THE next morning Mr. Emlyn, passing from his garden to the town of
Moleswich, descried a human form stretched on the burial-ground,
stirring restlessly but very slightly, as if with an involuntary
shiver, and uttering broken sounds, very faintly heard, like the moans
that a man in pain strives to suppress and cannot.
The rector hastened to the spot. The man was lying, his face
downward, on a grave-mound, not dead, not asleep.
"Poor fellow overtaken by drink, I fear," thought the gentle pastor;
and as it was the habit of his mind to compassionate error even more
than grief, he accosted the supposed sinner in very soothing
tones--trying to raise him from the ground--and with very kindly
words.
Then the man lifted his face from its pillow on the grave-mound,
looked round him dreamily into the gray, blank air of the cheerless
morn, and rose to his feet quietly and slowly. The vicar was
startled; he recognized the face of him he had last seen in the
magnificent affluence of health and strength. But the character of
the face was changed,--so changed! its old serenity of expression, at
once grave and sweet, succeeded by a wild trouble in the heavy eyelids
and trembling lips.
"Mr. Chillingly,--you! Is it possible?"
"Varus, Varus," exclaimed Kenelm, passionately, "what hast thou done
with my legions?"
At that quotation of the well-known greeting of Augustus to his
unfortunate general, the scholar recoiled. Had his young friend's
mind deserted him,--dazed, perhaps, by over-study?
He was soon reassured; Kenelm's face settled back into calm, though a
dreary calm, like that of the wintry day.
"I beg pardon, Mr. Emlyn; I had not quite shaken off the hold of a
strange dream. I dreamed that I was worse off than Augustus: he did
not lose the world when the legions he had trusted to another vanished
into a grave."
Here Kenelm linked his arm in that of the rector,--on which he leaned
rather heavily,--and drew him on from the burial-ground into the open
space where the two paths met.
"But how long have you returned to Moleswich?" asked Emlyn; "and how
came you to choose so damp a bed for your morning slumbers?"
"The wintry cold crept into my veins when I stood in the
burial-ground, and I was very weary; I had no sleep at night. Do not
let me take you out of your way; I am going on to Grasmere. So I see,
by the record on a gravestone, that it is more than a year ago since
Mr. Melville lost his wife."
"Wife? He never married."
"What!" cried Kenelm. "Whose, then, is that gravestone,--'L. M.'?"
"Alas! it is our poor Lily's."
"And she died unmarried?"
As Kenelm said this he looked up, and the sun broke out from the
gloomy haze of the morning. "I may claim thee, then," he thought
within himself, "claim thee as mine when we meet again."
"Unmarried,--yes," resumed the vicar. "She was indeed betrothed to
her guardian; they were to have been married in the autumn, on his
return from the Rhine. He went there to paint on the spot itself his
great picture, which is now so famous,--'Roland, the Hermit Knight,
looking towards the convent lattice for a sight of the Holy Nun.'
Melville had scarcely gone before the symptoms of the disease which
proved fatal to poor Lily betrayed themselves; they baffled all
medical skill,--rapid decline. She was always very delicate, but no
one detected in her the seeds of consumption. Melville only returned
a day or two before her death. Dear childlike Lily! how we all
mourned for her!--not least the poor, who believed in her fairy
charms."
"And least of all, it appears, the man she was to have married."
"He?--Melville? How can you wrong him so? His grief was
intense--overpowering--for the time."
"For the time! what time?" muttered Kenelm, in tones too low for the
pastor's ear.
They moved on silently. Mr. Emlyn resumed,--
"You noticed the text on Lily's gravestone--'Suffer the little
children to come unto me'? She dictated it herself the day before she
died. I was with her then, so I was at the last."
"Were you--were you--at the last--the last? Good-day, Mr. Emlyn; we
are just in sight of the garden gate. And--excuse me--I wish to see
Mr. Melville alone."
"Well, then, good-day; but if you are making any stay in the
neighbourhood, will you not be our guest? We have a room at your
service."
"I thank you gratefully; but I return to London in an hour or so.
Hold, a moment. You were with her at the last? She was resigned to
die?"
"Resigned! that is scarcely the word. The smile left upon her lips
was not that of human resignation: it was the smile of a divine joy."