Elsie left the house extremely bewildered, and with
a profound contempt for Mrs. Cameron’s knowledge
of what may happen to two young persons “brought
together.”
NOW, on that very day, and about the same hour in
which the conversation just recorded between Elsie
and Mrs. Cameron took place, Kenelm, in his solitary
noonday wanderings, entered the burial-ground in which
Lily had some short time before surprised him.
And there he found her, standing beside the flower
border which she had placed round the grave of the
child whom she had tended and nursed in vain.
The day was cloudless and sunless; one of those days
that so often instil a sentiment of melancholy into
the heart of an English summer.
“You come here too often, Miss Mordaunt,”
said Kenelm, very softly, as he approached.
Lily turned her face to him, without any start of
surprise, with no brightening change in its pensive
expression,—an expression rare to the mobile
play of her features.
“Not too often. I promised to come as
often as I could; and, as I told you before, I have
never broken a promise yet.”
Kenelm made no answer. Presently the girl turned
from the spot, and Kenelm followed her silently till
she halted before the old tombstone with its effaced
inscription.
“See,” she said, with a faint smile, “I
have put fresh flowers there. Since the day we
met in this churchyard, I have thought so much of
that tomb, so neglected, so forgotten, and—”
she paused a moment, and went on abruptly, “do
you not often find that you are much too—what
is the word? ah! too egotistical, considering and pondering
and dreaming greatly too much about yourself?”
“Yes, you are right there; though, till you
so accused me, my conscience did not detect it.”
“And don’t you find that you escape from
being so haunted by the thought of yourself, when
you think of the dead? they can never have any share
in your existence here. When you say,
’I shall do this or that to-day;’ when
you dream, ‘I may be this or that to-morrow,’
you are thinking and dreaming, all by yourself, for
yourself. But you are out of yourself, beyond
yourself, when you think and dream of the dead, who
can have nothing to do with your to-day or your to-morrow.”
As we all know, Kenelm Chillingly made it one of the
rules of his life never to be taken by surprise.
But when the speech I have written down came from
the lips of that tamer of butterflies, he was so startled
that all it occurred to him to say, after a long pause,
was,—
“The dead are the past; and with the past rests
all in the present or the future that can take us
out of our natural selves. The past decides
our present. By the past we divine our future.
History, poetry, science, the welfare of states,
the advancement of individuals, are all connected
with tombstones of which inscriptions are effaced.
You are right to honour the mouldered tombstones with
fresh flowers. It is only in the companionship
of the dead that one ceases to be an egotist.”
