He saw Mossgray change his position; he saw Helen rise, and with some evident shyness take the old man’s offered arm. They came towards him; the stern banker was conscious of some excitement. He changed his position, cleared his throat, and twisted up in his hands a roll of engravings which lay on a small table beside him, to their entire destruction, and the secret delight of his watching wife.
“I have brought Miss Buchanan to see our picture,” said the old man. “Mrs Oswald, has Lilias suffered you to see the portrait, for which I must borrow my young friend’s pleasant name—have you seen the Lily of Mossgray?”
The banker’s eyes were fascinated to the life-like nervous figure which stood so near him. The swift, instantaneous movements—the look which read the remainder of Mossgray’s words before his sentence was half spoken—the moving of the lip, which seemed to repeat them as if in unconscious impatience of their tardiness. She was not like her father; he could see, even in this glance—and with something of “the stern joy which foemen feel,” he perceived it—that the irritation which killed poor Walter Buchanan would have been but a spur to this elastic nature; and even Mr Oswald, strongly as he held by all the proprieties, could not but smile to think of the common-place people round him, “looking down” upon Helen.
“I have seen no Lily at Mossgray but one,” said Mrs Oswald, “and was just venturing to reprove her for retaining her paleness so long. Helen, I wish we could borrow some of your elasticity for Miss Maxwell.”
“That so Helen might withdraw from me the name she has given,” said Lilias, smiling; “and Mossgray forget that I am like his favourite flower; no, no, that will not do; but the picture—I did not think any one would be interested in the picture: and Helen has seen it, Mossgray?”
“Helen only saw it in its earliest sketch,” said the old man. “Come, I must exhibit it.”
It was in a little room, which opened from the drawing-room, a very small place, looking like a recess of the larger apartment. Mossgray led his young companion in, followed by Mrs Oswald and Lilias. The banker made a few steps after them, but suddenly discovering that William watched him, he made a spasmodic halt at the door.
The little room was not brilliantly lighted, and the picture stood leaning against the wall. Lilias had begged that it should not be hung in its future place of honour, until after this evening. It was a very good and truthful portrait, with a pale pure light in its colouring in keeping with the subject. The scene was an antique turret-room in the oldest quarter of the house of Mossgray, which had been a chamber of dais when the old stock of the moss-trooping Graemes began to gather riches and to desire peace. There were carvings of venerable oak about it, and furniture of a very old date; the Laird had especially chosen this room as the background for the portrait of Lilias.
And Lilias herself looked out from the brown tints of this still life, with her serene looks and every-day apparel. The painter and his subject had, both of them, too much taste to choose the vulgar, full dress, sitting-for-a-portrait attitude. A certain visionary poetic grace and fitness were in all the adjuncts. The contemplative, pensive look, the serene pale face, the pure, calm, melancholy brow, were rendered with a graceful hand; and the old man named the picture well when he called it the Lily of Mossgray.
“But Hope would not have arranged it so,” said Helen, when she had sufficiently admired the portrait. “Hope would have made a group instead of that single spiritual face.”