But should you be as kind to the presumptuous man as you were to the bashful boy, and say, “Realized be the dream, fulfilled be the object of your life! take from me as her next of kin, the last descendant of your benefactor,” then I venture to address to you this request. You are in the place of mother to your sister’s child, act for her as a keeper now, to prepare her mind and heart for the coming change in the relations between her and me. When I last saw her, six months ago, she was still so playfully infantine that it half seems to me I should be sinning against the reverence due to a child, if I said too abruptly, “You are woman, and I love you not as child but as woman.” And yet, time is not allowed to me for long, cautious, and gradual slide from the relationship of friend into that of lover. I now understand what the great master of my art once said to me, “A career is a destiny.” By one of those merchant princes who now at Manchester, as they did once at Genoa or Venice, reign alike over those two civilizers of the world which to dull eyes seem antagonistic, Art and Commerce, an offer is made to me for a picture on a subject which strikes his fancy: an offer so magnificently liberal that his commerce must command my art; and the nature of the subject compels me to seek the banks of the Rhine as soon as may be. I must have all the hues of the foliage in the meridian glories of summer. I can but stay at Grasmere a very few days; but before I leave I must know this, am I going to work for Lily or am I not? On the answer to that question depends all. If not to work for her, there would be no glory in the summer, no triumph in art to me: I refuse the offer. If she says, “Yes; it is for me you work,” then she becomes my destiny. She assures my career. Here I speak as an artist: nobody who is not an artist can guess how sovereign over even his moral being, at a certain critical epoch in his career of artist or his life of man, is the success or the failure of a single work. But I go on to speak as man. My love for Lily is such for the last six months that, though if she rejected me I should still serve art, still yearn for fame, it would be as an old man might do either. The youth of my life would be gone.
As man I say, all my thoughts, all my dreams of happiness, distinct from Art and fame, are summed up in the one question, “Is Lily to be my wife or not?”
Yours affectionately,
W. M.
Kenelm returned the letter without a word.
Enraged by his silence, Mrs. Cameron exclaimed, “Now, sir, what say you? You have scarcely known Lily five weeks. What is the feverish fancy of five weeks’ growth to the lifelong devotion of a man like this? Do you now dare to say, ‘I persist’?”
Kenelm waved his hand very quietly, as if to dismiss all conception of taunt and insult and said with his soft melancholy eyes fixed upon the working features of Lily’s aunt, “This man is more worthy of her than I. He prays you, in his letter, to prepare your niece for that change of relationship which he dreads too abruptly to break to her himself. Have you done so?”
“I have; the night I got the letter.”
“And—you hesitate; speak truthfully, I implore. And she—”
“She,” answered Mrs. Cameron, feeling herself involuntarily compelled to obey the voice of that prayer—“she seemed stunned at first, muttering, ‘This is a dream: it cannot be true,—cannot! I Lion’s wife—I—I! I, his destiny! In me his happiness!’ And then she laughed her pretty child’s laugh, and put her arms round my neck, and said, ‘You are jesting, aunty. He could not write thus!’ So I put that part of his letter under her eyes; and when she had convinced herself, her face became very grave, more like a woman’s face than I ever saw it; and after a pause she cried out passionately, ‘Can you think me—can I think myself—so bad, so ungrateful, as to doubt what I should answer, if Lion asked me whether I would willingly say or do anything that made him unhappy? If there be such a doubt in my heart, I would tear it out by the roots, heart and all!’ Oh, Mr. Chillingly! There would be no happiness for her with another, knowing that she had blighted the life of him to whom she owes so much, though she never will learn how much more she owes.” Kenelm not replying to this remark, Mrs. Cameron resumed, “I will be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Chillingly. I was not quite satisfied with Lily’s manner and looks the next morning, that is, yesterday. I did fear there might be some struggle in her mind in which there entered a thought of yourself. And when Walter, on his arrival here in the evening, spoke of you as one he had met before in his rural excursions, but whose name he only learned on parting at the bridge by Cromwell Lodge, I saw that Lily turned pale, and shortly afterwards went to her own room for the night. Fearing that any interview with you, though it would not alter her resolve, might lessen her happiness on the only choice she can and ought to adopt, I resolved to visit you this morning, and make that appeal to your reason and your heart which I have done now,—not, I am sure, in vain. Hush! I hear his voice!”
Melville entered the room, Lily leaning on his arm. The artist’s comely face was radiant with ineffable joyousness. Leaving Lily, he reached Kenelm’s side as with a single bound, shook him heartily by the hand, saying, “I find that you have already been a welcomed visitor in this house. Long may you be so, so say I, so (I answer for her) says my fair betrothed, to whom I need not present you.”