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 vicar, 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?”
“She is his daughter. Did you ever know Leopold Travers?”
“I have heard him mentioned by friends of mine long ago,—long ago,” replied Mrs. Cameron with a sort of weary languor, not unwonted, in her voice and manner; and then, as if dismissing the bygone reminiscence from her thoughts, changed the subject.
“Lily tells me, Mr. Chillingly, that you said you were staying at Mr. Jones’s, Cromwell Lodge. I hope you are made comfortable there.”
“Very. The situation is singularly pleasant.”
“Yes, it is considered the prettiest spot on the brook-side, and used to be a favourite resort for anglers; but the trout, I believe, are growing scarce; at least, now that the fishing in the Thames is improved, poor Mr. Jones complains that his old lodgers desert him. Of course you took the rooms for the sake of the fishing. I hope the sport may be better than it is said to be.”
“It is of little consequence to me: I do not care much about fishing; and since Miss Mordaunt calls the book which first enticed me to take to it ‘a cruel one,’ I feel as if the trout had become as sacred as crocodiles were to the ancient Egyptians.”
“Lily is a foolish child on such matters. She cannot bear the thought of giving pain to any dumb creature; and just before our garden there are a few trout which she has tamed. They feed out of her hand; she is always afraid they will wander away and get caught.”
“But Mr. Melville is an angler?”
“Several years ago he would sometimes pretend to fish, but I believe it was rather an excuse for lying on the grass and reading ‘the cruel book,’ or perhaps, rather, for sketching. But now he is seldom here till autumn, when it grows too cold for such amusement.”
Here Sir Thomas’s voice was so loudly raised that it stopped the conversation between Kenelm and Mrs. Cameron. He had got into some question of politics on which he and the vicar did not agree, and the discussion threatened to become warm, when Mrs. Braefield, with a woman’s true tact, broached a new topic, in which Sir Thomas was immediately interested, relating to the construction of a conservatory for orchids that he meditated adding to his country-house, and in which frequent appeal was made to Mrs. Cameron, who was considered an accomplished florist, and who seemed at some time or other in her life to have acquired a very intimate acquaintance with the costly family of orchids.
When the ladies retired Kenelm found himself seated next to Mr. Emlyn, who astounded him by a complimentary quotation from one of his own Latin prize poems at the university, hoped he would make some stay at Moleswich, told him of the principal places in the neighbourhood worth visiting, and offered him the run of his library, which he flattered himself was rather rich, both in the best editions of Greek and Latin classics and in early English literature. Kenelm was much pleased with the scholarly vicar, especially when Mr. Emlyn began to speak about Mrs. Cameron and Lily. Of the first he said, “She is one of those women in whom quiet is so predominant that it is long before one can know what undercurrents of good feeling flow beneath the unruffled surface. I wish, however, she was a little more active in the management and education of her niece,—a girl in whom I feel a very anxious interest, and whom I doubt if Mrs. Cameron understands. Perhaps, however, only a poet, and a very peculiar sort of poet, can understand her: Lily Mordaunt is herself a poem.”
“I like your definition of her,” said Kenelm. “There is certainly something about her which differs much from the prose of common life.”
“You probably know Wordsworth’s lines:
“‘... and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty, born of murmuring sound, Shall pass into her face.’
“They are lines that many critics have found unintelligible; but Lily seems like the living key to them.”
Kenelm’s dark face lighted up, but he made no answer.
“Only,” continued Mr. Emlyn, “how a girl of that sort, left wholly to herself, untrained, undisciplined, is to grow up into the practical uses of womanhood, is a question that perplexes and saddens me.”
“Any more wine?” asked the host, closing a conversation on commercial matters with Sir Thomas. “No?—shall we join the ladies?”
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