“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.”