THE next day, towards noon, Kenelm and his visitor, walking together along the brook-side, stopped before Izaak Walton’s summer-house, and, at Kenelm’s suggestion, entered therein to rest, and more at their ease to continue the conversation they had begun.
“You have just told me,” said Kenelm, “that you feel as if a load were taken off your heart, now that you have again met Jessie Somers, and that you find her so changed that she is no longer the woman you loved. As to the change, whatever it be, I own, it seems to me for the better, in person, in manners, in character; of course I should not say this, if I were not convinced of your perfect sincerity when you assured me that you are cured of the old wound. But I feel so deeply interested in the question how a fervent love, once entertained and enthroned in the heart of a man so earnestly affectionate and so warm-blooded as yourself, can be, all of a sudden, at a single interview, expelled or transferred into the calm sentiment of friendship, that I pray you to explain.”
“That is what puzzles me, sir,” answered Tom, passing his hand over his forehead. “And I don’t know if I can explain it.
“Think over it, and try.”
Tom mused for some moments and then began. “You see, sir, that I was a very different man myself when I fell in love with Jessie Wiles, and said, ‘Come what may, that girl shall be my wife. Nobody else shall have her.’”
“Agreed; go on.”
“But while I was becoming a different man, when I thought of her—and I was always thinking of her—I still pictured her to myself as the same Jessie Wiles; and though, when I did see her again at Graveleigh, after she had married—the day—”
“You saved her from the insolence of the Squire.”
“She was but very recently married. I did not realize her as married. I did not see her husband, and the difference within myself was only then beginning. Well, so all the time I was reading and thinking, and striving to improve my old self at Luscombe, still Jessie Wiles haunted me as the only girl I had ever loved, ever could love; I could not believe it possible that I could ever marry any one else. And lately I have been much pressed to marry some one else; all my family wish it: but the face of Jessie rose up before me, and I said to myself, ‘I should be a base man if I married one woman, while I could not get another woman out of my head.’ I must see Jessie once more, must learn whether her face is now really the face that haunts me when I sit alone; and I have seen her, and it is not that face: it may be handsomer, but it is not a girl’s face, it is the face of a wife and a mother. And, last evening, while she was talking with an open-heartedness which I had never found in her before, I became strangely conscious of the difference in myself that had been silently at work within the last two years or so. Then, sir, when I was but an ill-conditioned, uneducated, petty village farrier, there was no inequality between me and a peasant girl; or, rather, in all things except fortune, the peasant girl was much above me. But last evening I asked myself, watching her and listening to her talk, ‘If Jessie were now free, should I press her to be my wife?’ and I answered myself, ‘No.’”
Kenelm listened with rapt attention, and exclaimed briefly, but passionately, “Why?”