as we may
indirectly claim them through alliances centuries ago. I have never
married. I was to have been a bride, bringing to the representative
of no ignoble house what was to have been a princely dower; the
wedding day was fixed, when the bolt fell. I have never again seen my
betrothed. He went abroad and died there. I think he loved me; he
knew I loved him. Who can blame him for deserting me? Who could
marry the felon's sister? Who would marry the felon's child? Who but
one? The man who knows her secret, and will guard it; the man who,
caring little for other education, has helped to instil into her
spotless childhood so steadfast a love of truth, so exquisite a pride
of honour, that did she know such ignominy rested on her birth she
would pine herself away."
"Is there only one man on earth," cried Kenelm, suddenly, rearing his
face,--till then concealed and downcast,--and with a loftiness of
pride on its aspect, new to its wonted mildness, "is there only one
man who would deem the virgin at whose feet he desires to kneel and
say, 'Deign to be the queen of my life,' not far too noble in herself
to be debased by the sins of others before she was even born; is there
only one man who does not think that the love of truth and the pride
of honour are most royal attributes of woman or of man, no matter
whether the fathers of the woman or the man were pirates as lawless as
the fathers of Norman kings, or liars as unscrupulous, where their own
interests were concerned, as have been the crowned representatives of
lines as deservedly famous as Caesars and Bourbons, Tudors and
Stuarts? Nobility, like genius, is inborn. One man alone guard /her/
secret!--guard a secret that if made known could trouble a heart that
recoils from shame! Ah, madam, we Chillinglys are a very obscure,
undistinguished race, but for more than a thousand years we have been
English gentlemen. Guard her secret rather than risk the chance of
discovery that could give her a pang! I would pass my whole life by
her side in Kamtchatka, and even there I would not snatch a glimpse of
the secret itself with mine own eyes: it should be so closely muffled
and wrapped round by the folds of reverence and worship."
This burst of passion seemed to Mrs. Cameron the senseless declamation
of an inexperienced, hot-headed young man; and putting it aside, much
as a great lawyer dismisses as balderdash the florid rhetoric of some
junior counsel, rhetoric in which the great lawyer had once indulged,
or as a woman for whom romance is over dismisses as idle verbiage some
romantic sentiment that befools her young daughter, Mrs. Cameron
simply replied, "All this is hollow talk, Mr. Chillingly; let us come
to the point. After all I have said, do you mean to persist in your
suit to my niece?"
"I persist."
"What!" she cried, this time indignantly, and with generous
indignation; "what, even were it possible that you could win your
parents' consent to marry the child of a man condemned to penal
servitude, or, consistently with the duties a son owes to parents,
conceal that fact from them, could you, born to a station on which
every gossip will ask, 'Who and what is the name of the future Lady
Chillingly?' believe that the who and the what will never be
discovered! Have you, a mere stranger, unknown to us a few weeks ago,
a right to say to Walter Melville, 'Resign to me that which is your
sole reward for the sublime sacrifices, for the loyal devotion, for
the watchful tenderness of patient years'?"
"Surely, madam," cried Kenelm, more startled, more shaken in soul by
this appeal, than by the previous revelations, "surely, when we last
parted, when I confided to you my love for your niece, when you
consented to my proposal to return home and obtain my father's
approval of my suit,--surely then was the time to say, 'No; a suitor
with claims paramount and irresistible has come before you.'"
"I did not then know, Heaven is my witness, I did not then even
suspect, that Walter Melville ever dreamed of seeking a wife in the
child who had grown up under his eyes. You must own, indeed, how much
I discouraged your suit; I could not discourage it more without
revealing the secret of her birth, only to be revealed as an extreme
necessity. But my persuasion was that your father would not consent
to your alliance with one so far beneath the expectations he was
entitled to form, and the refusal of that consent would terminate all
further acquaintance between you and Lily, leaving her secret
undisclosed. It was not till you had left, only indeed two days ago,
that I received a letter from Walter Melville,--a letter which told me
what I had never before conjectured. Here is the letter, read it, and
then say if you have the heart to force yourself into rivalry,
with--with--" She broke off, choked by her exertion, thrust the
letter into his hands, and with keen, eager, hungry stare watched his
countenance while he read.
----- STREET, BLOOMSBURY.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--Joy and triumph! My picture is completed, the
picture on which for so many months I have worked night and day in
this den of a studio, without a glimpse of the green fields,
concealing my address from every one, even from you, lest I might be
tempted to suspend my labours. The picture is completed: it is sold;
guess the price! Fifteen hundred guineas, and to a dealer,--a dealer!
Think of that! It is to be carried about the country exhibited by
itself. You remember those three little landscapes of mine which two
years ago I would gladly have sold for ten pounds, only neither Lily
nor you would let me. My good friend and earliest patron, the German
merchant at Luscombe, who called on me yesterday, offered to cover
them with guineas thrice piled over the canvas. Imagine how happy I
felt when I forced him to accept them as a present. What a leap in a
man's life it is when he can afford to say, "I give!" Now then, at
last, at last I am in a position which justifies the utterance of the
hope which has for eighteen years been my solace, my support; been the
sunbeam that ever shone through the gloom when my fate was at the
darkest; been the melody that buoyed me aloft as in the song of the
skylark, when in the voices of men I heard but the laugh of scorn. Do
you remember the night on which Lily's mother besought us to bring up
her child in ignorance of her parentage, not even to communicate to
unkind and disdainful relatives that such a child was born? Do you
remember how plaintively, and yet how proudly, she, so nobly born, so
luxuriously nurtured, clasping my hand when I ventured to remonstrate,
and say that her own family could not condemn her child because of the
father's guilt,--she, the proudest woman I ever knew, she whose smile
I can at rare moments detect in Lily, raised her head from her pillow,
and gasped forth,--
"I am dying: the last words of the dying are commands. I command you
to see that my child's lot is not that of a felon's daughter
transported to the hearth of nobles. To be happy, her lot must be
humble: no roof too humble to shelter, no husband too humble to wed,
the felon's daughter."
From that hour I formed a resolve that I would keep hand and heart
free, that when the grandchild of my princely benefactor grew up into
womanhood I might say to her, "I am humbly born, but thy mother would
have given thee to me." The newborn, consigned to our charge, has now
ripened into woman, and I have now so assured my fortune that it is no
longer poverty and struggle that I should ask her to share. I am
conscious that, were her fate not so exceptional, this hope of mine
would be a vain presumption,--conscious that I am but the creature of
her grandsire's bounty, and that from it springs all I ever can
be,--conscious of the disparity in years,-conscious of many a past
error and present fault. But, as fate so ordains, such considerations
are trivial; I am her rightful choice. What other choice, compatible
with these necessities which weigh, dear and honoured friend,
immeasurably more on your sense of honour than they do upon mine? and
yet mine is not dull. Granting, then, that you, her nearest and most
responsible relative, do not contemn me for presumption, all else
seems to me clear. Lily's childlike affection for me is too deep and
too fond not to warm into a wife's love. Happily, too, she has not
been reared in the stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of
knowledge and vulgarities of gentility; but educated, like myself, by
the free influences of Nature, longing for no halls and palaces save
those that we build as we list, in fairyland; educated to comprehend
and share the fancies which are more than booklore to the worshipper
of art and song. In a day or two, perhaps the day after you receive
this, I shall be able to escape from London, and most likely shall
come on foot as usual. How I long to see once more the woodbine on
the hedgerows, the green blades of the cornfields, the sunny lapse of
the river, and dearer still the tiny falls of our own little noisy
rill! Meanwhile I entreat you, dearest, gentlest, most honored of
such few friends as my life has hitherto won to itself, to consider
well the direct purport of this letter. If you, born in a grade so
much higher than mine, feel that it is unwarrantable insolence in me
to aspire to the hand of my patron's grandchild, say so plainly; and I
remain not less grateful for your friendship than I was to your
goodness when dining for the first time at your father's palace. Shy
and sensitive and young, I felt that his grand guests wondered why I
was invited to the same board as themselves. You, then courted,
admired, you had sympathetic compassion on the raw, sullen boy; left
those, who then seemed to me like the gods and goddesses of a heathen
Pantheon, to come and sit beside your father's protege and cheeringly
whisper to him such words as make a low-born ambitious lad go home
light-hearted, saying to himself, "Some day or other." And what it is
to an ambitious lad, fancying himself lifted by the gods and goddesses
of a Pantheon, to go home light-hearted muttering to himself, "Some
day or other," I doubt if even you can divine.
But should you be as kind to the presumptuous man as you were to the
bashful boy, and say, "Realized be the dream, fulfilled be the object
of your life! take from me as her next of kin, the last descendant of
your benefactor," then I venture to address to you this request. You
are in the place of mother to your sister's child, act for her as a
keeper now, to prepare her mind and heart for the coming change in the
relations between her and me. When I last saw her, six months ago,
she was still so playfully infantine that it half seems to me I should
be sinning against the reverence due to a child, if I said too
abruptly, "You are woman, and I love you not as child but as woman."
And yet, time is not allowed to me for long, cautious, and gradual
slide from the relationship of friend into that of lover. I now
understand what the great master of my art once said to me, "A career
is a destiny." By one of those merchant princes who now at
Manchester, as they did once at Genoa or Venice, reign alike over
those two civilizers of the world which to dull eyes seem
antagonistic, Art and Commerce, an offer is made to me for a picture
on a subject which strikes his fancy: an offer so magnificently
liberal that his commerce must command my art; and the nature of the
subject compels me to seek the banks of the Rhine as soon as may be.
I must have all the hues of the foliage in the meridian glories of
summer. I can but stay at Grasmere a very few days; but before I
leave I must know this, am I going to work for Lily or am I not? On
the answer to that question depends all. If not to work for her,
there would be no glory in the summer, no triumph in art to me: I
refuse the offer. If she says, "Yes; it is for me you work," then she
becomes my destiny. She assures my career. Here I speak as an
artist: nobody who is not an artist can guess how sovereign over even
his moral being, at a certain critical epoch in his career of artist
or his life of man, is the success or the failure of a single work.
But I go on to speak as man. My love for Lily is such for the last
six months that, though if she rejected me I should still serve art,
still yearn for fame, it would be as an old man might do either. The
youth of my life would be gone.
As man I say, all my thoughts, all my dreams of happiness, distinct
from Art and fame, are summed up in the one question, "Is Lily to be
my wife or not?"
Yours affectionately,
W. M.
Kenelm returned the letter without a word.
Enraged by his silence, Mrs. Cameron exclaimed, "Now, sir, what say
you? You have scarcely known Lily five weeks. What is the feverish
fancy of five weeks' growth to the lifelong devotion of a man like
this? Do you now dare to say, 'I persist'?"
Kenelm waved his hand very quietly, as if to dismiss all conception of
taunt and insult and said with his soft melancholy eyes fixed upon the
working features of Lily's aunt, "This man is more worthy of her than
I. He prays you, in his letter, to prepare your niece for that change
of relationship which he dreads too abruptly to break to her himself.
Have you done so?"
"I have; the night I got the letter."
"And--you hesitate; speak truthfully, I implore. And she--"
"She," answered Mrs. Cameron, feeling herself involuntarily compelled
to obey the voice of that prayer--"she seemed stunned at first,
muttering, 'This is a dream: it cannot be true,--cannot! I Lion's
wife--I--I! I, his destiny! In me his happiness!' And then she
laughed her pretty child's laugh, and put her arms round my neck, and
said, 'You are jesting, aunty. He could not write thus!' So I put
that part of his letter under her eyes; and when she had convinced
herself, her face became very grave, more like a woman's face than I
ever saw it; and after a pause she cried out passionately, 'Can you
think me--can I think myself--so bad, so ungrateful, as to doubt what
I should answer, if Lion asked me whether I would willingly say or do
anything that made him unhappy? If there be such a doubt in my heart,
I would tear it out by the roots, heart and all!' Oh, Mr. Chillingly!
There would be no happiness for her with another, knowing that she had
blighted the life of him to whom she owes so much, though she never
will learn how much more she owes." Kenelm not replying to this
remark, Mrs. Cameron resumed, "I will be perfectly frank with you, Mr.
Chillingly. I was not quite satisfied with Lily's manner and looks
the next morning, that is, yesterday. I did fear there might be some
struggle in her mind in which there entered a thought of yourself.
And when Walter, on his arrival here in the evening, spoke of you as
one he had met before in his rural excursions, but whose name he only
learned on parting at the bridge by Cromwell Lodge, I saw that Lily
turned pale, and shortly afterwards went to her own room for the
night. Fearing that any interview with you, though it would not alter
her resolve, might lessen her happiness on the only choice she can and
ought to adopt, I resolved to visit you this morning, and make that
appeal to your reason and your heart which I have done now,--not, I am
sure, in vain. Hush! I hear his voice!"
Melville entered the room, Lily leaning on his arm. The artist's
comely face was radiant with ineffable joyousness. Leaving Lily, he
reached Kenelm's side as with a single bound, shook him heartily by
the hand, saying, "I find that you have already been a welcomed
visitor in this house. Long may you be so, so say I, so (I answer for
her) says my fair betrothed, to whom I need not present you."
Lily advanced, and held out her hand very timidly. Kenelm touched
rather than clasped it. His own strong hand trembled like a leaf. He
ventured but one glance at her face. All the bloom had died out of
it, but the expression seemed to him wondrously, cruelly tranquil.
"Your betrothed! your future bride!" he said to the artist, with a
mastery over his emotion rendered less difficult by the single glance
at that tranquil face. "I wish you joy. All happiness to you, Miss
Mordaunt. You have made a noble choice."
He looked round for his hat; it lay at his feet, but he did not see
it; his eyes wandering away with uncertain vision, like those of a
sleep-walker.
Mrs. Cameron picked up the hat and gave it to him.
"Thank you," he said meekly; then with a smile half sweet, half
bitter, "I have so much to thank you for, Mrs. Cameron."
"But you are not going already,--just as I enter too. Hold! Mrs.
Cameron tells me you are lodging with my old friend Jones. Come and
stop a couple of days with us: we can find you a room; the room over
your butterfly cage, eh, Fairy?"
"Thank you too. Thank you all. No; I must be in London by the first
train."
Speaking thus, he had found his way to the door, bowed with the quiet
grace that characterized all his movements, and was gone.
"Pardon his abruptness, Lily; he too loves; he too is impatient to
find a betrothed," said the artist gayly: "but now he knows my dearest
secret, I think I have a right to know his; and I will try."
He had scarcely uttered the words before he too had quitted the room
and overtaken Kenelm just at the threshold.
"If you are going back to Cromwell Lodge,--to pack up, I suppose,--let
me walk with you as far as the bridge."
Kenelm inclined his head assentingly and tacitly as they passed
through the garden-gate, winding backwards through the lane which
skirted the garden pales; when, at the very spot in which the day
after their first and only quarrel Lily's face had been seen
brightening through the evergreen, that day on which the old woman,
quitting her, said, "God bless you!" and on which the vicar, walking
with Kenelm, spoke of her fairy charms; well, just in that spot Lily's
face appeared again, not this time brightening through the evergreens,
unless the palest gleam of the palest moon can be said to brighten.
Kenelm saw, started, halted. His companion, then in the rush of a
gladsome talk, of which Kenelm had not heard a word, neither saw nor
halted; he walked on mechanically, gladsome, and talking.
Lily stretched forth her hand through the evergreens. Kenelm took it
reverentially. This time it was not his hand that trembled.
"Good-by," she said in a whisper, "good-by forever in this world. You
understand,--you do understand me. Say that you do."
"I understand. Noble child! noble choice! God bless you! God
comfort me!" murmured Kenelm. Their eyes met. Oh, the sadness; and,
alas! oh the love in the eyes of both!
Kenelm passed on.
All said in an instant. How many Alls are said in an instant!
Melville was in the midst of some glowing sentence, begun when Kenelm
dropped from his side, and the end of the sentence was this:
"Words cannot say how fair seems life; how easy seems conquest of
fame, dating from this day--this day"--and in his turn he halted,
looked round on the sunlit landscape, and breathed deep, as if to
drink into his soul all of the earth's joy and beauty which his gaze
could compass and the arch of the horizon bound.
"They who knew her even the best," resumed the artist, striding on,
"even her aunt, never could guess how serious and earnest, under all
her infantine prettiness of fancy, is that girl's real nature. We
were walking along the brook-side, when I began to tell how solitary
the world would be to me if I could not win her to my side; while I
spoke she had turned aside from the path we had taken, and it was not
till we were under the shadow of the church in which we shall be
married that she uttered the word that gives to every cloud in my fate
the silver lining; implying thus how solemnly connected in her mind
was the thought of love with the sanctity of religion."
Kenelm shuddered,--the church, the burial-ground, the old Gothic tomb,
the flowers round the infant's grave!
"But I am talking a great deal too much about myself," resumed the
artist. "Lovers are the most consummate of all egotists, and the most
garrulous of all gossips. You have wished me joy on my destined
nuptials, when shall I wish you joy on yours? Since we have begun to
confide in each other, you are in my debt as to a confidence."
They had now gained the bridge. Kenelm turned round abruptly,
"Good-day; let us part here. I have nothing to confide to you that
might not seem to your ears a mockery when I wish you joy." So
saying, so obeying in spite of himself the anguish of his heart,
Kenelm wrung his companion's hand with the force of an uncontrollable
agony, and speeded over the bridge before Melville recovered his
surprise.
The artist would have small claim to the essential attribute of
genius--namely, the intuitive sympathy of passion with passion--if
that secret of Kenelm's which he had so lightly said "he had acquired
the right to learn," was not revealed to him as by an electric flash.
"Poor fellow!" he said to himself pityingly; "how natural that he
should fall in love with Fairy! but happily he is so young, and such a
philosopher, that it is but one of those trials through which, at
least ten times a year, I have gone with wounds that leave not a
scar."
Thus soliloquizing, the warm-blooded worshipper of Nature returned
homeward, too blest in the triumph of his own love to feel more than a
kindly compassion for the wounded heart, consigned with no doubt of
the healing result to the fickleness of youth and the consolations of
philosophy. Not for a moment did the happier rival suspect that
Kenelm's love was returned; that an atom in the heart of the girl who
had promised to be his bride could take its light or shadow from any
love but his own. Yet, more from delicacy of respect to the rival so
suddenly self-betrayed than from any more prudential motive, he did
not speak even to Mrs. Cameron of Kenelm's secret and sorrow; and
certainly neither she nor Lily was disposed to ask any question that
concerned the departed visitor.
In fact the name of Kenelm Chillingly was scarcely, if at all,
mentioned in that household during the few days which elapsed before
Walter Melville quitted Grasmere for the banks of the Rhine, not to
return till the autumn, when his marriage with Lily was to take place.
During those days Lily was calm and seemingly cheerful; her manner
towards her betrothed, if more subdued, not less affectionate than of
old. Mrs. Cameron congratulated herself on having so successfully got
rid of Kenelm Chillingly.