KENELM did not return home till dusk, and just as he was sitting down to his solitary meal there was a ring at the bell, and Mrs. Jones ushered in Mr. Thomas Bowles.
Though that gentleman had never written to announce the day of his arrival, he was not the less welcome.
“Only,” said Kenelm, “if you preserve the appetite I have lost, I fear you will find meagre fare to-day. Sit down, man.”
“Thank you, kindly, but I dined two hours ago in London, and I really can eat nothing more.”
Kenelm was too well-bred to press unwelcome hospitalities. In a very few minutes his frugal repast was ended; the cloth removed, the two men were left alone.
“Your room is here, of course, Tom; that was engaged from the day I asked you, but you ought to have given me a line to say when to expect you, so that I could have put our hostess on her mettle as to dinner or supper. You smoke still, of course: light your pipe.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chillingly, I seldom smoke now; but if you will excuse a cigar,” and Tom produced a very smart cigar-case.
“Do as you would at home. I shall send word to Will Somers that you and I sup there to-morrow. You forgive me for letting out your secret. All straightforward now and henceforth. You come to their hearth as a friend, who will grow dearer to them both every year. Ah, Tom, this love for woman seems to me a very wonderful thing. It may sink a man into such deeps of evil, and lift a man into such heights of good.”
“I don't know as to the good,” said Tom, mournfully, and laying aside his cigar.
“Go on smoking: I should like to keep you company; can you spare me one of your cigars?”
Tom offered his case. Kenelm extracted a cigar, lighted it, drew a few whiffs, and, when he saw that Tom had resumed his own cigar, recommenced conversation.
“You don't know as to the good; but tell me honestly, do you think if you had not loved Jessie Wiles, you would be as good a man as you are now?”
“If I am better than I was, it is not because of my love for the girl.”
Kenelm started, turned very pale, threw aside the cigar, rose, and walked the room to and fro with very quick but very irregular strides.
Tom continued quietly. “Suppose I had won Jessie and married her, I don't think any idea of improving myself would have entered my head. My uncle would have been very much offended at my marrying a day-labourer's daughter, and would not have invited me to Luscombe. I should have remained at Graveleigh, with no ambition of being more than a common farrier, an ignorant, noisy, quarrelsome man; and if I could not have made Jessie as fond of me as I wished, I should not have broken myself of drinking, and I shudder to think what a brute I might have been, when I see in the newspapers an account of some drunken wife-beater. How do we know but what that wife-beater loved his wife dearly before marriage, and she did not care for him? His home was unhappy, and so he took to drink and to wife-beating.”
“I was right, then,” said Kenelm, halting his strides, when I told you it would be a miserable fate to be married to a girl whom you loved to distraction, and whose heart you could never warm to you, whose life you could never render happy.”
“Let us drop that part of the subject at present,” said Kenelm, reseating himself, “and talk about your wish to travel. Though contented that you did not marry Jessie, though you can now, without anguish, greet her as the wife of another, still there are some lingering thoughts of her that make you restless; and you feel that you could more easily wrench yourself from these thoughts in a marked change of scene and adventure, that you might bury them altogether in the soil of a strange land. Is it so?”
Then Kenelm roused himself to talk of foreign lands, and to map out a plan of travel that might occupy some months. He was pleased to find that Tom had already learned enough of French to make himself understood at least upon commonplace matters, and still more pleased to discover that he had been not only reading the proper guide-books or manuals descriptive of the principal places in Europe worth visiting, but that he had acquired an interest in the places; interest in the fame attached to them by their history in the past, or by the treasures of art they contained.
So they talked far into the night; and when Tom retired to his room, Kenelm let himself out of the house noiselessly, and walked with slow steps towards the old summer-house in which he had sat with Lily. The wind had risen, scattering the clouds that had veiled the preceding day, so that the stars were seen in far chasms of the sky beyond,—seen for a while in one place, and, when the swift clouds rolled over them there, shining out elsewhere. Amid the varying sounds of the trees, through which swept the night gusts, Kenelm fancied he could distinguish the sigh of the willow on the opposite lawn of Grasmere.
