NEARLY a year and a half has elapsed since the date of my last chapter. Two Englishmen were—the one seated, the other reclined at length—on one of the mounds that furrow the ascent of Posilippo. Before them spread the noiseless sea, basking in the sunshine, without visible ripple; to the left there was a distant glimpse through gaps of brushwood of the public gardens and white water of the Chiaja. They were friends who had chanced to meet abroad unexpectedly, joined company, and travelled together for many months, chiefly in the East. They had been but a few days in Naples. The elder of the two had important affairs in England which ought to have summoned him back long since. But he did not let his friend know this; his affairs seemed to him less important than the duties he owed to one for whom he entertained that deep and noble love which is something stronger than brotherly, for with brotherly affection it combines gratitude and reverence. He knew, too, that his friend was oppressed by a haunting sorrow, of which the cause was divined by one, not revealed by the other.
To leave him, so beloved, alone with that sorrow in strange lands, was a thought not to be cherished by a friend so tender; for in the friendship of this man there was that sort of tenderness which completes a nature, thoroughly manlike, by giving it a touch of the woman’s.
It was a day which in our northern climates is that of winter: in the southern clime of Naples it was mild as an English summer day, lingering on the brink of autumn; the sun sloping towards the west, and already gathering around it roseate and purple fleeces; elsewhere the deep blue sky was without a cloudlet.
Both had been for some minutes silent; at length the man reclining on the grass—it was the younger man—said suddenly, and with no previous hint of the subject introduced, “Lay your hand on your heart, Tom, and answer me truly. Are your thoughts as clear from regrets as the heavens above us are from a cloud? Man takes regret from tears that have ceased to flow, as the heavens take clouds from the rains that have ceased to fall.”
“Regrets? Ah, I understand, for the loss of the girl I once loved to distraction! No; surely I made that clear to you many, many, many months ago, when I was your guest at Moleswich.”
“Ay, but I have never, since then, spoken to you on that subject. I did not dare. It seems to me so natural that a man, in the earlier struggle between love and reason, should say, ‘Reason shall conquer, and has conquered;’ and yet—and yet—as time glides on, feel that the conquerors who cannot put down rebellion have a very uneasy reign. Answer me not as at Moleswich, during the first struggle, but now, in the after-day, when reaction from struggle comes.”
“Upon my honour,” answered the friend, “I have had no reaction at all. I was cured entirely, when I had once seen Jessie again, another man’s wife, mother to his child, happy in her marriage; and, whether she was changed or not,—very different from the sort of wife I should like to marry, now that I am no longer a village farrier.”
“And, I remember, you spoke of some other girl whom it would suit you to marry. You have been long abroad from her. Do you ever think of her,—think of her still as your future wife? Can you love her? Can you, who have once loved so faithfully, love again?”
“I am sure of that. I love Emily better than I did when I left England. We correspond. She writes such nice letters.” Tom hesitated, blushed, and continued timidly, “I should like to show you one of her letters.”
“Do.”
Tom drew forth the last of such letters from his breast-pocket.
Kenelm raised himself from the grass, took the letter, and read slowly, carefully, while Tom watched in vain for some approving smile to brighten up the dark beauty of that melancholy face.
Certainly it was the letter a man in love might show with pride to a friend: the letter of a lady, well educated, well brought up, evincing affection modestly, intelligence modestly too; the sort of letter in which a mother who loved her daughter, and approved the daughter’s choice, could not have suggested a correction.
As Kenelm gave back the letter, his eyes met his friend’s. Those were eager eyes,—eyes hungering for praise. Kenelm’s heart smote him for that worst of sins in friendship,—want of sympathy; and that uneasy heart forced to his lips congratulations, not perhaps quite sincere, but which amply satisfied the lover. In uttering them, Kenelm rose to his feet, threw his arm round his friend’s shoulder, and said, “Are you not tired of this place, Tom? I am. Let us go back to England to-morrow.” Tom’s honest face brightened vividly. “How selfish and egotistical I have been!” continued Kenelm; “I ought to have thought more of you, your career, your marriage,—pardon me—”
“Pardon you,—pardon! Don’t I owe to you all,—owe to you Emily herself? If you had never come to Graveleigh, never said, ‘Be my friend,’ what should I have been now? what—what?”
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.
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