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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Kenelm Chillingly, by E. B. Lytton, Book 8
+#85 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+Title: Kenelm Chillingly, Book 8.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7657]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 25, 2004]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILLINGLY, LYTTON, BOOK 8 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Dagny,
+and David Widger,
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VIII.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+NEVER in his whole life had the mind of Sir Peter been so agitated as
+it was during and after the perusal of Kenelm's flighty composition.
+He had received it at the breakfast-table, and, opening it eagerly,
+ran his eye hastily over the contents, till he very soon arrived at
+sentences which appalled him.  Lady Chillingly, who was fortunately
+busied at the tea-urn, did not observe the dismay on his countenance.
+It was visible only to Cecilia and to Gordon.  Neither guessed who
+that letter was from.
+
+"No bad news, I hope," said Cecilia, softly.
+
+"Bad news," echoed Sir Peter.  "No, my dear, no; a letter on business.
+It seems terribly long," and he thrust the packet into his pocket,
+muttering, "see to it by and by."
+
+"That slovenly farmer of yours, Mr. Nostock, has failed, I suppose,"
+said Mr. Travers, looking up and observing a quiver on his host's lip.
+"I told you he would,--a fine farm too.  Let me choose you another
+tenant."
+
+Sir Peter shook his head with a wan smile.
+
+"Nostock will not fail.  There have been six generations of Nostocks
+on the farm."
+
+"So I should guess," said Travers, dryly.
+
+"And--and," faltered Sir Peter, "if the last of the race fails, he
+must lean upon me, and--if one of the two break down--it shall not
+be--"
+
+"Shall not be that cross-cropping blockhead, my dear Sir Peter.  This
+is carrying benevolence too far."
+
+Here the tact and /savoir vivre/ of Chillingly Gordon came to the
+rescue of the host.  Possessing himself of the "Times" newspaper, he
+uttered an exclamation of surprise, genuine or simulated, and read
+aloud an extract from the leading article, announcing an impending
+change in the Cabinet.
+
+As soon as he could quit the breakfast-table, Sir Peter hurried into
+his library and there gave himself up to the study of Kenelm's
+unwelcome communication.  The task took him long, for he stopped at
+intervals, overcome by the struggle of his heart, now melted into
+sympathy with the passionate eloquence of a son hitherto so free from
+amorous romance, and now sorrowing for the ruin of his own cherished
+hopes.  This uneducated country girl would never be such a helpmate to
+a man like Kenelm as would have been Cecilia Travers.  At length,
+having finished the letter, he buried his head between his clasped
+hands, and tried hard to realize the situation that placed the father
+and son into such direct antagonism.
+
+"But," he murmured, "after all it is the boy's happiness that must be
+consulted.  If he will not be happy in my way, what right have I to
+say that he shall not be happy in his?"
+
+Just then Cecilia came softly into the room.  She had acquired the
+privilege of entering his library at will; sometimes to choose a book
+of his recommendation, sometimes to direct and seal his letters,--Sir
+Peter was grateful to any one who saved him an extra trouble,--and
+sometimes, especially at this hour, to decoy him forth into his wonted
+constitutional walk.
+
+He lifted his face at the sound of her approaching tread and her
+winning voice, and the face was so sad that the tears rushed to her
+eyes on seeing it.  She laid her hand on his shoulder, and said
+pleadingly, "Dear Sir Peter, what is it,--what is it?"
+
+"Ah--ah, my dear," said Sir Peter, gathering up the scattered sheets
+of Kenelm's effusion with hurried, trembling hands.  "Don't
+ask,--don't talk of it; 'tis but one of the disappointments that all
+of us must undergo, when we invest our hopes in the uncertain will of
+others."
+
+Then, observing that the tears were trickling down the girl's fair,
+pale cheeks, he took her hand in both his, kissed her forehead, and
+said, whisperingly, "Pretty one, how good you have been to me!  Heaven
+bless you.  What a wife you will be to some man!"
+
+Thus saying, he shambled out of the room through the open casement.
+She followed him impulsively, wonderingly; but before she reached his
+side he turned round, waved his hand with a gently repelling gesture,
+and went his way alone through dense fir-groves which had been planted
+in honour of Kenelm's birth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+KENELM arrived at Exmundham just in time to dress for dinner.  His
+arrival was not unexpected, for the morning after his father had
+received his communication, Sir Peter had said to Lady
+Chillingly--"that he had heard from Kenelm to the effect that he might
+be down any day."
+
+"Quite time he should come," said Lady Chillingly.  "Have you his
+letter about you?"
+
+"No, my dear Caroline.  Of course he sends you his kindest love, poor
+fellow."
+
+"Why poor fellow?  Has he been ill?"
+
+"No; but there seems to be something on his mind.  If so we must do
+what we can to relieve it.  He is the best of sons, Caroline."
+
+"I am sure I have nothing to say against him, except," added her
+Ladyship, reflectively, "that I do wish he were a little more like
+other young men."
+
+"Hum--like Chillingly Gordon, for instance?"
+
+"Well, yes; Mr. Gordon is a remarkably well-bred, sensible young man.
+How different from that disagreeable, bearish father of his, who went
+to law with you!"
+
+"Very different indeed, but with just as much of the Chillingly blood
+in him.  How the Chillinglys ever gave birth to a Kenelm is a question
+much more puzzling."
+
+"Oh, my dear Sir Peter, don't be metaphysical.  You know how I hate
+puzzles."
+
+"And yet, Caroline, I have to thank you for a puzzle which I can never
+interpret by my brain.  There are a great many puzzles in human nature
+which can only be interpreted by the heart."
+
+"Very true," said Lady Chillingly.  "I suppose Kenelm is to have his
+old room, just opposite to Mr. Gordon's."
+
+"Ay--ay, just opposite.  Opposite they will be all their lives.  Only
+think, Caroline, I have made a discovery!"
+
+"Dear me!  I hope not.  Your discoveries are generally very expensive,
+and bring us in contact with such very odd people."
+
+"This discovery shall not cost us a penny, and I don't know any people
+so odd as not to comprehend it.  Briefly it is this: To genius the
+first requisite is heart; it is no requisite at all to talent.  My
+dear Caroline, Gordon has as much talent as any young man I know, but
+he wants the first requisite of genius.  I am not by any means sure
+that Kenelm has genius, but there is no doubt that he has the first
+requisite of genius,--heart.  Heart is a very perplexing, wayward,
+irrational thing; and that perhaps accounts for the general incapacity
+to comprehend genius, while any fool can comprehend talent.  My dear
+Caroline, you know that it is very seldom, not more than once in three
+years, that I presume to have a will of my own against a will of
+yours; but should there come a question in which our son's heart is
+concerned, then (speaking between ourselves) my will must govern
+yours."
+
+"Sir Peter is growing more odd every day," said Lady Chillingly to
+herself when left alone.  "But he does not mean ill, and there are
+worse husbands in the world."
+
+Therewith she rang for her maid, gave requisite orders for the
+preparing of Kenelm's room, which had not been slept in for many
+months, and then consulted that functionary as to the adaptation of
+some dress of hers, too costly to be laid aside, to the style of some
+dress less costly which Lady Glenalvon had imported from Paris as /la
+derniere mode/.
+
+On the very day on which Kenelm arrived at Exmundham, Chillingly
+Gordon had received this letter from Mr. Gerald Danvers.
+
+
+DEAR GORDON,--In the ministerial changes announced as rumour in the
+public papers, and which you may accept as certain, that sweet little
+cherub--is to be sent to sit up aloft and pray there for the life of
+poor Jack; namely, of the government he leaves below.  In accepting
+the peerage, which I persuaded him to do,--creates a vacancy for the
+borough of -----, just the place for you, far better in every way than
+Saxborough. ----- promises to recommend you to his committee.  Come to
+town at once.  Yours, etc.
+
+     G. DANVERS.
+
+
+Gordon showed this letter to Mr. Travers, and, on receiving the hearty
+good-wishes of that gentleman, said, with emotion partly genuine,
+partly assumed, "You cannot guess all that the realization of your
+good-wishes would be.  Once in the House of Commons, and my motives
+for action are so strong that--do not think me very conceited if I
+count upon Parliamentary success."
+
+"My clear Gordon, I am as certain of your success as I am of my own
+existence."
+
+"Should I succeed,--should the great prizes of public life be within
+my reach,--should I lift myself into a position that would warrant my
+presumption, do you think I could come to you and say, 'There is an
+object of ambition dearer to me than power and office,--the hope of
+attaining which was the strongest of all my motives of action?  And in
+that hope shall I also have the good-wishes of the father of Cecilia
+Travers?"
+
+"My dear fellow, give me your hand; you speak manfully and candidly as
+a gentleman should speak.  I answer in the same spirit.  I don't
+pretend to say that I have not entertained views for Cecilia which
+included hereditary rank and established fortune in a suitor to her
+hand, though I never should have made them imperative conditions.  I
+am neither potentate nor /parvenu/ enough for that; and I can never
+forget" (here every muscle in the man's face twitched) "that I myself
+married for love, and was so happy.  How happy Heaven only knows!
+Still, if you had thus spoken a few weeks ago, I should not have
+replied very favourably to your question.  But now that I have seen so
+much of you, my answer is this: If you lose your election,--if you
+don't come into Parliament at all, you have my good-wishes all the
+same.  If you win my daughter's heart, there is no man on whom I would
+more willingly bestow her hand.  There she is, by herself too, in the
+garden.  Go and talk to her."
+
+Gordon hesitated.  He knew too well that he had not won her heart,
+though he had no suspicion that it was given to another.  And he was
+much too clever not to know also how much he hazards who, in affairs
+of courtship, is premature.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I cannot express my gratitude for words so generous,
+encouragement so cheering.  But I have never yet dared to utter to
+Miss Travers a word that would prepare her even to harbour a thought
+of me as a suitor.  And I scarcely think I should have the courage to
+go through this election with the grief of her rejection on my heart."
+
+"Well, go in and win the election first; meanwhile, at all events,
+take leave of Cecilia."
+
+Gordon left his friend, and joined Miss Travers, resolved not indeed
+to risk a formal declaration, but to sound his way to his chances of
+acceptance.
+
+The interview was very brief.  He did sound his way skilfully, and
+felt it very unsafe for his footsteps.  The advantage of having gained
+the approval of the father was too great to be lost altogether, by one
+of those decided answers on the part of the daughter which allow of no
+appeal, especially to a poor gentleman who wooes an heiress.
+
+He returned to Travers, and said simply, "I bear with me her
+good-wishes as well as yours.  That is all.  I leave myself in your
+kind hands."
+
+Then he hurried away to take leave of his host and hostess, say a few
+significant words to the ally he had already gained in Mrs. Campion,
+and within an hour was on his road to London, passing on his way the
+train that bore Kenelm to Exmundham.  Gordon was in high spirits.  At
+least he felt as certain of winning Cecilia as he did of winning his
+election.
+
+"I have never yet failed in what I desired," said he to himself,
+"because I have ever taken pains not to fail."
+
+The cause of Gordon's sudden departure created a great excitement in
+that quiet circle, shared by all except Cecilia and Sir Peter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+KENELM did not see either father or mother till he appeared at dinner.
+Then he was seated next to Cecilia.  There was but little conversation
+between the two; in fact, the prevalent subject of talk was general
+and engrossing, the interest in Chillingly Gordon's election;
+predictions of his success, of what he would do in Parliament.
+"Where," said Lady Glenalvon, "there is such a dearth of rising young
+men, that if he were only half as clever as he is he would be a gain."
+
+"A gain to what?" asked Sir Peter, testily.  "To his country? about
+which I don't believe he cares a brass button."
+
+To this assertion Leopold Travers replied warmly, and was not less
+warmly backed by Mrs. Campion.
+
+"For my part," said Lady Glenalvon, in conciliatory accents, "I think
+every able man in Parliament is a gain to the country; and he may not
+serve his country less effectively because he does not boast of his
+love for it.  The politicians I dread most are those so rampant in
+France nowadays, the bawling patriots.  When Sir Robert Walpole said,
+'All those men have their price,' he pointed to the men who called
+themselves 'patriots.'"
+
+"Bravo!" cried Travers.
+
+"Sir Robert Walpole showed his love for his country by corrupting it.
+There are many ways besides bribing for corrupting a country," said
+Kenelm, mildly, and that was Kenelm's sole contribution to the general
+conversation.
+
+It was not till the rest of the party had retired to rest that the
+conference, longed for by Kenelm, dreaded by Sir Peter, took place in
+the library.  It lasted deep into the night; both parted with
+lightened hearts and a fonder affection for each other.  Kenelm had
+drawn so charming a picture of the Fairy, and so thoroughly convinced
+Sir Peter that his own feelings towards her were those of no passing
+youthful fancy, but of that love which has its roots in the innermost
+heart, that though it was still with a sigh, a deep sigh, that he
+dismissed the thought of Cecilia, Sir Peter did dismiss it; and,
+taking comfort at last from the positive assurance that Lily was of
+gentle birth, and the fact that her name of Mordaunt was that of
+ancient and illustrious houses, said, with half a smile, "It might
+have been worse, my dear boy.  I began to be afraid that, in spite of
+the teachings of Mivers and Welby, it was 'The Miller's Daughter,'
+after all.  But we still have a difficult task to persuade your poor
+mother.  In covering your first flight from our roof I unluckily put
+into her head the notion of Lady Jane, a duke's daughter, and the
+notion has never got out of it.  That comes of fibbing."
+
+"I count on Lady Glenalvon's influence on my mother in support of your
+own," said Kenelm.  "If so accepted an oracle in the great world
+pronounce in my favour, and promise to present my wife at Court and
+bring her into fashion, I think that my mother will consent to allow
+us to reset the old family diamonds for her next reappearance in
+London.  And then, too, you can tell her that I will stand for the
+county.  I will go into Parliament, and if I meet there our clever
+cousin, and find that he does not care a brass button for the country,
+take my word for it, I will lick him more easily than I licked Tom
+Bowles."
+
+"Tom Bowles! who is he?--ah!  I remember some letter of yours in which
+you spoke of a Bowles, whose favourite study was mankind, a moral
+philosopher."
+
+"Moral philosophers," answered Kenelm, "have so muddled their brains
+with the alcohol of new ideas that their moral legs have become shaky,
+and the humane would rather help them to bed than give them a licking.
+My Tom Bowles is a muscular Christian, who became no less muscular,
+but much more Christian, after he was licked."
+
+And in this pleasant manner these two oddities settled their
+conference, and went up to bed with arms wrapped round each other's
+shoulder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+KENELM found it a much harder matter to win Lady Glenalvon to his side
+than he had anticipated.  With the strong interest she had taken in
+Kenelm's future, she could not but revolt from the idea of his union
+with an obscure portionless girl whom he had only known a few weeks,
+and of whose very parentage he seemed to know nothing, save an
+assurance that she was his equal in birth.  And, with the desire,
+which she had cherished almost as fondly as Sir Peter, that Kenelm
+might win a bride in every way so worthy of his choice as Cecilia
+Travers, she felt not less indignant than regretful at the overthrow
+of her plans.
+
+At first, indeed, she was so provoked that she would not listen to his
+pleadings.  She broke away from him with a rudeness she had never
+exhibited to any one before, refused to grant him another interview in
+order to re-discuss the matter, and said that, so far from using her
+influence in favour of his romantic folly, she would remonstrate well
+with Lady Chillingly and Sir Peter against yielding their assent to
+his "thus throwing himself away."
+
+It was not till the third day after his arrival that, touched by the
+grave but haughty mournfulness of his countenance, she yielded to the
+arguments of Sir Peter in the course of a private conversation with
+that worthy baronet.  Still it was reluctantly (she did not fulfil her
+threat of remonstrance with Lady Chillingly) that she conceded the
+point, that a son who, succeeding to the absolute fee-simple of an
+estate, had volunteered the resettlement of it on terms singularly
+generous to both his parents, was entitled to some sacrifice of their
+inclinations on a question in which he deemed his happiness vitally
+concerned; and that he was of age to choose for himself independently
+of their consent, but for a previous promise extracted from him by his
+father, a promise which, rigidly construed, was not extended to Lady
+Chillingly, but confined to Sir Peter as the head of the family and
+master of the household.  The father's consent was already given, and,
+if in his reverence for both parents Kenelm could not dispense with
+his mother's approval, surely it was the part of a true friend to
+remove every scruple from his conscience, and smooth away every
+obstacle to a love not to be condemned because it was disinterested.
+
+After this conversation, Lady Glenalvon sought Kenelm, found him
+gloomily musing on the banks of the trout-stream, took his arm, led
+him into the sombre glades of the fir-grove, and listened patiently to
+all he had to say.  Even then her woman's heart was not won to his
+reasonings, until he said pathetically, "You thanked me once for
+saving your son's life: you said then that you could never repay me;
+you can repay me tenfold.  Could your son, who is now, we trust, in
+heaven, look down and judge between us, do you think he would approve
+you if you refuse?"
+
+Then Lady Glenalvon wept, and took his hand, kissed his forehead as a
+mother might kiss it, and said, "You triumph; I will go to Lady
+Chillingly at once.  Marry her whom you so love, on one condition:
+marry her from my house."
+
+Lady Glenalvon was not one of those women who serve a friend by
+halves.  She knew well how to propitiate and reason down the apathetic
+temperament of Lady Chillingly; she did not cease till that lady
+herself came into Kenelm's room, and said very quietly,--
+
+"So you are going to propose to Miss Mordaunt, the Warwickshire
+Mordaunts I suppose?  Lady Glenalvon says she is a very lovely girl,
+and will stay with her before the wedding.  And as the young lady is
+an orphan Lady Glenalvon's uncle the Duke, who is connected with the
+eldest branch of the Mordaunts, will give her away.  It will be a very
+brilliant affair.  I am sure I wish you happy; it is time you should
+have sown your wild oats."
+
+Two days after the consent thus formally given, Kenelm quitted
+Exmundham.  Sir Peter would have accompanied him to pay his respects
+to the intended, but the agitation he had gone through brought on a
+sharp twinge of the gout, which consigned his feet to flannels.
+
+After Kenelm had gone, Lady Glenalvon went into Cecilia's room.
+Cecilia was seated very desolately by the open window.  She had
+detected that something of an anxious and painful nature had been
+weighing upon the minds of father and son, and had connected it with
+the letter which had so disturbed the even mind of Sir Peter; but she
+did not divine what the something was, and if mortified by a certain
+reserve, more distant than heretofore, which had characterized
+Kenelm's manner towards herself, the mortification was less sensibly
+felt than a tender sympathy for the sadness she had observed on his
+face and yearned to soothe.  His reserve had, however, made her own
+manner more reserved than of old, for which she was now rather chiding
+herself than reproaching him.
+
+Lady Glenalvon put her arms round Cecilia's neck and kissed her,
+whispering, "That man has so disappointed me: he is so unworthy of the
+happiness I had once hoped for him!"
+
+"Whom do you speak of?" murmured Cecilia, turning very pale.
+
+"Kenelm Chillingly.  It seems that he has conceived a fancy for some
+penniless girl whom he has met in his wanderings, has come here to get
+the consent of his parents to propose to her, has obtained their
+consent, and is gone to propose."
+
+Cecilia remained silent for a moment with her eyes closed, then she
+said, "He is worthy of all happiness, and he would never make an
+unworthy choice.  Heaven bless him--and--and--" She would have added,
+"his bride," but her lips refused to utter the word bride.
+
+"Cousin Gordon is worth ten of him," cried Lady Glenalvon,
+indignantly.
+
+She had served Kenelm, but she had not forgiven him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+KENELM slept in London that night, and, the next day, being singularly
+fine for an English summer, he resolved to go to Moleswich on foot.
+He had no need this time to encumber himself with a knapsack; he had
+left sufficient change of dress in his lodgings at Cromwell Lodge.
+
+It was towards the evening when he found himself in one of the
+prettiest rural villages by which
+
+
+     "Wanders the hoary Thames along
+      His silver-winding way."
+
+
+It was not in the direct road from London to Moleswich, but it was a
+pleasanter way for a pedestrian.  And when, quitting the long street
+of the sultry village, he came to the shelving margin of the river, he
+was glad to rest a while, enjoy the cool of the rippling waters, and
+listen to their placid murmurs amid the rushes in the bordering
+shallows.  He had ample time before him.  His rambles while at
+Cromwell Lodge had made him familiar with the district for miles round
+Moleswich, and he knew that a footpath through the fields at the right
+would lead him, in less than an hour, to the side of the tributary
+brook on which Cromwell Lodge was placed, opposite the wooden bridge
+which conducted to Grasmere and Moleswich.
+
+To one who loves the romance of history, English history, the whole
+course of the Thames is full of charm.  Ah! could I go back to the
+days in which younger generations than that of Kenelm Chillingly were
+unborn, when every wave of the Rhine spoke of history and romance to
+me, what fairies should meet on thy banks, O thou our own Father
+Thames!  Perhaps some day a German pilgrim may repay tenfold to thee
+the tribute rendered by the English kinsman to the Father Rhine.
+
+Listening to the whispers of the reeds, Kenelm Chillingly felt the
+haunting influence of the legendary stream.  Many a poetic incident or
+tradition in antique chronicle, many a votive rhyme in song, dear to
+forefathers whose very names have become a poetry to us, thronged
+dimly and confusedly back to his memory, which had little cared to
+retain such graceful trinkets in the treasure-house of love.  But
+everything that, from childhood upward, connects itself with romance,
+revives with yet fresher bloom in the memories of him who loves.
+
+And to this man, through the first perilous season of youth, so
+abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril,--to this would-be
+pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a
+Mivers,--to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of
+the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life
+became ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies
+undulated into curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day
+life attuned into delicacies of song.  How full of sanguine yet dreamy
+bliss was his heart--and seemed his future--in the gentle breeze and
+the softened glow of that summer eve!  He should see Lily the next
+morn, and his lips were now free to say all that they had as yet
+suppressed.
+
+Suddenly he was roused from the half-awake, half-asleep happiness that
+belongs to the moments in which we transport ourselves into Elysium,
+by the carol of a voice more loudly joyous than that of his own
+heart--
+
+
+               "Singing, singing,
+      Lustily singing,
+      Down the road, with his dogs before,
+      Came the Ritter of Nierestein."
+
+
+Kenelm turned his head so quickly that he frightened Max, who had for
+the last minute been standing behind him inquisitively with one paw
+raised, and sniffing, in some doubt whether he recognized an old
+acquaintance; but at Kenelm's quick movement the animal broke into a
+nervous bark, and ran back to his master.
+
+The minstrel, little heeding the figure reclined on the bank, would
+have passed on with his light tread and his cheery carol, but Kenelm
+rose to his feet, and holding out his hand, said, "I hope you don't
+share Max's alarm at meeting me again?"
+
+"Ah, my young philosopher, is it indeed you?"
+
+"If I am to be designated a philosopher it is certainly not I.  And,
+honestly speaking, I am not the same.  I, who spent that pleasant day
+with you among the fields round Luscombe two years ago--"
+
+"Or who advised me at Tor Hadham to string my lyre to the praise of a
+beefsteak.  I, too, am not quite the same,--I, whose dog presented you
+with the begging-tray."
+
+"Yet you still go through the world singing."
+
+"Even that vagrant singing time is pretty well over.  But I disturbed
+you from your repose; I would rather share it.  You are probably not
+going my way, and as I am in no hurry, I should not like to lose the
+opportunity chance has so happily given me of renewing acquaintance
+with one who has often been present to my thoughts since we last met."
+Thus saying, the minstrel stretched himself at ease on the bank, and
+Kenelm followed his example.
+
+There certainly was a change in the owner of the dog with the
+begging-tray, a change in costume, in countenance, in that
+indescribable self-evidence which we call "manner."  The costume was
+not that Bohemian attire in which Kenelm had first encountered the
+wandering minstrel, nor the studied, more graceful garb, which so well
+became his shapely form during his visit to Luscombe.  It was now
+neatly simple, the cool and quiet summer dress any English gentleman
+might adopt in a long rural walk.  And as he uncovered his head to
+court the cooling breeze, there was a graver dignity in the man's
+handsome Rubens-like face, a line of more concentrated thought in the
+spacious forehead, a thread or two of gray shimmering here and there
+through the thick auburn curls of hair and beard.  And in his manner,
+though still very frank, there was just perceptible a sort of
+self-assertion, not offensive, but manly; such as does not misbecome
+one of maturer years, and of some established position, addressing
+another man much younger than himself, who in all probability has
+achieved no position at all beyond that which the accident of birth
+might assign to him.
+
+"Yes," said the minstrel, with a half-suppressed sigh, "the last year
+of my vagrant holidays has come to its close.  I recollect that the
+first day we met by the road-side fountain, I advised you to do like
+me, seek amusement and adventure as a foot-traveller.  Now, seeing
+you, evidently a gentleman by education and birth, still a
+foot-traveller, I feel as if I ought to say, 'You have had enough of
+such experience: vagabond life has its perils as well as charms; cease
+it, and settle down.'"
+
+"I think of doing so," replied Kenelm, laconically.
+
+"In a profession?--army, law, medicine?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ah, in marriage then.  Right; give me your hand on that.  So a
+petticoat indeed has at last found its charm for you in the actual
+world as well as on the canvas of a picture?"
+
+"I conclude," said Kenelm, evading any direct notice of that playful
+taunt, "I conclude from your remark that it is in marriage /you/ are
+about to settle down."
+
+"Ay, could I have done so before I should have been saved from many
+errors, and been many years nearer to the goal which dazzled my sight
+through the haze of my boyish dreams."
+
+"What is that goal,--the grave?"
+
+"The grave!  That which allows of no grave,--fame."
+
+"I see--despite of what you just now said--you still mean to go
+through the world seeking a poet's fame."
+
+"Alas!  I resign that fancy," said the minstrel, with another
+half-sigh.  "It was not indeed wholly, but in great part the hope
+of the poet's fame that made me a truant in the way to that which
+destiny, and such few gifts as Nature conceded to me, marked
+out for my proper and only goal.  But what a strange, delusive
+Will-o'-the-Wisp the love of verse-making is!  How rarely a man of
+good sense deceives himself as to other things for which he is fitted,
+in which he can succeed; but let him once drink into his being the
+charm of verse-making, how the glamour of the charm bewitches his
+understanding! how long it is before he can believe that the world
+will not take his word for it, when he cries out to sun, moon, and
+stars, 'I, too, am a poet.' And with what agonies, as if at the wrench
+of soul from life, he resigns himself at last to the conviction that
+whether he or the world be right, it comes to the same thing.  Who can
+plead his cause before a court that will not give him a hearing?"
+
+It was with an emotion so passionately strong, and so intensely
+painful, that the owner of the dog with the begging-tray thus spoke,
+that Kenelm felt, through sympathy, as if he himself were torn asunder
+by the wrench of life from soul.  But then Kenelm was a mortal so
+eccentric that, if a single acute suffering endured by a fellow mortal
+could be brought before the evidence of his senses, I doubt whether he
+would not have suffered as much as that fellow-mortal.  So that,
+though if there were a thing in the world which Kenelm Chillingly
+would care not to do, it was verse-making, his mind involuntarily
+hastened to the arguments by which he could best mitigate the pang of
+the verse-maker.
+
+Quoth he: "According to my very scanty reading, you share the love of
+verse-making with men the most illustrious in careers which have
+achieved the goal of fame.  It must, then, be a very noble love:
+Augustus, Pollio, Varius, Maecenas,--the greatest statesmen of their
+day,--they were verse-makers.  Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker;
+Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren
+Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt,--all were
+verse-makers.  Verse-making did not retard--no doubt the qualities
+essential to verse-making accelerated--their race to the goal of fame.
+What great painters have been verse-makers!  Michael Angelo, Leonardo
+da Vinci, Salvator Rosa"--and Heaven knows how may other great names
+Kenelm Chillingly might have proceeded to add to his list, if the
+minstrel had not here interposed.
+
+"What!  all those mighty painters were verse-makers?"
+
+"Verse-makers so good, especially Michael Angelo,--the greatest
+painter of all,--that they would have had the fame of poets, if,
+unfortunately for that goal of fame, their glory in the sister art of
+painting did not outshine it.  But when you give to your gift of song
+the modest title of verse-making, permit me to observe that your gift
+is perfectly distinct from that of the verse-maker.  Your gift,
+whatever it may be, could not exist without some sympathy with the non
+verse-making human heart.  No doubt in your foot travels, you have
+acquired not only observant intimacy with external Nature in the
+shifting hues at each hour of a distant mountain, in the lengthening
+shadows which yon sunset casts on the waters at our feet, in the
+habits of the thrush dropped fearlessly close beside me, in that turf
+moistened by its neighbourhood to those dripping rushes, all of which
+I could describe no less accurately than you,--as a Peter Bell might
+describe them no less accurately than a William Wordsworth.  But in
+such songs of yours as you have permitted me to hear, you seem to have
+escaped out of that elementary accidence of the poet's art, and to
+touch, no matter how slightly, on the only lasting interest which the
+universal heart of man can have in the song of the poet; namely, in
+the sound which the poet's individual sympathy draws forth from the
+latent chords in that universal heart.  As for what you call 'the
+world,' what is it more than the fashion of the present day?  How far
+the judgment of that is worth a poet's pain I can't pretend to say.
+But of one thing I am sure, that while I could as easily square the
+circle as compose a simple couplet addressed to the heart of a simple
+audience with sufficient felicity to decoy their praises into Max's
+begging-tray, I could spin out by the yard the sort of verse-making
+which characterizes the fashion of the present day."
+
+Much flattered, and not a little amused, the wandering minstrel turned
+his bright countenance, no longer dimmed by a cloud, towards that of
+his lazily reclined consoler, and answered gayly,--
+
+"You say that you could spin out by the yard verses in the fashion of
+the present day.  I wish you would give me a specimen of your skill in
+that handiwork."
+
+"Very well; on one condition, that you will repay my trouble by a
+specimen of your own verses, not in the fashion of the present
+day,--something which I can construe.  I defy you to construe mine."
+
+"Agreed."
+
+"Well, then, let us take it for granted that this is the Augustan age
+of English poetry, and that the English language is dead, like the
+Latin.  Suppose I am writing for a prize-medal in English, as I wrote
+at college for a prize-medal in Latin: of course, I shall be
+successful in proportion as I introduce the verbal elegances peculiar
+to our Augustan age, and also catch the prevailing poetic
+characteristic of that classical epoch.
+
+"Now I think that every observant critic will admit that the striking
+distinctions of the poetry most in the fashion of the present day,
+namely, of the Augustan age, are,--first, a selection of such verbal
+elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of
+the preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty disdain of all
+prosaic condescensions to common-sense, and an elaborate cultivation
+of that element of the sublime which Mr. Burke defines under the head
+of obscurity.
+
+"These premises conceded, I will only ask you to choose the metre.
+Blank verse is very much in fashion just now."
+
+"Pooh! blank verse indeed!  I am not going so to free your experiment
+from the difficulties of rhyme."
+
+"It is all one to me," said Kenelm, yawning; "rhyme be it: heroic or
+lyrical?"
+
+"Heroics are old-fashioned; but the Chaucer couplet, as brought to
+perfection by our modern poets, I think the best adapted to dainty
+leaves and uncrackable nuts.  I accept the modern Chaucerian.  The
+subject?"
+
+"Oh, never trouble yourself about that.  By whatever title your
+Augustan verse-maker labels his poem, his genius, like Pindar's,
+disdains to be cramped by the subject.  Listen, and don't suffer Max
+to howl, if he can help it.  Here goes."
+
+And in an affected but emphatic sing-song Kenelm began:--
+
+
+     "In Attica the gentle Pythias dwelt.
+      Youthful he was, and passing rich: he felt
+      As if nor youth nor riches could suffice
+      For bliss.  Dark-eyed Sophronia was a nice
+      Girl: and one summer day, when Neptune drove
+      His sea-car slowly, and the olive grove
+      That skirts Ilissus, to thy shell, Harmonia,
+      Rippled, he said 'I love thee' to Sophronia.
+      Crocus and iris, when they heard him, wagged
+      Their pretty heads in glee: the honey-bagged
+      Bees became altars: and the forest dove
+      Her plumage smoothed.  Such is the charm of love.
+      Of this sweet story do ye long for more?
+      Wait till I publish it in volumes four;
+      Which certain critics, my good friends, will cry
+      Up beyond Chaucer.  Take their word for 't.  I
+      Say 'Trust them, but not read,--or you'll not buy.'"
+
+
+"You have certainly kept your word," said the minstrel, laughing; "and
+if this be the Augustan age, and the English were a dead language, you
+deserve to win the prize-medal."
+
+"You flatter me," said Kenelm, modestly.  "But if I, who never before
+strung two rhymes together, can improvise so readily in the style of
+the present day, why should not a practical rhymester like yourself
+dash off at a sitting a volume or so in the same style; disguising
+completely the verbal elegances borrowed, adding to the delicacies of
+the rhyme by the frequent introduction of a line that will not scan,
+and towering yet more into the sublime by becoming yet more
+unintelligible?  Do that, and I promise you the most glowing panegyric
+in 'The Londoner,' for I will write it myself."
+
+"'The Londoner'!" exclaimed the minstrel, with an angry flush on his
+cheek and brow, "my bitter, relentless enemy."
+
+"I fear, then, you have as little studied the critical press
+of the Augustan age as you have imbued your muse with the classical
+spirit of its verse.  For the art of writing a man must cultivate
+himself.  The art of being reviewed consists in cultivating the
+acquaintance of reviewers.  In the Augustan age criticism is cliquism.
+Belong to a clique and you are Horace or Tibullus.  Belong to no
+clique and, of course, you are Bavius or Maevius.  'The Londoner' is
+the enemy of no man: it holds all men in equal contempt.  But as, in
+order to amuse, it must abuse, it compensates the praise it is
+compelled to bestow upon the members of its clique by heaping
+additional scorn upon all who are cliqueless.  Hit him hard: he has no
+friends."
+
+"Ah," said the minstrel, "I believe that there is much truth in what
+you say.  I never had a friend among the cliques.  And Heaven knows
+with what pertinacity those from whom I, in utter ignorance of the
+rules which govern so-called organs of opinion, had hoped, in my time
+of struggle, for a little sympathy, a kindly encouragement, have
+combined to crush me down.  They succeeded long.  But at last I
+venture to hope that I am beating them.  Happily, Nature endowed me
+with a sanguine, joyous, elastic temperament.  He who never despairs
+seldom completely fails."
+
+This speech rather perplexed Kenelm, for had not the minstrel declared
+that his singing days were over, that he had decided on the
+renunciation of verse-making?  What other path to fame, from which the
+critics had not been able to exclude his steps, was he, then, now
+pursuing,--he whom Kenelm had assumed to belong to some commercial
+moneymaking firm?  No doubt some less difficult prose-track, probably
+a novel.  Everybody writes novels nowadays, and as the public will
+read novels without being told to do so, and will not read poetry
+unless they are told that they ought, possibly novels are not quite so
+much at the mercy of cliques as are the poems of our Augustan age.
+
+However, Kenelm did not think of seeking for further confidence on
+that score.  His mind at that moment, not unnaturally, wandered from
+books and critics to love and wedlock.
+
+"Our talk," said he, "has digressed into fretful courses; permit me to
+return to the starting-point.  You are going to settle down into the
+peace of home.  A peaceful home is like a good conscience.  The rains
+without do not pierce its roof, the winds without do not shake its
+walls.  If not an impertinent question, is it long since you have
+known your intended bride?"
+
+"Yes, very long."
+
+"And always loved her?"
+
+"Always, from her infancy.  Out of all womankind, she was designed to
+be my life's playmate and my soul's purifier.  I know not what might
+have become of me, if the thought of her had not walked beside me as
+my guardian angel.  For, like many vagrants from the beaten high roads
+of the world, there is in my nature something of that lawlessness
+which belongs to high animal spirits, to the zest of adventure, and
+the warm blood that runs into song, chiefly because song is the voice
+of a joy.  And no doubt, when I look back on the past years I must own
+that I have too often been led astray from the objects set before my
+reason, and cherished at my heart, by erring impulse or wanton fancy."
+
+"Petticoat interest, I presume," interposed Kenelm, dryly.
+
+"I wish I could honestly answer 'No,'" said the minstrel, colouring
+high.  "But from the worst, from all that would have permanently
+blasted the career to which I intrust my fortunes, all that would have
+rendered me unworthy of the pure love that now, I trust, awaits and
+crowns my dreams of happiness, I have been saved by the haunting smile
+in a sinless infantine face.  Only once was I in great peril,--that
+hour of peril I recall with a shudder.  It was at Luscombe."
+
+"At Luscombe!"
+
+"In the temptation of a terrible crime I thought I heard a voice say,
+'Mischief!  Remember the little child.' In that supervention which is
+so readily accepted as a divine warning, when the imagination is
+morbidly excited, and when the conscience, though lulled asleep for a
+moment, is still asleep so lightly that the sigh of a breeze, the fall
+of a leaf, can awake it with a start of terror, I took the voice for
+that of my guardian angel.  Thinking it over later, and coupling the
+voice with the moral of those weird lines you repeated to ine so
+appositely the next day, I conclude that I am not mistaken when I say
+it was from your lips that the voice which preserved me came."
+
+"I confess the impertinence: you pardon it?"
+
+The minstrel seized Kenelm's hand and pressed it earnestly.
+
+"Pardon it!  Oh, could you but guess what cause I have to be grateful,
+everlastingly grateful!  That sudden cry, the remorse and horror of my
+own self that it struck into me,--deepened by those rugged lines which
+the next day made me shrink in dismay from 'the face of my darling
+sin'!  Then came the turning-point of my life.  From that day, the
+lawless vagabond within me was killed.  I mean not, indeed, the love
+of Nature and of song which had first allured the vagabond, but the
+hatred of steadfast habits and of serious work,--/that/ was killed.  I
+no longer trifled with my calling: I took to it as a serious duty.
+And when I saw her, whom fate has reserved and reared for my bride,
+her face was no longer in my eyes that of the playful child; the soul
+of the woman was dawning into it.  It is but two years since that day,
+to me so eventful.  Yet my fortunes are now secured.  And if fame be
+not established, I am at last in a position which warrants my saying
+to her I love, 'The time has come when, without fear for thy future, I
+can ask thee to be mine.'"
+
+The man spoke with so fervent a passion that Kenelm silently left him
+to recover his wonted self-possession,--not unwilling to be
+silent,--not unwilling, in the softness of the hour, passing from
+roseate sunset into starry twilight, to murmur to himself, "And the
+time, too, has come for me!"
+
+After a few moments the minstrel resumed lightly and cheerily,--
+
+"Sir, your turn: pray have you long known--judging by our former
+conversation you cannot have long loved--the lady whom you have wooed
+and won?"
+
+As Kenelm had neither as yet wooed nor won the lady in question, and
+did not deem it necessary to enter into any details on the subject of
+love particular to himself, he replied by a general observation,--
+
+"It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring:
+the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar.  It may be slow and
+gradual; it may be quick and sudden.  But in the morning, when we wake
+and recognize a change in the world without, verdure on the trees,
+blossoms on the sward, warmth in the sunshine, music in the air, then
+we say Spring has come!"
+
+"I like your illustration.  And if it be an idle question to ask a
+lover how long he has known the beloved one, so it is almost as idle
+to ask if she be not beautiful.  He cannot but see in her face the
+beauty she has given to the world without."
+
+"True; and that thought is poetic enough to make me remind you that I
+favoured you with the maiden specimen of my verse-making on condition
+that you repaid me by a specimen of your own practical skill in the
+art.  And I claim the right to suggest the theme.  Let it be--"
+
+"Of a beefsteak?"
+
+"Tush, you have worn out that tasteless joke at my expense.  The theme
+must be of love, and if you could improvise a stanza or two expressive
+of the idea you just uttered I shall listen with yet more pleased
+attention."
+
+"Alas!  I am no /improvisatore/.  Yet I will avenge myself on your
+former neglect of my craft by chanting to you a trifle somewhat in
+unison with the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not
+stay to hear at Tor Hadham (though you did drop a shilling into Max's
+tray); it was one of the songs I sang that evening, and it was not
+ill-received by my humble audience.
+
+
+     "THE BEAUTY OF THE MISTRESS IS IN THE LOVER'S EYE.
+
+     "Is she not pretty, my Mabel May?
+        Nobody ever yet called her so.
+      Are not her lineaments faultless, say?
+        If I must answer you plainly, No.
+
+     "Joy to believe that the maid I love
+        None but myself as she is can see;
+      Joy that she steals from her heaven above,
+        And is only revealed on this earth to me!"
+
+
+As soon as he had finished this very artless ditty, the minstrel rose
+and said,--
+
+"Now I must bid you good-by.  My way lies through those meadows, and
+yours no doubt along the high road."
+
+"Not so.  Permit me to accompany you.  I have a lodging not far from
+hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way."
+
+The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look
+towards Kenelm.  But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his
+fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he
+had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily
+made to him, he courteously said "that he wished the way were longer,
+since it would be so pleasantly halved," and strode forth at a brisk
+pace.
+
+The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer
+night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken.  Both these men,
+walking side by side, felt supremely happy.  But happiness is like
+wine; its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it
+acts.  In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man,
+warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external
+Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and,
+with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed,
+saturnine, meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external
+Nature, but deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of
+the domain of the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul
+of man dictated to the soulless Nature its own questions and its own
+replies.
+
+The minstrel took the talk on himself, and the talk charmed his
+listener.  It became so really eloquent in the tones of its utterance,
+in the frank play of its delivery, that I could no more adequately
+describe it than a reporter, however faithful to every word a true
+orator may say, can describe that which, apart from all words, belongs
+to the presence of the orator himself.
+
+Not, then, venturing to report the language of this singular
+itinerant, I content myself with saying that the substance of it was
+of the nature on which it is said most men can be eloquent: it was
+personal to himself.  He spoke of aspirations towards the achievement
+of a name, dating back to the dawn of memory; of early obstacles in
+lowly birth, stinted fortunes; of a sudden opening to his ambition
+while yet in boyhood, through the generous favour of a rich man, who
+said, "The child has genius: I will give it the discipline of culture;
+one day it shall repay to the world what it owes to me;" of studies
+passionately begun, earnestly pursued, and mournfully suspended in
+early youth.  He did not say how or wherefore: he rushed on to dwell
+upon the struggles for a livelihood for himself and those dependent on
+him; how in such struggles he was compelled to divert toil and energy
+from the systematic pursuit of the object he had once set before him;
+the necessities for money were too urgent to be postponed to the
+visions of fame.  "But even," he exclaimed, passionately, "even in
+such hasty and crude manifestations of what is within me, as
+circumstances limited my powers, I know that I ought to have found
+from those who profess to be authoritative judges the encouragement of
+praise.  How much better, then, I should have done if I had found it!
+How a little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, and
+the sneer of a contempt which he feels to be unjust chills the ardour
+to excel!  However, I forced my way, so far as was then most essential
+to me, the sufficing breadmaker for those I loved; and in my holidays
+of song and ramble I found a delight that atoned for all the rest.
+But still the desire of fame, once conceived in childhood, once
+nourished through youth, never dies but in our grave.  Foot and hoof
+may tread it down, bud, leaf, stalk; its root is too deep below the
+surface for them to reach, and year after year stalk and leaf and bud
+re-emerge.  Love may depart from our mortal life: we console
+ourselves; the beloved will be reunited to us in the life to come.
+But if he who sets his heart on fame loses it in this life, what can
+console him?"
+
+"Did you not say a little while ago that fame allowed of no grave?"
+
+"True; but if we do not achieve it before we ourselves are in the
+grave, what comfort can it give to us?  Love ascends to heaven, to
+which we hope ourselves to ascend; but fame remains on the earth,
+which we shall never again revisit.  And it is because fame is
+earth-born that the desire for it is the most lasting, the regret for
+the want of it the most bitter, to the child of earth.  But I shall
+achieve it now; it is already in my grasp."
+
+By this time the travellers had arrived at the brook, facing the
+wooden bridge beside Cromwell Lodge.
+
+Here the minstrel halted; and Kenelm with a certain tremble in his
+voice, said, "Is it not time that we should make ourselves known to
+each other by name?  I have no longer any cause to conceal mine,
+indeed I never had any cause stronger than whim,--Kenelm Chillingly,
+the only son of Sir Peter, of Exmundham, -----shire."
+
+"I wish your father joy of so clever a son," said the minstrel with
+his wonted urbanity.  "You already know enough of me to be aware that
+I am of much humbler birth and station than you; but if you chance to
+have visited the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year--ah!  I
+understand that start--you might have recognized a picture of which
+you have seen the rudimentary sketch, 'The Girl with the Flower-ball,'
+one of three pictures very severely handled by 'The Londoner,' but, in
+spite of that potent enemy, insuring fortune and promising fame to the
+wandering minstrel, whose name, if the sight of the pictures had
+induced you to inquire into that, you would have found to be Walter
+Melville.  Next January I hope, thanks to that picture, to add,
+'Associate of the Royal Academy.'  The public will not let them keep
+me out of it, in spite of 'The Londoner.'  You are probably an
+expected guest at one of the more imposing villas from which we see
+the distant lights.  I am going to a very humble cottage, in which
+henceforth I hope to find my established home.  I am there now only
+for a few days, but pray let me welcome you there before I leave.  The
+cottage is called Grasmere."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE minstrel gave a cordial parting shake of the hand to the
+fellow-traveller whom he had advised to settle down, not noticing how
+very cold had become the hand in his own genial grasp.  Lightly he
+passed over the wooden bridge, preceded by Max, and merrily, when he
+had gained the other side of the bridge, came upon Kenelm's ear,
+through the hush of the luminous night, the verse of the uncompleted
+love-song,--
+
+
+               "Singing, singing,
+      Lustily singing,
+      Down the road, with his dogs before,
+      Came the Ritter of Nierestein."
+
+
+Love-song, uncompleted; why uncompleted?  It was not given to Kenelm
+to divine the why.  It was a love-song versifying one of the prettiest
+fairy tales in the world, which was a great favourite with Lily, and
+which Lion had promised Lily to versify, but only to complete it in
+her presence and to her perfect satisfaction.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SO, then, but for that officious warning, uttered under the balcony at
+Luscombe, Kenelm Chillingly might never have had a rival in Walter
+Melville.  But ill would any reader construe the character of Kenelm,
+did he think that such a thought increased the bitterness of his
+sorrow.  No sorrow in the thought that a noble nature had been saved
+from the temptation to a great sin.
+
+The good man does good merely by living.  And the good he does may
+often mar the plans he formed for his own happiness.  But he cannot
+regret that Heaven has permitted him to do good.
+
+What Kenelm did feel is perhaps best explained in the letter to Sir
+Peter, which is here subjoined:--
+
+
+"MY DEAREST FATHER,--Never till my dying day shall I forget that
+tender desire for my happiness with which, overcoming all worldly
+considerations, no matter at what disappointment to your own cherished
+plans or ambition for the heir to your name and race, you sent me away
+from your roof, these words ringing in my ear like the sound of
+joy-bells, 'Choose as you will, with my blessing on your choice.  I
+open my heart to admit another child: your wife shall be my daughter.'
+It is such an unspeakable comfort to me to recall those words now.  Of
+all human affections gratitude is surely the holiest; and it blends
+itself with the sweetness of religion when it is gratitude to a
+father.  And, therefore, do not grieve too much for me, when I tell
+you that the hopes which enchanted me when we parted are not to be
+fulfilled.  Her hand is pledged to another,--another with claims upon
+her preference to which mine cannot be compared; and he is himself,
+putting aside the accidents of birth and fortune, immeasurably my
+superior.  In that thought--I mean the thought that the man she
+selects deserves her more than I do, and that in his happiness she
+will blend her own--I shall find comfort, so soon as I can fairly
+reason down the first all-engrossing selfishness that follows the
+sense of unexpected and irremediable loss.  Meanwhile you will think
+it not unnatural that I resort to such aids for change of heart as are
+afforded by change of scene.  I start for the Continent to-night, and
+shall not rest till I reach Venice, which I have not yet seen.  I feel
+irresistibly attracted towards still canals and gliding gondolas.  I
+will write to you and to my dear mother the day I arrive.  And I trust
+to write cheerfully, with full accounts of all I see and encounter.
+Do not, dearest father, in your letters to me, revert or allude to
+that grief which even the tenderest word from your own tender self
+might but chafe into pain more sensitive.  After all, a disappointed
+love is a very common lot.  And we meet every day, men--ay, and women
+too--who have known it, and are thoroughly cured.  The manliest of our
+modern lyrical poets has said very nobly, and, no doubt, very justly,
+
+
+          "To bear is to conquer our fate.
+
+
+     "Ever your loving son,
+
+          "K. C."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+NEARLY a year and a half has elapsed since the date of my last
+chapter.  Two Englishmen were--the one seated, the other reclined at
+length--on one of the mounds that furrow the ascent of Posilippo.
+Before them spread the noiseless sea, basking in the sunshine, without
+visible ripple; to the left there was a distant glimpse through gaps
+of brushwood of the public gardens and white water of the Chiaja.
+They were friends who had chanced to meet abroad unexpectedly, joined
+company, and travelled together for many months, chiefly in the East.
+They had been but a few days in Naples.  The elder of the two had
+important affairs in England which ought to have summoned him back
+long since.  But he did not let his friend know this; his affairs
+seemed to him less important than the duties he owed to one for whom
+he entertained that deep and noble love which is something stronger
+than brotherly, for with brotherly affection it combines gratitude and
+reverence.  He knew, too, that his friend was oppressed by a haunting
+sorrow, of which the cause was divined by one, not revealed by the
+other.
+
+To leave him, so beloved, alone with that sorrow in strange lands, was
+a thought not to be cherished by a friend so tender; for in the
+friendship of this man there was that sort of tenderness which
+completes a nature, thoroughly manlike, by giving it a touch of the
+woman's.
+
+It was a day which in our northern climates is that of winter: in the
+southern clime of Naples it was mild as an English summer day,
+lingering on the brink of autumn; the sun sloping towards the west,
+and already gathering around it roseate and purple fleeces; elsewhere
+the deep blue sky was without a cloudlet.
+
+Both had been for some minutes silent; at length the man reclining on
+the grass--it was the younger man--said suddenly, and with no previous
+hint of the subject introduced, "Lay your hand on your heart, Tom, and
+answer me truly.  Are your thoughts as clear from regrets as the
+heavens above us are from a cloud?  Man takes regret from tears that
+have ceased to flow, as the heavens take clouds from the rains that
+have ceased to fall."
+
+"Regrets?  Ah, I understand, for the loss of the girl I once loved to
+distraction!  No; surely I made that clear to you many, many, many
+months ago, when I was your guest at Moleswich."
+
+"Ay, but I have never, since then, spoken to you on that subject.  I
+did not dare.  It seems to me so natural that a man, in the earlier
+struggle between love and reason, should say, 'Reason shall conquer,
+and has conquered;' and yet--and yet--as time glides on, feel that the
+conquerors who cannot put down rebellion have a very uneasy reign.
+Answer me not as at Moleswich, during the first struggle, but now, in
+the after-day, when reaction from struggle comes."
+
+"Upon my honour," answered the friend, "I have had no reaction at all.
+I was cured entirely, when I had once seen Jessie again, another man's
+wife, mother to his child, happy in her marriage; and, whether she was
+changed or not,--very different from the sort of wife I should like to
+marry, now that I am no longer a village farrier."
+
+"And, I remember, you spoke of some other girl whom it would suit you
+to marry.  You have been long abroad from her.  Do you ever think of
+her,--think of her still as your future wife?  Can you love her?  Can
+you, who have once loved so faithfully, love again?"
+
+"I am sure of that.  I love Emily better than I did when I left
+England.  We correspond.  She writes such nice letters."  Tom
+hesitated, blushed, and continued timidly, "I should like to show you
+one of her letters."
+
+"Do."
+
+Tom drew forth the last of such letters from his breast-pocket.
+
+Kenelm raised himself from the grass, took the letter, and read
+slowly, carefully, while Tom watched in vain for some approving smile
+to brighten up the dark beauty of that melancholy face.
+
+Certainly it was the letter a man in love might show with pride to a
+friend: the letter of a lady, well educated, well brought up, evincing
+affection modestly, intelligence modestly too; the sort of letter in
+which a mother who loved her daughter, and approved the daughter's
+choice, could not have suggested a correction.
+
+As Kenelm gave back the letter, his eyes met his friend's.  Those were
+eager eyes,--eyes hungering for praise.  Kenelm's heart smote him for
+that worst of sins in friendship,--want of sympathy; and that uneasy
+heart forced to his lips congratulations, not perhaps quite sincere,
+but which amply satisfied the lover.  In uttering them, Kenelm rose to
+his feet, threw his arm round his friend's shoulder, and said, "Are
+you not tired of this place, Tom?  I am.  Let us go back to England
+to-morrow."  Tom's honest face brightened vividly.  "How selfish and
+egotistical I have been!" continued Kenelm; "I ought to have thought
+more of you, your career, your marriage,--pardon me--"
+
+"Pardon you,--pardon!  Don't I owe to you all,--owe to you Emily
+herself?  If you had never come to Graveleigh, never said, 'Be my
+friend,' what should I have been now? what--what?"
+
+The next day the two friends quitted Naples /en route/ for England,
+not exchanging many words by the way.  The old loquacious crotchety
+humour of Kenelm had deserted him.  A duller companion than he was you
+could not have conceived.  He might have been the hero of a young
+lady's novel.  It was only when they parted in London, that Kenelm
+evinced more secret purpose, more external emotion than one of his
+heraldic Daces shifting from the bed to the surface of a waveless
+pond.
+
+"If I have rightly understood you, Tom, all this change in you,
+all this cure of torturing regret, was wrought, wrought
+lastingly,--wrought so as to leave you heart-free for the world's
+actions and a home's peace, on that eve when you saw her whose face
+till then had haunted you, another man's happy wife, and in so seeing
+her, either her face was changed or your heart became so."
+
+"Quite true.  I might express it otherwise, but the fact remains the
+same."
+
+"God bless you, Tom; bless you in your career without, in your home
+within," said Kenelm, wringing his friend's hand at the door of the
+carriage that was to whirl to love and wealth and station the whilom
+bully of a village, along the iron groove of that contrivance which,
+though now the tritest of prosaic realities, seemed once too poetical
+for a poet's wildest visions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+A WINTER'S evening at Moleswich.  Very different from a winter sunset
+at Naples.  It is intensely cold.  There has been a slight fall of
+snow, accompanied with severe, bright, clean frost, a thin sprinkling
+of white on the pavements.  Kenelm Chillingly entered the town on
+foot, no longer a knapsack on his back.  Passing through the main
+street, he paused a moment at the door of Will Somers.  The shop was
+closed.  No, he would not stay there to ask in a roundabout way for
+news.  He would go in straightforwardly and manfully to Grasmere.  He
+would take the inmates there by surprise.  The sooner he could bring
+Tom's experience home to himself, the better.  He had schooled his
+heart to rely on that experience, and it brought him back the old
+elasticity of his stride.  In his lofty carriage and buoyant face were
+again visible the old haughtiness of the indifferentism that keeps
+itself aloof from the turbulent emotions and conventional frivolities
+of those whom its philosophy pities and scorns.
+
+"Ha! ha!" laughed he who like Swift never laughed aloud, and often
+laughed inaudibly.  "Ha! ha!  I shall exorcise the ghost of my grief.
+I shall never be haunted again.  If that stormy creature whom love
+might have maddened into crime, if he were cured of love at once by a
+single visit to the home of her whose face was changed to him,--for
+the smiles and the tears of it had become the property of another
+man,--how much more should I be left without a scar!  I, the heir of
+the Chillinglys!  I, the kinsman of a Mivers!  I, the pupil of a
+Welby!  I--I, Kenelm Chillingly, to be thus--thus--"  Here, in the
+midst of his boastful soliloquy, the well-remembered brook rushed
+suddenly upon eye and ear, gleaming and moaning under the wintry moon.
+Kenelm Chillingly stopped, covered his face with his hands, and burst
+into a passion of tears.
+
+Recovering himself slowly, he went on along the path, every step of
+which was haunted by the form of Lily.  He reached the garden gate of
+Grasmere, lifted the latch, and entered.  As he did so, a man,
+touching his hat, rushed beside, and advanced before him,--the village
+postman.  Kenelm drew back, allowing the man to pass to the door, and
+as he thus drew back, he caught a side view of lighted windows looking
+on the lawn,--the windows of the pleasant drawing-room in which he had
+first heard Lily speak of her guardian.
+
+The postman left his letters, and regained the garden gate, while
+Kenelm still stood wistfully gazing on those lighted windows.  He had,
+meanwhile, advanced along the whitened sward to the light, saying to
+himself, "Let me just see her and her happiness, and then I will knock
+boldly at the door, and say, 'Good-evening, Mrs. Melville.'"
+
+So Kenelm stole across the lawn, and, stationing himself at the angle
+of the wall, looked into the window.
+
+Melville, in dressing-robe and slippers, was seated alone by the
+fireside.  His dog was lazily stretched on the hearth rug.  One by one
+the features of the room, as the scene of his vanished happiness, grew
+out from its stillness; the delicately tinted walls, the dwarf
+bookcase, with its feminine ornaments on the upper shelf; the piano
+standing in the same place.  Lily's own small low chair; that was not
+in its old place, but thrust into a remote angle, as if it had passed
+into disuse.  Melville was reading a letter, no doubt one of those
+which the postman had left.  Surely the contents were pleasant, for
+his fair face, always frankly expressive of emotion, brightened
+wonderfully as he read on.  Then he rose with a quick, brisk movement,
+and pulled the bell hastily.
+
+A neat maid-servant entered,--a strange face to Kenelm.  Melville gave
+her some brief message.  "He has had joyous news," thought Kenelm.
+"He has sent for his wife that she may share his joy."  Presently the
+door opened, and entered not Lily, but Mrs. Cameron.
+
+She looked changed.  Her natural quietude of mien and movement the
+same, indeed, but with more languor in it.  Her hair had become gray.
+Melville was standing by the table as she approached him.  He put the
+letter into her hands with a gay, proud smile, and looked over her
+shoulder while she read it, pointing with his finger as to some lines
+that should more emphatically claim her attention.
+
+When she had finished her face reflected his smile.  They exchanged a
+hearty shake of the hand, as if in congratulation.
+
+"Ah," thought Kenelm, "the letter is from Lily.  She is abroad.
+Perhaps the birth of a first-born."
+
+Just then Blanche, who had not been visible before, emerged from under
+the table, and as Melville reseated himself by the fireside, sprang
+into his lap, rubbing herself against his breast.  The expression of
+his face changed; he uttered some low exclamation.  Mrs. Cameron took
+the creature from his lap, stroking it quietly, carried it across the
+room, and put it outside the door.  Then she seated herself beside the
+artist, placing her hand in his, and they conversed in low tones, till
+Melville's face again grew bright, and again he took up the letter.
+
+A few minutes later the maid-servant entered with the tea-things, and
+after arranging them on the table approached the window.  Kenelm
+retreated into the shade, the servant closed the shutters and drew the
+curtains; that scene of quiet home comfort vanished from the eyes of
+the looker-on.
+
+Kenelm felt strangely perplexed.  What had become of Lily? was she
+indeed absent from her home?  Had he conjectured rightly that the
+letter which had evidently so gladdened Melville was from her, or was
+it possible--here a thought of joy seized his heart and held him
+breathless--was it possible that, after all, she had not married her
+guardian; had found a home elsewhere,--was free?  He moved on farther
+down the lawn, towards the water, that he might better bring before
+his sight that part of the irregular building in which Lily formerly
+had her sleeping-chamber, and her "own-own room."
+
+All was dark there; the shutters inexorably closed.  The place with
+which the childlike girl had associated her most childlike fancies,
+taming and tending the honey-drinkers destined to pass into fairies,
+that fragile tenement was not closed against the winds and snows; its
+doors were drearily open; gaps in the delicate wire-work; of its
+dainty draperies a few tattered shreds hanging here and there; and on
+the depopulated floor the moonbeams resting cold and ghostly.  No
+spray from the tiny fountain; its basin chipped and mouldering; the
+scanty waters therein frozen.  Of all the pretty wild ones that Lily
+fancied she could tame, not one.  Ah! yes, there was one, probably not
+of the old familiar number; a stranger that might have crept in for
+shelter from the first blasts of winter, and now clung to an angle in
+the farther wall, its wings folded,--asleep, not dead.  But Kenelm saw
+it not; he noticed only the general desolation of the spot.
+
+"Natural enough," thought he.  "She has outgrown all such pretty
+silliness.  A wife cannot remain a child.  Still, if she had belonged
+to me--"  The thought choked even his inward, unspoken utterance.  He
+turned away, paused a moment under the leafless boughs of the great
+willow still dipping into the brook, and then with impatient steps
+strode back towards the garden gate.
+
+"No,--no,--no.  I cannot now enter that house and ask for Mrs.
+Melville.  Trial enough for one night to stand on the old ground.  I
+will return to the town.  I will call at Jessie's, and there I can
+learn if she indeed be happy."
+
+So he went on by the path along the brook-side, the night momently
+colder and colder, and momently clearer and clearer, while the moon
+noiselessly glided into loftier heights.  Wrapped in his abstracted
+thoughts, when he came to the spot in which the path split in twain,
+he did not take that which led more directly to the town.  His steps,
+naturally enough following the train of his thoughts, led him along
+the path with which the object of his thoughts was associated.  He
+found himself on the burial-ground, and in front of the old ruined
+tomb with the effaced inscription.
+
+"Ah! child! child!" he murmured almost audibly, "what depths of woman
+tenderness lay concealed in thee!  In what loving sympathy with the
+past--sympathy only vouchsafed to the tenderest women and the highest
+poets--didst thou lay thy flowers on the tomb, to which thou didst
+give a poet's history interpreted by a woman's heart, little dreaming
+that beneath the stone slept a hero of thine own fallen race."
+
+He passed beneath the shadow of the yews, whose leaves no winter wind
+can strew, and paused at the ruined tomb,--no flower now on its stone,
+only a sprinkling of snow at the foot of it,--sprinklings of snow at
+the foot of each humbler grave-mound.  Motionless in the frosty air
+rested the pointed church-spire, and through the frosty air, higher
+and higher up the arch of heaven, soared the unpausing moon.  Around
+and below and above her, the stars which no science can number; yet
+not less difficult to number are the thoughts, desires, aspirations
+which, in a space of time briefer than a winter's night, can pass
+through the infinite deeps of a human soul.
+
+From his stand by the Gothic tomb, Kenelm looked along the churchyard
+for the infant's grave which Lily's pious care had bordered with
+votive flowers.  Yes, in that direction there was still a gleam of
+colour; could it be of flowers in that biting winter time?--the moon
+is so deceptive, it silvers into the hue of the jessamines the green
+of the everlastings.
+
+He passed towards the white grave-mound.  His sight had duped him; no
+pale flower, no green "everlasting" on its neglected border,--only
+brown mould, withered stalks, streaks of snow.
+
+"And yet," he said sadly, "she told me she had never broken a promise;
+and she had given a promise to the dying child.  Ah! she is too happy
+now to think of the dead."
+
+So murmuring, he was about to turn towards the town, when close by
+that child's grave he saw another.  Round that other there were pale
+"everlastings," dwarfed blossoms of the laurestinus; at the four
+angles the drooping bud of a Christmas rose; at the head of the grave
+was a white stone, its sharp edges cutting into the starlit air; and
+on the head, in fresh letters, were inscribed these words:--
+
+
+                    To the Memory of
+                          L. M.
+                         Aged 17,
+               Died October 29, A. D. 18--,
+     This stone, above the grave to which her mortal
+   remains are consigned, beside that of an infant not
+        more sinless, is consecrated by those who
+                 most mourn and miss her,
+                     ISABEL CAMERON,
+                     WALTER MELVILLE.
+       "Suffer the little children to come unto me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+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."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+"YES, sir, Mr. Melville is at home in his studio."
+
+Kenelm followed the maid across the hall into a room not built at the
+date of Kenelm's former visits to the house: the artist, making
+Grasmere his chief residence after Lily's death, had added it at the
+back of the neglected place wherein Lily had encaged "the souls of
+infants unbaptized."
+
+A lofty room, with a casement partially darkened, to the bleak north;
+various sketches on the walls; gaunt specimens of antique furniture,
+and of gorgeous Italian silks, scattered about in confused disorder;
+one large picture on its easel curtained; another as large, and half
+finished, before which stood the painter.  He turned quickly, as
+Kenelm entered the room unannounced, let fall brush and palette, came
+up to him eagerly, grasped his hand, drooped his head on Kenelm's
+shoulder, and said, in a voice struggling with evident and strong
+emotion,--
+
+"Since we parted, such grief! such a loss!"
+
+"I know it; I have seen her grave.  Let us not speak of it.  Why so
+needlessly revive your sorrow?  So--so--your sanguine hopes are
+fulfilled: the world at last has done you justice?  Emlyn tells me
+that you have painted a very famous picture."
+
+Kenelm had seated himself as he thus spoke.  The painter still stood
+with dejected attitude on the middle of the floor, and brushed his
+hand over his moistened eyes once or twice before he answered, "Yes,
+wait a moment, don't talk of fame yet.  Bear with me.  The sudden
+sight of you unnerved me."
+
+The artist here seated himself also on an old worm-eaten Gothic chest,
+rumpling and chafing the golden or tinselled threads of the
+embroidered silk, so rare and so time-worn, flung over the Gothic
+chest, so rare also, and so worm-eaten.
+
+Kenelm looked through half-closed lids at the artist, and his lips,
+before slightly curved with a secret scorn, became gravely compressed.
+In Melville's struggle to conceal emotion the strong man recognized a
+strong man,--recognized, and yet only wondered; wondered how such a
+man, to whom Lily had pledged her hand, could so soon after the loss
+of Lily go on painting pictures, and care for any praise bestowed on a
+yard of canvas.
+
+In a very few minutes Melville recommenced conversation,--no more
+reference to Lily than if she had never existed.  "Yes, my last
+picture has been indeed a success,--a reward complete, if tardy, for
+all the bitterness of former struggles made in vain, for the galling
+sense of injustice, the anguish of which only an artist knows, when
+unworthy rivals are ranked before him.
+
+
+          "'Foes quick to blame, and friends afraid to praise.'
+
+
+"True that I have still much to encounter; the cliques still seek to
+disparage me, but between me and the cliques there stands at last the
+giant form of the public, and at last critics of graver weight than
+the cliques have deigned to accord to me a higher rank than even the
+public yet acknowledge.  Ah, Mr. Chillingly, you do not profess to be
+a judge of paintings, but, excuse me, just look at this letter.  I
+received it only last night from the greatest connoisseur of my art,
+certainly in England, perhaps in Europe."  Here Melville drew, from
+the side-pocket of his picturesque /moyen age/ surtout, a letter
+signed by a name authoritative to all who, being painters themselves,
+acknowledge authority in one who could no more paint a picture himself
+than Addison, the ablest critic of the greatest poem modern Europe has
+produced, could have written ten lines of the "Paradise Lost," and
+thrust the letter into Kenelm's hand.  Kenelm read it listlessly, with
+an increased contempt for an artist who could so find in gratified
+vanity consolation for the life gone from earth.  But, listlessly as
+he read the letter, the sincere and fervent enthusiasm of the
+laudatory contents impressed him, and the preeminent authority of the
+signature could not be denied.
+
+The letter was written on the occasion of Melville's recent election
+to the dignity of R. A., successor to a very great artist whose death
+had created a vacancy in the Academy.  He returned the letter to
+Melville, saying, "This is the letter I saw you reading last night as
+I looked in at your window.  Indeed, for a man who cares for the
+opinion of other men, this letter is very flattering; and for the
+painter who cares for money, it must be very pleasant to know by how
+many guineas every inch of his canvas may be covered."  Unable longer
+to control his passions of rage, of scorn, of agonizing grief, Kenelm
+then burst forth: "Man, man, whom I once accepted as a teacher on
+human life,--a teacher to warm, to brighten, to exalt mine own
+indifferent, dreamy, slow-pulsed self! has not the one woman whom thou
+didst select out of this overcrowded world to be bone of thy bone,
+flesh of thy flesh, vanished evermore from the earth,--little more
+than a year since her voice was silenced, her heart ceased to beat?
+But how slight is such loss to thy life compared to the worth of a
+compliment that flatters thy vanity!"
+
+The artist rose to his feet with an indignant impulse.  But the angry
+flush faded from his cheek as he looked on the countenance of his
+rebuker.  He walked up to him, and attempted to take his hand, but
+Kenelm snatched it scornfully from his grasp.
+
+"Poor friend," said Melville, sadly and soothingly, "I did not think
+you loved her thus deeply.  Pardon me."  He drew a chair close to
+Kenelm's, and after a brief pause went on thus, in very earnest tones,
+"I am not so heartless, not so forgetful of my loss as you suppose.
+But reflect, you have but just learned of her death, you are under the
+first shock of grief.  More than a year has been given to me for
+gradual submission to the decree of Heaven.  Now listen to me, and try
+to listen calmly.  I am many years older than you: I ought to know
+better the conditions on which man holds the tenure of life.  Life is
+composite, many-sided: nature does not permit it to be lastingly
+monopolized by a single passion, or while yet in the prime of its
+strength to be lastingly blighted by a single sorrow.  Survey the
+great mass of our common race, engaged in the various callings, some
+the humblest, some the loftiest, by which the business of the world is
+carried on,--can you justly despise as heartless the poor trader, or
+the great statesman, when it may be but a few days after the loss of
+some one nearest and dearest to his heart, the trader reopens his
+shop, the statesman reappears in his office?  But in me, the votary of
+art, in me you behold but the weakness of gratified vanity; if I feel
+joy in the hope that my art may triumph, and my country may add my
+name to the list of those who contribute to her renown, where and when
+ever lived an artist not sustained by that hope, in privation, in
+sickness, in the sorrows he must share with his kind?  Nor is this
+hope that of a feminine vanity, a sicklier craving for applause; it
+identifies itself with glorious services to our land, to our race, to
+the children of all after time.  Our art cannot triumph, our name
+cannot live, unless we achieve a something that tends to beautify or
+ennoble the world in which we accept the common heritage of toil and
+of sorrow, in order therefrom to work out for successive multitudes a
+recreation and a joy."
+
+While the artist thus spoke Kenelm lifted towards his face eyes
+charged with suppressed tears.  And the face, kindling as the artist
+vindicated himself from the young man's bitter charge, became
+touchingly sweet in its grave expression at the close of the not
+ignoble defence.
+
+"Enough," said Kenelm, rising.  "There is a ring of truth in what you
+say.  I can conceive the artist's, the poet's escape from this world,
+when all therein is death and winter, into the world he creates and
+colours at his will with the hues of summer.  So, too, I can conceive
+how the man whose life is sternly fitted into the grooves of a
+trader's calling, or a statesman's duties, is borne on by the force of
+custom, afar from such brief halting-spot as a grave.  But I am no
+poet, no artist, no trader, no statesman; I have no calling, my life
+is fixed into no grooves.  Adieu."
+
+"Hold a moment.  Not now, but somewhat later, ask yourself whether any
+life can be permitted to wander in space, a monad detached from the
+lives of others.  Into some groove or other, sooner or later, it must
+settle, and be borne on obedient to the laws of Nature and the
+responsibility to God."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+KENELM went back alone, and with downcast looks, through the desolate,
+flowerless garden, when at the other side of the gate a light touch
+was laid on his arm.  He looked up, and recognized Mrs. Cameron.
+
+"I saw you," she said, "from my window coming to the house, and I have
+been waiting for you here.  I wished to speak to you alone.  Allow me
+to walk beside you."'
+
+Kenelm inclined his head assentingly, but made no answer.  They were
+nearly midway between the cottage and the burial-ground when Mrs.
+Cameron resumed, her tones quick and agitated, contrasting her
+habitual languid quietude,--
+
+"I have a great weight on my mind; it ought not to be remorse.  I
+acted as I thought in my conscience for the best.  But oh, Mr.
+Chillingly, if I erred,--if I judged wrongly, do say you at least
+forgive me."  She seized his hand, pressing it convulsively.  Kenelm
+muttered inaudibly: a sort of dreary stupor had succeeded to the
+intense excitement of grief.  Mrs. Cameron went on,--
+
+"You could not have married Lily; you know you could not.  The secret
+of her birth could not, in honour, have been concealed from your
+parents.  They could not have consented to your marriage; and even if
+you had persisted, without that consent and in spite of that secret,
+to press for it,--even had she been yours--"
+
+"Might she not be living now?" cried Kenelm, fiercely.
+
+"No,--no; the secret must have come out.  The cruel world would have
+discovered it; it would have reached her ears.  The shame of it would
+have killed her.  How bitter then would have been her short interval
+of life!  As it is, she passed away,--resigned and happy.  But I own
+that I did not, could not, understand her, could not believe her
+feeling for you to be so deep.  I did think that when she knew her own
+heart she would find that love for her guardian was its strongest
+affection.  She assented, apparently without a pang, to become his
+wife; and she seemed always so fond of him, and what girl would not
+be?  But I was mistaken, deceived.  From the day you saw her last, she
+began to fade away; but then Walter left a few days after, and I
+thought that it was his absence she mourned.  She never owned to me
+that it was yours,--never till too late,--too late,--just when my sad
+letter had summoned him back, only three days before she died.  Had I
+known earlier, while yet there was hope of recovery, I must have
+written to you, even though the obstacles to your union with her
+remained the same.  Oh, again I implore you, say that if I erred you
+forgive me.  She did, kissing me so tenderly.  She did forgive me.
+Will not you?  It would have been her wish."
+
+"Her wish?  Do you think I could disobey it?  I know not if I have
+anything to forgive.  If I have, now could I not forgive one who loved
+her?  God comfort us both."
+
+He bent down and kissed Mrs. Cameron's forehead.  The poor woman threw
+her arm gratefully, lovingly round him, and burst into tears.
+
+When she had recovered her emotion, she said,--
+
+"And now, it is with so much lighter a heart that I can fulfil her
+commission to you.  But, before I place this in your hands, can you
+make me one promise?  Never tell Melville how she loved you.  She was
+so careful he should never guess that.  And if he knew it was the
+thought of union with him which had killed her, he would never smile
+again."
+
+"You would not ask such a promise if you could guess how sacred from
+all the world I hold the secret that you confide to me.  By that
+secret the grave is changed into an altar.  Our bridals now are only a
+while deferred."
+
+Mrs. Cameron placed a letter in Kenelm's hand, and murmuring in
+accents broken by a sob, "She gave it to me the day before her last,"
+left him, and with quick vacillating steps hurried back towards the
+cottage.  She now understood him, at last, too well not to feel that
+on opening that letter he must be alone with the dead.
+
+It is strange that we need have so little practical household
+knowledge of each other to be in love.  Never till then had Kenelm's
+eyes rested upon Lily's handwriting.  And he now gazed at the formal
+address on the envelope with a sort of awe.  Unknown handwriting
+coming to him from an unknown world,--delicate, tremulous
+handwriting,--handwriting not of one grown up, yet not of a child who
+had long to live.
+
+He turned the envelope over and over,--not impatiently, as does the
+lover whose heart beats at the sound of the approaching footstep, but
+lingeringly, timidly.  He would not break the seal.
+
+He was now so near the burial-ground.  Where should the first letter
+ever received from her--the sole letter he ever could receive--be so
+reverentially, lovingly read, as at her grave?
+
+He walked on to the burial-ground, sat down by the grave, broke the
+envelope; a poor little ring, with a poor little single turquoise,
+rolled out and rested at his feet.  The letter contained only these
+words,--
+
+
+The ring comes back to you.  I could not live to marry another.  I
+never knew how I loved you--till, till I began to pray that you might
+not love me too much.  Darling! darling! good-by, darling!
+
+                    LILY.
+
+Don't let Lion ever see this, or ever know what it says to you.  He is
+so good, and deserves to be so happy.  Do you remember the day of the
+ring?  Darling! darling!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+SOMEWHAT more than another year has rolled away.  It is early spring
+in London.  The trees in the park and squares are budding into leaf
+and blossom.  Leopold Travers has had a brief but serious conversation
+with his daughter, and now gone forth on horseback.  Handsome and
+graceful still, Leopold Travers when in London is pleased to find
+himself scarcely less the fashion with the young than he was when
+himself in youth.  He is now riding along the banks of the Serpentine,
+no one better mounted, better dressed, better looking, or talking with
+greater fluency on the topics which interest his companions.
+
+Cecilia is in the smaller drawing-room, which is exclusively
+appropriated to her use, alone with Lady Glenalvon.
+
+LADY GLENALVON.--"I own, my dear, dear Cecilia, that I arrange myself
+at last on the side of your father.  How earnestly at one time I had
+hoped that Kenelm Chillingly might woo and win the bride that seemed
+to me most fitted to adorn and to cheer his life, I need not say.  But
+when at Exmundham he asked me to befriend his choice of another, to
+reconcile his mother to that choice,--evidently not a suitable one,--I
+gave him up.  And though that affair is at an end, he seems little
+likely ever to settle down to practical duties and domestic habits, an
+idle wanderer over the face of the earth, only heard of in remote
+places and with strange companions.  Perhaps he may never return to
+England."
+
+CECILIA.--"He is in England now, and in London."
+
+LADY GLENALVON.--"You amaze me!  Who told you so?"
+
+CECILIA.--"His father, who is with him.  Sir Peter called yesterday,
+and spoke to me so kindly."  Cecilia here turned aside her face to
+conceal the tears that had started to her eyes.
+
+LADY GLENALVON.--"Did Mr. Travers see Sir Peter?"
+
+CECILIA.--"Yes; and I think it was something that passed between them
+which made my father speak to me--for the first time--almost sternly."
+
+LADY GLENALVON.--"In urging Chillingly Gordon's suit?"
+
+CECILIA.--"Commanding me to reconsider my rejection of it.  He has
+contrived to fascinate my father."
+
+LADY GLENALVON.--"So he has me.  Of course you might choose among
+other candidates for your hand one of much higher worldly rank, of
+much larger fortune; yet, as you have already rejected them, Gordon's
+merits become still more entitled to a fair hearing.  He has already
+leaped into a position that mere rank and mere wealth cannot attain.
+Men of all parties speak highly of his parliamentary abilities.  He is
+already marked in public opinion as a coming man,--a future minister
+of the highest grade.  He has youth and good looks; his moral
+character is without a blemish: yet his manners are so free from
+affected austerity, so frank, so genial.  Any woman might be pleased
+with his companionship; and you, with your intellect, your
+culture,--you, so born for high station,--you of all women might be
+proud to partake the anxieties of his career and the rewards of his
+ambition."
+
+CECILIA (clasping her hands tightly together).--"I cannot, I cannot.
+He may be all you say,--I know nothing against Mr. Chillingly
+Gordon,--but my whole nature is antagonistic to his, and even were it
+not so--"
+
+She stopped abruptly, a deep blush warming up her fair face, and
+retreating to leave it coldly pale.
+
+LADY GLENALVON (tenderly kissing her).--"You have not, then, even yet
+conquered the first maiden fancy; the ungrateful one is still
+remembered?"
+
+Cecilia bowed her head on her friend's breast, and murmured
+imploringly, "Don't speak against him; he has been so unhappy.  How
+much he must have loved!"
+
+"But it is not you whom he loved."
+
+"Something here, something at my heart, tells me that he will love me
+yet; and, if not, I am contented to be his friend."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+WHILE the conversation just related took place between Cecilia and
+Lady Glenalvon, Chillingly Gordon was seated alone with Mivers in the
+comfortable apartment of the cynical old bachelor.  Gordon had
+breakfasted with his kinsman, but that meal was long over; the two men
+having found much to talk about on matters very interesting to the
+younger, nor without interest to the elder one.
+
+It is true that Chillingly Gordon had, within the very short space of
+time that had elapsed since his entrance into the House of Commons,
+achieved one of those reputations which mark out a man for early
+admission into the progressive career of office,--not a very showy
+reputation, but a very solid one.  He had none of the gifts of the
+genuine orator, no enthusiasm, no imagination, no imprudent bursts of
+fiery words from a passionate heart.  But he had all the gifts of an
+exceedingly telling speaker,--a clear metallic voice; well-bred,
+appropriate action, not less dignified for being somewhat too quiet;
+readiness for extempore replies; industry and method for prepared
+expositions of principle or fact.  But his principal merit with the
+chiefs of the assembly was in the strong good sense and worldly tact
+which made him a safe speaker.  For this merit he was largely indebted
+to his frequent conferences with Chillingly Mivers.  That gentleman,
+whether owing to his social qualities or to the influence of "The
+Londoner" on public opinion, enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the
+chiefs of all parties, and was up to his ears in the wisdom of the
+world.  "Nothing," he would say, "hurts a young Parliamentary speaker
+like violence in opinion, one way or the other.  Shun it.  Always
+allow that much may be said on both sides.  When the chiefs of your
+own side suddenly adopt a violence, you can go with them or against
+them, according as best suits your own book."
+
+"So," said Mivers, reclined on his sofa, and approaching the end of
+his second Trabuco (he never allowed himself more than two), "so I
+think we have pretty well settled the tone you must take in your
+speech to-night.  It is a great occasion."
+
+"True.  It is the first time in which the debate has been arranged so
+that I may speak at ten o'clock or later.  That in itself is a great
+leap; and it is a Cabinet minister whom I am to answer,--luckily, he
+is a very dull fellow.  Do you think I might hazard a joke,--at least
+a witticism?"
+
+"At his expense?  Decidedly not.  Though his office compels him to
+introduce this measure, he was by no means in its favour when it was
+discussed in the Cabinet; and though, as you say, he is dull, it is
+precisely that sort of dulness which is essential to the formation of
+every respectable Cabinet.  Joke at him, indeed!  Learn that gentle
+dulness never loves a joke--at its own expense.  Vain man! seize the
+occasion which your blame of his measure affords you to secure his
+praise of yourself; compliment him.  Enough of politics.  It never
+does to think too much over what one has already decided to say.
+Brooding over it, one may become too much in earnest, and commit an
+indiscretion.  So Kenelm has come back?"
+
+"Yes.  I heard that news last night, at White's, from Travers.  Sir
+Peter had called on Travers."
+
+"Travers still favours your suit to the heiress?"
+
+"More, I think, than ever.  Success in Parliament has great effect on
+a man who has success in fashion and respects the opinion of clubs.
+But last night he was unusually cordial.  Between you and me, I think
+he is a little afraid that Kenelm may yet be my rival.  I gathered
+that from a hint he let fall of the unwelcome nature of Sir Peter's
+talk to him."
+
+"Why has Travers conceived a dislike to poor Kenelm?  He seemed
+partial enough to him once."
+
+"Ay, but not as a son-in-law, even before I had a chance of becoming
+so.  And when, after Kenelm appeared at Exmundham, while Travers was
+staying there, Travers learned, I suppose from Lady Chillingly, that
+Kenelm had fallen in love with and wanted to marry some other girl,
+who it seems rejected him; and still more when he heard that Kenelm
+had been subsequently travelling on the Continent in company with a
+low-lived fellow, the drunken, riotous son of a farrier, you may well
+conceive how so polished and sensible a man as Leopold Travers would
+dislike the idea of giving his daughter to one so little likely to
+make an agreeable son-in-law.  Bah!  I have no fear of Kenelm.  By the
+way, did Sir Peter say if Kenelm had quite recovered his health?  He
+was at death's door some eighteen months ago, when Sir Peter and Lady
+Chillingly were summoned to town by the doctors."
+
+"My dear Gordon, I fear there is no chance of your succession to
+Exmundham.  Sir Peter says that his wandering Hercules is as stalwart
+as ever, and more equable in temperament, more taciturn and grave,--in
+short, less odd.  But when you say you have no fear of Kenelm's
+rivalry, do you mean only as to Cecilia Travers?"
+
+"Neither as to that nor as to anything in life; and as to the
+succession to Exmundham, it is his to leave as he pleases, and I have
+cause to think he would never leave it to me.  More likely to Parson
+John or the parson's son,--or why not to yourself?  I often think that
+for the prizes immediately set before my ambition I am better off
+without land: land is a great obfuscator."
+
+"Humph, there is some truth in that.  Yet the fear of land and
+obfuscation does not seem to operate against your suit to Cecilia
+Travers?"
+
+"Her father is likely enough to live till I maybe contented to 'rest
+and be thankful' in the Upper House; and I should not like to be a
+landless peer."
+
+"You are right there; but I should tell you that, now Kenelm has come
+back, Sir Peter has set his heart on his son's being your rival."
+
+"For Cecilia?"
+
+"Perhaps; but certainly for Parliamentary reputation.  The senior
+member for the county means to retire, and Sir Peter has been urged to
+allow his son to be brought forward,--from what I hear, with the
+certainty of success."
+
+"What! in spite of that wonderful speech of his on coming of age?"
+
+"Pooh! that is now understood to have been but a bad joke on the new
+ideas, and their organs, including 'The Londoner.' But if Kenelm does
+come into the House, it will not be on your side of the question; and
+unless I greatly overrate his abilities--which very likely I do--he
+will not be a rival to despise.  Except, indeed, that he may have one
+fault which in the present day would be enough to unfit him for public
+life."
+
+"And what is that fault?"
+
+"Treason to the blood of the Chillinglys.  This is the age, in
+England, when one cannot be too much of a Chillingly.  I fear that if
+Kenelm does become bewildered by a political abstraction,--call it, no
+matter what, say, 'love of his country,' or some such old-fashioned
+crotchet,--I fear, I greatly fear, that he may be--in earnest."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE LAST.
+
+IT was a field night in the House of Commons,--an adjourned debate,
+opened by George Belvoir, who had been, the last two years, very
+slowly creeping on in the favour, or rather the indulgence of the
+House, and more than justifying Kenelm's prediction of his career.
+Heir to a noble name and vast estates, extremely hard-working, very
+well informed, it was impossible that he should not creep on.  That
+night he spoke sensibly enough, assisting his memory by frequent
+references to his notes; listened to courteously, and greeted with a
+faint "Hear, hear!" of relief when he had done.
+
+Then the House gradually thinned till nine o'clock, at which hour it
+became very rapidly crowded.  A Cabinet minister had solemnly risen,
+deposited on the table before him a formidable array of printed
+papers, including a corpulent blue-book.  Leaning his arm on the red
+box, he commenced with this awe-compelling sentence,--
+
+"Sir, I join issue with the right honourable gentleman opposite.  He
+says this is not raised as a party question.  I deny it.  Her
+Majesty's Government are put upon their trial."
+
+Here there were cheers, so loudly, and so rarely greeting a speech
+from that Cabinet minister, that he was put out, and had much to "hum"
+and to "ha," before he could recover the thread of his speech.  Then
+he went on, with unbroken but lethargic fluency; read long extracts
+from the public papers, inflicted a whole page from the blue-book,
+wound up with a peroration of respectable platitudes, glanced at the
+clock, saw that he had completed the hour which a Cabinet minister who
+does not profess to be oratorical is expected to speak, but not to
+exceed; and sat down.
+
+Up rose a crowd of eager faces, from which the Speaker, as previously
+arranged with the party whips, selected one,--a young face, hardy,
+intelligent, emotionless.
+
+I need not say that it was the face of Chillingly Gordon.  His
+position that night was one that required dexterous management and
+delicate tact.  He habitually supported the Government; his speeches
+had been hitherto in their favour.  On this occasion he differed from
+the Government.  The difference was known to the chiefs of the
+Opposition, and hence the arrangement of the whips, that he should
+speak for the first time after ten o'clock, and for the first time in
+reply to a Cabinet minister.  It is a position in which a young party
+man makes or mars his future.  Chillingly Gordon spoke from the third
+row behind the Government; he had been duly cautioned by Mivers not to
+affect a conceited independence, or an adhesion to "violence" in
+ultra-liberal opinions, by seating himself below the gangway.
+Speaking thus, amid the rank and file of the Ministerial supporters,
+any opinion at variance with the mouthpieces of the Treasury Bench
+would be sure to produce a more effective sensation than if delivered
+from the ranks of the mutinous Bashi Bazouks divided by the gangway
+from better disciplined forces.  His first brief sentences enthralled
+the House, conciliated the Ministerial side, kept the Opposition side
+in suspense.  The whole speech was, indeed, felicitously adroit, and
+especially in this, that, while in opposition to the Government as a
+whole, it expressed the opinions of a powerful section of the Cabinet,
+which, though at present a minority, yet being the most enamoured of a
+New Idea, the progress of the age would probably render a safe
+investment for the confidence which honest Gordon reposed in its
+chance of beating its colleagues.
+
+It was not, however, till Gordon had concluded that the cheers of his
+audience--impulsive and hearty as are the cheers of that assembly when
+the evidence of intellect is unmistakable--made manifest to the
+gallery and the reporters the full effect of the speech he had
+delivered.  The chief of the Opposition whispered to his next
+neighbour, "I wish we could get that man."  The Cabinet minister whom
+Gordon had answered--more pleased with a personal compliment to
+himself than displeased with an attack on the measure his office
+compelled him to advocate--whispered to his chief, "That is a man we
+must not lose."
+
+Two gentlemen in the Speaker's gallery, who had sat there from the
+opening of the debate, now quitted their places.  Coming into the
+lobby, they found themselves commingled with a crowd of members who
+had also quitted their seats, after Gordon's speech, in order to
+discuss its merits, as they gathered round the refreshment table for
+oranges or soda-water.  Among them was George Belvoir, who, on sight
+of the younger of the two gentlemen issuing from the Speaker's
+gallery, accosted him with friendly greeting,--
+
+"Ha!  Chillingly, how are you?  Did not know you were in town.  Been
+here all the evening?  Yes; very good debate.  How did you like
+Gordon's speech?"
+
+"I liked yours much better."
+
+"Mine!" cried George, very much flattered and very much surprised.
+"Oh, mine was a mere humdrum affair, a plain statement of the reasons
+for the vote I should give.  And Gordon's was anything but that.  You
+did not like his opinions?"
+
+"I don't know what his opinions are.  But I did not like his ideas."
+
+"I don't quite understand you.  What ideas?"
+
+"The new ones; by which it is shown how rapidly a great state can be
+made small."
+
+Here Mr. Belvoir was taken aside by a brother member, on an important
+matter to be brought before the committee on salmon fisheries, on
+which they both served; and Kenelm, with his companion, Sir Peter,
+threaded his way through the crowded lobby and disappeared.  Emerging
+into the broad space, with its lofty clock-tower, Sir Peter halted,
+and pointing towards the old Abbey, half in shadow, half in light,
+under the tranquil moonbeams, said,--
+
+"It tells much for the duration of a people when it accords with the
+instinct of immortality in a man; when an honoured tomb is deemed
+recompense for the toils and dangers of a noble life.  How much of the
+history of England Nelson summed up in the simple words,--'Victory or
+Westminster Abbey.'"
+
+"Admirably expressed, my dear father," said Kenelm, briefly.
+
+"I agree with your remark, which I overheard, on Gordon's speech,"
+resumed Sir Peter.  "It was wonderfully clever; yet I should have been
+sorry to hear you speak it.  It is not by such sentiments that Nelsons
+become great.  If such sentiments should ever be national, the cry
+will not be 'Victory or Westminster Abbey!' but 'Defeat and the Three
+per Cents!'"
+
+Pleased with his own unwonted animation, and with the sympathizing
+half-smile on his son's taciturn lips, Sir Peter then proceeded more
+immediately to the subjects which pressed upon his heart.  Gordon's
+success in Parliament, Gordon's suit to Cecilia Travers, favoured, as
+Sir Peter had learned, by her father, rejected as yet by herself, were
+somehow inseparably mixed up in Sir Peter's mind and his words, as he
+sought to kindle his son's emulation.  He dwelt on the obligations
+which a country imposed on its citizens, especially on the young and
+vigorous generation to which the destinies of those to follow were
+intrusted; and with these stern obligations he combined all the
+cheering and tender associations which an English public man connects
+with an English home: the wife with a smile to soothe the cares, and a
+mind to share the aspirations, of a life that must go through labour
+to achieve renown; thus, in all he said, binding together, as if they
+could not be disparted, Ambition and Cecilia.
+
+His son did not interrupt him by a word, Sir Peter in his eagerness
+not noticing that Kenelm had drawn him aside from the direct
+thoroughfare, and had now made halt in the middle of Westminster
+bridge, bending over the massive parapet and gazing abstractedly upon
+the waves of the starlit river.  On the right the stately length of
+the people's legislative palace, so new in its date, so elaborately in
+each detail ancient in its form, stretching on towards the lowly and
+jagged roofs of penury and crime.  Well might these be so near to the
+halls of a people's legislative palace: near to the heart of every
+legislator for a people must be the mighty problem how to increase a
+people's splendour and its virtue, and how to diminish its penury and
+its crime.
+
+"How strange it is," said Kenelm, still bending over the parapet,
+"that throughout all my desultory wanderings I have ever been
+attracted towards the sight and the sound of running waters, even
+those of the humblest rill!  Of what thoughts, of what dreams, of what
+memories, colouring the history of my past, the waves of the humblest
+rill could speak, were the waves themselves not such supreme
+philosophers,--roused indeed on their surface, vexed by a check to
+their own course, but so indifferent to all that makes gloom or death
+to the mortals who think and dream and feel beside their banks."
+
+"Bless me," said Peter to himself, "the boy has got back to his old
+vein of humours and melancholies.  He has not heard a word I have been
+saying.  Travers is right.  He will never do anything in life.  Why
+did I christen him Kenelm? he might as well have been christened
+Peter."  Still, loth to own that his eloquence had been expended in
+vain and that the wish of his heart was doomed to expire disappointed,
+Sir Peter said aloud, "You have not listened to what I said; Kenelm,
+you grieve me."
+
+"Grieve you! you! do not say that, Father, dear Father.  Listen to
+you!  Every word you have said has sunk into the deepest deep of my
+heart.  Pardon my foolish, purposeless snatch of talk to myself: it is
+but my way, only my way, dear Father!"
+
+"Boy, boy," cried Sir Peter, with tears in his voice, "if you could
+get out of those odd ways of yours I should be so thankful.  But if
+you cannot, nothing you can do shall grieve me.  Only, let me say
+this; running waters have had a great charm for you.  With a humble
+rill you associate thoughts, dreams, memories in your past.  But now
+you halt by the stream of the mighty river: before you the senate of
+an empire wider than Alexander's; behind you the market of a commerce
+to which that of Tyre was a pitiful trade.  Look farther down, those
+squalid hovels, how much there to redeem or to remedy; and out of
+sight, but not very distant, the nation's Walhalla, 'Victory or
+Westminster Abbey!'  The humble rill has witnessed your past.  Has the
+mighty river no effect on your future?  The rill keeps no record of
+your past: shall the river keep no record of your future?  Ah, boy,
+boy, I see you are dreaming still,--no use talking.  Let us go home."
+
+"I was not dreaming, I was telling myself that the time had come to
+replace the old Kenelm with the new ideas, by a new Kenelm with the
+Ideas of Old.  Ah! perhaps we must,--at whatever cost to
+ourselves,--we must go through the romance of life before we clearly
+detect what is grand in its realities.  I can no longer lament that I
+stand estranged from the objects and pursuits of my race.  I have
+learned how much I have with them in common.  I have known love; I
+have known sorrow."
+
+Kenelm paused a moment, only a moment, then lifted the head which,
+during that pause, had drooped, and stood erect at the full height of
+his stature, startling his father by the change that had passed over
+his face; lip, eye, his whole aspect, eloquent with a resolute
+enthusiasm, too grave to be the flash of a passing moment.
+
+"Ay, ay," he said, "Victory or Westminster Abbey!  The world is a
+battle-field in which the worst wounded are the deserters, stricken as
+they seek to fly, and hushing the groans that would betray the secret
+of their inglorious hiding-place.  The pain of wounds received in the
+thick of the fight is scarcely felt in the joy of service to some
+honoured cause, and is amply atoned by the reverence for noble scars.
+My choice is made.  Not that of deserter, that of soldier in the
+ranks."
+
+"It will not be long before you rise from the ranks, my boy, if you
+hold fast to the Idea of Old, symbolized in the English battle-cry,
+'Victory or Westminster Abbey.'"
+
+So saying, Sir Peter took his son's arm, leaning on it proudly; and
+so, into the crowded thoroughfares, from the halting-place on the
+modern bridge that spans the legendary river, passes the Man of the
+Young Generation to fates beyond the verge of the horizon to which the
+eyes of my generation must limit their wistful gaze.
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILLINGLY, LYTTON, BOOK 8 ***
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