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!"