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.’”