“Perhaps because his verse is so smooth in its
beauty?”
“Probably. When one is very young one’s
taste is faulty; and if a poet is not faulty, we are
apt to think he wants vivacity and fire.”
“Thank you for your lucid explanation,”
answered Kenelm, adding musingly to himself, “I
am afraid I should yawn very often if I were married
to a Miss Virgil.”
THE house of Mr. Travers contained a considerable
collection of family portraits, few of them well painted,
but the Squire was evidently proud of such evidences
of ancestry. They not only occupied a considerable
space on the walls of the reception rooms, but swarmed
into the principal sleeping-chambers, and smiled or
frowned on the beholder from dark passages and remote
lobbies. One morning, Cecilia, on her way to
the china closet, found Kenelm gazing very intently
upon a female portrait consigned to one of those obscure
receptacles by which through a back staircase he gained
the only approach from the hall to his chamber.
“I don’t pretend to be a good judge of
paintings,” said Kenelm, as Cecilia paused beside
him; “but it strikes me that this picture is
very much better than most of those to which places
of honour are assigned in your collection. And
the face itself is so lovely that it would add an
embellishment to the princeliest galleries.”
“Yes,” said Cecilia, with a half-sigh.
“The face is lovely, and the portrait is considered
one of Lely’s rarest masterpieces. It used
to hang over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room.
My father had it placed here many years ago.”
“Perhaps because he discovered it was not a
family portrait?”
“On the contrary,—because it grieves
him to think it is a family portrait. Hush!
I hear his footstep: don’t speak of it
to him; don’t let him see you looking at it.
The subject is very painful to him.”
Here Cecilia vanished into the china closet and Kenelm
turned off to his own room.
What sin committed by the original in the time of
Charles II. but only discovered in the reign of Victoria
could have justified Leopold Travers in removing the
most pleasing portrait in the house from the honoured
place it had occupied, and banishing it to so obscure
a recess? Kenelm said no more on the subject,
and indeed an hour afterwards had dismissed it from
his thoughts. The next day he rode out with
Travers and Cecilia. Their way passed through
quiet shady lanes without any purposed direction,
when suddenly, at the spot where three of those lanes
met on an angle of common ground, a lonely gray tower,
in the midst of a wide space of grass-land which looked
as if it had once been a park, with huge boles of
pollarded oak dotting the space here and there, rose
before them.
