THE same evening, after dinner (during that lovely summer month they dined at Neesdale Park at an unfashionably early hour), Kenelm, in company with Travers and Cecilia, ascended a gentle eminence at the back of the gardens, on which there were some picturesque ivy-grown ruins of an ancient priory, and commanding the best view of a glorious sunset and a subject landscape of vale and wood, rivulet and distant hills.
“Is the delight in scenery,” said Kenelm, “really an acquired gift, as some philosophers tell us? Is it true that young children and rude savages do not feel it; that the eye must be educated to comprehend its charm, and that the eye can be only educated through the mind?”
“I should think your philosophers are right,” said Travers. “When I was a schoolboy, I thought no scenery was like the flat of a cricket ground; when I hunted at Melton, I thought that unpicturesque country more beautiful than Devonshire. It is only of late years that I feel a sensible pleasure in scenery for its own sake, apart from associations of custom or the uses to which we apply them.”
“And what say you, Miss Travers?”
“I scarcely know what to say,” answered Cecilia, musingly. “I can remember no time in my childhood when I did not feel delight in that which seemed to me beautiful in scenery, but I suspect that I vaguely distinguished one kind of beauty from another. A common field with daisies and buttercups was beautiful to me then, and I doubt if I saw anything more beautiful in extensive landscapes.”
“True,” said Kenelm: “it is not in early childhood that we carry the sight into distance: as is the mind so is the eye; in early childhood the mind revels in the present, and the eye rejoices most in the things nearest to it. I don’t think in childhood that we—
“‘Watched with wistful eyes the setting sun.’”
“Ah! what a world of thought in that word ‘wistful’!” murmured Cecilia, as her gaze riveted itself on the western heavens, towards which Kenelm had pointed as he spoke, where the enlarging orb rested half its disk on the rim of the horizon.
She had seated herself on a fragment of the ruin, backed by the hollows of a broken arch. The last rays of the sun lingered on her young face, and then lost themselves in the gloom of the arch behind. There was a silence for some minutes, during which the sun had sunk. Rosy clouds in thin flakes still floated, momently waning: and the eve-star stole forth steadfast, bright, and lonely,—nay, lonely not now; that sentinel has aroused a host.
Said a voice, “No sign of rain yet, Squire. What will become of the turnips?”
“Real life again! Who can escape it?” muttered Kenelm, as his eye rested on the burly figure of the Squire’s bailiff.
“Ha! North,” said Travers, “what brings you here? No bad news, I hope?”
“Indeed, yes, Squire. The Durham bull—”
“The Durham bull! What of him? You frighten me.”
“Taken bad. Colic.”
“Excuse me, Chillingly,” cried Travers; “I must be off. A most valuable animal, and no one I can trust to doctor him but myself.”
“That’s true enough,” said the bailiff, admiringly. “There’s not a veterinary in the county like the Squire.”
Travers was already gone, and the panting bailiff had hard work to catch him up.
Kenelm seated himself beside Cecilia on the ruined fragment.
“How I envy your father!” said he.
“Why just at this moment,—because he knows how to doctor the bull?” said Cecilia, with a sweet low laugh.
“Well, that is something to envy. It is a pleasure to relieve from pain any of God’s creatures,—even a Durham bull.”
“Indeed, yes. I am justly rebuked.”
“On the contrary you are to be justly praised. Your question suggested to me an amiable sentiment in place of the selfish one which was uppermost in my thoughts. I envied your father because he creates for himself so many objects of interest; because while he can appreciate the mere sensuous enjoyment of a landscape and a sunset, he can find mental excitement in turnip crops and bulls. Happy, Miss Travers, is the Practical Man.”
“When my dear father was as young as you, Mr. Chillingly, I am sure that he had no more interest in turnips and bulls than you have. I do not doubt that some day you will be as practical as he is in that respect.”
“Do you think so—sincerely?”
Cecilia made no answer.
Kenelm repeated the question.
“Sincerely, then, I do not know whether you will take interest in precisely the same things that interest my father; but there are other things than turnips and cattle which belong to what you call ‘practical life,’ and in these you will take interest, as you took in the fortunes of Will Somers and Jessie Wiles.”
“That was no practical interest. I got nothing by it. But even if that interest were practical,—I mean productive, as cattle and turnip crops are,—a succession of Somerses and Wileses is not to be hoped for. History never repeats itself.”
“May I answer you, though very humbly?”
“Miss Travers, the wisest man that ever existed never was wise enough to know woman; but I think most men ordinarily wise will agree in this, that woman is by no means a humble creature, and that when she says she ‘answers very humbly,’ she does not mean what she says. Permit me to entreat you to answer very loftily.”
Cecilia laughed and blushed. The laugh was musical; the blush was—what? Let any man, seated beside a girl like Cecilia at starry twilight, find the right epithet for that blush. I pass it by epithetless. But she answered, firmly though sweetly,—
“Are there not things very practical, and affecting the happiness, not of one or two individuals, but of innumerable thousands, in which a man like Mr. Chillingly cannot fail to feel interest, long before he is my father’s age?”
“Forgive me: you do not answer; you question. I imitate you, and ask what are those things as applicable to a man like Mr. Chillingly?”
Cecilia gathered herself up, as with the desire to express a great deal in short substance, and then said,—
“In the expression of thought, literature; in the conduct of action, politics.”
Kenelm Chillingly stared, dumfounded. I suppose the greatest enthusiast for woman’s rights could not assert more reverentially than he did the cleverness of women; but among the things which the cleverness of woman did not achieve, he had always placed “laconics.” “No woman,” he was wont to say, “ever invented an axiom or a proverb.”
“Miss Travers,” he said at last, “before we proceed further, vouchsafe to tell me if that very terse reply of yours is spontaneous and original; or whether you have not borrowed it from some book which I have not chanced to read?”
Cecilia pondered honestly, and then said, “I don’t think it is from any book; but I owe so many of my thoughts to Mrs. Campion, and she lived so much among clever men, that—”
“I see it all, and accept your definition, no matter whence it came. You think I might become an author or a politician. Did you ever read an essay by a living author called ‘Motive Power’?”
“No.”
“That essay is designed to intimate that without motive power a man, whatever his talents or his culture, does nothing practical. The mainsprings of motive power are Want and Ambition. They are absent from my mechanism. By the accident of birth I do not require bread and cheese; by the accident of temperament and of philosophical culture I care nothing about praise or blame. But without want of bread and cheese, and with a most stolid indifference to praise and blame, do you honestly think that a man will do anything practical in literature or politics? Ask Mrs. Campion.”
“I will not ask her. Is the sense of duty nothing?”
“Alas! we interpret duty so variously. Of mere duty, as we commonly understand the word, I do not think I shall fail more than other men. But for the fair development of all the good that is in us, do you believe that we should adopt some line of conduct against which our whole heart rebels? Can you say to the clerk, ‘Be a poet’? Can you say to the poet, ‘Be a clerk’? It is no more to the happiness of a man’s being to order him to take to one career when his whole heart is set on another, than it is to order him to marry one woman when it is to another woman that his heart will turn.”
Cecilia here winced and looked away. Kenelm had more tact than most men of his age,—that is, a keener perception of subjects to avoid; but then Kenelm had a wretched habit of forgetting the person he talked to and talking to himself. Utterly oblivious of George Belvoir, he was talking to himself now. Not then observing the effect his mal-a-propos dogma had produced on his listener, he went on, “Happiness is a word very lightly used. It may mean little; it may mean much. By the word happiness I would signify, not the momentary joy of a child who gets a plaything, but the lasting harmony between our inclinations and our objects; and without that harmony we are a discord to ourselves, we are incompletions, we are failures. Yet there are plenty of advisers who say to us, ‘It is a duty to be a discord.’ I deny it.”
Here Cecilia rose and said in a low voice, “It is getting late. We must go homeward.”
They descended the green eminence slowly, and at first in silence. The bats, emerging from the ivied ruins they left behind, flitted and skimmed before them, chasing the insects of the night. A moth, escaping from its pursuer, alighted on Cecilia’s breast, as if for refuge.
“The bats are practical,” said Kenelm; “they are hungry, and their motive power to-night is strong. Their interest is in the insects they chase. They have no interest in the stars; but the stars lure the moth.”
Cecilia drew her slight scarf over the moth, so that it might not fly off and become a prey to the bats. “Yet,” said she, “the moth is practical too.”
“Ay, just now, since it has found an asylum from the danger that threatened it in its course towards the stars.”
Cecilia felt the beating of her heart, upon which lay the moth concealed. Did she think that a deeper and more tender meaning than they outwardly expressed was couched in these words? If so, she erred. They now neared the garden gate, and Kenelm paused as he opened it. “See,” he said, “the moon has just risen over those dark firs, making the still night stiller. Is it not strange that we mortals, placed amid perpetual agitation and tumult and strife, as if our natural element, conceive a sense of holiness in the images antagonistic to our real life; I mean in images of repose? I feel at the moment as if I suddenly were made better, now that heaven and earth have suddenly become yet more tranquil. I am now conscious of a purer and sweeter moral than either I or you drew from the insect you have sheltered. I must come to the poets to express it,—
“‘The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow; The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.’
“Oh, that something afar! that something afar! never to be reached on this earth,—never, never!”
There was such a wail in that cry from the man’s heart that Cecilia could not resist the impulse of a divine compassion. She laid her hand on his, and looked on the dark wildness of his upward face with eyes that Heaven meant to be wells of comfort to grieving man. At the light touch of that hand Kenelm started, looked down, and met those soothing eyes.
“I am happy to tell you that I have saved my Durham,” cried out Mr. Travers from the other side of the gate.
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