Home > Authors Index > Edward Bulwer-Lytton > Kenelm Chillingly > This page
Kenelm Chillingly, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
||
Book 8 - Chapter 11 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ BOOK VIII CHAPTER XI THE next morning Mr. Emlyn, passing from his garden to the town of Moleswich, descried a human form stretched on the burial-ground, stirring restlessly but very slightly, as if with an involuntary shiver, and uttering broken sounds, very faintly heard, like the moans that a man in pain strives to suppress and cannot. The rector hastened to the spot. The man was lying, his face downward, on a grave-mound, not dead, not asleep. "Poor fellow overtaken by drink, I fear," thought the gentle pastor; and as it was the habit of his mind to compassionate error even more than grief, he accosted the supposed sinner in very soothing tones--trying to raise him from the ground--and with very kindly words. Then the man lifted his face from its pillow on the grave-mound, looked round him dreamily into the gray, blank air of the cheerless morn, and rose to his feet quietly and slowly. The vicar was startled; he recognized the face of him he had last seen in the magnificent affluence of health and strength. But the character of the face was changed,--so changed! its old serenity of expression, at once grave and sweet, succeeded by a wild trouble in the heavy eyelids and trembling lips. "Mr. Chillingly,--you! Is it possible?" "Varus, Varus," exclaimed Kenelm, passionately, "what hast thou done with my legions?" At that quotation of the well-known greeting of Augustus to his unfortunate general, the scholar recoiled. Had his young friend's mind deserted him,--dazed, perhaps, by over-study? He was soon reassured; Kenelm's face settled back into calm, though a dreary calm, like that of the wintry day. "I beg pardon, Mr. Emlyn; I had not quite shaken off the hold of a strange dream. I dreamed that I was worse off than Augustus: he did not lose the world when the legions he had trusted to another vanished into a grave." Here Kenelm linked his arm in that of the rector,--on which he leaned rather heavily,--and drew him on from the burial-ground into the open space where the two paths met. "But how long have you returned to Moleswich?" asked Emlyn; "and how came you to choose so damp a bed for your morning slumbers?" "The wintry cold crept into my veins when I stood in the burial-ground, and I was very weary; I had no sleep at night. Do not let me take you out of your way; I am going on to Grasmere. So I see, by the record on a gravestone, that it is more than a year ago since Mr. Melville lost his wife." "Wife? He never married." "What!" cried Kenelm. "Whose, then, is that gravestone,--'L. M.'?" "Alas! it is our poor Lily's." "And she died unmarried?" As Kenelm said this he looked up, and the sun broke out from the gloomy haze of the morning. "I may claim thee, then," he thought within himself, "claim thee as mine when we meet again." "Unmarried,--yes," resumed the vicar. "She was indeed betrothed to her guardian; they were to have been married in the autumn, on his return from the Rhine. He went there to paint on the spot itself his great picture, which is now so famous,--'Roland, the Hermit Knight, looking towards the convent lattice for a sight of the Holy Nun.' Melville had scarcely gone before the symptoms of the disease which proved fatal to poor Lily betrayed themselves; they baffled all medical skill,--rapid decline. She was always very delicate, but no one detected in her the seeds of consumption. Melville only returned a day or two before her death. Dear childlike Lily! how we all mourned for her!--not least the poor, who believed in her fairy charms." "And least of all, it appears, the man she was to have married." "He?--Melville? How can you wrong him so? His grief was intense--overpowering--for the time." "For the time! what time?" muttered Kenelm, in tones too low for the pastor's ear. They moved on silently. Mr. Emlyn resumed,-- "You noticed the text on Lily's gravestone--'Suffer the little children to come unto me'? She dictated it herself the day before she died. I was with her then, so I was at the last." "Were you--were you--at the last--the last? Good-day, Mr. Emlyn; we are just in sight of the garden gate. And--excuse me--I wish to see Mr. Melville alone." "Well, then, good-day; but if you are making any stay in the neighbourhood, will you not be our guest? We have a room at your service." "I thank you gratefully; but I return to London in an hour or so. Hold, a moment. You were with her at the last? She was resigned to die?" "Resigned! that is scarcely the word. The smile left upon her lips was not that of human resignation: it was the smile of a divine joy." _ |
||