"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, a.s.serting 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 b.u.t.terflies; 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.
Pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.ses, the germs of strength, fertility, and beauty, than can a reckless wind or a vagrant bird, which, where it pa.s.ses, 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 a.s.sociation, 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ated. 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 gla.s.s 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."