“No wonder you are affected by the recollection of all his benefits. But when once you have seen him, you will find yourself ever after at your ease. And so, pray smile and look as good as you are; for I am proud of your open honest look when you are pleased, Mother. And he must see your heart in your face, as I do.”
With this, Leonard put his arm round the widow’s neck and kissed her. She clung to him fondly for a moment, and he felt her tremble from head to foot. Then she broke from his embrace, and hurried out of the room. Leonard thought perhaps she had gone to improve her dress, or to carry her housewife energies to the decoration of the other rooms; for “the house” was Mrs. Fairfield’s hobby and passion; and now that she worked no more, save for her amusement, it was her main occupation. The hours she contrived to spend daily in bustling about those little rooms, and leaving everything therein to all appearance precisely the same, were among the marvels in life which the genius of Leonard had never comprehended. But she was always so delighted when Mr. Norreys, or some rare visitor came, and said,—Mr. Norreys never failed to do so,-“How neatly all is kept here. What could Leonard do without you, Mrs. Fairfield?”
And, to Norreys’s infinite amusement, Mrs. Fairfield always returned the same answer. “‘Deed, sir, and thank you kindly, but ‘t is my belief that the drawin’-room would be awful dusty.”
Once more left alone, Leonard’s mind returned to the state of revery, and his face assumed the expression that had now become to it habitual. Thus seen, he was changed much since we last beheld him. His cheek was more pale and thin, his lips more firmly compressed, his eye more fixed and abstract. You could detect, if I may borrow a touching French expression, that “Sorrow had passed by there.” But the melancholy on his countenance was ineffably sweet and serene, and on his ample forehead there was that power, so rarely seen in early youth,—the power that has conquered, and betrays its conquests but in calm. The period of doubt, of struggle, of defiance, was gone, perhaps forever; genius and soul were reconciled to human life. It was a face most lovable; so gentle and peaceful in its character. No want of fire; on the contrary, the fire was so clear and so steadfast, that it conveyed but the impression of light. The candour of boyhood, the simplicity of the villager, were still there,—refined by intelligence, but intelligence that seemed to have traversed through knowledge, not with the ‘footstep, but the wing, unsullied by the mire, tending towards the star, seeking through the various grades of Being but the lovelier forms of truth and goodness; at home, as should be the Art that consummates the Beautiful,—
“In den heitern Regionen
Wo die reinen Formen wohnen.”
[At home—“In the serene regions
Where dwell the pure forms.”]
From this revery Leonard did not seek to rouse himself, till the bell at the garden gate rang loud and shrill; and then starting up and hurrying into the hall, his hand was grasped in Harley’s.
CHAPTER XVI.
A full and happy hour passed away in Harley’s questions and Leonard’s answers,—the dialogue that naturally ensued between the two, on the first interview after an absence of years so eventful to the younger man.
The history of Leonard during this interval was almost solely internal, the struggle of intellect with its own difficulties, the wanderings of imagination through its own adventurous worlds.