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Kenelm Chillingly, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
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Book 6 - Chapter 4 |
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_ BOOK VI CHAPTER IV KENELM went with somewhat rapid pace from Mrs. Braefield's to the shop in the High Street kept by Will Somers. Jessie was behind the counter, which was thronged with customers. Kenelm gave her a brief direction about his portmanteau, and then passed into the back parlour, where her husband was employed on his baskets,--with the baby's cradle in the corner, and its grandmother rocking it mechanically, as she read a wonderful missionary tract full of tales of miraculous conversions: into what sort of Christians we will not pause to inquire. "And so you are happy, Will?" said Kenelm, seating himself between the basket-maker and the infant; the dear old mother beside him, reading the tract which linked her dreams of life eternal with life just opening in the cradle that she rocked. He not happy! How he pitied the man who could ask such a question. "Happy, sir! I should think so, indeed. There is not a night on which Jessie and I, and mother too, do not pray that some day or other you may be as happy. By and by the baby will learn to pray 'God bless papa, and mamma, grandmamma, and Mr. Chillingly.'" "There is some one else much more deserving of prayers than I, though needing them less. You will know some day: pass it by now. To return to the point: you are happy; if I asked why, would you not say, 'Because I have married the girl I love, and have never repented'?" "Well, sir, that is about it; though, begging your pardon, I think it could be put more prettily somehow." "You are right there. But perhaps love and happiness never yet found any words that could fitly express them. Good-bye, for the present." Ah! if it were as mere materialists, or as many middle-aged or elderly folks, who, if materialists, are so without knowing it, unreflectingly say, "The main element of happiness is bodily or animal health and strength," that question which Chillingly put would appear a very unmeaning or a very insulting one addressed to a pale cripple, who however improved of late in health, would still be sickly and ailing all his life,--put, too, by a man of the rarest conformation of physical powers that nature can adapt to physical enjoyment,--a man who, since the age in which memory commences, had never known what it was to be unwell, who could scarcely understand you if you talked of a finger-ache, and whom those refinements of mental culture which multiply the delights of the senses had endowed with the most exquisite conceptions of such happiness as mere nature and its instincts can give! But Will did not think the question unmeaning or insulting. He, the poor cripple, felt a vast superiority on the scale of joyous being over the young Hercules, well born, cultured, and wealthy, who could know so little of happiness as to ask the crippled basket-maker if he were happy.--he, blessed husband and father! _ |
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