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Kenelm Chillingly, Book 6.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Kenelm Chillingly, Book 6.




Kenelm reseated himself.

"Is she a child? I don't think she is actually a child."

"Not in years; she is between seventeen and eighteen: but my husband
says that she is too childish to talk to, and always tells me to take
her off his hands; he would rather talk with Mrs. Cameron."

"Indeed!"

"Still I find something in her."

"Indeed!"

"Not exactly childish, nor quite womanish."

"What then?"

"I can't exactly define. But you know what Mr. Melville and Mrs.
Cameron call her as a pet name?"

"No."

"Fairy! Fairies have no age; fairy is neither child nor woman."

"Fairy. She is called fairy by those who know her best? Fairy!"

"And she believes in fairies."

"Does she?--so do I. Pardon me, I must be off. The day after
to-morrow,--six o'clock."

"Wait one moment," said Elsie, going to her writing-table. "Since you
pass Grasmere on your way home, will you kindly leave this note?"

"I thought Grasmere was a lake in the north?"

"Yes; but Mr. Melville chose to call the cottage by the name of the
lake. I think the first picture he ever sold was a view of
Wordsworth's house there. Here is my note to ask Mrs. Cameron to meet
you; but if you object to be my messenger--"

"Object! my dear Mrs. Braefield. As you say, I pass close by the
cottage."



CHAPTER IV.

KENELM went with somewhat rapid pace from Mrs. Braefield's to the shop
in the High Street kept by Will Somers. Jessie was behind the
counter, which was thronged with customers. Kenelm gave her a brief
direction about his portmanteau, and then passed into the back
parlour, where her husband was employed on his baskets,--with the
baby's cradle in the corner, and its grandmother rocking it
mechanically, as she read a wonderful missionary tract full of tales
of miraculous conversions: into what sort of Christians we will not
pause to inquire.

"And so you are happy, Will?" said Kenelm, seating himself between the
basket-maker and the infant; the dear old mother beside him, reading
the tract which linked her dreams of life eternal with life just
opening in the cradle that she rocked. He not happy! How he pitied
the man who could ask such a question.

"Happy, sir! I should think so, indeed. There is not a night on
which Jessie and I, and mother too, do not pray that some day or other
you may be as happy. By and by the baby will learn to pray 'God bless
papa, and mamma, grandmamma, and Mr. Chillingly.'"

"There is some one else much more deserving of prayers than I, though
needing them less. You will know some day: pass it by now. To return
to the point: you are happy; if I asked why, would you not say,
'Because I have married the girl I love, and have never repented'?"

"Well, sir, that is about it; though, begging your pardon, I think it
could be put more prettily somehow."

"You are right there. But perhaps love and happiness never yet found
any words that could fitly express them. Good-bye, for the present."

Ah! if it were as mere materialists, or as many middle-aged or elderly
folks, who, if materialists, are so without knowing it, unreflectingly
say, "The main element of happiness is bodily or animal health and
strength," that question which Chillingly put would appear a very
unmeaning or a very insulting one addressed to a pale cripple, who
however improved of late in health, would still be sickly and ailing
all his life,--put, too, by a man of the rarest conformation of
physical powers that nature can adapt to physical enjoyment,--a man
who, since the age in which memory commences, had never known what it
was to be unwell, who could scarcely understand you if you talked of a
finger-ache, and whom those refinements of mental culture which
multiply the delights of the senses had endowed with the most
exquisite conceptions of such happiness as mere nature and its
instincts can give! But Will did not think the question unmeaning or
insulting. He, the poor cripple, felt a vast superiority on the scale
of joyous being over the young Hercules, well born, cultured, and
wealthy, who could know so little of happiness as to ask the crippled
basket-maker if he were happy.--he, blessed husband and father!



CHAPTER V.

LILY was seated on the grass under a chestnut-tree on the lawn. A
white cat, not long emerged from kittenhood, curled itself by her
side. On her lap was an open volume, which she was reading with the
greatest delight.

Mrs. Cameron came from the house, looked round, perceived the girl,
and approached; and either she moved so gently, or Lily was so
absorbed in the book, that the latter was not aware of her presence
till she felt a light hand on her shoulder, and, looking up,
recognized her aunt's gentle face.

"Ah! Fairy, Fairy, that silly book, when you ought to be at your
French verbs. What will your guardian say when he comes and finds you
have so wasted time?"

"He will say that fairies never waste their time; and he will scold
you for saying so." Therewith Lily threw down the book, sprang to her
feet, wound her arm round Mrs. Cameron's neck, and kissed her fondly.
"There! is that wasting time? I love you so, aunty. In a day like
this I think I love everybody and everything!" As she said this, she
drew up her lithe form, looked into the blue sky, and with parted lips
seemed to drink in air and sunshine. Then she woke up the dozing cat,
and began chasing it round the lawn.

Mrs. Cameron stood still, regarding her with moistened eyes. Just at
that moment Kenelm entered through the garden gate. He, too, stood
still, his eyes fixed on the undulating movements of Fairy's exquisite
form. She had arrested her favourite, and was now at play with it,
shaking off her straw hat, and drawing the ribbon attached to it
tantalizingly along the smooth grass. Her rich hair, thus released
and dishevelled by the exercise, fell partly over her face in wavy
ringlets; and her musical laugh and words of sportive endearment
sounded on Kenelm's ear more joyously than the thrill of the skylark,
more sweetly than the coo of the ring-dove.

He approached towards Mrs. Cameron. Lily turned suddenly and saw him.
Instinctively she smoothed back her loosened tresses, replaced the
straw hat, and came up demurely to his side just as he had accosted
her aunt.

"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 viear, 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?"

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