CHAPTER III
A SMART pony-phaeton, with a box for a driver in livery equally smart, stood at the shop-door.
“Now, Mr. Chillingly,” said Mrs. Braefield, “it is my turn to run away with you; get in!”
“Eh!” murmured Kenelm, gazing at her with large dreamy eyes. “Is it possible?”
“Quite possible; get in. Coachman, home! Yes, Mr. Chillingly, you meet again that giddy creature whom you threatened to thrash; it would have served her right. I ought to feel so ashamed to recall myself to your recollection, and yet I am not a bit ashamed. I am proud to show you that I have turned out a steady, respectable woman, and, my husband tells me, a good wife.”
“You have only been six months married, I hear,” said Kenelm, dryly. “I hope your husband will say the same six years hence.”
“He will say the same sixty years hence, if we live as long.”
“How old is he now?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“When a man wants only two years of his hundredth, he probably has learned to know his own mind; but then, in most cases, very little mind is left to him to know.”
“Don’t be satirical, sir; and don’t talk as if you were railing at marriage, when you have just left as happy a young couple as the sun ever shone upon; and owing,—for Mrs. Somers has told me all about her marriage,—owing their happiness to you.”
“Their happiness to me! not in the least. I helped them to marry, and in spite of marriage they helped each other to be happy.”
“You are still unmarried yourself?”
“Yes, thank Heaven!”
“And are you happy?”
“No; I can’t make myself happy: myself is a discontented brute.”
“Then why do you say ‘thank Heaven’?”
“Because it is a comfort to think I am not making somebody else unhappy.”
“Do you believe that if you loved a wife who loved you, you should make her unhappy?”
“I am sure I don’t know; but I have not seen a woman whom I could love as a wife. And we need not push our inquiries further. What has become of that ill-treated gray cob?”
“He was quite well, thank you, when I last heard of him.”
“And the uncle who would have inflicted me upon you, if you had not so gallantly defended yourself?”
“He is living where he did live, and has married his housekeeper. He felt a delicate scruple against taking that step till I was married myself and out of the way.”
Here Mrs. Braefield, beginning to speak very hurriedly, as women who seek to disguise emotion often do, informed Kenelm how unhappy she had felt for weeks after having found an asylum with her aunt,—how she had been stung by remorse and oppressed by a sense of humiliation at the thought of her folly and the odious recollection of Mr. Compton,—how she had declared to herself that she would never marry any one now—never! How Mr. Braefield happened to be on a visit in the neighbourhood, and saw her at church,—how he had sought an introduction to her,—and how at first she rather disliked him than not; but he was so good and so kind, and when at last he proposed—and she had frankly told him all about her girlish flight and infatuation—how generously he had thanked her for a candour which had placed her as high in his esteem as she had been before in his love. “And from that moment,” said Mrs. Braefield, passionately, “my whole heart leaped to him. And now you know all; and here we are at the Lodge.”
The pony-phaeton went with great speed up a broad gravel-drive, bordered with rare evergreens, and stopped at a handsome house with a portico in front, and a long conservatory at the garden side,—one of those houses which belong to “city gentlemen,” and often contain more comfort and exhibit more luxury than many a stately manorial mansion.
Mrs. Braefield evidently felt some pride as she led Kenelm through the handsome hall, paved with Malvern tiles and adorned with Scagliola columns, and into a drawing-room furnished with much taste and opening on a spacious flower-garden.
“But where is Mr. Braefield?” asked Kenelm.
“Oh, he has taken the rail to his office; but he will be back long before dinner, and of course you dine with us.”
“You’re very hospitable, but—”
“No buts: I will take no excuse. Don’t fear that you shall have only mutton-chops and a rice-pudding; and, besides, I have a children’s party coming at two o’clock, and there will be all sorts of fun. You are fond of children, I am sure?”
“I rather think I am not. But I have never clearly ascertained my own inclinations upon that subject.”
“Well, you shall have ample opportunity to do so to-day. And oh! I promise you the sight of the loveliest face that you can picture to yourself when you think of your future wife.”
“My future wife, I hope, is not yet born,” said Kenelm, wearily, and with much effort suppressing a yawn. “But at all events, I will stay till after two o’clock; for two o’clock, I presume, means luncheon.”
Mrs. Braefield laughed. “You retain your appetite?”
“Most single men do, provided they don’t fall in love and become doubled up.”
At this abominable attempt at a pun, Mrs. Braefield disdained to laugh; but turning away from its perpetrator she took off her hat and gloves and passed her hands lightly over her forehead, as if to smooth back some vagrant tress in locks already sufficiently sheen and trim. She was not quite so pretty in female attire as she had appeared in boy’s dress, nor did she look quite as young. In all other respects she was wonderfully improved. There was a serener, a more settled intelligence in her frank bright eyes, a milder expression in the play of her parted lips. Kenelm gazed at her with pleased admiration. And as now, turning from the glass, she encountered his look, a deeper colour came into the clear delicacy of her cheeks, and the frank eyes moistened. She came up to him as he sat, and took his hand in both hers, pressing it warmly. “Ah, Mr. Chillingly,” she said, with impulsive tremulous tones, “look round, look round this happy, peaceful home!—the life so free from a care, the husband whom I so love and honour; all the blessings that I might have so recklessly lost forever had I not met with you, had I been punished as I deserved. How often I thought of your words, that ‘you would be proud of my friendship when we met again’! What strength they gave me in my hours of humbled self-reproach!” Her voice here died away as if in the effort to suppress a sob.
She released his hand, and, before he could answer, passed quickly through the open sash into the garden.
CHAPTER IV
THE children have come,—some thirty of them, pretty as English children generally are, happy in the joy of the summer sunshine, and the flower lawns, and the feast under cover of an awning suspended between chestnut-trees, and carpeted with sward.
No doubt Kenelm held his own at the banquet, and did his best to increase the general gayety, for whenever he spoke the children listened eagerly, and when he had done they laughed mirthfully.
“The fair face I promised you,” whispered Mrs. Braefield, “is not here yet. I have a little note from the young lady to say that Mrs. Cameron does not feel very well this morning, but hopes to recover sufficiently to come later in the afternoon.”
“And pray who is Mrs. Cameron?”
“Ah! I forgot that you are a stranger to the place. Mrs. Cameron is the aunt with whom Lily resides. Is it not a pretty name, Lily?”
“Very! emblematic of a spinster that does not spin, with a white head and a thin stalk.”
“Then the name belies my Lily, as you will see.”
The children now finished their feast, and betook themselves to dancing in an alley smoothed for a croquet-ground, and to the sound of a violin played by the old grandfather of one of the party. While Mrs. Braefield was busying herself with forming the dance, Kenelm seized the occasion to escape from a young nymph of the age of twelve who had sat next him at the banquet, and taken so great a fancy to him that he began to fear she would vow never to forsake his side, and stole away undetected.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood. Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which, though the lilacs were faded, the laburnum still retained here and there the waning gold of its clusters, Kenelm came into a recess which bounded his steps and invited him to repose. It was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers. In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant passions—love, ambition, desire of power or gold or fame or knowledge—form the proud background to the brief-lived flowerets of our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom, catch the glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet, and yet, exclude our sight from the lengths and the widths of the space which extends behind and beyond them.
Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain. From afar came the whoop and the laugh of the children in their sports or their dance. At the distance their joy did not sadden him,—he marvelled why; and thus, in musing revery, thought to explain the why to himself.
“The poet,” so ran his lazy thinking, “has told us that ‘distance lends enchantment to the view,’ and thus compares to the charm of distance the illusion of hope. But the poet narrows the scope of his own illustration. Distance lends enchantment to the ear as well as to the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone. Memory no less than hope owes its charm to ‘the far away.’
“I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the midst of young noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here, subdued and mellowed, and knowing, thank Heaven, that the urchins are not within reach of me, I could readily dream myself back into childhood, and into sympathy with the lost playfields of school.
“So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible agony for a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret for one who disappeared into Heaven years ago! So with the art of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother. But when Oedipus commits those unhappy mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand years ago.
“And,” continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical criticism, “even where the poet deals with persons and things close upon our daily sight,—if he would give them poetic charm he must resort to a sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they are to us in external circumstance, the farther they must be in some internal peculiarities. Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest details of apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our daily lives by their idiosyncrasies and their fates. We know that while Werter and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very pain which their fate inflicts on us. Thus, I suppose, it must be in love. If the love we feel is to have the glamour of poetry, it must be love for some one morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual selves; in short, differing from us in attributes which, however near we draw to the possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in attributes of our own; so that there is something in the loved one that always remains an ideal,—a mystery,—‘a sun-bright summit mingling with the sky’!”
Herewith the soliloquist’s musings glided vaguely into mere revery. He closed his eyes drowsily, not asleep, nor yet quite awake; as sometimes in bright summer days when we recline on the grass we do close our eyes, and yet dimly recognize a golden light bathing the drowsy lids; and athwart that light images come and go like dreams, though we know that we are not dreaming.
CHAPTER V
FROM this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was roused slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek,—again a little less softly; he opened his eyes, they fell first upon two tiny rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen on his breast; and then looking up, he saw before him, in an opening of the trellised circle, a female child’s laughing face. Her hand was still uplifted charged with another rosebud, but behind the child’s figure, looking over her shoulder and holding back the menacing arm, was a face as innocent but lovelier far,—the face of a girl in her first youth, framed round with the blossoms that festooned the trellise. How the face became the flowers! It seemed the fairy spirit of them.
Kenelm started and rose to his feet. The child, the one whom he had so ungallantly escaped from ran towards him through a wicket in the circle. Her companion disappeared.
“Is it you?” said Kenelm to the child, “you who pelted me so cruelly? Ungrateful creature! Did I not give you the best strawberries in the dish and all my own cream?”
“But why did you run away and hide yourself when you ought to be dancing with me?” replied the young lady, evading, with the instinct of her sex, all answer to the reproach she had deserved.
“I did not run away, and it is clear that I did not mean to hide myself, since you so easily found me out. But who was the young lady with you? I suspect she pelted me too, for she seems to have run away to hide herself.”
“No, she did not pelt you; she wanted to stop me, and you would have had another rosebud—oh, so much bigger!—if she had not held back my arm. Don’t you know her,—don’t you know Lily?”
“No; so that is Lily? You shall introduce me to her.”
By this time they had passed out of the circle through the little wicket opposite the path by which Kenelm had entered, and opening at once on the lawn. Here at some distance the children were grouped, some reclined on the grass, some walking to and fro, in the interval of the dance.
In the space between the group and the trellise Lily was walking alone and quickly. The child left Kenelm’s side and ran after her friend, soon overtook, but did not succeed in arresting her steps. Lily did not pause till she had reached the grassy ball-room, and here all the children came round her and shut out her delicate form from Kenelm’s sight.
Before he had reached the place, Mrs. Braefield met him.
“Lily is come!”
“I know it: I have seen her.”
“Is not she beautiful?”
“I must see more of her if I am to answer critically; but before you introduce me, may I be permitted to ask who and what is Lily?”
Mrs. Braefield paused a moment before she answered, and yet the answer was brief enough not to need much consideration. “She is a Miss Mordaunt, an orphan; and, as I before told you, resides with her aunt, Mrs. Cameron, a widow. They have the prettiest cottage you ever saw on the banks of the river, or rather rivulet, about a mile from this place. Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple-hearted woman. As to Lily, I can praise her beauty only with safe conscience, for as yet she is a mere child,—her mind quite unformed.”
“Did you ever meet any man, much less any woman, whose mind was formed?” muttered Kenelm. “I am sure mine is not, and never will be on this earth.”
Mrs. Braefield did not hear this low-voiced observation. She was looking about for Lily; and perceiving her at last as the children who surrounded her were dispersing to renew the dance, she took Kenelm’s arm, led him to the young lady, and a formal introduction took place.
Formal as it could be on those sunlit swards, amidst the joy of summer and the laugh of children. In such scene and such circumstance formality does not last long. I know not how it was, but in a very few minutes Kenelm and Lily had ceased to be strangers to each other. They found themselves seated apart from the rest of the merry-makers, on the bank shadowed by lime-trees; the man listening with downcast eyes, the girl with mobile shifting glances now on earth, now on heaven, and talking freely; gayly,—like the babble of a happy stream, with a silvery dulcet voice and a sparkle of rippling smiles.
No doubt this is a reversal of the formalities of well-bred life, and conventional narrating thereof. According to them, no doubt, it is for the man to talk and the maid to listen; but I state the facts as they were, honestly. And Lily knew no more of the formalities of drawing-room life than a skylark fresh from its nest knows of the song-teacher and the cage. She was still so much of a child. Mrs. Braefield was right: her mind was still so unformed.
What she did talk about in that first talk between them that could make the meditative Kenelm listen so mutely, so intently, I know not, at least I could not jot it down on paper. I fear it was very egotistical, as the talk of children generally is,—about herself and her aunt, and her home and her friends; all her friends seemed children like herself, though younger,—Clemmy the chief of them. Clemmy was the one who had taken a fancy to Kenelm. And amidst all this ingenuous prattle there came flashes of a quick intellect, a lively fancy,—nay, even a poetry of expression or of sentiment. It might be the talk of a child, but certainly not of a silly child. But as soon as the dance was over, the little ones again gathered round Lily. Evidently she was the prime favourite of them all; and as her companion had now become tired of dancing, new sports were proposed, and Lily was carried off to “Prisoner’s Base.”
“I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Chillingly,” said a frank, pleasant voice; and a well-dressed, good-looking man held out his hand to Kenelm.
“My husband,” said Mrs. Braefield, with a certain pride in her look.
Kenelm responded cordially to the civilities of the master of the house, who had just returned from his city office, and left all its cares behind him. You had only to look at him to see that he was prosperous, and deserved to be so. There were in his countenance the signs of strong sense, of good-humour,—above all, of an active energetic temperament. A man of broad smooth forehead, keen hazel eyes, firm lips and jaw; with a happy contentment in himself, his house, the world in general, mantling over his genial smile, and outspoken in the metallic ring of his voice.
“You will stay and dine with us, of course,” said Mr. Braefield; “and, unless you want very much to be in town to-night, I hope you will take a bed here.”
Kenelm hesitated.
“Do stay at least till to-morrow,” said Mrs. Braefield. Kenelm hesitated still; and while hesitating his eye rested on Lily, leaning on the arm of a middle-aged lady, and approaching the hostess,—evidently to take leave.
“I cannot resist so tempting an invitation,” said Kenelm, and he fell back a little behind Lily and her companion.
“Thank you much for so pleasant a day,” said Mrs. Cameron to the hostess. “Lily has enjoyed herself extremely. I only regret we could not come earlier.”
“If you are walking home,” said Mr. Braefield, “let me accompany you. I want to speak to your gardener about his heart’s-ease: it is much finer than mine.”
“If so,” said Kenelm to Lily, “may I come too? Of all flowers that grow, heart’s-ease is the one I most prize.”
A few minutes afterwards Kenelm was walking by the side of Lily along the banks of a little stream, tributary to the Thames; Mrs. Cameron and Mr. Braefield in advance, for the path only held two abreast.
Suddenly Lily left his side, allured by a rare butterfly—I think it is called the Emperor of Morocco—that was sunning its yellow wings upon a group of wild reeds. She succeeded in capturing this wanderer in her straw hat, over which she drew her sun-veil. After this notable capture she returned demurely to Kenelm’s side.
“Do you collect insects?” said that philosopher, as much surprised as it was his nature to be at anything.
“Only butterflies,” answered Lily; “they are not insects, you know; they are souls.”
“Emblems of souls you mean,—at least, so the Greeks prettily represented them to be.”
“No, real souls,—the souls of infants that die in their cradles unbaptized; and if they are taken care of, and not eaten by birds, and live a year then they pass into fairies.”
“It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on evidence quite as rational as other assertions of the metamorphosis of one creature into another. Perhaps you can do what the philosophers cannot,—tell me how you learned a new idea to be an incontestable fact?”
“I don’t know,” replied Lily, looking very much puzzled; “perhaps I learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it.”
“You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philosopher. But you talk of taking care of butterflies; how do you do that? Do you impale them on pins stuck into a glass case?”
“Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve to be pinched by the fairies.”
“I am afraid,” thought Kenelm, compassionately, “that my companion has no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously called ‘an innocent.’”
He shook his head and remained silent. Lily resumed,—
“I will show you my collection when we get home; they seem so happy. I am sure there are some of them who know me: they will feed from my hand. I have only had one die since I began to collect them last summer.”
“Then you have kept them a year: they ought to have turned into fairies.”
“I suppose many of them have. Of course I let out all those that had been with me twelve months: they don’t turn to fairies in the cage, you know. Now I have only those I caught this year, or last autumn; the prettiest don’t appear till the autumn.”
The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat, her tresses shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the prisoner. Then again she looked up and around her, and abruptly stopped, and exclaimed,—
“How can people live in towns? How can people say they are ever dull in the country? Look,” she continued, gravely and earnestly, “look at that tall pine-tree, with its long branch sweeping over the water; see how, as the breeze catches it, it changes its shadow, and how the shadow changes the play of the sunlight on the brook:—
“‘Wave your tops, ye pines;
With every plant, in sign of worship wave.’
“What an interchange of music there must be between Nature and a poet!”
Kenelm was startled. This “an innocent”!—this a girl who had no mind to be formed! In that presence he could not be cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying humbug, as he had done to the man poet. He replied gravely,—
“The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother. To them the butterfly’s wing may well buoy into heaven a fairy’s soul!”
When he had thus said Lily turned, and for the first time attentively looked into his dark soft eyes; then instinctively she laid her light hand on his arm, and said in a low voice, “Talk on; talk thus: I like to hear you.”
But Kenelm did not talk on. They had now arrived at the garden-gate of Mrs. Cameron’s cottage, and the elder persons in advance paused at the gate and walked with them to the house.
It was a long, low, irregular cottage, without pretension to architectural beauty, yet exceedingly picturesque,—a flower-garden, large, but in proportion to the house, with parterres in which the colours were exquisitely assorted, sloping to the grassy margin of the rivulet, where the stream expanded into a lake-like basin, narrowed at either end by locks, from which with gentle sound flowed shallow waterfalls. By the banks was a rustic seat, half overshadowed by the drooping boughs of a vast willow.
The inside of the house was in harmony with the exterior,—cottage-like, but with an unmistakable air of refinement about the rooms, even in the little entrance-hall, which was painted in Pompeian frescos.
“Come and see my butterfly-cage,” said Lily, whisperingly.
Kenelm followed her through the window that opened on the garden; and at one end of a small conservatory, or rather greenhouse, was the habitation of these singular favourites. It was as large as a small room; three sides of it formed by minute wirework, with occasional draperies of muslin or other slight material, and covered at intervals, sometimes within, sometimes without, by dainty creepers; a tiny cistern in the centre, from which upsprang a sparkling jet. Lily cautiously lifted a sash-door and glided in, closing it behind her. Her entrance set in movement a multitude of gossamer wings, some fluttering round her, some more boldly settling on her hair or dress. Kenelm thought she had not vainly boasted when she said that some of the creatures had learned to know her. She released the Emperor of Morocco from her hat; it circled round her fearlessly, and then vanished amidst the leaves of the creepers. Lily opened the door and came out.
“I have heard of a philosopher who tamed a wasp,” said Kenelm, “but never before of a young lady who tamed butterflies.”
“No,” said Lily, proudly; “I believe I am the first who attempted it. I don’t think I should have attempted it if I had been told that others had succeeded before me. Not that I have succeeded quite. No matter; if they don’t love me, I love them.”
They re-entered the drawing-room, and Mrs. Cameron addressed Kenelm.
“Do you know much of this part of the country, Mr. Chillingly?”
“It is quite new to me, and more rural than many districts farther from London.”
“That is the good fortune of most of our home counties,” said Mr. Braefield; “they escape the smoke and din of manufacturing towns, and agricultural science has not demolished their leafy hedgerows. The walks through our green lanes are as much bordered with convolvulus and honeysuckle as they were when Izaak Walton sauntered through them to angle in that stream!”
“Does tradition say that he angled in that stream? I thought his haunts were rather on the other side of London.”
“Possibly; I am not learned in Walton or in his art, but there is an old summer-house, on the other side of the lock yonder, on which is carved the name of Izaak Walton, but whether by his own hand or another’s who shall say? Has Mr. Melville been here lately, Mrs. Cameron?”
“No, not for several months.”
“He has had a glorious success this year. We may hope that at last his genius is acknowledged by the world. I meant to buy his picture, but I was not in time: a Manchester man was before me.”
“Who is Mr. Melville? any relation to you?” whispered Kenelm to Lily.
“Relation,—I scarcely know. Yes, I suppose so, because he is my guardian. But if he were the nearest relation on earth, I could not love him more,” said Lily, with impulsive eagerness, her cheeks flushing, her eyes filling with tears.
“And he is an artist,—a painter?” asked Kenelm.
“Oh, yes; no one paints such beautiful pictures,—no one so clever, no one so kind.”
Kenelm strove to recollect if he had ever heard the name of Melville as a painter, but in vain. Kenelm, however, knew but little of painters: they were not in his way; and he owned to himself, very humbly, that there might be many a living painter of eminent renown whose name and works would be strange to him.
He glanced round the wall; Lily interpreted his look. “There are no pictures of his here,” said she; “there is one in my own room. I will show it you when you come again.”
“And now,” said Mr. Braefield, rising, “I must just have a word with your gardener, and then go home. We dine earlier here than in London, Mr. Chillingly.”
As the two gentlemen, after taking leave, re-entered the hall, Lily followed them and said to Kenelm, “What time will you come to-morrow to see the picture?”
Kenelm averted his head, and then replied, not with his wonted courtesy, but briefly and brusquely,—
“I fear I cannot call to-morrow. I shall be far away by sunrise.”
Lily made no answer, but turned back into the room.
Mr. Braefield found the gardener watering a flower-border, conferred with him about the heart’s-ease, and then joined Kenelm, who had halted a few yards beyond the garden-gate.
“A pretty little place that,” said Mr. Braefield, with a sort of lordly compassion, as became the owner of Braefieldville. “What I call quaint.”