Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

And that night Kenelm wrote to Mr. Bowles:

MY DEAR TOM,—Come and spend a few days with me at Cromwell Lodge, Moleswich. Mr. and Mrs. Somers wish much to see and to thank you. I could not remain forever degraded in order to gratify your whim. They would have it that I bought their shop, etc., and I was forced in self-defence to say who it was. More on this and on travels when you come.

Your true friend, K. C.

CHAPTER XVI

MRS. CAMERON was seated alone in her pretty drawing-room, with a book lying open, but unheeded, on her lap. She was looking away from its pages, seemingly into the garden without, but rather into empty space.

To a very acute and practised observer, there was in her countenance an expression which baffled the common eye.

To the common eye it was simply vacant; the expression of a quiet, humdrum woman, who might have been thinking of some quiet humdrum household detail,—found that too much for her, and was now not thinking at all.

But to the true observer, there were in that face indications of a troubled past, still haunted with ghosts never to be laid at rest,—indications, too, of a character in herself that had undergone some revolutionary change; it had not always been the character of a woman quiet and humdrum. The delicate outlines of the lip and nostril evinced sensibility, and the deep and downward curve of it bespoke habitual sadness. The softness of the look into space did not tell of a vacant mind, but rather of a mind subdued and over-burdened by the weight of a secret sorrow. There was also about her whole presence, in the very quiet which made her prevalent external characteristic, the evidence of manners formed in a high-bred society,—the society in which quiet is connected with dignity and grace. The poor understood this better than her rich acquaintances at Moleswich, when they said, “Mrs. Cameron was every inch a lady.” To judge by her features she must once have been pretty, not a showy prettiness, but decidedly pretty. Now, as the features were small, all prettiness had faded away in cold gray colourings, and a sort of tamed and slumbering timidity of aspect. She was not only not demonstrative, but must have imposed on herself as a duty the suppression of demonstration. Who could look at the formation of those lips, and not see that they belonged to the nervous, quick, demonstrative temperament? And yet, observing her again more closely, that suppression of the constitutional tendency to candid betrayal of emotion would the more enlist our curiosity or interest; because, if physiognomy and phrenology have any truth in them, there was little strength in her character. In the womanly yieldingness of the short curved upper lip, the pleading timidity of the regard, the disproportionate but elegant slenderness of the head between the ear and the neck, there were the tokens of one who cannot resist the will, perhaps the whim, of another whom she either loves or trusts.

The book open on her lap is a serious book on the doctrine of grace, written by a popular clergyman of what is termed “the Low Church.” She seldom read any but serious books, except where such care as she gave to Lily’s education compelled her to read “Outlines of History and Geography,” or the elementary French books used in seminaries for young ladies. Yet if any one had decoyed Mrs. Cameron into familiar conversation, he would have discovered that she must early have received the education given to young ladies of station. She could speak and write French and Italian as a native. She had read, and still remembered, such classic authors in either language as are conceded to the use of pupils by the well-regulated taste of orthodox governesses. She had a knowledge of botany, such as botany was taught twenty years ago. I am not sure that, if her memory had been fairly aroused, she might not have come out strong in divinity and political economy, as expounded by the popular manuals of Mrs. Marcet. In short, you could see in her a thoroughbred English lady, who had been taught in a generation before Lily’s, and immeasurably superior in culture to the ordinary run of English young ladies taught nowadays. So, in what after all are very minor accomplishments,—now made major accomplishments,—such as music, it was impossible that a connoisseur should hear her play on the piano without remarking, “That woman has had the best masters of her time.” She could only play pieces that belonged to her generation. She had learned nothing since. In short, the whole intellectual culture had come to a dead stop long years ago, perhaps before Lily was born.

Now, while she is gazing into space Mrs. Braefield is announced. Mrs. Cameron does not start from revery. She never starts. But she makes a weary movement of annoyance, resettles herself, and lays the serious book on the sofa table. Elsie enters, young, radiant, dressed in all the perfection of the fashion, that is, as ungracefully as in the eyes of an artist any gentlewoman can be; but rich merchants who are proud of their wives so insist, and their wives, in that respect, submissively obey them.

The ladies interchange customary salutations, enter into the customary preliminaries of talk, and after a pause Elsie begins in earnest.

“But sha’n’t I see Lily? Where is she?”

“I fear she has gone into the town. A poor little boy, who did our errands, has met with an accident,—fallen from a cherry-tree.”

“Which he was robbing?”

“Probably.”

“And Lily has gone to lecture him?”

“I don’t know as to that; but he is much hurt, and Lily has gone to see what is the matter with him.”

Mrs. Braefield, in her frank outspoken way,—“I don’t take much to girls of Lily’s age in general, though I am passionately fond of children. You know how I do take to Lily; perhaps because she is so like a child. But she must be an anxious charge to you.”

Mrs. Cameron replied by an anxious “No; she is still a child, a very good one; why should I be anxious?”

Mrs. Braefield, impulsively,—“Why, your child must now be eighteen.”

Mrs. Cameron,—“Eighteen—is it possible! How time flies! though in a life so monotonous as mine, time does not seem to fly, it slips on like the lapse of water. Let me think,—eighteen? No, she is but seventeen,—seventeen last May.”

Mrs. Braefield,—“Seventeen! A very anxious age for a girl; an age in which dolls cease and lovers begin.”

Mrs. Cameron, not so languidly, but still quietly,—“Lily never cared much for dolls,—never much for lifeless pets; and as to lovers, she does not dream of them.”

Mrs. Braefield, briskly,—“There is no age after six in which girls do not dream of lovers. And here another question arises. When a girl so lovely as Lily is eighteen next birthday, may not a lover dream of her?”

Mrs. Cameron, with that wintry cold tranquillity of manner, which implies that in putting such questions an interrogator is taking a liberty,—“As no lover has appeared, I cannot trouble myself about his dreams.”

Said Elsie inly to herself, “This is the stupidest woman I ever met!” and aloud to Mrs. Cameron,—“Do you not think that your neighbour, Mr. Chillingly, is a very fine young man?”

“I suppose he would be generally considered so. He is very tall.”

“A handsome face?”

“Handsome, is it? I dare say.”

“What does Lily say?”

“About what?”

“About Mr. Chillingly. Does she not think him handsome?”

“I never asked her.”

“My dear Mrs. Cameron, would it not be a very pretty match for Lily? The Chillinglys are among the oldest families in Burke’s ‘Landed Gentry,’ and I believe his father, Sir Peter, has a considerable property.”

For the first time in this conversation Mrs. Cameron betrayed emotion. A sudden flush overspread her countenance, and then left it paler than before. After a pause she recovered her accustomed composure, and replied, rudely,—

“It would be no friend to Lily who could put such notions into her head; and there is no reason to suppose that they have entered into Mr. Chillingly’s.”

“Would you be sorry if they did? Surely you would like your niece to marry well, and there are few chances of her doing so at Moleswich.”

“Pardon me, Mrs. Braefield, but the question of Lily’s marriage I have never discussed, even with her guardian. Nor, considering the childlike nature of her tastes and habits, rather than the years she has numbered, can I think the time has yet come for discussing it at all.”

Elsie, thus rebuked, changed the subject to some newspaper topic which interested the public mind at the moment and very soon rose to depart. Mrs. Cameron detained the hand that her visitor held out, and said in low tones, which, though embarrassed, were evidently earnest, “My dear Mrs. Braefield, let me trust to your good sense and the affection with which you have honoured my niece not to incur the risk of unsettling her mind by a hint of the ambitious projects for her future on which you have spoken to me. It is extremely improbable that a young man of Mr. Chillingly’s expectations would entertain any serious thoughts of marrying out of his own sphere of life, and—”

“Stop, Mrs. Cameron, I must interrupt you. Lily’s personal attractions and grace of manner would adorn any station; and have I not rightly understood you to say that though her guardian, Mr. Melville, is, as we all know, a man who has risen above the rank of his parents, your niece, Miss Mordaunt, is like yourself, by birth a gentlewoman?”

“Yes, by birth a gentlewoman,” said Mrs. Cameron, raising her head with a sudden pride. But she added, with as sudden a change to a sort of freezing humility, “What does that matter? A girl without fortune, without connection, brought up in this little cottage, the ward of a professional artist, who was the son of a city clerk, to whom she owes even the home she has found, is not in the same sphere of life as Mr. Chillingly, and his parents could not approve of such an alliance for him. It would be most cruel to her, if you were to change the innocent pleasure she may take in the conversation of a clever and well-informed stranger into the troubled interest which, since you remind me of her age, a girl even so childlike and beautiful as Lily might conceive in one represented to her as the possible partner of her life. Don’t commit that cruelty; don’t—don’t, I implore you!”

“Trust me,” cried the warm-hearted Elsie, with tears rushing to her eyes. “What you say so sensibly, so nobly, never struck me before. I do not know much of the world,—knew nothing of it till I married,—and being very fond of Lily, and having a strong regard for Mr. Chillingly, I fancied I could not serve both better than—than—but I see now; he is very young, very peculiar; his parents might object, not to Lily herself, but to the circumstances you name. And you would not wish her to enter any family where she was not as cordially welcomed as she deserves to be. I am glad to have had this talk with you. Happily, I have done no mischief as yet. I will do none. I had come to propose an excursion to the remains of the Roman Villa, some miles off, and to invite you and Mr. Chillingly. I will no longer try to bring him and Lily together.”

“Thank you. But you still misconstrue me. I do not think that Lily cares half so much for Mr. Chillingly as she does for a new butterfly. I do not fear their coming together, as you call it, in the light in which she now regards him, and in which, from all I observe, he regards her. My only fear is that a hint might lead her to regard him in another way, and that way impossible.”

Elsie left the house extremely bewildered, and with a profound contempt for Mrs. Cameron’s knowledge of what may happen to two young persons “brought together.”

CHAPTER XVII

NOW, on that very day, and about the same hour in which the conversation just recorded between Elsie and Mrs. Cameron took place, Kenelm, in his solitary noonday wanderings, entered the burial-ground in which Lily had some short time before surprised him. And there he found her, standing beside the flower border which she had placed round the grave of the child whom she had tended and nursed in vain.

The day was cloudless and sunless; one of those days that so often instil a sentiment of melancholy into the heart of an English summer.

“You come here too often, Miss Mordaunt,” said Kenelm, very softly, as he approached.

Lily turned her face to him, without any start of surprise, with no brightening change in its pensive expression,—an expression rare to the mobile play of her features.

“Not too often. I promised to come as often as I could; and, as I told you before, I have never broken a promise yet.”

Kenelm made no answer. Presently the girl turned from the spot, and Kenelm followed her silently till she halted before the old tombstone with its effaced inscription.

“See,” she said, with a faint smile, “I have put fresh flowers there. Since the day we met in this churchyard, I have thought so much of that tomb, so neglected, so forgotten, and—” she paused a moment, and went on abruptly, “do you not often find that you are much too—what is the word? ah! too egotistical, considering and pondering and dreaming greatly too much about yourself?”

“Yes, you are right there; though, till you so accused me, my conscience did not detect it.”

“And don’t you find that you escape from being so haunted by the thought of yourself, when you think of the dead? they can never have any share in your existence here. When you say, ‘I shall do this or that to-day;’ when you dream, ‘I may be this or that to-morrow,’ you are thinking and dreaming, all by yourself, for yourself. But you are out of yourself, beyond yourself, when you think and dream of the dead, who can have nothing to do with your to-day or your to-morrow.”

As we all know, Kenelm Chillingly made it one of the rules of his life never to be taken by surprise. But when the speech I have written down came from the lips of that tamer of butterflies, he was so startled that all it occurred to him to say, after a long pause, was,—

“The dead are the past; and with the past rests all in the present or the future that can take us out of our natural selves. The past decides our present. By the past we divine our future. History, poetry, science, the welfare of states, the advancement of individuals, are all connected with tombstones of which inscriptions are effaced. You are right to honour the mouldered tombstones with fresh flowers. It is only in the companionship of the dead that one ceases to be an egotist.”

If the imperfectly educated Lily had been above the quick comprehension of the academical Kenelm in her speech, so Kenelm was now above the comprehension of Lily. She, too, paused before she replied,—

“If I knew you better, I think I could understand you better. I wish you knew Lion. I should like to hear you talk with him.”

While thus conversing, they had left the burial-ground, and were in the pathway trodden by the common wayfarer.

Lily resumed,—“Yes, I should like to hear you talk with Lion.”

“You mean your guardian, Mr. Melville?”

“Yes, you know that.”

“And why should you like to hear me talk to him?”

“Because there are some things in which I doubt if he was altogether right, and I would ask you to express my doubts to him; you would, would you not?”

“But why can you not express them yourself to your guardian; are you afraid of him?”

“Afraid, no indeed! But—ah, how many people there are coming this way! There is some tiresome public meeting in the town to-day. Let us take the ferry: the other side of the stream is much pleasanter; we shall have it more to ourselves.”

Turning aside to the right while she thus spoke, Lily descended a gradual slope to the margin of the stream, on which they found an old man dozily reclined in his ferry-boat.

As, seated side by side, they were slowly borne over the still waters under a sunless sky, Kenelm would have renewed the subject which his companion had begun, but she shook her head, with a significant glance at the ferryman. Evidently what she had to say was too confidential to admit of a listener, not that the old ferryman seemed likely to take the trouble of listening to any talk that was not addressed to him. Lily soon did address her talk to him, “So, Brown, the cow has quite recovered.”

“Yes, Miss, thanks to you, and God bless you. To think of your beating the old witch like that!”

“‘Tis not I who beat the witch, Brown; ‘tis the fairy. Fairies, you know, are much more powerful than witches.”

“So I find, Miss.”

Lily here turned to Kenelm; “Mr. Brown has a very nice milch-cow that was suddenly taken very ill, and both he and his wife were convinced that the cow was bewitched.”

“Of course it were, that stands to reason. Did not Mother Wright tell my old woman that she would repent of selling milk, and abuse her dreadful; and was not the cow taken with shivers that very night?”

“Gently, Brown. Mother Wright did not say that your wife would repent of selling milk, but of putting water into it.”

“And how did she know that, if she was not a witch? We have the best of customers among the gentlefolks, and never any one that complained.”

“And,” answered Lily to Kenelm, unheeding this last observation, which was made in a sullen manner, “Brown had a horrid notion of enticing Mother Wright into his ferry-boat and throwing her into the water, in order to break the spell upon the cow. But I consulted the fairies, and gave him a fairy charm to tie round the cow’s neck. And the cow is quite well now, you see. So, Brown, there was no necessity to throw Mother Wright into the water, because she said you put some of it into the milk. But,” she added, as the boat now touched the opposite bank, “shall I tell you, Brown, what the fairies said to me this morning?”

“Do, Miss.”

“It was this: If Brown’s cow yields milk without any water in it, and if water gets into it when the milk is sold, we, the fairies, will pinch Mr. Brown black and blue; and when Brown has his next fit of rheumatics he must not look to the fairies to charm it away.”

Herewith Lily dropped a silver groat into Brown’s hand, and sprang lightly ashore, followed by Kenelm.

“You have quite converted him, not only as to the existence, but as to the beneficial power of fairies,” said Kenelm.

“Ah,” answered Lily very gravely, “ah, but would it not be nice if there were fairies still? good fairies, and one could get at them? tell them all that troubles and puzzles us, and win from them charms against the witchcraft we practise on ourselves?”

“I doubt if it would be good for us to rely on such supernatural counsellors. Our own souls are so boundless that the more we explore them the more we shall find worlds spreading upon worlds into infinities; and among the worlds is Fairyland.” He added, inly to himself, “Am I not in Fairyland now?”

“Hush!” whispered Lily. “Don’t speak more yet awhile. I am thinking over what you have just said, and trying to understand it.”

Thus walking silently they gained the little summer-house which tradition dedicated to the memory of Izaak Walton. Lily entered it and seated herself; Kenelm took his place beside her. It was a small octagon building which, judging by its architecture, might have been built in the troubled reign of Charles I.; the walls plastered within were thickly covered with names and dates, and inscriptions in praise of angling, in tribute to Izaak, or with quotations from his books. On the opposite side they could see the lawn of Grasmere, with its great willows dipping into the water. The stillness of the place, with its associations of the angler’s still life, were in harmony with the quiet day, its breezeless air, and cloud-vested sky.

“You were to tell me your doubts in connection with your guardian, doubts if he were right in something which you left unexplained, which you could not yourself explain to him.”

Lily started as from thoughts alien to the subject thus reintroduced. “Yes, I cannot mention my doubts to him because they relate to me, and he is so good. I owe him so much that I could not bear to vex him by a word that might seem like reproach or complaint. You remember,” here she drew nearer to him; and with that ingenuous confiding look and movement which had, not unfrequently, enraptured him at the moment, and saddened him on reflection,—too ingenuous, too confiding, for the sentiment with which he yearned to inspire her,—she turned towards him her frank untimorous eyes, and laid her hand on his arm: “you remember that I said in the burial-ground how much I felt that one is constantly thinking too much of one’s self. That must be wrong. In talking to you only about myself I know I am wrong, but I cannot help it: I must do so. Do not think ill of me for it. You see I have not been brought up like other girls. Was my guardian right in that? Perhaps if he had insisted upon not letting me have my own wilful way, if he had made me read the books which Mr. and Mrs. Emlyn wanted to force on me, instead of the poems and fairy tales which he gave me, I should have had so much more to think of that I should have thought less of myself. You said that the dead were the past; one forgets one’s self when one thinks of the dead. If I had read more of the past, had more subjects of interest in the dead whose history it tells, surely I should be less shut up, as it were, in my own small, selfish heart? It is only very lately I have thought of this, only very lately that I have felt sorrow and shame in the thought that I am so ignorant of what other girls know, even little Clemmy. And I dare not say this to Lion when I see him next, lest he should blame himself, when he only meant to be kind, and used to say, ‘I don’t want Fairy to be learned, it is enough for me to think she is happy.’ And oh, I was so happy, till—till of late!”

“Because till of late you only knew yourself as a child. But, now that you feel the desire of knowledge, childhood is vanishing. Do not vex yourself. With the mind which nature has bestowed on you, such learning as may fit you to converse with those dreaded ‘grown-up folks’ will come to you very easily and quickly. You will acquire more in a month now than you would have acquired in a year when you were a child, and task-work was loathed, not courted. Your aunt is evidently well instructed, and if I might venture to talk to her about the choice of books—”

“No, don’t do that. Lion would not like it.”

“Your guardian would not like you to have the education common to other young ladies?”

“Lion forbade my aunt to teach me much that I rather wished to learn. She wanted to do so, but she has given it up at his wish. She only now teases me with those horrid French verbs, and that I know is a mere make-belief. Of course on Sunday it is different; then I must not read anything but the Bible and sermons. I don’t care so much for the sermons as I ought, but I could read the Bible all day, every week-day as well as Sunday; and it is from the Bible that I learn that I ought to think less about myself.”

Kenelm involuntarily pressed the little hand that lay so innocently on his arm.

“Do you know the difference between one kind of poetry and another?” asked Lily, abruptly.

“I am not sure. I ought to know when one kind is good and another kind is bad. But in that respect I find many people, especially professed critics, who prefer the poetry which I call bad to the poetry I think good.”

“The difference between one kind of poetry and another, supposing them both to be good,” said Lily, positively, and with an air of triumph, “is this,—I know, for Lion explained it to me,—in one kind of poetry the writer throws himself entirely out of his existence, he puts himself into other existences quite strange to his own. He may be a very good man, and he writes his best poetry about very wicked men: he would not hurt a fly, but he delights in describing murderers. But in the other kind of poetry the writer does not put himself into other existences, he expresses his own joys and sorrows, his own individual heart and mind. If he could not hurt a fly, he certainly could not make himself at home in the cruel heart of a murderer. There, Mr. Chillingly, that is the difference between one kind of poetry and another.”