"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day; please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of; I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."
She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or crooked.
The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another. Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a mist-blue cloak of hyacinths—what could be prettier?—but now it has laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest, fancifullest of all our singers?
"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,That led through this garden along and across,—Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,—"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bellsAs fair as the fabulous asphodels,And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."
They describe Glan-yr-Afon wood much better than I can. It is a great green cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and where the rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.
"Had we not better walk arm in arm?" asks Esther, sardonically, as they march along in silence. "I believe it is the correct thing on these occasions; at least Gwen and her sweetheart always do on Sunday evenings."
He turns towards her; an expression of surprised delight upspringing into his eyes.
"Do you meanreally?"
She is mollified, despite herself, by the simple joy beaming in his poor, good-looking face—face that would be more than good-looking if only some great grief would give it fuller expression; if only a few months of late hours and mundane dissipations would wear off its look of exuberant bucolic healthiness.
"No, no; I was only joking."
"Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seat that stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliaged than its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeam pierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up so pleasantly from below."
Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is too secluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin and Dowsabel might sit fluting and weaving
".... belts of straw and ivy buds,"
and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.
"I don't fancy it," she says, beginning to walk on; "it looksearwiggy."
"Only the other day you said it was quite a lovers' seat!" he exclaims, in surprise.
"Exactly; and for that very reason I prefer waiting till I am more qualified to sit upon it."
By-and-by Miss Craven finds a position that suits her better; one nearer the edge of the wood, in full view of the Naullan road, along which market women, coal carts, stray limping tramps, go passing, and where loverly blandishments are out of the question.
The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rock fragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at the birch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mosses and little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it is such a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the boulders that lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with a coaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrels brought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shells are lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them again in idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through the birch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther's gown and Robert's recumbent figure, as he lies in the repose of warmth, absolute idleness, absolute content at her feet. An hour and a half, two hours to be spent in trying to like Robert! Faugh! She yawns.
"That is the seventh time you have yawned since we have been here," remarks her lover, a little reproachfully.
"I dare say; and if you wait five minutes longer, you will probably be able to tell me that it is the seventy-seventh time."
"You did not yawn while we were indoors."
"I had my work; what is a woman without her work? A dismounted dragoon—a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily, to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted as tedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me the other day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It is putting one's felicity on rather a low level, but I believe it is true."
"In the same way as no man can be good-tempered who is not fond of smoking," says Bob, starting a rival masculine proposition.
"I don't know anything at all about men," replies Esther, exhaustively. "No woman in the world can have a more limited acquaintance with the masculine gender than I have."
"You are young yet," says Brandon, consolingly.
"I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, her thoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is
"Wooed and married and a'"
before her sixteenth birthday.
"You are eight years younger than I am."
"Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly uninteresting to her.
"Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us."
"Why?"
"Because you are the more likely to outlive me."
She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I shallcertainlyoutlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a tortoise, to a hundred."
"But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly.
She shrugs her shoulders. "Cela dépend. I shall live here as long as Jack remains unmarried."
"That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "A farmer requires a wife more than most men."
"More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile.
He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makes ineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has he never yet shown even apreferencefor any one?" he asks, feeling a more personal interest than he had ever before experienced in Jack's amours and amourettes.
"Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one, nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal too poor to be in any demand."
"I am glad of it."
"You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one ever showed the slightest inclination to be your rival."
"So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody else wants you."
"Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, I suppose?"
A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides by along the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orange handkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm.
Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate, fortunate old woman! she has no lover!
"I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly, flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at her companion.
"Why should not I? Iamhappy."
"But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries, emphatically.
"I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seem pretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining."
"You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," she says drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now."
At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in this speech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks down with a snubbed expression.
"I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says, humbly, "because I have always been such a lucky fellow; my profession suits me down to the ground; I have never had an ache or a pain in all my life, and I have the best woman in England for my mother."
A body free from disease, a commission in a marching regiment, a methodistical,exigeanteold mother. These would seem but a poorchétiflist of subjects of thankfulness to Fortune's curled and perfumed darlings.
"Your acquaintance amongst old ladies must be extensive to justify you in that last statement," says Esther, with a smile.
"The best woman I know, then."
"It is a pity that when you went, like Coelebs, in search of a wife, you did not try to find some one more like her," rejoins Esther, piqued and surprised, despite her utter indifference to his opinion of her, at finding that, notwithstanding the imbecile pitch of love for herself at which she believes him to have arrived, he can still set a dowdy, havering, brown old woman on a pedestal, above even that which she, with all the radiant red and white beauty of which she is so calmly aware, all the triumph of her seventeen sweet summers, occupies in his heart.
"You are young and she is old," says Robert, encouragingly; "I don't see why you should not be like her when you are her age."
"I think not; I hope not," says Miss Craven, coolly, strangling her twenty-fifth yawn. "Without meaning any insult to Mrs. Brandon, I should be sorry to think that, at any period of my life, I should be a mere reproduction of some one else."
Another long pause. (Have we been here an hour yet?) The brown bees go humming, droning, lumbering about, velvet-coated: a high-shouldered grasshopper chirps shrilly: the dim air vibrates.
"Just listen to that cricket!" says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something. "How noisy he is! I read in a book the other day that if a man's voice were as strong in proportion to his size as a locust's, he could be heard from here to St. Petersburg."
"Could he?" says Bob, absently, not much interested in his betrothed's curious little piece of entomological information; "how unpleasant!" Then dragging himself along the grass and the flowers still closer to her feet, he says, "Esther, mother hopes to see a great deal more of you now than she has done hitherto."
"Does she? she is very good, I am sure," answers Esther, formally, with a feeling of compunction at her utter inability to echo the wish.
"She bid me tell you that she hopes you will come in as often as you can of an evening. We are all sure to be at home then; the girls read aloud by turns, and mother thought that——"
"That it might improve my mind, and that it needs improving," interrupts Esther, smiling drily; "so it does. I quite agree with her; but not even for that object could I leave Jack of an evening; he is out all day long, and the evening is the only time when I have him to myself."
"You find plenty to say tohimalways, I suppose?" says Robert, with an involuntary sigh and slight stress upon the wordhim.
"Not a word, sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other in sociable silence."
"Howfond you are of that fellow!" says Robert, sighing again, and thinking, ruefully, what a long time it would be before any one would say to her, "Howfond you are of Bob Brandon!"
"He is the one thing upon earth that I could not do without!" she answers shortly, turning away her head.
There are some people that we love so intensely that we can hardly speak even of our own love for them without tears.
"I should be afraid to say that of any one," says Bob, bluntly, "for fear of being shown that Imustdo without them."
"What have I in all the world but him?" she cries, a passionate earnestness chasing the slow languor from her voice, all her soft face afire with eager tenderness; "neither kith nor kin; neither friends nor money. I am as destitute, in fact, though not in seeming, as that girl that passed just now, shuffling her bare feet along in the dust, and with three boxes of matches—her whole stock-in-trade—in her dirty hand. But for Jack," she continues, in a lighter strain, "you might at the present moment be carrying half a pound of tea or four penn'orth of snuff as a present to me in the Naullan almshouses."
Robert looks attentive, and says "Hem," which is a sort of "Selah" or "Higgaion," and does not express much beyond inarticulate interest.
"I often think that he is too good for this world," says the young girl, mournfully, picking an orchis leaf, and looking down absently on the capricious black splashes that freak its green surface.
Bob is a little embarrassed between his love of truth and his desire to coincide in opinion with his beloved.
Jack is not in the least like the little morbid boys and girls in his sister Bessy's books, who retire into corners in play-hours to read about hell-fire, to whom marbles and toffee and bull's-eyes are as dung, and who are inextricably entangled in his mind with the idea of "too good for this world." He evades the discussion of the alarming nature of young Craven's goodness by a judicious silence.
"I am such an expense to him," continues Esther, lugubriously, the corners of her mouth drooping like a child's about to cry—"what with clothes, and food, and altogether. Even though one does not eat very much every day, it comes to a great deal at the end of the year, does it not?"
"If you come to me, you would be no expense at all to him," Robert answers, stroking his great, broad, yellow beard (beard that will have to disappear before he rejoins his gallant corps in Bermuda), and looking very sentimental; yet not that either, for sentimental implies the existence of a little feeling, and the affectation of a great deal more.
"He would have to provide me with a trousseau and a wedding-cake, even in that case."
"I would excuse him both."
"Would you?" she says, jestingly; "I wouldn't; it has always seemed to me that the best part of holy matrimony is the avalanche of new clothes that attends being wed."
"You shall have any amount of new clothes."
"I should be an expense to you, then," she says, giving him a smile that is grateful and bright and cold, all in one, like a January morning. Cold as her smile is, it is a smile, and he is encouraged by it to refer to a subject nearer his heart than Jack Craven's excellences.
"If you cannot spare time to come to us of an evening, would you let me—might I—would you mind my joining you and Jack—now and then—for half an hour or so—if I should not be in the way?"
Her countenance falls, more visibly than she is herself perhaps aware of.
"Of course," she answers, in a constrained voice, "if you wish; we shall always be glad to see you, of course."
"I would not come often," says the poor young man wistfully; "once a week perhaps—so that we might get to know one another better; mother says——"
"Don't tell me any more of your mother's speeches to-day, or we shall have none left for to-morrow," interrupts Esther, with a sort of ironical playfulness, flapping about with her pocket-handkerchief at a squadron of young midges, and looking mild exasperation at the unlucky six-foot slave at her feet. Then she stretches out her hand, plucks a dandelion, or what was a dandelion a week ago, but is now a sphere of delicatest, fragilest, downspikes, and blows it like a child to see what o'clock it is. "One, two, three, four, five, six. Time to go home!" she says, flinging away the hollow stalk and springing up.
"It seems only five minutes since we came," says Robert, with a great sigh of good-bye, looking down at the long stretch of bruised grass that indicates his late resting-place.
"Do you think so?" exclaims Esther, opening her eyes very wide, and the most violent negative could not have expressed dissent more clearly.
So they pass home through the loudly vocal wood, and he parts from her under the porch. He had meant to squeeze her hand at parting; perhaps still bolder forms of adieu flitted before his mind's eye, but a certain expression in her face makes all such plans take to their heels. He looks as if he would come in if he were asked; but he is not asked, therefore, courage failing him, he departs. She stands in the shadow watching him, and thinks, "What bad boots! and is not one shoulder rather higher than the other?" It is not the least bit higher; no young fir is straighter than he; but when a thing belongs, or may possibly belong, to oneself, one waxes marvellous critical.
"Something new! something new!" cried the Athenians; and across two thousand years we catch up and echo their greedy cry. But why do we? We all know well enough that there is nothing new; there was not even in King Solomon's time—not even in all his treasure-house, nor among his seven hundred wives. What an advantage those ancients who saw the world's infancy had over us—over us, who have to content ourselves with the lees of the wine, which the few dropped ears scattered about the great reaped harvest field! Who would not fain have lived in the days when nothing had yet been said—when everything, consequently, remained to be said? Who could be trite then, in that blest epoch when platitudes were unborn, whenTupperwas an impossibility, and even the statement that two and two make four had something startlingly novel about it?Thena man's thoughts were his own, hisveryown, his own by the best of all rights—creation;nowthey are the bastard product of ten thousand buried men's dead ideas.
Original is a pleasant word, is it not?—fair and well-sounding; but it is like the sample figs at the top of the box: it represents nothing, or something infinitely smaller than itself behind and underneath it. Is it too much to say that it is impossible to find an original idea in any writer we wot of? You meet, perhaps, some day in a book a thought, an image that strikes you. You say, "This is this thinker's own; there is the stamp of this one individual mind upon it;" when lo! mayhap but a few hours later you are reading the thoughts of some elder scribe, one that has been dust nigh ten or twenty centuries back, and you find the same thought, half fledged or quarter fledged, only in the egg, perhaps—but still it is there. There is nothing new under the sun.
And if this is true of other subjects, how much truer of that most outworn, threadbare old theme, Love! The world has been spinning round six thousand years at the lowest, most exploded computation; in any thousand years there have been thirty or forty generations, and each unit in every one of those generations, if he has lived to man's estate, has surely loved after one fashion or another. Whosoever has done any worthy thing, whosoever has sent out his thoughts in writing or speech or action to the world, has felt the stirrings of this strange instinct; unconsciously it has moulded and permeated his deeds and his words: and yet, old as it is, we are not tired of it, any more than we are of the back-coming green of the spring, or the never-extinguished lamps of the stars.
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended;" at least well nigh ended. Jack and Esther are at breakfast: outside the scarlet geraniums are blazing away in the morning sun, trying their best to shine as brightly as he is doing, and the gnats are dancing round and round on the buoyant floor of their ball-room—the air. I wonder that that incessant valsing does not make them giddy. I am not sure that human beings, like the lions and tigers and uneasy black bears in the Zoological, look their best at feeding-time; but such as they are, here they are.
Esther in a chintz gown, sown all over with little red carnations as thickly as the firmament with heavenly bodies. She looks as fresh as a daisy—as an Englishwoman, to whom morningdéshabille, wrapper, slippers, undressed hair, are unknown Gallic abominations—and is eating porridge with a spoon. Jack reading his letters, which look all bills and circulars, after the fashion of men's correspondence; for what man made after the fashion of a man, would sit down to indite an epistle to another man, were it hisalter egounless he had something to say about a horse or a dog or a gun? Presently he finishes this cursory survey, crumples up the last blue envelope in his hand, flings it with manly untidiness into the summer-dressed grate, and says, resuming a conversation which had been interrupted a quarter of an hour ago by the entrance of prayers and the urn, "I cannot imagine what you have done to the fellow! he used not to be half a bad fellow to talk to. Never a genius, you know, but still I used to like to have him to walk over the farm with me—not that he knows a swede from a mangold: don't see much sign of his old mother's farming mantle falling upon him. But now he has not a word to throw to a dog; he is as stupid as a stuck pig."
"I have not cut out his tongue or tied it up in a bag, if that is what you are hinting at," says Esther, with a smile as confused as a dog's, when, not quite sure of his reception, he sneaks up to you sideways, lifting his upper lip, and from tail to muzzle one nervous wriggle. "Perhaps he is like the birds, and gets silent towards the end of the summer."
"Why you keep him dangling after you, like the tail of a kite, I cannot conceive," Mr. Craven cries, crumbling his bread with a little irritation. "It must be such a nuisance having a great long thing like him knocking about under your feet morning, noon, and night."
Esther is silent; only her head droops lower, lower, till her little nose almost immerses itself in her stirabout.
"Whereas," pursues Jack, helping himself to a great deal of cold beef, "if you were to give him hiscongénow (Jack is by no means neglectful of thegin the French word), he would be all right again in a fortnight, ready for the shooting."
"He would, would he?" says Esther, lifting up her nose and reddening with vexation.
No woman likes to think of her empire as anything short of eternal.
"If you don't like to do it yourself, I'll do it for you," pursues her brother, making a magnanimously handsome offer. "I would say to him, 'My dear fellow, it is no good, she does not seem to care about you,' as soon as look at him."
"What a delicate way of breaking the news!" cries Esther, ironically. "Commend me to a man for gentlefinesse."
"I don't believe inbreakingnews," replies Jack, sturdily. "If you were to go off in a fit, or the bay colt was to break his leg, or anything to go wrong, I'd far sooner people would tell me so without any humming and hawing and keeping me on the tenter hooks. Breaking news is like half cutting your throat before you are hanged, making you die two deaths instead of one."
"But suppose I do seem to care a little about him?" suggests Esther, blushing furiously, but holding up her head bravely, and looking straight at her brother.
"Suppose the cow jumped over the moon," replies Jack with incredulity.
"I don't know whether the cow has accomplished her feat, but I have accomplished mine," says Esther, trying to make her face as brass, and failing signally.
Jack puts up his hand, and strokes the future birthplace of his moustache, to hide an unavoidable smile.
"I don't wish to be rude," he says; "but may I ask, since when? Was it a week ago, or less, that you requested me to accompany you on one of your joint excursions to that everlasting wood, and told me you thought your watch wanted cleaning, the time seemed to go so slow?"
"A week!" cries his sister, indignantly. "Three weeks, or a month, at least."
"Wrong, Essie, wrong; it was this day fortnight, Ryvel Horse Fair, which was the reason why I had to decline your invitation."
"What does a week one way or another signify?" she cries, becoming irrational, as a worsted woman mostly does.
"Nothing to a woman or a—weathercock."
This last insult is too much for Miss Craven.
"I see you are determined to turn me into ridicule; I see you don't believe me!" she cries, preparing to rush from the room like a tornado.
"My good Essie," says Jack, jumping up, taking her two hands, and manfully repressing his inclination to laugh—"here I am; tell meanything, and I'll swear by the tomb of my grandmother to believe it."
"Why should not I like him? What is there in him so hateful as to make my being fond of him incredible?" asks Essie, unreasonable and sobbing.
"Nothing that I know of—except hisboots, and you told metheywere—"
"So they are," she says, smiling through her tears—"more than hateful; they haunt one like a bad dream."
"He is not the least penitent about them, I can tell you: only yesterday he showed them me with ungodly glee, told me he had got them at Hugh Hughes's, at Naullan, and advised me to go and do likewise."
"But—but—his boots are not he; he is not his boots, I mean," remarks Miss Craven, with meek suggestion; "mercifully, they are separable."
"He was not born in them, you mean? I did not suppose he was; he would have been worse than Richard the Third, who made his appearance with all his teeth in his head—didn't he?—if he had."
"It is quite true—perfectly true," continues Esther, leaning her two hands on the back of a chair, and tilting it up and down, "what you say about his being so stupid; heisextremely stupid: often I feel inclined to box his ears, for the thing he says, and for not understanding things, and having to have them explained to him; but after all, do you know, I am not sure that it is the people who say clever things, and snap one up all in a minute, that are the best to live with."
"You contemplate living with him then, eh? Last time I was favoured with your plans, you were to be a vestal to the end of the chapter."
"A provision for old age: I cannot expect you to be satisfied with me always," she answers, with rather a sad smile. "And when I am superseded, a good worthy simpleton, with obsolete chivalrous ideas ofWomanin the abstract—Womanwith a bigW—who will laugh at my worst jokes whether he sees them or not, and make none himself, is better than nothing."
"All right," says Jack, calmly, walking towards the door, and unfolding theTimeswith a crackling that nearly drowns his voice: "please yourself and you'll please me: only be so good as to tell me when the wedding day is fixed, as I must get a new coat. I suppose that the one I had for Uncle John's funeral will not do, will it?"
Who is it says in the "Tempest," if neither Ferdinand nor any other beautiful young Prince had come on the scene, yet if Miranda had remained alone with her father, and the storms and winds and water-spirits, she would have ended by loving Caliban? I do not know about Miranda, but I am sure that if Esther had been in Miranda's place she would have so ended; would have carried faggots in her slender arms for the shaggy monster—have called him caressing diminutives, and asked him little interested questions about his dam Sycorax.
The desire to be loved is strong enough in us all; in this girl it amounted to madness: it is the key to all the foolish, wicked, senseless things you will find her doing through this history's short course. If she could have had her will, every man, woman, and child, every cow and calf and dog and cat that met her, would have watched her coming with joy and her going with grief. Add to which, in the summer time most women like to have a lover; it is almost as necessary to them as warm clothes at Christmas. In winter the fire is lover enough for any one. The frosty splendour of the stars and the chill flashing of the northern lights provoke no yearning in any one human soul towards any other; we peep at them through our icy casements, then drop the curtain shivering, and leave them alone to their high cold play in the sky. But who can look at a July moon alone?
You will say that Esther was not alone, that she had her brother to look at it with her; but who will deny that a brother who makes agricultural remarks about the Queen of Night, and observes that the haze round her royal head looks well for the turnips, is worse, immeasurably worse than nobody? To me it seems that there is nothing absolute, positive in all this shifting, kaleidoscope world; everything is comparative. There is nothing either good, bad, pretty, ugly, large, small, except as compared with something better, worse, prettier, uglier, larger, smaller. Measure two men together, and you find one tall and the other short; put the short one by himself or among a world of pigmies, and straightway he grows tall. Lacking a standard to go by, we make egregious errors. I have known many a woman to pass through life with a pigmy beside her, taking him for a giant all the while, nor undeceived to the end. Esther has no man to measure her Robert by; none at all, save the cowman, the carter, and the groom. Intellectually, morally, physically, he outtops them in stature, and that is all she can as yet know about him. Moonlight, propinquity, total absence of objects of comparison—these three must be Esther's excuses.
Robert is not much like her ideal, certainly—the ideal whose picture she has been painting life-size on the canvas of her mind during the vacant moments of the last two transitional years; but if we all waited to be wed till our ideal came knocking at our doors, the world would be shortly dispeopled of legitimate inhabitants. Miss Craven's ideal is dark; at seventeen, most ideals are dark: he has long, fierce, sleepy, unfathomable eyes. Robert is straw-coloured: his eyes are blue; very wide awake: they say exactly what his tongue does, neither more nor less, and there is absolutely no harm in them—a doubtful recommendation to a woman. The ideal's nose is fine cut, delicately chiselled; his cheeks are a little haggard, slightly hollowed and paled by five and thirty years or so of the reckless life of one that has lived, not existed. Robert's nose is broad and blunt; his cheeks have the roundness and bloom of a countryman's five and twenty. The ideal breaks most of the commandments with easy grace; is inclined to be sceptical and a little sarcastic over the old world beliefs, and facts hoary with time and reverence. Robert nightly prays on bent knees to be "not led into temptation but delivered from evil;" he believes firmly every thing that he ever was taught, from the Peep of Day upwards, and he could no more shape his honest lips into a sneer than he could square the circle. Before the fell shafts of the ideal's eyes women lie slain as thick as Greeks lay beneath the arrows of Apollo in the Iliad's opening clash; the number of Robert's female victims is represented by a duck's egg.
"Je ne comprends pas l'amour sans effroi," says one of the characters in the best French novel I have read this many a day. The ideal inspires fear equally with love; you can imagine his being harsh, fierce, cruel, to the woman he loves. In none of the most hard-hearted of created beings could Robert provoke alarm. Children who see him for the first time come and thrust their little dimpled hands into his, and laugh up with confident impudence in his face. Dogs to whom he has never been introduced come and rub their shaggy heads against his knees, and curl and wriggle about his friendly feet.
Esther can indulge no faintest hope that he will bully her. The ideal rides straight as a die, and is as much a part of his horse as a centaur. Robert is very fond of getting a day's hunting when he can afford the two guineas requisite for the hiring of a horse, which is not very often; and he likes to get his money's worth by blundering blindly over everything that comes in his way, but he has about as much idea ofridingas a tailor or a cow. The ideal is an idol to be set up and worshipped—a Baal to be adored with tears and blood and knife-gashings. Robert is a worshipper to be encouraged by a cold look and smile flung to him every now and then, like a bone to a dog, or spurned away with disapproving foot, as Cain was from his unaccepted altar. To worship is to a woman always sweeter than to be worshipped. To worship one must look up; to be worshipped one must look down....
Come with me this August Sunday through the wood from Glan-yr-Afon to Plas Berwyn—from Esther's home to Robert's. It is but a few hundred yards of shade and shine, a small, scarce trodden wood-path whose narrow, faint track the ripe grasses and the seeded ferns have wellnigh obliterated, flinging themselves across it in all theabandonof their unspeakable grace. The apples' round faces are reddening in the little Plas Berwyn orchard; the shorn fields slope barely, slantwise along the hill-side in their yellow stubble. For weeks and weeks the corn has been whitening under the sun's hard, veilless stare, and now at last it has fallen; the barley has bowed its bearded head beneath the sickle's stroke, and the oats their tremulous ringlets. They are all gathered in, and garnered in Mrs. Brandon's stout, well-thatched stacks; to thatch a stack is the one thing a Welshman can do.
It is an hour past noon, and the Reverend Evan Evans has released the bodies of his congregation from that white-washed, tumble-down old barn that he is pleased to call his church, and their minds from the tension necessary to take in the ill-strung-together, misapplied texts that he is pleased to call his sermon.
Plas Berwyn is a house of about the same size as Glan-yr-Afon, but the rooms do not look so large, they are so full of large things and large people. The dining-room is crowded up with a great mahogany table, a great mahogany sideboard, great mahogany chairs—inconvenient relics, fondly clung to by people who from a larger house have subsided into a smaller one—a sort of warranty of past respectability like the cottager's japanned tea-tray and brass candlesticks. There is an atmosphere of lumbersome age and gravity about the whole place; none of the fragrance and light and melody that youth, sheer youth, even divorced from any other attractive qualities, brings with it.
Of all the gods of the Greek mythology I will bring my votive crowns and my salt cakes to Bacchus. Not the bloated old gentleman striding drunk over a barrel, as we figure him, but Bacchus eternally young. What is there so worthy of adoration in this aging, wrinkling world as never ending youth?
Most people are cross and most people are unusually hungry on Sunday. I do not know why it is, but if you observe your acquaintance you will find it to be true. Hungry or not, the Brandons are at dinner, dining frugally and sparely on cold roast beef and cold apple tart. Nothing hot ever figures on the Brandons' Sabbath table, not even potatoes; indeed, unless they boiled themselves, and hopped out of the pot judiciously when they found themselves done, I do not see how they could, as on the Sabbath morn every living soul at Plas Berwyn, every reluctant scullion and recalcitrant housemaid, is trundled off to church, the house-door locked, and the key deposited in Mrs. Brandon's pocket.
All the Brandons hate dining in the middle of the day, consequently they always dine in the middle of the day on Sunday. Everybody knows that there are few things more distinctly unpleasant than to sit in the same room in which you have your meals; to live with the unending smell and steam of departed viands up your nose and eyes and ears: consequently the Brandons always sit in the dining-room on Sunday. Sunday is to them a sort of aggravated Ash Wednesday and Good Friday rolled into one. On Saturday night Miss Bessy Brandon swoops down upon all novels, travels, biographies, magazines, poetry books, that may be lying about, makes a clean sweep of them and consigns them to disgrace and a cupboard till the return of Monday releases them.
The Brandon family at the present moment have got their Sunday faces and their Sunday clothes on, and they misbecome most of them very sorely. Very few men look their best in their Go-to-Meeting clothes. For some unexplained reason, a black coat made by a country tailor shows its shortcomings more plainly than a coloured one. The garment that cases Bob's broad shoulders would draw tears from Mr. Poole's eyes, could he see it. As for Mrs. Brandon, she always has more or less of a Sunday face on—which I do not say in any dispraise, but merely to express a sober, steadfast face, unfurrowed by any violent gust of mirth or blast of anger. She is like Enid and her mother,
"clad all in faded silk,"
and on her breast she has a miniature of the departed Brandon, in Geneva gown and bands, about as big as a teacup, and with two small glutinous curls of the departed's hair at the back. It is so long ago since he died, that she must have forgotten all about him—what he was like, even; but she still wears his effigy, as an old inn continues to hang out the sign of the Saracen's Head, though it is centuries since ever a Saracen has been seen on the earth's face.
Opposite each other, like little bad mirrors of one another, sit the Misses Brandon, in melancholy little gowns of no particular stuff and no particular colour, and little wisps of thin, fine hair well down over their ears, and minute chignons on the napes of their necks—their little, bustless, waistless, hipless figures, long plaintive noses, and meek, dull eyes proclaiming them of that virgin band to whom St. Paul has awarded the palm of excellence. The Sunday literature is scattered about on the hard-bottomed chairs. "Stop the Leak" lies on the pit of its stomach, open at the spot where Miss Bessy abandoned it in favour of the cold beef; the "Saturday Night of the World," with its mouth open, and a paper-knife in it.
"Cut two or three good large slices, Bob, dear; they will be so nice for old John Owen," Mrs. Brandon is saying, in her benignant, cracked, old voice.
"We can leave them as we go by to church; Bob can carry them," says Miss Brandon, with authority.
Robert is silent.
"Bob does not like the idea of being seen carrying a basket; he thinks it would spoil his appearance."
"Hang the appearance!" says Bob, with an easy laugh. "If a man is a gentleman, it does not make him any the less a gentleman even if he were seen wheeling a perambulator down Regent Street; but, to tell the truth, I don't think I shall go to church this afternoon."
"Not go to church! Not go to church!! Not go to church!!!" in three different keys, rising from astonishment to horrified incredulity.
But seldom has Mr. Brandon missed attending divine service from the auspicious day, two and twenty years ago, when, at the tender age of three years, being, Eutychus-like, overcome with sleep, he fell down with much clamour from a high bench, and raised a mountainous red lump on his baby forehead, coming into contact with the hard pew floor:
"And his head, as he tumbled, went knicketty-knock,Like a pebble in Carisbrook well."
Robert feels the weight of public opinion to be heavy, but he sticks like a man to what he said.
"Not to-day, mother, I think. Esther said she would be coming in by-and-by to say good-bye to you all, and, as it is her last day, I thought I might as well have as much as I could of her."
"Whatdoyou mean, Bob? Is the girl going to die to-night?" inquires Miss Brandon, perking up her little tow-coloured head sharply.
"God forbid!" he cries, with a hasty shudder; "don't suggest anything so frightful; but she is off to-morrow for a week or ten days on a visit to some friends."
"Going away without mentioning a word about it!"
"Going awaynow!"
These two sentences shoot out with simultaneous velocity from two mouths.
"Are you surprised at her not tellinguswhere she is going? Does she ever tellusanything? Does she makeusher confidants!" subjoins Miss Bessy, with mild spite.
Spite is permissible on the Sabbath, though hot potatoes and novels are not.
"She did not know herself till yesterday," says Bob, briefly, cutting away rather viciously at the beef.
"But who are these sudden friends that have sprung up all at once? What are their names? Where do they live? Tell us all about them, dear boy," says the old woman, gently, seeing that her son is chafed.
"Their names are Sir Thomas and Lady Gerard; they are old friends of the Cravens' father, and they live in ——shire; that is all I know about them."
"A steady-going old couple, I suppose? Will not that be rather dull for a little gay thing like Esther?"
"There is a girl of about her own age, I believe, a ward of Sir Thomas's."
"A ward!—oh!"
"And also a son."
"A son! o—h!"
"Well, why should not there be a son? What harm is there in that?" asks Robert, raising his voice a little in irritation.
"No harm whatever! Much better thing than a daughter! Can push his own way in the world. Not that I know in the least what you are talking about," cries a young, saucy voice, which, with the little sleek, dark head it belongs to, appears uninvited at the door at this juncture. "Oh! I see you are all at dinner, so I'll stay outside till you have finished; it is so horrible to be watched when one is eating, isn't it? I hate it myself." And the head and the voice disappear again as quickly as they came.
A ruddier tinge rushes into Robert's already ruddy cheek—ruddy as King David's when he tended his few sheep in the Syrian pastures, before the weight of the heavy Israelitish crown, and of his own wars and murders had blanched it. Down go the carving knife and fork with a clatter, and, "like a doting mallard," he flies after the little vision, banging the door behind him with an impetus that makes his sisters bound up from their horsehair chairs like two small parched peas. Presently he brings her back in triumph.
"So you are going to run away from us, my love?" says Mrs. Brandon, holding Esther's young white hand in her old veiny one.
"Yes, I'm afraid so; it is a great bore, isn't it?" answers Esther, trying her best to lengthen her round face and look miserable.
"If it is a bore, why do you go?" inquires Miss Bessy, drily.
"Because I think I ought to make some friends for myself; I never met anybody before that had no friends, as Jack and I have not; we literally have not one—except all of you, of course," she ends with a happy after-thought.
"When you come to my age, my dear," says Mrs. Brandon, shaking her head, and all the innumerous stiff frillings of her cap, and bringing to bear on Esther's sanguine youth the weight of her own gloomy experiences, in the infuriating way that old people do, "you will have found out that a few good friends are worth more than a great many indifferent ones."
"But why should not these people be good friends?" asks the girl, a little incredulously. "Who knows? Surely there must be more good people in the world than bad ones; so the chances are in favour of them."
"We are expressly forbidden to judge," begins Miss Bessy, charitably; "otherwise——There's the first bell beginning; we had better go and put on our things, Jane."
Five minutes more, and three large brown parasols, a large black poke bonnet and two little dirt-coloured ones, are seen slowly pacing down the hill to the House of Prayer. The lovers have Plas Berwyn to themselves. Bob has gained his point, despite a parting fleer from Bessy as to the undesirability of neglecting the Creator for the creature.
"Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler!" cries Esther, joyously, jumping about the room like a child, and mimicking the one church bell which is heard clearly tinkling through the valley. "Listen, Bob! Does it not say 'Tim Dowler' just exactly as if it were speaking it? Oh! look here: I'll lose all their places for them in their good books, and I bet anything they'll never find them again." So saying, she proceeds to remove the paper-knife from the "Saturday Night of the World," and carefully closes "Stop the Leak."
"What spirits you are in to-day, Essie!" says Bob, balancing himself on the window-sill, with his long legs dangling lugubriously, and following her about the room with his eyes, as a child does a butterfly. "I believe it is because you are going to be rid of me for a fortnight."
"Partly, I think," replies Esther, nonchalantly. "It seems as if all my life I had seen and heard of nothing but Glan-yr-Afon and Plas Berwyn, Plas Berwyn and Glan-yr-Afon, and now I'm going to see and hear something fresh; it may be better and it may be worse; but, at all events, it will be something different. Perhaps I shall come back as the country mouse did, more in love than ever with my own cheeseparings and tallow-candle ends; perhaps"—swinging her Sunday bonnet by the strings and looking up maliciously—"perhaps I shall see some one I like better than you, and not come back at all."
"Hush!" he cries, hurriedly, putting up his hand before her mouth. "Don't say that; it is bad luck. I should not mind your saying it if it were not so horribly probable."
Esther subsides into gravity.
"I wish to Heaven you were not so fond of me!" she says, hastily; "please do try not to be: it makes me feel as if I were cheating all the time—having things and not paying for them."
"I could have given you upat first, if you had told me it must be so positively; I'm sure I could have made shift to do without you, as I have made shift to do without many a thing that other fellows consider necessaries of life; but now——"
He has seized her two hands, and now holds her standing there before him. To hold her hand is the one familiarity Robert is permitted; not once in all his life has he kissed his betrothed.
"It was a foolish, silly custom," she said one day, pettishly—"no sensibler than rubbing noses together, as the Feejee islanders did; for her part, she hated it, &c."
"But now, what? finish your sentence, please," says the little captive, gaily.
"Esther, I wish these people had not got a son."
"What people?"
"These Gerards."
"Why so? Do you think that they would have left you their money if they had not?"
"No, not that," smiling against his will. "But, Essie, you'll promise to write and tell me what he is like?"
"Yes."
"What sort of age?"
"Yes."
"Whether you see much of him?"
"Yes."
"What he says to you?"
"Come, I cannot promise that," says Esther, bursting out laughing. "Oh you dear old goose! are you jealous of a name, a shade, an imagination?"
"Iamjealous," he answers, reddening. "I can no more help it than a man in the gout can help having twinges. I shall always be jealous until you are really mine past stealing or taking back again: after that I never shall."
"I should hope not," retorts she, with levity: "if you were, I should think it my duty to try and give you some cause."
The church bell has ceased; there is no sound in the quiet room but that of one fat-bodied bluebottle, labouring and buzzing up the pane, and then tumbling back again. Robert has abandoned the window-sill, finding it a painful and not luxurious seat: he is walking up and down, up and down; one stride and a half of his long legs taking him from end to end of the little room. Esther has thrown herself into an American rocking chair, and is rocking violently backwards and forwards, trying her best to tip herself over.
"Promise me, Essie," says the young man, coming to a sudden standstill beside her—"promise me that you'll talk seriously of—you know what—when you come home; I give you till then? Good heavens! what sort of stuff could Jacob have been made of to have held out all those fourteen years!"
"'The little maid replied,Some say a little sighed,And what shall we have for to eat, eat, eat?Will the love that you're so rich inMake a fire in the kitchen,Or the little god of love turn the spit, spit, spit?'"
answers Esther, evading her lover's urgency by a quotation.
"If I could get an Adjutancy of Volunteers," pursues he, resuming his walk, with his eyes bent on the ground, and frowning away in the intensity of his thinking, "or, better still, a Militia one, or a Chief Constableship, or the Governorship of a gaol: there are always some of those sort of things going about. Why should I not come in for one as well as another fellow? We want so little——"
"Want so little?" interrupts Esther, briskly. "Speak for yourself, please: I want a great deal; only, as far as I can see, want is likely to be my master."
"You are no fine lady," pursues he, talking more to himself than to her, "that requires to be waited on; you can make your own bonnets and gowns, cannot you? My sisters always do."
"So I should imagine," says Esther, drily.
"What do you mean? Are not they all right? is there anything the matter with them?" inquires he, stopping short and looking surprised, as if the idea of there being any deficiency in his sisters' costumes was an entirely new light to him. But Miss Craven purses up her pretty mouth in a silence more damnatory of the Misses Brandon's toilettes than any words could be.
"If we had not a large enough income to live by ourselves," says he, beginning again his tramp, tramp, "we might join housekeeping with mother and the girls; they would not object, I'm sure."
"But I should,strongly," cries Esther, springing up, and getting crimson with vexation. "Why, we should all be by the ears in a week. Robert, how many times will you make me tell you that I like you well enough to go sailing along beside you on the sea of life as long as it is nice and smooth, but I really do not love you enough to go bumping over rocks and into breakers with you? I would do it for Jack, and welcome, but for no other human being on the face of the earth."
"Will you never like me as well as you do Jack?" he inquires, sadly, looking at her with eyes so loving, that one would think her own must catch the infection. But, no; they remain coldly bright, with the cold brightness of friendship.
"Never."
"Not after ten years?"
"No."
"Nor twenty?"
"No."
"Nor thirty?"
"No, nor a thousand. Cannot you see what a different thing it is? If one loses a lover one can get a hundred more just as good as, if not better than, the one lost; but if I were to lose Jack—oh, God! how can I suggest anything so awful—who could give me another brother?"
"So be it, then, since it must be that I am to play second fiddle all my life (sighing); but, Essie, you'll promise to write to me every day, won't you?"
"Certainly not."
"Every second day, then?"
"Certainly not."
"Twice a week, then?"
"Per—haps; if I have anything to say."
"And you'll be sure not to stay beyond the fortnight?"
"That depends. If they arefine, and inclined to 'country cousin' me, I shall probably be back the day after to-morrow: if they make a great fuss with me, and if Mr. Gerard is young and handsome and civil-spoken, I dare say you will not see me again under two months."
He looks so sincerely pained that her conscience smites her.
"There," she says, "I have teased you enough for one day; let us kiss and make friends,—that is, figuratively. Come," putting out her hand to draw him along with her, "let us go to the kitchen garden and see if the wasps have left us any apricots. If Bessy were here, she would tell us some pleasing anecdote of how some people went and picked apricots on the Sabbath, and got stung in the throat and swelled, and died in great agonies; but I'm willing to run the risk if you are."
Nine o'clock! The maid-servants are at evening church, combining the double advantage ofmaking their soulsand meeting their sweethearts. Esther, happily rid of hers, is sitting on the ground at the French window of the study, beside her brother. The rooks that blackened the meadow awhile ago have flapped heavily home to the mile-off rookery. It is such a great, still world; who would fancy that there were so many noisy men, barking dogs, snorting steam-engines in it? It seems a world of stars and flowers, as one would imagine it after reading one of Mrs. Heman's poems.
Jack is smoking; now and then Esther takes the pipe out of his mouth, gives a little puff, coughs and chokes, and puts it back again. Oh, blessed state of intimacy, when you may sit by a person for hours and never utter to them! Esther is thinking what a pretty, pleasant Idyllic life hers is; like an Arcadian shepherdess's in this lovely valley, far away from smoky towns and vulgar cares and sordid toils. Young and beautiful (what pretty woman is mock-modest to her own thoughts?), living with a brother who is to her what father, mother, brothers, sisters, husband, children, are to other women; a brother who is only three years older than herself, consequently not likely to die much before her. She is thinking, a little regretfully, that, fair and poetic as this life is, it is passing, and that as it passes she does not feel its beauty as acutely as she ought—does not suck out all its sweetness, as a man swallows a delicious draught hastily, carelessly, without tasting and dwelling upon its rare flavour. It is the samesortof thought (only much weaker) as those that torment us as we sit alone by the hearth mourning our dead, and reproach ourselves, with a yearning pain, that while they were yet with us we did not draw our chairs half close enough to theirs—did not take hold of their hands and kiss their faces half often enough—did not half often enough tell them, with eager lips, how preciouser than life they were to us.
"What will you be doing this time to-morrow, Essie?" asks Jack, breaking in upon her reverie; and has not he a right, for is not he king and hero of it?
"Wishing myself back again, to a dead certainty," answers Essie, emphatically. "Jack" (rubbing her cheek up and down softly against his shoulder—Jack is but a young, slight stripling), "I do believe that if I were in heaven, and saw you sitting all alone here smoking your pipe, I should have to throw away my harp and crown, and come down to keep you company."
"If you were in heaven," returns Jack, gravely, "I think you would be so surprised and pleased to find yourself there that you would be in no hurry to come out again for me or anybody else."
"Perhaps so, but I think not," she answers, sighing, and thrusting her arm gently through his.
"Have you got any money, Essie?"
"Plenty."
"How much?"
"Plenty."
"But how much?"
"Never you mind."
"But I do mind."
"Enough to take me there and bring me back again, and I don't suppose they'll charge me for board and lodging."
"Servants at those sort of swell places expect such a lot of tipping," says Jack, pensively, knocking the ash out of his pipe.
"They may expect, then; a little disappointment is very wholesome for us all. They are much better able to tip me than I them."
"There are sure to be charity sermons, too," continues the boy, with a forethought worthy of riper years. "I don't know how it is, but I never went to a strange place in my life without there being a collection for the Kaffirs or the Jews or the Additional Curates or something the very first Sunday after I got there."
"I would pretend I had forgotten my purse."
Jack puts his pipe in his pocket, rises, retires into his sanctum, lights a candle, rummages in a drawer, and presently returns with a five-pound note. Bank notes grew but in scanty crops at Glan-yr-Afon.
"Here, Essie."
"No!no!NO!" cries Essie, volubly, jumping up and clasping her hands behind her back.
"Yes!yes!YES!"
"No! no! You won't have enough money to pay the men on Saturday night."
"Talk about what you understand," says Jack, gruffly. "Do you think I'm going to let my sister go about like a beggar and whine for halfpence?"
"Oh, Jack, Jack!" throwing herself about his neck, and burying her face in his sunburnt throat. "How bitter it is always to take, and never to give! Oh! if I had but something to give you; but you know I have got nothing in the world."
"You have got Bob."
"Ah! so I have" (making a little grimace); "and if he would do you any good, you might have him, and welcome, to make mincemeat of, if you liked."
The 2.25 train from Brainton is due at Felton at 5.30. It is drawing near Hither now, escorted by a vanguard, bodyguard, and rearguard of dust-clouds; it rushes along, with the sun beating down on the roofs of the carriages, making them like little compartments of Hades. If the devil took a hint from the Coldbath Fields cells for "improving the prisons of Hell," he certainly might take a hint from the Brainton train for improving the travelling conveyances of the same locality.
In one of the first-class carriages there is a baby: it has got a cold, and seems rather inclined to be sick; so both the nurse, on whose lap it lies gaping and blowing bubbles, and the idolising mother, who sits over against it, insist on keeping its window tight up. There is a rusty old divine, in gilt-rimmed spectacles and a jowl, reading theGuardian;a commercial traveller, with his hat off, his legs up, and a gaudy cap on his head, fast asleep; and, lastly, a little young lady, sitting facing the engine, with the dusty blast driving hot and full in her face, blinking, coughing, choking, with the utmost patience. On her lap lies a huge bunch of red and yellow roses and heavy-scented double-stocks, all limp and drooping and soiled. Bob gave them to her when he came down to the station to see her off—and very kind of him too, and very nice they are; but all the same, as she has already a bag, a box, and a parasol to carry, she thinks (though she barely owns it to herself) that she would almost as soon have been without them.
The dusty blast blows gentler, moderates to a dusty zephyr; the train is slackening speed. "Fel—ton!" "Fel—ton!" cry a row of green-fustianed porters, as the long bulk draws up at the platform.
"Please 'm, are you Miss Craven?" inquires a tall footman in powder and a cockade, touching his hat to Esther, as she stands all by herself, trying to take several beams out of her own eye.
"Yes."
"The carriage is here for you, 'm. Would you please to show me which is your maid and luggage?"
"I have no maid, and there's my luggage," responds Esther, pointing with one grimy kid finger to a small trunk standing on its head, and looking half inclined to burst asunder in the midst. She is ashamed of her destitute condition, and ashamed of herself for being ashamed of it.
"Will it change into a pumpkin?" thinks Miss Craven, as she steps into a large yellow barouche, with two fidgety, showy greys, that is waiting for her at the station gate. After the yammering of the baby, the dull rumble-rumble of the train, how delicious! "If it were only my own," she says to herself, throwing herself back with a consequential feeling on the soft cushions, as some country people pass and pull their forelocks to the well-known liveries.
"Well, odder things have happened!Butfor Bob! The Prince fell in love with Cinderella at first sight; why should not Prince Gerard with me? I dare say I'm quite as good-looking as Cinderella was!"
As they pass Lady Gerard's model school, twenty little charity girls come trooping out in the uniformity of their cotton frock and straw bonnet livery, and drop twenty bob courtesies to Esther, who feels as the man in the "Arabian Nights" did who woke and found himself Sultan. Labouring men go stumping heavily home, with their tools over their shoulders and their heads bent earthwards, as is always the case with the tillers of the soil, who must—oh, hard necessity!—be ever looking down.
Park palings, through which the strong brake fern is thrusting itself, slide past; then a red lodge, picked out with blue bricks, where an obsequious old woman rushes out from the washtub, with hands all soapsuds, to open the gates; then a grassy, knolly park; then a great red house, likewise picked out with blue bricks; then stones clattering under an echoing portico; then the pumpkin stops, and Cinderella descends.
"Miss Craven!" announces the butler, opening a tall door; and Miss Craven, plucking up heart, marches into a high, dark library, lined with high, dark books—marches in, looking very much like a chimney sweep. Dust lies in ridges on her once white bonnet; dust, instead of belladonna, in streaks under her eyes; dust on the parting of her hair, on her eyelashes, up her nose (on which there is also, though, happily for her, she does not know it, a large smut), and a double portion of dust on the great, faded, yellow roses, to which she cleaves with as much pertinacity as the idiot in "Excelsior" clave to that senseless banner which he was so determined to run up hill with.
As she enters, a goddess rises like an exhalation (as Pandemonium did), and comes floating on lilac clouds towards her. This is as things seem to her; in reality, a large, fair, young woman comes forward in a long-tailed mauve muslin. Simultaneously a man's two legs are seen disappearing over the window-sill.
"How do you do?" says the goddess, sweetly. "I think the train must have been rather late; we expected you half an hour ago."
"Yes."
A little pause, each taking stock.
"Won't you have some tea?"
"Thanks."
The tea is poured out; it has been standing on the table an hour, and is perfectly cold. The goddess and the little female collier examine each other stealthily.
"Rather alarming," thinks the latter: "talks in such a low voice, and has such a difficulty in pronouncing herr's. So that is the correct thing, is it? Well, I'll always call RobertWobertfor the future."
"Might be pretty, if she were not so filthy," thinks the other.
"Same age as I am, indeed! She looks five years older."
"I think, if you don't mind, we had perhaps better be going to dress. Sir Thomas is so very particular as to punctuality."
"Is he? was that Sir Thomas that got out of the window just as I came in?"
"Oh no! that was St. John."
("St. John! What a pretty name! How much prettier than Bob!")
Sir Thomas Gerard is walking up and down the library, with his watch in his hand, prepared the instant the clock strikes to ring the bell violently, and inquire what is the meaning of dinner being so late. Sir Thomas is a big man, who affects the country squire, the good, old English gentleman—plain Sir Thomas, without any nonsense about him; dresses to the character, and succeeds in looking not unlike the Frenchman's idea of an Englishmilord, as depicted inPunchsome years ago, where he is represented in low-crowned hat and breeches, with the face of a truculent butcher, cracking a whip, and exclaiming, with equal coherency and elegance, "Rosbif! I send my wife to Smiffel! God dam!"
Sir Thomas does not use such strong language when speaking of Lady Gerard, but in other respects the portrait is not unfaithful. Lady Gerard is lying in an arm-chair. She is fat to make you shudder; she has a short, turn-up nose, short legs, a red skin, and next to no hair—all very good points in a pig, but hardly so good in a lady. The clock strikes, and at the same instant the butler opens the door, and announces "Dinner!"
"Come along, Conny!" says Sir Thomas, sticking out his elbow to his ward.
"Are not you going to wait for Miss Craven? And St. John is not down, either," suggests Lady Gerard, who is hoisting herself slowly up out of her chair.
"Wait for 'em? Not I," responds Sir Roger de Coverley. "If people don't choose to conform to the rules of my house, they may go without their dinner for all I care, and serve 'em right, too. Come along, Conny!"
The soup is nearly ended when two people, who have come together by a fortuitous concourse of atoms at the door, make a simultaneous entry into the dining-room.
"Companions in iniquity!" says St. John, with a sarcastic look at his father, bowing to Esther, as he seats himself beside Miss Blessington.
"How do?" says Sir Thomas, putting out his left hand (his right is still grasping his spoon). "Never wait for anybody here; would not let the soup get cold for the Queen nor the Lord Chancellor either."
"Miss Craven mistook you for Sir Thomas before dinner," says Miss Blessington, in her sweet, smooth way to her neighbour.
"Did she? Unintentional compliments are always the most flattering," replies Mr. Gerard, quietly.
Then he looks across through the partition wall of great bigonias in silver pots, and sees a little face peeping at him under and over the broad crimson leaves.
No one would ever call Esther's a Madonna face. No artist would ever ask her to sit for St. Catherine, or St. Cecilia, or St. Anybody else; hers is essentiallybeauté du diable—one of those little, sparkling, provoking, petulant faces that have a fresh dress of smiles or tears, or dimples or blushes, for every trivial, passing question; one of those little faces that have been at the bottom of half the mischiefs the world has seen.
"I only saw a pair of legs," replies the face, exculpating itself; "how could I tell whether they were young or old legs?"
Miss Blessington looks rather shocked, as if she thought that Esther's modes of expression were somewhatlibre;and indeed at the rate of purity at which we are advancing,legswill soon walk off into the limbo of silence and unmentionableness;armswill probably follow them, and then perhaps noses.
Although Miss Blessington looks shocked, St. John only laughs. He looks pleasant when he laughs; he did not look pleasant just now, when he was turning up his nose at his cold soup. When he is in an ill-humour he has a decided look of his father, though it puts him into an awful rage to tell him so. He is not handsome, certainly; not a straight-nosed, pink-cheeked, flaxen-curled, fairy prince at all; neither is he very young—not a boy, that is to say—five-and-thirty, or thereabouts; his face has a weather-beaten look, as of one that has felt many an icy wind and many a tropic sun beat against it. No lily-handed, curled woman's darling.
"What do you mean?" cries Sir Thomas, raising his voice, and turning round in a fury (with his stiff grey hair standing upright, and the veins in his forehead swelling) upon an unlucky footman, who has had themaladresseto drop three spoons that he was carrying upon a tray. "You stupid hound, mind what you are about, or else keep out of the room, one or the other!"
Esther's mouth opens; she feels a sensation of shamefaced aghastness; but the rest of the company sit with the composure induced by long familiarity with the good old English gentleman's courtesies. Only one little flash of indignant contempt shoots from St. John's grey eyes. "How I hate my father!" would be his reading of the great statesman's dying ejaculation, "How I love my country!"
Nobody ever speaks much at dinner at Felton. St. John because he knows, if he trusted himself to speak at all, it would be to contradict his father flatwhateverhe said, for the mere pleasure of contradicting him; Lady Gerard because she has heard that it is impossible to do two things well at the same time, and as she is quite resolved upon doing the eating part well, she thinks she will leave the talking alone; Miss Blessington because, having contributed her hard, cold beauty to the entertainment, she thinks she has done enough.