“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.