THE room is duly obscured and the white sheet attached to the wall; the children are seated, hushed, and awe-stricken. And Kenelm is placed next to Lily.
The tritest things in our mortal experience are among the most mysterious. There is more mystery in the growth of a blade of grass than there is in the wizard’s mirror or the feats of a spirit medium. Most of us have known the attraction that draws one human being to another, and makes it so exquisite a happiness to sit quiet and mute by another’s side; which stills for the moment the busiest thoughts in our brain, the most turbulent desires in our heart, and renders us but conscious of a present ineffable bliss. Most of us have known that. But who has ever been satisfied with any metaphysical account of its why or wherefore? We can but say it is love, and love at that earlier section of its history which has not yet escaped from romance; but by what process that other person has become singled out of the whole universe to attain such special power over one is a problem that, though many have attempted to solve it, has never attained to solution. In the dim light of the room Kenelm could only distinguish the outlines of Lily’s delicate face, but at each new surprise in the show, the face intuitively turned to his, and once, when the terrible image of a sheeted ghost, pursuing a guilty man, passed along the wall, she drew closer to him in her childish fright, and by an involuntary innocent movement laid her hand on his. He detained it tenderly, but, alas! it was withdrawn the next moment; the ghost was succeeded by a couple of dancing dogs. And Lily’s ready laugh—partly at the dogs, partly at her own previous alarm—vexed Kenelm’s ear. He wished there had been a succession of ghosts, each more appalling than the last.
The entertainment was over, and after a slight refreshment of cakes and wine-and-water the party broke up; the children visitors went away attended by servant-maids who had come for them. Mrs. Cameron and Lily were to walk home on foot.
“It is a lovely night, Mrs. Cameron,” said Mr. Emlyn, “and I will attend you to your gate.”
“Permit me also,” said Kenelm.
“Ay,” said the vicar, “it is your own way to Cromwell Lodge.”
The path led them through the churchyard as the nearest approach to the brook-side. The moonbeams shimmered through the yew-trees and rested on the old tomb; playing, as it were, round the flowers which Lily’s hand had that day dropped upon its stone. She was walking beside Kenelm, the elder two a few paces in front.
“How silly I was,” said she, “to be so frightened at the false ghost! I don’t think a real one would frighten me, at least if seen here, in this loving moonlight, and on God’s ground!”
“Ghosts, were they permitted to appear except in a magic lantern, could not harm the innocent. And I wonder why the idea of their apparition should always have been associated with such phantasies of horror, especially by sinless children, who have the least reason to dread them.”
“Oh, that is true,” cried Lily; “but even when we are grown up there must be times in which we should so long to see a ghost, and feel what a comfort, what a joy it would be.”
“I understand you. If some one very dear to us had vanished from our life; if we felt the anguish of the separation so intensely as to efface the thought that life, as you said so well, ‘never dies;’ well, yes, then I can conceive that the mourner would yearn to have a glimpse of the vanished one, were it but to ask the sole and only question he could desire to put, ‘Art thou happy? May I hope that we shall meet again, never to part,—never?’”
Kenelm’s voice trembled as he spoke, tears stood in his eyes. A melancholy—vague, unaccountable, overpowering—passed across his heart, as the shadow of some dark-winged bird passes over a quiet stream.
“You have never yet felt this?” asked Lily doubtingly, in a soft voice, full of tender pity, stopping short and looking into his face.
“I? No. I have never yet lost one whom I so loved and so yearned to see again. I was but thinking that such losses may befall us all ere we too vanish out of sight.”
“Lily!” called forth Mrs. Cameron, halting at the gate of the burial-ground.
“Yes, auntie?”
“Mr. Emlyn wants to know how far you have got in ‘Numa Pompilius.’ Come and answer for yourself.”
“Oh, those tiresome grown-up people!” whispered Lily, petulantly, to Kenelm. “I do like Mr. Emlyn; he is one of the very best of men. But still he is grown up, and his ‘Numa Pompilius’ is so stupid.”
“My first French lesson-book. No, it is not stupid. Read on. It has hints of the prettiest fairy tale I know, and of the fairy in especial who bewitched my fancies as a boy.”
By this time they had gained the gate of the burial-ground.
“What fairy tale? what fairy?” asked Lily, speaking quickly.
“She was a fairy, though in heathen language she is called a nymph,—Egeria. She was the link between men and gods to him she loved; she belongs to the race of gods. True, she, too, may vanish, but she can never die.”
“Well, Miss Lily,” said the vicar, “and how far in the book I lent you,—‘Numa Pompilius.’”
“Ask me this day next week.”
“I will; but mind you are to translate as you go on. I must see the translation.”
“Very well. I will do my best,” answered Lily meekly. Lily now walked by the vicar’s side, and Kenelm by Mrs. Cameron’s, till they reached Grasmere.
“I will go on with you to the bridge, Mr. Chillingly,” said the vicar, when the ladies had disappeared within their garden. “We had little time to look over my books, and, by the by, I hope you at least took the Juvenal.”
“No, Mr. Emlyn; who can quit your house with an inclination for satire? I must come some morning and select a volume from those works which give pleasant views of life and bequeath favourable impressions of mankind. Your wife, with whom I have had an interesting conversation, upon the principles of aesthetical philosophy—”
“My wife! Charlotte! She knows nothing about aesthetical philosophy.”
“She calls it by another name, but she understands it well enough to illustrate the principles by example. She tells me that labour and duty are so taken up by you—
‘In den heitern Regionen
Wo die reinen Formen wohnen,’
that they become joy and beauty,—is it so?”
“I am sure that Charlotte never said anything half so poetical. But, in plain words, the days pass with me very happily. I should be ungrateful if I were not happy. Heaven has bestowed on me so many sources of love,—wife, children, books, and the calling which, when one quits one’s own threshold, carries love along with it into the world beyond; a small world in itself,—only a parish,—but then my calling links it with infinity.”
“I see; it is from the sources of love that you draw the supplies for happiness.”
“Surely; without love one may be good, but one could scarcely be happy. No one can dream of a heaven except as the abode of love. What writer is it who says, ‘How well the human heart was understood by him who first called God by the name of Father’?”
“I do not remember, but it is beautifully said. You evidently do not subscribe to the arguments in Decimus Roach’s ‘Approach to the Angels.’”
“Ah, Mr. Chillingly! your words teach me how lacerated a man’s happiness may be if he does not keep the claws of vanity closely pared. I actually feel a keen pang when you speak to me of that eloquent panegyric on celibacy, ignorant that the only thing I ever published which I fancied was not without esteem by intellectual readers is a Reply to ‘The Approach to the Angels,’—a youthful book, written in the first year of my marriage. But it obtained success: I have just revised the tenth edition of it.”
“That is the book I will select from your library. You will be pleased to hear that Mr. Roach, whom I saw at Oxford a few days ago, recants his opinions, and, at the age of fifty, is about to be married; he begs me to add, ‘not for his own personal satisfaction.’”
“Going to be married!—Decimus Roach! I thought my Reply would convince him at last.”
“I shall look to your Reply to remove some lingering doubts in my own mind.”
“Doubts in favour of celibacy?”
“Well, if not for laymen, perhaps for a priesthood.”
“The most forcible part of my Reply is on that head: read it attentively. I think that, of all sections of mankind, the clergy are those to whom, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the community, marriage should be most commended. Why, sir,” continued the vicar, warming up into oratorical enthusiasm, “are you not aware that there are no homes in England from which men who have served and adorned their country have issued forth in such prodigal numbers as those of the clergy of our Church? What other class can produce a list so crowded with eminent names as we can boast in the sons we have reared and sent forth into the world? How many statesmen, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, physicians, authors, men of science, have been the sons of us village pastors? Naturally: for with us they receive careful education; they acquire of necessity the simple tastes and disciplined habits which lead to industry and perseverance; and, for the most part, they carry with them throughout life a purer moral code, a more systematic reverence for things and thoughts religious, associated with their earliest images of affection and respect, than can be expected from the sons of laymen whose parents are wholly temporal and worldly. Sir, I maintain that this is a cogent argument, to be considered well by the nation, not only in favour of a married clergy,—for, on that score, a million of Roaches could not convert public opinion in this country,—but in favour of the Church, the Established Church, which has been so fertile a nursery of illustrious laymen; and I have often thought that one main and undetected cause of the lower tone of morality, public and private, of the greater corruption of manners, of the more prevalent scorn of religion which we see, for instance, in a country so civilized as France, is, that its clergy can train no sons to carry into the contests of earth the steadfast belief in accountability to Heaven.”
“I thank you with a full heart,” said Kenelm. “I shall ponder well over all that you have so earnestly said. I am already disposed to give up all lingering crotchets as to a bachelor clergy; but, as a layman, I fear that I shall never attain to the purified philanthropy of Mr. Decimus Roach, and, if ever I do marry, it will be very much for my personal satisfaction.”
Mr. Emlyn laughed good-humouredly, and, as they had now reached the bridge, shook hands with Kenelm, and walked homewards, along the brook-side and through the burial-ground, with the alert step and the uplifted head of a man who has joy in life and admits of no fear in death.
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