"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 embarra.s.sed, 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 n.o.bly, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 b.u.t.terfly. 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 G.o.d 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."