Here Cecilia rose and said in a low voice, “It
is getting late. We must go homeward.”
They descended the green eminence slowly, and at first
in silence. The bats, emerging from the ivied
ruins they left behind, flitted and skimmed before
them, chasing the insects of the night. A moth,
escaping from its pursuer, alighted on Cecilia’s
breast, as if for refuge.
“The bats are practical,” said Kenelm;
“they are hungry, and their motive power to-night
is strong. Their interest is in the insects they
chase. They have no interest in the stars; but
the stars lure the moth.”
Cecilia drew her slight scarf over the moth, so that
it might not fly off and become a prey to the bats.
“Yet,” said she, “the moth is practical
too.”
“Ay, just now, since it has found an asylum
from the danger that threatened it in its course towards
the stars.”
Cecilia felt the beating of her heart, upon which
lay the moth concealed. Did she think that a
deeper and more tender meaning than they outwardly
expressed was couched in these words? If so, she
erred. They now neared the garden gate, and Kenelm
paused as he opened it. “See,” he
said, “the moon has just risen over those dark
firs, making the still night stiller. Is it not
strange that we mortals, placed amid perpetual agitation
and tumult and strife, as if our natural element,
conceive a sense of holiness in the images antagonistic
to our real life; I mean in images of repose?
I feel at the moment as if I suddenly were made better,
now that heaven and earth have suddenly become yet
more tranquil. I am now conscious of a purer
and sweeter moral than either I or you drew from the
insect you have sheltered. I must come to the
poets to express it,—
“’The desire of the moth for the
star,
Of the night for the morrow;
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.’
“Oh, that something afar! that something afar!
never to be reached on this earth,—never,
never!”
There was such a wail in that cry from the man’s
heart that Cecilia could not resist the impulse of
a divine compassion. She laid her hand on his,
and looked on the dark wildness of his upward face
with eyes that Heaven meant to be wells of comfort
to grieving man. At the light touch of that hand
Kenelm started, looked down, and met those soothing
eyes.
“I am happy to tell you that I have saved my
Durham,” cried out Mr. Travers from the other
side of the gate.
AS Kenelm that night retired to his own room, he paused
on the landing-place opposite to the portrait which
Mr. Travers had consigned to that desolate exile.
This daughter of a race dishonoured in its extinction
might well have been the glory of the house she had
entered as a bride. The countenance was singularly
beautiful, and of a character of beauty eminently
patrician; there was in its expression a gentleness
and modesty not often found in the female portraits
of Sir Peter Lely, and in the eyes and in the smile
a wonderful aspect of innocent happiness.
