Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

“Pardon my intrusion, Mrs. Cameron. I am the bearer of this note from Mrs. Braefield.” While the aunt read the note, he turned to the niece.

“You promised to show me the picture, Miss Mordaunt.”

“But that was a long time ago.”

“Too long to expect a lady’s promise to be kept?”

Lily seemed to ponder that question, and hesitated before she answered.

“I will show you the picture. I don’t think I ever broke a promise yet, but I shall be more careful how I make one in future.”

“Why so?”

“Because you did not value mine when I made it, and that hurt me.” Lily lifted up her head with a bewitching stateliness, and added gravely, “I was offended.”

“Mrs. Braefield is very kind,” said Mrs. Cameron; “she asks us to dine the day after to-morrow. You would like to go, Lily?”

“All grown-up people, I suppose? No, thank you, dear aunt. You go alone, I would rather stay at home. May I have little Clemmy to play with? She will bring Juba, and Blanche is very partial to Juba, though she does scratch him.”

“Very well, my dear, you shall have your playmate, and I will go by myself.”

Kenelm stood aghast. “You will not go, Miss Mordaunt; Mrs. Braefield will be so disappointed. And if you don’t go, whom shall I have to talk to? I don’t like grown-up people better than you do.”

“You are going?”

“Certainly.”

“And if I go you will talk to me? I am afraid of Mr. Braefield. He is so wise.”

“I will save you from him, and will not utter a grain of wisdom.”

“Aunty, I will go.”

Here Lily made a bound and caught up Blanche, who, taking her kisses resignedly, stared with evident curiosity upon Kenelm.

Here a bell within the house rang the announcement of luncheon. Mrs. Cameron invited Kenelm to partake of that meal. He felt as Romulus might have felt when first invited to taste the ambrosia of the gods. Yet certainly that luncheon was not such as might have pleased Kenelm Chillingly in the early days of the Temperance Hotel. But somehow or other of late he had lost appetite; and on this occasion a very modest share of a very slender dish of chicken fricasseed, and a few cherries daintily arranged on vine leaves, which Lily selected for him, contented him,—as probably a very little ambrosia contented Romulus while feasting his eyes on Hebe.

Luncheon over, while Mrs. Cameron wrote her reply to Elsie, Kenelm was conducted by Lily into her own own room, in vulgar parlance her boudoir, though it did not look as if any one ever bouder’d there. It was exquisitely pretty,—pretty not as a woman’s, but as a child’s dream of the own own room she would like to have,—wondrously neat and cool, and pure-looking; a trellis paper, the trellis gay with roses and woodbine, and birds and butterflies; draperies of muslin, festooned with dainty tassels and ribbons; a dwarf bookcase, that seemed well stored, at least as to bindings; a dainty little writing-table in French marqueterie, looking too fresh and spotless to have known hard service. The casement was open, and in keeping with the trellis paper; woodbine and roses from without encroached on the window-sides, gently stirred by the faint summer breeze, and wafted sweet odours into the little room. Kenelm went to the window, and glanced on the view beyond. “I was right,” he said to himself; “I divined it.” But though he spoke in a low inward whisper, Lily, who had watched his movements in surprise, overheard.

“You divined it. Divined what?”

“Nothing, nothing; I was but talking to myself.”

“Tell me what you divined: I insist upon it!” and Fairy petulantly stamped her tiny foot on the floor.

“Do you? Then I obey. I have taken a lodging for a short time on the other side of the brook,—Cromwell Lodge,—and seeing your house as I passed, I divined that your room was in this part of it. How soft here is the view of the water! Ah! yonder is Izaak Walton’s summer-house.”

“Don’t talk about Izaak Walton, or I shall quarrel with you, as I did with Lion when he wanted me to like that cruel book.”

“Who is Lion?”

“Lion,—of course, my guardian. I called him Lion when I was a little child. It was on seeing in one of his books a print of a lion playing with a little child.”

“Ah! I know the design well,” said Kenelm, with a slight sigh. “It is from an antique Greek gem. It is not the lion that plays with the child, it is the child that masters the lion, and the Greeks called the child ‘Love.’”

This idea seemed beyond Lily’s perfect comprehension. She paused before she answered, with the naivete of a child six years old,—

“I see now why I mastered Blanche, who will not make friends with any one else: I love Blanche. Ah, that reminds me,—come and look at the picture.”

She went to the wall over the writing-table, drew a silk curtain aside from a small painting in a dainty velvet framework, and pointing to it, cried with triumph, “Look there! is it not beautiful?”

Kenelm had been prepared to see a landscape, or a group, or anything but what he did see: it was the portrait of Blanche when a kitten.

Little elevated though the subject was, it was treated with graceful fancy. The kitten had evidently ceased from playing with the cotton reel that lay between her paws, and was fixing her gaze intently on a bulfinch that had lighted on a spray within her reach.

“You understand,” said Lily, placing her hand on his arm, and drawing him towards what she thought the best light for the picture; “it is Blanche’s first sight of a bird. Look well at her face; don’t you see a sudden surprise,—half joy, half fear? She ceases to play with the reel. Her intellect—or, as Mr. Braefield would say, ‘her instinct’—is for the first time aroused. From that moment Blanche was no longer a mere kitten. And it required, oh, the most careful education, to teach her not to kill the poor little birds. She never does now, but I had such trouble with her.”

“I cannot say honestly that I do see all that you do in the picture; but it seems to me very simply painted, and was, no doubt, a striking likeness of Blanche at that early age.”

“So it was. Lion drew the first sketch from life with his pencil; and when he saw how pleased I was with it—he was so good—he put it on canvas, and let me sit by him while he painted it. Then he took it away, and brought it back finished and framed as you see, last May, a present for my birthday.”

“You were born in May—with the flowers.”

“The best of all the flowers are born in May,—violets.”

“But they are born in the shade, and cling to it. Surely, as a child of May, you love the sun!”

“I love the sun; it is never too bright nor too warm for me. But I don’t think that, though born in May, I was born in sunlight. I feel more like my own native self when I creep into the shade and sit down alone. I can weep then.”

As she thus shyly ended, the character of her whole countenance was changed: its infantine mirthfulness was gone; a grave, thoughtful, even a sad expression settled on the tender eyes and the tremulous lips.

Kenelm was so touched that words failed him, and there was silence for some moments between the two. At length Kenelm said, slowly,—

“You say your own native self. Do you, then, feel, as I often do, that there is a second, possibly a native, self, deep hid beneath the self,—not merely what we show to the world in common (that may be merely a mask), but the self that we ordinarily accept even when in solitude as our own, an inner innermost self, oh so different and so rarely coming forth from its hiding-place, asserting its right of sovereignty, and putting out the other self as the sun puts out a star?”

Had Kenelm thus spoken to a clever man of the world—to a Chillingly Mivers, to a Chillingly Gordon—they certainly would not have understood him. But to such men he never would have thus spoken. He had a vague hope that this childlike girl, despite so much of childlike talk, would understand him; and she did at once.

Advancing close to him, again laying her hand on his arm, and looking up towards his bended face with startled wondering eyes, no longer sad, yet not mirthful,—

“How true! You have felt that too? Where is that innermost self, so deep down,—so deep; yet when it does come forth, so much higher,—higher,—immeasurably higher than one’s everyday self? It does not tame the butterflies; it longs to get to the stars. And then,—and then,—ah, how soon it fades back again! You have felt that. Does it not puzzle you?”

“Very much.”

“Are there no wise books about it that help to explain?”

“No wise books in my very limited reading even hint at the puzzle. I fancy that it is one of those insoluble questions that rest between the infant and his Maker. Mind and soul are not the same things, and what you and I call ‘wise men’ are always confounding the two—”

Fortunately for all parties—especially the reader; for Kenelm had here got on the back of one of his most cherished hobbies, the distinction between psychology and metaphysics, soul and mind scientifically or logically considered—Mrs. Cameron here entered the room, and asked him how he liked the picture.

“Very much. I am no great judge of the art. But it pleased me at once, and now that Miss Mordaunt has interpreted the intention of the painter I admire it yet more.”

“Lily chooses to interpret his intention in her own way, and insists that Blanche’s expression of countenance conveys an idea of her capacity to restrain her destructive instinct, and be taught to believe that it is wrong to kill birds for mere sport. For food she need not kill them, seeing that Lily takes care that she has plenty to eat. But I don’t think that Mr. Melville had the slightest suspicion that he had indicated that capacity in his picture.”

“He must have done so, whether he suspected it or not,” said Lily, positively; “otherwise he would not be truthful.”

“Why not truthful?” asked Kenelm.

“Don’t you see? If you were called upon to describe truthfully the character of any little child, would you only speak of such naughty impulses as all children have in common, and not even hint at the capacity to be made better?”

“Admirably put!” said Kenelm. “There is no doubt that a much fiercer animal than a cat—a tiger, for instance, or a conquering hero—may be taught to live on the kindest possible terms with the creatures on which it was its natural instinct to prey.”

“Yes, yes; hear that, aunty! You remember the Happy Family that we saw eight years ago, at Moleswich fair, with a cat not half so nice as Blanche allowing a mouse to bite her ear? Well, then, would Lion not have been shamefully false to Blanche if he had not”—

Lily paused and looked half shyly, half archly, at Kenelm, then added, in slow, deep-drawn tones—“given a glimpse of her innermost self?”

“Innermost self!” repeated Mrs. Cameron, perplexed and laughing gently.

Lily stole nearer to Kenelm and whispered,—

“Is not one’s innermost self one’s best self?”

Kenelm smiled approvingly. The fairy was rapidly deepening her spell upon him. If Lily had been his sister, his betrothed, his wife, how fondly he would have kissed her! She had expressed a thought over which he had often inaudibly brooded, and she had clothed it with all the charm of her own infantine fancy and womanlike tenderness. Goethe has said somewhere, or is reported to have said, “There is something in every man’s heart, that, if you knew it, would make you hate him.” What Goethe said, still more what Goethe is reported to have said, is never to be taken quite literally. No comprehensive genius—genius at once poet and thinker—ever can be so taken. The sun shines on a dunghill. But the sun has no predilection for a dunghill. It only comprehends a dunghill as it does a rose. Still Kenelm had always regarded that loose ray from Goethe’s prodigal orb with an abhorrence most unphilosophical for a philosopher so young as generally to take upon oath any words of so great a master. Kenelm thought that the root of all private benevolence, of all enlightened advance in social reform, lay in the adverse theorem,—that in every man’s nature there lies a something that, could we get at it, cleanse it, polish it, render it visibly clear to our eyes, would make us love him. And in this spontaneous, uncultured sympathy with the results of so many laborious struggles of his own scholastic intellect against the dogma of the German giant, he felt as if he had found a younger—true, but oh, how much more subduing, because so much younger—sister of his own man’s soul. Then came, so strongly, the sense of her sympathy with his own strange innermost self, which a man will never feel more than once in his life with a daughter of Eve, that he dared not trust himself to speak. He somewhat hurried his leave-taking.

Passing in the rear of the garden towards the bridge which led to his lodging, he found on the opposite bank, at the other end of the bridge, Mr. Algernon Sidney Gale Jones peacefully angling for trout.

“Will you not try the stream to-day, sir? Take my rod.” Kenelm remembered that Lily had called Izaak Walton’s book “a cruel one,” and shaking his head gently, went his way into the house. There he seated himself silently by the window, and looked towards the grassy lawn and the dipping willows, and the gleam of the white walls through the girdling trees, as he had looked the eve before.

“Ah!” he murmured at last, “if, as I hold, a man but tolerably good does good unconsciously merely by the act of living,—if he can no more traverse his way from the cradle to the grave, without letting fall, as he passes, the germs of strength, fertility, and beauty, than can a reckless wind or a vagrant bird, which, where it passes, leaves behind it the oak, the corn-sheaf, or the flower,—ah, if that be so, how tenfold the good must be, if the man find the gentler and purer duplicate of his own being in that mysterious, undefinable union which Shakspeares and day-labourers equally agree to call love; which Newton never recognizes, and which Descartes (his only rival in the realms of thought at once severe and imaginative) reduces into links of early association, explaining that he loved women who squinted, because, when he was a boy, a girl with that infirmity squinted at him from the other side of his father’s garden-wall! Ah! be this union between man and woman what it may; if it be really love, really the bond which embraces the innermost and bettermost self of both,—how daily, hourly, momently, should we bless God for having made it so easy to be happy and to be good!”

CHAPTER VI

THE dinner-party at Mr. Braefield’s was not quite so small as Kenelm had anticipated. When the merchant heard from his wife that Kenelm was coming, he thought it would be but civil to the young gentleman to invite a few other persons to meet him.

“You see, my dear,” he said to Elsie, “Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple sort of woman, but not particularly amusing; and Lily, though a pretty girl, is so exceedingly childish. We owe much, my sweet Elsie, to this Mr. Chillingly,”—here there was a deep tone of feeling in his voice and look,—“and we must make it as pleasant for him as we can. I will bring down my friend Sir Thomas, and you ask Mr. Emlyn and his wife. Sir Thomas is a very sensible man, and Emlyn a very learned one. So Mr. Chillingly will find people worth talking to. By the by, when I go to town I will send down a haunch of venison from Groves’s.”

So when Kenelm arrived, a little before six o’clock, he found in the drawing-room the Rev. Charles Emlyn, vicar of Moleswich proper, with his spouse, and a portly middle-aged man, to whom, as Sir Thomas Pratt, Kenelm was introduced. Sir Thomas was an eminent city banker. The ceremonies of introduction over, Kenelm stole to Elsie’s side.

“I thought I was to meet Mrs. Cameron. I don’t see her.”

“She will be here presently. It looks as if it might rain, and I have sent the carriage for her and Lily. Ah, here they are!”

Mrs. Cameron entered, clothed in black silk. She always wore black; and behind her came Lily, in the spotless colour that became her name; no ornament, save a slender gold chain to which was appended a single locket, and a single blush rose in her hair. She looked wonderfully lovely; and with that loveliness there was a certain nameless air of distinction, possibly owing to delicacy of form and colouring; possibly to a certain grace of carriage, which was not without a something of pride.

Mr. Braefield, who was a very punctual man, made a sign to his servant, and in another moment or so dinner was announced. Sir Thomas, of course, took in the hostess; Mr. Braefield, the vicar’s wife (she was a dean’s daughter); Kenelm, Mrs. Cameron; and the vicar, Lily.

On seating themselves at the table Kenelm was on the left hand, next to the hostess, and separated from Lily by Mrs. Cameron and Mr. Emlyn; and when the vicar had said grace, Lily glanced behind his back and her aunt’s at Kenelm (who did the same thing), making at him what the French call a moue. The pledge to her had been broken. She was between two men very much grown up,—the vicar and the host. Kenelm returned the moue with a mournful smile and an involuntary shrug.

All was silent till, after his soup and his first glass of sherry, Sir Thomas began,—

“I think, Mr. Chillingly, we have met before, though I had not the honour then of making your acquaintance.” Sir Thomas paused before he added, “Not long ago; the last State ball at Buckingham Palace.”

Kenelm bent his head acquiescingly. He had been at that ball.

“You were talking with a very charming woman,—a friend of mine,—Lady Glenalvon.”

(Sir Thomas was Lady Glenalvon’s banker.)

“I remember perfectly,” said Kenelm. “We were seated in the picture gallery. You came to speak to Lady Glenalvon, and I yielded to you my place on the settee.”

“Quite true; and I think you joined a young lady, very handsome,—the great heiress, Miss Travers.”

Kenelm again bowed, and, turning away as politely as he could, addressed himself to Mrs. Cameron. Sir Thomas, satisfied that he had impressed on his audience the facts of his friendship with Lady Glenalvon and his attendance at the court ball, now directed his conversational powers towards the vicar, who, utterly foiled in the attempt to draw out Lily, met the baronet’s advances with the ardour of a talker too long suppressed. Kenelm continued, unmolested, to ripen his acquaintance with Mrs. Cameron. She did not, however, seem to lend a very attentive ear to his preliminary commonplace remarks about scenery or weather, but at his first pause, said,—

“Sir Thomas spoke about a Miss Travers: is she related to a gentleman who was once in the Guards, Leopold Travers?”

“She is his daughter. Did you ever know Leopold Travers?”

“I have heard him mentioned by friends of mine long ago,—long ago,” replied Mrs. Cameron with a sort of weary languor, not unwonted, in her voice and manner; and then, as if dismissing the bygone reminiscence from her thoughts, changed the subject.

“Lily tells me, Mr. Chillingly, that you said you were staying at Mr. Jones’s, Cromwell Lodge. I hope you are made comfortable there.”

“Very. The situation is singularly pleasant.”

“Yes, it is considered the prettiest spot on the brook-side, and used to be a favourite resort for anglers; but the trout, I believe, are growing scarce; at least, now that the fishing in the Thames is improved, poor Mr. Jones complains that his old lodgers desert him. Of course you took the rooms for the sake of the fishing. I hope the sport may be better than it is said to be.”

“It is of little consequence to me: I do not care much about fishing; and since Miss Mordaunt calls the book which first enticed me to take to it ‘a cruel one,’ I feel as if the trout had become as sacred as crocodiles were to the ancient Egyptians.”

“Lily is a foolish child on such matters. She cannot bear the thought of giving pain to any dumb creature; and just before our garden there are a few trout which she has tamed. They feed out of her hand; she is always afraid they will wander away and get caught.”

“But Mr. Melville is an angler?”

“Several years ago he would sometimes pretend to fish, but I believe it was rather an excuse for lying on the grass and reading ‘the cruel book,’ or perhaps, rather, for sketching. But now he is seldom here till autumn, when it grows too cold for such amusement.”

Here Sir Thomas’s voice was so loudly raised that it stopped the conversation between Kenelm and Mrs. Cameron. He had got into some question of politics on which he and the vicar did not agree, and the discussion threatened to become warm, when Mrs. Braefield, with a woman’s true tact, broached a new topic, in which Sir Thomas was immediately interested, relating to the construction of a conservatory for orchids that he meditated adding to his country-house, and in which frequent appeal was made to Mrs. Cameron, who was considered an accomplished florist, and who seemed at some time or other in her life to have acquired a very intimate acquaintance with the costly family of orchids.

When the ladies retired Kenelm found himself seated next to Mr. Emlyn, who astounded him by a complimentary quotation from one of his own Latin prize poems at the university, hoped he would make some stay at Moleswich, told him of the principal places in the neighbourhood worth visiting, and offered him the run of his library, which he flattered himself was rather rich, both in the best editions of Greek and Latin classics and in early English literature. Kenelm was much pleased with the scholarly vicar, especially when Mr. Emlyn began to speak about Mrs. Cameron and Lily. Of the first he said, “She is one of those women in whom quiet is so predominant that it is long before one can know what undercurrents of good feeling flow beneath the unruffled surface. I wish, however, she was a little more active in the management and education of her niece,—a girl in whom I feel a very anxious interest, and whom I doubt if Mrs. Cameron understands. Perhaps, however, only a poet, and a very peculiar sort of poet, can understand her: Lily Mordaunt is herself a poem.”

“I like your definition of her,” said Kenelm. “There is certainly something about her which differs much from the prose of common life.”

“You probably know Wordsworth’s lines:

  “‘... and she shall lean her ear    In many a secret place    Where rivulets dance their wayward round,    And beauty, born of murmuring sound,    Shall pass into her face.’

“They are lines that many critics have found unintelligible; but Lily seems like the living key to them.”

Kenelm’s dark face lighted up, but he made no answer.

“Only,” continued Mr. Emlyn, “how a girl of that sort, left wholly to herself, untrained, undisciplined, is to grow up into the practical uses of womanhood, is a question that perplexes and saddens me.”

“Any more wine?” asked the host, closing a conversation on commercial matters with Sir Thomas. “No?—shall we join the ladies?”

CHAPTER VII

THE drawing-room was deserted; the ladies were in the garden. As Kenelm and Mr. Emlyn walked side by side towards the group (Sir Thomas and Mr. Braefield following at a little distance), the former asked, somewhat abruptly, “What sort of man is Miss Cameron’s guardian, Mr. Melville?”

“I can scarcely answer that question. I see little of him when he comes here. Formerly, he used to run down pretty often with a harum-scarum set of young fellows, quartered at Cromwell Lodge,—Grasmere had no accommodation for them,—students in the Academy, I suppose. For some years he has not brought those persons, and when he does come himself it is but for a few days. He has the reputation of being very wild.”