“AND how is your good man, Mrs. Haley?” said the vicar, who had now reached the spot on which the old woman stood,—with Lily’s fair face still bended down to her,—while Kenelm slowly followed him.
“Thank you kindly, sir, he is better; out of his bed now. The young lady has done him a power of good—”
“Hush!” said Lily, colouring. “Make haste home now; you must not keep him waiting for his dinner.”
The old woman again curtsied, and went off at a brisk pace.
“Do you know, Mr. Chillingly,” said Mr. Emlyn, “that Miss Mordaunt is the best doctor in the place? Though if she goes on making so many cures she will find the number of her patients rather burdensome.”
“It was only the other day,” said Lily, “that you scolded me for the best cure I have yet made.”
“I?—Oh! I remember; you led that silly child Madge to believe that there was a fairy charm in the arrowroot you sent her. Own you deserved a scolding there.”
“No, I did not. I dressed the arrowroot, and am I not Fairy? I have just got such a pretty note from Clemmy, Mr. Emlyn, asking me to come up this evening and see her new magic lantern. Will you tell her to expect me? And, mind, no scolding.”
“And all magic?” said Mr. Emlyn; “be it so.”
Lily and Kenelm had not hitherto exchanged a word. She had replied with a grave inclination of her head to his silent bow. But now she turned to him shyly and said, “I suppose you have been fishing all the morning?”
“No; the fishes hereabout are under the protection of a Fairy,—whom I dare not displease.”
Lily’s face brightened, and she extended her hand to him over the palings. “Good-day; I hear aunty’s voice: those dreadful French verbs!”
She disappeared among the shrubs, amid which they heard the thrill of her fresh young voice singing to herself.
“That child has a heart of gold,” said Mr. Emlyn, as the two men walked on. “I did not exaggerate when I said she was the best doctor in the place. I believe the poor really do believe that she is a fairy. Of course we send from the vicarage to our ailing parishioners who require it, food and wine; but it never seems to do them the good that her little dishes made by her own tiny hands do; and I don’t know if you noticed the basket that old woman took away,—Miss Lily taught Will Somers to make the prettiest little baskets; and she puts her jellies or other savouries into dainty porcelain gallipots nicely fitted into the baskets, which she trims with ribbons. It is the look of the thing that tempts the appetite of the invalids, and certainly the child may well be called Fairy at present; but I wish Mrs. Cameron would attend a little more strictly to her education. She can’t be a fairy forever.”
Kenelm sighed, but made no answer.
Mr. Emlyn then turned the conversation to erudite subjects, and so they came in sight of the town, when the vicar stopped and pointed towards the church, of which the spire rose a little to the left, with two aged yew-trees half shadowing the burial-ground, and in the rear a glimpse of the vicarage seen amid the shrubs of its garden ground.
“You will know your way now,” said the vicar; “excuse me if I quit you: I have a few visits to make; among others, to poor Haley, husband to the old woman you saw. I read to him a chapter in the Bible every day; yet still I fancy that he believes in fairy charms.”
“Better believe too much, than too little,” said Kenelm; and he turned aside into the village and spent half-an-hour with Will, looking at the pretty baskets Lily had taught Will to make. Then, as he went slowly homeward, he turned aside into the churchyard.
The church, built in the thirteenth century, was not large, but it probably sufficed for its congregation, since it betrayed no signs of modern addition; restoration or repair it needed not. The centuries had but mellowed the tints of its solid walls, as little injured by the huge ivy stems that shot forth their aspiring leaves to the very summit of the stately tower as by the slender roses which had been trained to climb up a foot or so of the massive buttresses. The site of the burial-ground was unusually picturesque: sheltered towards the north by a rising ground clothed with woods, sloping down at the south towards the glebe pasture-grounds through which ran the brooklet, sufficiently near for its brawling gurgle to be heard on a still day. Kenelm sat himself on an antique tomb, which was evidently appropriated to some one of higher than common rank in bygone days, but on which the sculpture was wholly obliterated.
The stillness and solitude of the place had their charms for his meditative temperament; and he remained there long, forgetful of time, and scarcely hearing the boom of the clock that warned him of its lapse.
When suddenly, a shadow—the shadow of a human form—fell on the grass on which his eyes dreamily rested. He looked up with a start, and beheld Lily standing before him mute and still. Her image was so present in his thoughts at the moment that he felt a thrill of awe, as if the thoughts had conjured up her apparition. She was the first to speak.
“You here, too?” she said very softly, almost whisperingly. “Too!” echoed Kenelm, rising; “too! ‘Tis no wonder that I, a stranger to the place, should find my steps attracted towards its most venerable building. Even the most careless traveller, halting at some remote abodes of the living, turns aside to gaze on the burial-ground of the dead. But my surprise is that you, Miss Mordaunt, should be attracted towards the same spot.”
“It is my favourite spot,” said Lily, “and always has been. I have sat many an hour on that tombstone. It is strange to think that no one knows who sleeps beneath it. The ‘Guide Book to Moleswich,’ though it gives the history of the church from the reign in which it was first built, can only venture a guess that this tomb, the grandest and oldest in the burial-ground, is tenanted by some member of a family named Montfichet, that was once very powerful in the county, and has become extinct since the reign of Henry VI. But,” added Lily, “there is not a letter of the name Montfichet left. I found out more than any one else has done; I learned black-letter on purpose; look here,” and she pointed to a small spot in which the moss had been removed. “Do you see those figures? are they not XVIII? and look again, in what was once the line above the figures, ELE. It must have been an Eleanor, who died at the age of eighteen—”
“I rather think it more probable that the figures refer to the date of the death, 1318 perhaps; and so far as I can decipher black-letter, which is more in my father’s line than mine, I think it is AL, not EL, and that it seems as if there had been a letter between L and the second E, which is now effaced. The tomb itself is not likely to belong to any powerful family then resident at the place. Their monuments, according to usage, would have been within the church,—probably in their own mortuary chapel.”
“Don’t try to destroy my fancy,” said Lily, shaking her head; “you cannot succeed, I know her history too well. She was young, and some one loved her, and built over her the finest tomb he could afford; and see how long the epitaph must have been! how much it must have spoken in her praise and of his grief. And then he went his way, and the tomb was neglected, and her fate forgotten.”
“My dear Miss Mordaunt, this is indeed a wild romance to spin out of so slender a thread. But even if true, there is no reason to think that a life is forgotten, though a tomb be neglected.”
“Perhaps not,” said Lily, thoughtfully. “But when I am dead, if I can look down, I think it would please me to see my grave not neglected by those who had loved me once.”
She moved from him as she said this, and went to a little mound that seemed not long since raised; there was a simple cross at the head and a narrow border of flowers round it. Lily knelt beside the flowers and pulled out a stray weed. Then she rose, and said to Kenelm, who had followed, and now stood beside her,—
“She was the little grandchild of poor old Mrs. Hales. I could not cure her, though I tried hard: she was so fond of me, and died in my arms. No, let me not say ‘died,’—surely there is no such thing as dying. ‘Tis but a change of life,—
‘Less than the void between two waves of air,
The space between existence and a soul.’”
“Whose lines are those?” asked Kenelm.
“I don’t know; I learnt them from Lion. Don’t you believe them to be true?”
“Yes. But the truth does not render the thought of quitting this scene of life for another more pleasing to most of us. See how soft and gentle and bright is all that living summer land beyond; let us find subject for talk from that, not from the graveyard on which we stand.”
“But is there not a summer land fairer than that we see now; and which we do see, as in a dream, best when we take subjects of talk from the graveyard?” Without waiting for a reply, Lily went on. “I planted these flowers: Mr. Emlyn was angry with me; he said it was ‘Popish.’ But he had not the heart to have them taken up; I come here very often to see to them. Do you think it wrong? Poor little Nell! she was so fond of flowers. And the Eleanor in the great tomb, she too perhaps knew some one who called her Nell; but there are no flowers round her tomb. Poor Eleanor!”
She took the nosegay she wore on her bosom, and as she repassed the tomb laid it on the mouldering stone.
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