The company being rather silent, Esther turns her eyes round the room, and scans the pictures. Two or three Gerards, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, in very full dress; a large copper-coloured woman by Rubens, in no dress at all; "Susanna and the Elders;" "Jupiter and Leda" (twice life-size); a "Venus Sleeping, surprised by Satyrs" (a great gem); and many other like subjects, such as one mostly meets with in the dining-rooms of English nobles and gentles—subjects pleasant and profitable, to employ the eyes and minds of their daughters while engaged in eating their dinners. Esther is staring hard at Susanna's fat, coy face, when her attention is recalled by Mr. Gerard's voice addressing her. She starts and blushes furiously, like a child whose fingers have been found straying among the jam-pots. He looks amused at her confusion.
"I have just been thinking, Miss Craven, how pleasant your first impressions of us must be. What a well-mannered, courteous family you must think us!—I tumbling out of the window at the risk of breaking my neck to avoid you, and my father and mother going to dinner without you."
"If you had been a little quicker in your movements, I should have known nothing about you," responds she, the carmine called forth by her detection dying slowly out of her cheeks, and noticing only the half of his sentence that refers to himself.
"Ah! I am not so young as I was" (with a sigh); "but, to tell the truth, we had just been dragging the pool, like Boodles in 'Happy Thoughts,' and I was such a mass of mud that I had not moral courage to face you."
"We should have met on equal terms. I was as black as a coal, was not I?"
"Railroads do make one wonderfully dusty," replies Miss Blessington, with a polite, evasive platitude.
"I had a worse infliction than any dust to bear," says Esther, stretching her long throat around the bigonia to get a fuller view of hervis-à-vis.
"A baby, of course?" replies he, stretching his neck too for a like purpose.
"An aggravated case of baby—a baby that had something odd the matter with it."
"Not so bad as a man drinking sherry," says he, his grey eyes and a bit of his nose laughing through the leaves; "a woman eating gingerbread is bad enough. I travelled once with a woman who ate gingerbread from London to Holyhead without stopping."
"And did not offer you any?"
"Good heavens, no! What a prodigious suggestion!—that would have been adding insult to injury."
"If I had been travelling with you I should undoubtedly have offered you some. I should have judged you by myself, and I am very fond of gingerbread."
"Indeed!"
"And" (with a mischievous look) "fonder still of peppermint lozenges, particularly in church on hot Sunday afternoons."
They were getting quite voluble, chatting and chirping like a nest of magpies—like children playing and laughing in a garden, unmindful that in a cave in a corner is a great old bear who may pounce out on them at any moment. The Felton bear pounces.
"What the devil do you mean leaving that door open? Morris! John! George! Here, some of you! there's a door open somewhere between here and the kitchen. Don't contradict me, sir! I say there is; if I catch you propping those swing doors open," &c. &c.
The birds have gone to bed, and the slugs come out to walk on the damp garden paths. Now and then a little wind gets up, whispers a word or two to the polished laurel leaves, and lies down again. There is a carpet of thin, smoke-grey clouds over heaven's blue floor. The two girls are strolling up and down the terrace walk. Esther has got a red cloak thrown about her shoulders; she is not in the least afraid of taking cold, and declined the offer of it in the first instance; but on second thoughts, reflecting that the dining-room windows look on the terrace, and that the fairy prince may see and like the combination of black eyes and red cloth (fairy princes being always partial to gay colours), accepted it.
I have called Esther "little," and Miss Blessington "large" but the truth is they are much of a height. The difference between them is, that one is a young, slight sapling that has been so busy shooting up skywards, that it has had no leisure to grow broad, and that the other is a full-grown, spreading, stately forest tree. And yet they are the same age; but some women develop, mind and body, much quicker than others.
From the unshuttered dining-room windows comes a great square of yellow lamplight, and lies smooth upon the gravel. Looking in you see rifled fruit dishes, half-filled wine-glasses, moths flying round and round the lamp globes, trying their best to find an entrance to fiery death.
Sir Thomas, in his red velvet easy chair, with his white duck legs stretched out before him—duck trousers and a blue coat and brass buttons are, I need hardly say, the fine old English gentleman's dinner costume—with his head thrown back, till you can see either up into his brains or down his throat, whichever you choose. St. John, with his elbow resting on the shining oak table, which reflects it as a mirror would, and his head on his hand, in a brown study.
"Do you always walk up and down here, Miss Blessington?" inquires Esther, who is getting rather tired of pacing along, along, along monotonously, with her gown sweeping a little avalanche of pebbles behind her.
"Generally" (with a pretty smile).
Miss Blessington has a very pretty smile—an "angelic smile"—people say who see her only once; but it is only one, and is aired every hour of the day—comes out for Sir Thomas, for Lady Gerard, for servants, for dogs, for callers, for old almswomen, for St. John—so that none can take it personally, can they?
"By yourself?"
"Not generally."
The pretty smile is dashed with a faint complacency.
("H'm! That means with St. John—
"'Walking in a shady groveWith my Juliana.'
"Pleasant look-out for me! A bad third! What a pity that Bob is not here! we should be apartie carrée, and might change partners every now and then; Miss Blessington should have Bob, and I would have St. John!")
Below the terrace spreads a large square of grass, uninvaded by flower-bed or shrub, mowed and rolled, rolled and mowed, into the similitude of a pancake for flatness. There croquet-hoops glance whitely in the soft half-light; mallets lie strewn like dead soldiers after a battle; balls red, blue, and yellow, like great ripe fruit tumbled among the grass.
"Is this your croquet-ground?"
"Yes."
"Nice and level?"
"Yes."
"Like a billiard table, only a prettier green?"
"Yes; would you like a game?"
"Better than doing nothing, isn't it?" answers Esther, cheerily; she being a young woman to whom the wordsrestandenjoymentare not synonymous, as they mostly grow to be to people in later years.
From the dining-room comes the faint melody of the trombone, played with the skill of much practice by Sir Thomas's nose. Some one comes to the window, looks out, puts a hand on the sill, and jumps down. St. John apparently has an aversion from going out and coming in by the authorised modes of exit and entrance. Now that one can see him without any bigonia interposing, one notices that he has kind, eager eyes—eyes that seem to be looking, looking for something that they have not found yet—and rather a long nose, that the sun has got hold of and browned, as a cook browns mashed potatoes.
"Won't you join us, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington, stooping to reinstate a fallen hoop, and looking calm invitation at him out of her great, fine, passionless, cow eyes.
St. John hesitates, and looks towards Esther to see whether she is not going to second the invitation; but she is balancing herself with her two feet on a croquet-mallet, and does not appear to see him.
"Gooseberry I may be," she thinks, "but, at all events, I won't be instrumental in making myself so."
"Do I ever play?" asks he, with petulance, walking off in a huff.
"He did not accept your invitation with the exultant gratitude one would have expected, did he?" says Miss Craven, maliciously.
"He hates the game," replies Miss Blessington, rather sharplier than is her wont—"particularly playing with odd numbers."
"Oh!"
The match begins; it is about as fair as a foot race between Deerfoot and a lame baby. Esther has played about six times in the course of her life; Miss Blessington about six thousand. Miss Blessington makes the round of the hoops in triumphant solitude, while poor Essie struggles feebly, ignorantly, unscientifically, to ring a bell that refuses to emit the faintest tinkle.
"Hare and tortoise!" cries she, laughing at her own discomfiture; "you'll go to sleep presently, and I shall crawl in and win."
"Since you wish me, I don't mind taking a mallet," says St. John, appearing suddenly round a big Wellingtonia, and looking confusedly conscious of being seen descending very awkwardly from his high horse.
"How do you know we wish you to take one?—we never said so," says Essie, flashing at him with her wicked, laughing, half-lowered eyes. ("Since I am another's and he is another's, I don't see why we should not try to amuse each other," she says to herself.)
"It is your turn to play, Miss Craven," interposes Constance, coldly.
"Come to my rescue, won't you?" says Esther, making her seventy-second careless, abortive attempt at the bell, and throwing twice as muchempressementinto her voice from the amiable motive that she thinks suchempressementis displeasing to Miss Blessington.
"You snubbed me so just now that I don't think I will. I'll leave you to perish miserably," answers he, looking at her as he speaks with an intentness only excusable by the dim light, and the indistinctness of all objects in it.
"Constance, if you don't mind I'll take one of Miss Craven's balls."
"If you remember, I asked you to join us half an hour ago," replies Constance, in her measured way.
"I make one stipulation before we start," cries Esther, gaily, "and that is, that you make no remarks upon my play except such as are of a laudatory nature."
"I'll make no stipulation of the kind," answers he, gaily too; "if I see anything reprehensible I shall testify."
Fate does not smile upon the union of St. John and Esther. Disgrace and disaster attend their arms; in ignorance, unskilfulness, and general incapacity, St. John is no whit inferior to his partner.
"Why, you play worse than I do," cries she, delighted at the discovery.
"I know I do," he answers, not too amiably; "I should be ashamed of myself if I did not; it is the vilest, stupidest game ever any idiot invented; no play in it whatever. All luck! all chance! Look there!" pointing with a sort of ill-tempered resignation to Constance, who, with dress delicately lifted with one hand, and foot gracefully poised, is inflicting heavy chastisement, with a calm, satisfied vindictiveness, on his ball.
"Take that, you fool you!" (this is addressed to the ball, not to Miss Blessington) hurling his mallet at it as it scuds swiftly over the sward and lodges in the pink and purple breast of an aster bed. The head and handle of the mallet fly asunder from the violence of their passage through the air, and Mr. Gerard is reduced to the ignominy of picking up thedisjecta membraand hammering them together again.
"You must make a sensation when you go to a croquet party," remarks Esther, sarcastically.
"Do you think so badly of me as to suppose I ever do? is thy servant a curate that he should do this thing?" he answers, coming over and standing close to her.
"Please attend to the game, St. John! It is you to play!" exclaims Constance, with suppressed, lady-like irritation, from the other end of the ground, where she stands in majestic solitude.
It is the penalty of greatness to be lonely. A few more egregious blunders on the part of the firm of Gerard and Craven, a few more masterstrokes by Miss Blessington, and the game draws to a conclusion.
"It is ridiculous playing against such luck as yours, Constance," cries St. John, flinging down his weapon in an unjust, unreasonable fury. "It is always the same; it does not matter what—whist, billiards, anything—always the same story. Take my advice" (turning to Essie, and speaking eagerly), "never play at anything, or do anything, or be anything with me, or you'll be sure to be a loser. I am the most unlucky devil under the sun." Then he feels that he is making a fool of himself, and walks off in a rage.
"Why, he isreallycross," says Esther, opening her great eyes and looking a little blankly after him.
"He is rather odd-tempered," answers Miss Blessington, composedly; "and the most singular thing is, that it is always the people he is fondest of with whom he is most easily irritated."
"How fond he must be of you!" says Esther, internally.
Death and the sun are very much alike in one respect, and that is, their utter impartiality and stupid want of discernment. They make no difference between those who love them and those who hate. They pay their visits equally to those who are longing for and lifting up eager hands towards them, and those who would much prefer to be without them.
I will drop the parallel, which cannot be carried much farther, and talk of the sun only. He certainly shows very little judgment, and less taste, in these matters. He gives his great, warm light just as readily to a scullery as a boudoir, to an ill-smelling dunghill as to a bed of mignonette; kisses with just as much relish the raddled cheeks of an old fish-wife as the fresh scarlet lips of a young countess.
This present August morning he is blazing full and hot on that very grievous daub of Mrs. Brandon in a no-waisted black satin, out of which she appears to be bursting, like a chrysalis from its sheath, in the Plas Berwyn dining-room, and not a whit more fully or more hotly on the exquisite "Monna Lisa" of Da Vinci, which is the chief jewel of the Gerard collection.
The same sunbeam that brings out with such clearness Monna Lisa's faint, weird smile, takes in also within its compass Esther's small, swart head, round the back of which coils a great, loose, careless twist of burnished hair, like a black snake. She is standing outside the dining-room door, with her lithe,sveltefigure stooped forward a little. The family are at prayers, as she ascertained by applying her ear to the key-hole, and hearing a harsh, elderly voice going at a good round trot through a variety of petitions, for himself, his children (he has only one, and hates him), his friends, his enemies, his queen, his bishops and curates, his black brethren, &c., all without the vestige of a comma between them.
"What! eavesdropping?" asks St. John, coming down the handsome, shallow stairs in knickerbockers and heather-mixture stockings that his old mother made him.
"Hush!" holding up her forefinger; "they are at prayers."
St. John listens too, and a sneer comes and settles on his mouth.
"Isn't he a worthy rival for the man who said he would give any one as far as Pontius Pilate in the Creed, and then beat him?"
"You ought not to abuse your own father" (in a whisper).
"I know I ought not" (in another whisper).
"Why do you, then?" casting down her eyes, that he may see how large a portion of downy cheeks her long curly lashes shade.
"I only do for him what I know he would do for me if he had the chance."
"Hush! they are nearly over."
"... be with us all evermore. Amen. Morris!"
"Yes, Sir Thomas."
"What the deuce do you mean sticking the legs of that chair against the wall knocking all the paint off the wainscot?"
"Oh! blessings on his kindly voice,And on his silver hair!"
says St. John, in ironical quotation; and then the door opens, and a long string of servants issue out, and the two culprits again, as on the previous evening, together enter.
Lady Gerard never appears at breakfast. About twenty years ago she had an illness, and, on the strength of it, has kept up a character for invalidhood ever since. Miss Blessington takes her place at the head of the table; she is sitting there now. Her shapely hands are busy among the teacups; her white lids drooped over her calm eyes. There is a great gold cross on her breast, that rises and falls in soft, even undulations. Eve, as she was when first she grew into separate entity and embodiment out of Adam's side; Eve, of creamiest flesh, and richest, reddest blood, before a soul—a tormenting, puzzling, intangible, incomprehensible soul—was breathed into her.
When Constance marries, her husband will gaze at her as a man might gaze at Gibson's "Venus," supposing that he had bought for a great price that marvel of modern sculpture, and had set it up in the place of honour in his gallery. He would half-shut his eyes, the better to appreciate the exquisite turn of the cold, stately throat, the modelling of the little rounded wrist; would put his head on one side, and look at it this way and that, to determine whether he liked the tinting.
"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,"
as the pithy line that everybody knows, and that next to nobody could have written, hath it. At forty Constance will be a much handsomer woman than Esther. At forty those clean-cut, immovable, expressionless features will be hardly the worse for wear; that colourless marble skin will be hardly less smoothly polished than it is now. At forty Esther (if she live so long) will have cried and laughed, and fretted and teased herself into a mere shadow of her present self.
Every one's letters at Felton are put on their plate for them. As Esther takes her seat, she perceives that there is one for her—one directed in a scrawling, schoolboy hand. The blood rushes to her face, as it does to a turkeycock's wattles when he is excited or angry, and she thrusts it hastily into her pocket. To her guilty imagination it seems that written all over it, in big red letters, legible to every eye, is, "From Bob Brandon, Esther Craven's lover." As her eyes lift themselves shyly, to see whether St. John is observing her, they meet his, looking at her curiously, interestedly, puzzledly.
"We allow people to read their letters at breakfast here," he says, with a friendly smile; "we are not particular as to manners, as I dare say you have found out by this time."
"Oh! thanks, I'm in no hurry; it's of no consequence—it will keep," answers Esther, disjointedly, with would-be indifference, and the turkeycock hue spreading to the edge of her white gown.
The morning hours at Felton are not exciting. Sir Thomas is building a new orchid house, and spends much of his time standing over the bricklayers, like an Egyptian overseer, telling them with his usual courteous candour how much more he knows about their trade than they themselves do, who have been at it all their lives. St. John disappears too, and Constance and Esther are lefttête-à-tête.
Esther has plenty of time to read Bob's letter, and to understand it, which latter requires some ingenuity, as, from the greater rapidity of his thoughts than of his pen, he omits most of the little words—tosandandsandwhichsandwhosandhesandshes. There is a good deal about his mother in it: several messages from her; a great many questions as to what Mr. Gerard was like, with solemn adjurations to answer them; a sheet devoted to the exposition of the luxury in which it is possible to live on £300 a year; and, lastly, a sentence or two as to his great loneliness, and his eager longing to have his darling Esther back again—not much on that head, as if he were afraid of marring her enjoyment by intruding upon her the picture of his own disconsolateness. It was not an eloquent letter; in fact, it was rather a stupid one, and had evidently been written with a very nasty scratchy pen; but for all that it was a nice one, and so Esther felt, and wished that it had been less so.
Bob is a dear fellow; and, no doubt, when she goes back to Glan-yr-Afon, she will be very glad to see him, and be very fond of him; but, for the present, she would like to forget him altogether—to have a holiday from him: he seems to come in incongruously now somehow.
"Where's St. John?" grunts miladi, who makes her appearance towards luncheon time, from the arm-chair which is witness to so many gentle dozes on her part.
Miladi likes St. John; he is very good to her, and often stands in the breach between her and Sir Thomas.
"Vanished," answers Miss Blessington, in her slow, sweet drawl. "I think Miss Craven must have frightened him away."
It is very pleasant, is not it? when you think you have been making a highly favourable impression on a person, to hear that they have fled before you in abject fear.
"I had no idea that he was such a timid fawn," answers Essie, nettled.
"He is very peculiar," says Constance, her white fingers flying swiftly in and out among the coloured silks of the smoking cap she is embroidering; "and has a most unfortunate shrinking from strangers."
"The greatest friends must have been strangers once," objects Essie, feeling rather small.
"Quite true, so they must; but he is so verydifficile, we never can get him to admire any one—can we, aunt?"
But "aunt" has fallen sweetly asleep.
"With the exception of two or three fortunate blondes—I prefer dark people myself infinitely, don't you?"
"Infinitely," replies Esther, with emphasis.
It is not true—she does nothing of the kind; but, after all, what is truth in comparison of the discomfiture of an adversary?
Luncheon comes, but no St. John. After luncheon Sir Thomas, Miss Blessington, and Miss Craven go out riding. Miss Craven's knowledge of horsemanship is confined to her exploits on a small, shaggy, down-hearted Welsh pony, concerning whom it would be difficult to predicate which he was fullest of, years or grass. Miss Blessington has lent her an old habit; it is much too big in the waist and shoulders for her, but a well-made garment always manages to adapt itself more or less to any figure, and she does not look amiss in it. It is a matter of very little consequence to her at the present moment how she looks; she is the arrantest coward in Christendom, and her heart sinks down to the bottom of her boots as she sees three horses that look unnaturally tall and depressingly cheerful issue through the great folding-doors that open into the stable-yard.
"Oh, Sir Thomas! it is a chesnut, is it? Don't they say that chesnuts always have very uncertain tempers? Oh! please—I'm rather frightened. I think, if you don't mind, I'd almost as soon——"
"Fiddlesticks!" answers Sir Thomas, roughly. "Cannot have my horses saddled and unsaddled every half-hour because you don't know your own mind. God bless my soul, child! Don't look as if you were going to be hanged! Why, you might ride her with a bit of worsted. Here, Simpson, look sharp, and put Miss Craven up."
After two abortive attempts, in the first of which she springs short, and glides ignobly to earth again, and in the second takes a bound that goes near to carrying her clean over her steed, after having given Simpson a kick in the face, and torn a hole in her borrowed habit, Miss Craven is at length settled in her seat.
It is a hot afternoon; after all, I think that miladi has the best of it, sitting in a garden-chair under a tulip tree, eating apricots. The deer, with dappled sides and heavy-horned heads, are herding about the rough, knotted feet of the great trees that stand here and there in solitary kingship about the park. They spread their ancient, outstretched arms between earth and heaven, and man and beast rejoice in the shade thereof. The dust lies a hand-breadth thick upon the road; the nuts in the hedgerow, the half-ripe blackberries, the rag-wort in the grass—all merge their distinctive colours in one dirty-white mask.
"Is she going to kick, do you think?" asks Esther, in a mysterious whisper of Miss Blessington, across Sir Thomas. "Does not it mean that when they put their ears back?"
"I don't think you need be alarmed," answers Constance, with politely-veiled contempt; "it is only the flies that tease her."
The animal that inspires such alarm in Esther's mind, is a slight, showy thing, nearly thoroughbred; a capital lady's park hack. It is quiet enough, only that the quietness of a young, oats-fed mare, and of an antediluvian Welsh pony blown out with grass, are two different things. She is sidling along now, half across the road, coquetting with her own shadow.
"Oh, Sir Thomas!" (in an agonised voice) "why does not she walk straight? Why does she go like a crab?"
"Pooh!" answers Sir Thomas, in his hard, loud voice; "it's only play!"
"If I'm upset, I don't much care whether it is in play or earnest," rejoins Esther, ruefully.
The glare from the road, the dust and the midges, make people keep their eyes closed as nearly as they can: so that it is not till they are close upon him that they perceive that the man who is dawdling along to meet them on a stout, grey cob, with his hat and coat and whiskers nearly as white as any miller's, is St. John. He looks rather annoyed at the rencontre.
"I have been over to Melford, Sir Thomas, to see that pointer of Burleigh's. It will not do at all; it's not half broken."
"You had better turn back with us, St. John," suggests Constance, graciously.
"No, thanks; much too hot!"
"Au revoir, then," nodding her head and her tall hat, and about a million flies that are promenading on it, gracefully.
Esther's fears vanish.
"Three is no company," she says in a low voice, and making rather a plaintive little face as he passes her.
Drawn by the magnet that has succeeded in drawing to itself most things that it wished—viz., a woman's inviting eyes—he turns the cob's head sharp round.
"But four is," he answers, with an eager smile, putting his horse alongside of hers.
She was rather compunctious the moment she had said it. It is reversing the order of things—the woman after the man; "the haystack after the cow;" as the homely old proverb says.
The road is broad, and for a little while they all four jog on abreast, as in a Roman chariot-race or a city omnibus—rather a dreary squadron.
"This is very dull," thinks Esther. "Oh! if I could lose my handkerchief, or my veil, or my gloves! Why cannot I drop my whip?"
No sooner said than done.
"Oh! Mr. Gerard, I am so sorry, I have dropped my whip!"
Mr. Gerard, of course, dismounts and picks it up; Sir Thomas and his ward pass on.
"What a happy thought that was of yours!" says St. John, wiping the little delicate switch before giving it back to her.
"Happy thought!What do you mean?" (reddening).
"Oh! it was accident, was it? I quite thought you had dropped it on purpose, and was lost in admiration of your ingenuity."
He looks at her searchingly as he speaks.
"Ididdrop it on purpose," she answers, blushing painfully. "Why do you make me tell the truth, when I did not mean to do so?"
"Don't you always tell truth?" (a little anxiously).
"Does anybody?"
"I hope so. A few men do, I think."
"As I have no pretensions to being a man, you cannot be surprised that my veracity is not my strongest point."
"You are only joking" (looking at her with uneasy intentness). "Please reassure me, by saying that you do not tell any greater number of fibs than every one is compelled to contribute towards the carrying on of society."
"Perhaps I do, and perhaps I do not."
He looks only half-satisfied with this oracular evasion; but does not press the point farther.
"It is not often that my papa and I take the air together; we think we have almost enough of each other's society in-doors."
"He is your father," says Esther, rather snappishly; a little out of humour with him for having put her out of conceit with herself.
"I never could see what claim to respect that was," answers he, gravely; "on the contrary I think that one's parents ought to apologise to one for bringing one, without asking one's leave, into such a disagreeable place as this world is."
"Disagreeable!" cries Esther, turning her eyes, broad open, in childish wonder upon him. "Disagreeable toyou!Young and——"
"Beautiful, were you going to say?"
"No, certainly not——and with plenty of money to make it pleasant?"
"But I have not plenty of money. Ishallhave, probably, when I'm too old to care about it!heis good for thirty years more, you know," nodding respectfully at Sir Thomas's broad, blue back.
"Itmustbe tiring, waiting for dead men's shoes," says Esther, a little sardonically.
"Tiring!I believe you," says St. John, energetically; "it is worse than tiring—it is degrading. Do you suppose I do not think my own life quite as contemptible as you can? Take my word for it" (emphasising every syllable), "there is no class of men in England so much to be pitied as heirs to properties. We cannot dig; to beg we are ashamed."
"I never was heir to anything, so I cannot tell."
"I should have been a happier fellow, and worth something then, perhaps, if I had been somebody's tenth son, and had had to earn my bread quill-driving, or soap-boiling, or sawbones-ing. I think I see myself pounding away at a pestle and mortar in the surgery" (laughing). "I should have had a chance, then, of being liked for myself too, even if I did smell rather of pills and plaister; whereas now, if anybody looks pleasant at me, or says anything civil to me, I always think it is for love of Felton, not of me."
"You should go aboutincognito, like the Lord of Burleigh."
"He was but a landscape painter, you know. Do you know that once, not a very many years ago, I had a ridiculous notion in my head that one ought to try and do some little good in the world? Thanks to Sir Thomas's assistance and example, I have very nearly succeeded in getting rid of that chimera. If I am asked at the Last Day how I have spent my life, I can say, I have shot a few bears in Norway, and a good many turkeys and grebe in Albania; I have killed several salmon in Connemara: I have made a fool of myself once, and a beast of myself many times."
"How did you make a fool of yourself?" pricking up her ears.
"Oh! never mind; it is a stupid story without any point, and I have not quite come to the pitch of dotage of telling senile anecdotes about myself. Here, let us turn in at this gate, and take a cut across the park: it is cooler, and we can have a nice gallop under the trees, without coming in for the full legacy of Sir Thomas's and Conny's dust, as we are doing now."
"But—but—is not it ratherdangerous?" objects Esther, demurring. "Don't they sometimes put their feet into rabbit-holes, and tumble down and break their legs?"
"Frequently, I may almost sayinvariably," answers St. John, laughing, and opening the gate with the handle of his whip.
The soft, springy, green turf is certainly pleasanter than the hard, whity-brown turnpike road, and so the horses think as they break into a brisk canter. The quick air freshens the riders' faces—comes to them like comfortable words from Heaven to a soul in Purgatory—as they dash along under the trees, stooping their heads every now and then to avoid coming into contact with the great, low-spreading boughs.
Laughing, flushed, half-fright, half-enjoyment:
"She looked so lovely as she swayedThe rein with dainty finger-tips;A man had given all other bliss,And all his worldly worth for this—To waste his whole heart in one kissUpon her perfect lips."
"Delicious! I'm not a bit afraid now; I bid defiance to the rabbit-holes," she cries, with little breathless pauses between the words.
Let no one shout before they are out of the wood. Hardly have the words left her mouth, when all at once, at their very feet almost, from among the seven-foot-high fern, where they have been crouching, rise a score of deer with sudden rustling; and, their slender knees bent, spring away with speedy grace through the mimic forest. Esther's mare, frightened at the sudden apparition (many horses are afraid of deer), swerves violently to the left; then gets her head down, and sets to kicking as if she would kick herself out of her skin.
"Mind! Take care! Hold tight! Keep her head up!" shouts St. John, in an agony.
Next moment the chesnut, with head in the air, nostrils extended, and bridle swinging to and fro against her fore legs, tears riderless past him. In a second he is off, and at the side of the heap of blue cloth that is lying motionless among the buttercups.
"I'm not dead," says the heap, raising itself, and smiling rather a difficult smile up at him, as he leans over it or her, his burnt face whitened with extremest fear. "Don't look so frightened!"
"Thank God!" he says, hardly above his breath, and more devoutly than he is in the habit of saying his prayers. "When I saw you there, lying all shapeless, I half thought—Oh!" (with a shudder) "I don't know what I thought."
"I must be tied on next time, mustn't I?" says Essie, putting up her hand to her head with an uncertain movement, as if she were not quite sure of finding it there. "Oh! Mr. Gerard,"—the colour coming back faintly to her lips and cheeks—"Idohate riding! it's horribly dangerous! quite as bad as a battle!"
"Quite!" acquiesces St. John, laughing heartily in his intense relief. "And you are quite sure you are not hurt?"
"Quite!"
"Really?"
"Really!"
To prove how perfectly intact she is, she jumps up; but, as she does so, her face grows slightly distorted with a look of pain, and she sinks back on her buttercup bed.
"Not quite sure, either; I seem to have done something stupid to my foot—turned it or twisted it."
So saying, she thrusts out from under her habit a small foot. Itisa small—averysmall—foot; but the boot in which it is cased is country made, and about three times too big for it; so that it might rattle in it, like a pea in a drum. Even at this affecting moment St. John cannot repress a slight feeling of disappointment.
"I'm awfully sorry! Whereabouts does it hurt? There?" putting his fingers gently on the slender, rounded ankle.
"Yes, a little."
"I'm awfully sorry!" (You see there is not much variety in his laments.) "What can I do for it? gallop home as hard as I can, and make them send the carriage?"
"With a doctor, a lawyer, and a parson in it? No, I think not."
"But you cannot sit here all night. Could youridehome, do you think?"
"On that dreadful beast?" with a horrified intonation.
"But if I lead her all the way?"
"Very well" (reluctantly); "but (brightening a little) I cannot ride her; she is not here."
"I suppose I must be going to look after her," says St. John, dragging himself up very unwillingly. "Brute! she is as cunning as Old Nick! And you are sure you don't mind being left here by yourself for a minute or two?"
"Not if there are no horses within reach," she answers, with an innocent smile, which he carries away with him through the sunshine and the fern and the grass.
Essie spends full half an hour pushing out, pinching in, smoothing and stroking Miss Blessington's caved-in hat; full a quarter of an hour in picking every grass and sedge and oxeye that grew within reach of her destroying arm; and full another quarter in thinking what a pleasant, manly, straightforward face St. John's is—what a thoroughly terrified face it looked when she met it within an inch of her own nose after her disgracefulbouleversement—what a much better height five feet ten is for all practical purposes than six feet four.
At the end of the fourth quarter Mr. Gerard returns, with a fire hardly inferior to St. Anthony's in his face; with his hair cleaving damply to his brows, and without the mare.
"Would not let me get within half a mile of her! far too knowing! Brute! and now she'll be sure to go and knock the saddle to pieces, and then there'll be the devil to pay!"
"I'm so sorry," says Esther, looking up sympathisingly, with her lap full of decapitated oxeyes.
"So am I, for your sake: you'll have to ride the cob home."
"I shall have to turn into a man, then," she says, glancing rather doubtfully at the male saddle.
"No, you won't," (laughing).
He rises, and unfastens the cob from the tree-branch to which he has been tied. He has been indulging a naturally greedy disposition—biting off leaves and eating them—until he has made his bit and his mouth as green as green peas.
"You must let me put you up, I think," says Gerard bending down and looking into his companion's great, sweet eyes, under the rim of her battered, intoxicating-looking hat.
"Must I?" (lowering her eyelids shyly.)
"Yes; do you mind much?"
"No—o."
He stoops and lifts her gently. He is not a Samson or a prize-fighter, and well grown young women of seventeen are not generally feather-weights; but yet it seems to him that the second occupied in raising her from the ground and placing her in the saddle was shorter than other seconds.
A man's arms are not sticks or bits of iron, that they can hold a beautiful woman without feeling it. St. John's blood is giving little quick throbs of pleasure. His arms seem to feel the pressure of that pleasant burden long after they have been emptied of it.
"I think you must let me hold you," he says, gently and very respectfully passing his arm round her waist.
"No, no!" she cries, hastily, pulling herself away—"no need!—no need at all! I shall not fall."
She feels an overpowering shrinking from the enforced, unavoidable familiarity. It does not arise from any distaste for St. John certainly, nor yet from any quixotic loyalty to Bob; it springs from a new, unknown, uncomprehended shyness.
"Very well," he answers, quietly, releasing her instantly, and taking the bridle in his hand. "But I'm afraid you will find that you are mistaken."
They set forward across the park, at a foot's pace and in silence. Esther twists her hands in the cob's mane, and tries to persuade herself that pommelless pigskin does not make a slippery seat. Every two paces she slides down an inch or so, and then recovers herself with an awkward jerk. The sun is hot. Now and then, as the cob puts his foot on a mole-hill, or some other slight inequality in the ground, her ankle bumps against the saddle-flap. She feels turning giddy and sick with the heat and the pain.
"Mr. Gerard! Mr. Gerard! I'm falling!" she calls out loud, stretching out her arms to him, and clutching hold of his shoulder with a violence and tenacity that she herself is not in the least aware of.
He is magnanimous. He does not exult over her; he does not say, "I knew how it would be; I told you so!" He only says, in a kind, anxious voice, and plainlier still with kind, anxious eyes, "I'm afraid you are in great pain?" and replaces the rejected arm in its former obnoxious position.
As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."
"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly; "even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."
"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks, explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance.
"Broken the mare's knees, I suppose?" cries Sir Thomas, loudly, taking no notice whatever of Miss Craven's casualties. "Some fool's play, of course; larking over the palings, I dare say. Well, sir, what have you done with her? where have you left her? out with it!" (lashing himself up into an irrational turkeycock fury.)
"Damn the mare!" answered St. John in a rage, growing rather white, and forgetting his manners.
St. John's rages, when he does get into them, which is not very often, are far worse ones than his papa's, and so the latter knows, and is cowed by the first symptoms of the approach of one.
Miss Blessington looks up shocked. Thisjeune personne bien élevéealways is shocked at whatever people ought to be shocked at—Colenso, Swinburne, skittles, &c.
"You are not much hurt,really, I hope?" she says, suavely, walking along beside Esther, while Sir Thomas and his heir wrangle in the background. "Which way did you come, and whathasbecome of your horse?"
"We came through the park," answers Esther, holding on by her eyelids to the cob's slippery back; "so I suppose the horse is there still. Mr. Gerard tried to catch it, and could not."
"Through the park!" repeats Miss Blessington, with a slight smile of superior intelligence. "Oh! I see; a short cut home! Poor St. John has such a horror of taking a ride for riding's sake, that he always tries to shorten his penance as much as possible!"
It is the 1st of September, and the seal of impending destruction is set upon many a little plump brown bird; but ignorance is bliss, and the little brown birds do not know it, and are walking about the turnip ridges and amongst the stubble fields as confidently as if there were no such man as Purdey, and no such infernal machine as a gun. St. John and his papa go out shooting together. Sir Thomas knocks up by luncheon time, and returns to his orchid-house, and to the goading the bricklayers, as King Agamemnon did his fellow-chiefs, with bitter words. Esther spends the day in her bedroom, lying in state on a sofa with her ankle bandaged up. It hurts her acutely if she attempts to walk on it; but if she keeps quiet, she is hardly aware of there being anything wrong with it. It is very annoying having to play the invalid for an ailment that is purely local when you feel in riotous health and spirits—to have your dinner sent up to you on a tray when you are so hungry that you could eat double your allotted portion, if it were not that, being an invalid, you are ashamed to say so. One has a sense of shamming, malingering.
Poor Miss Craven passes a very dull day; the red rose on one side the window, and the travellers' joy on the other, look in and say, "Why is this lazy child lying all day on a couch, when we and so many other flowers have been calling to her with our voiceless voices to come out into the breeze and shine?" A bee comes in sometimes, and goes buzz—buzzing about, telling himself how busy he is, and that he has no time to waste now that his honey-harvest is drawing so near to its sweet close. The room is so still that, but for feeling intensely alive, and not having her chin tied up, Esther might almost imagine herself laid out previous to her interment. Now and again Miss Blessington enters noiselessly, says "I hope you are feeling a little easier," in her soft monotone, and then rustles gently away again. She has provided Esther with a novel and a book of acrostics, and thinks she has done her duty by her neighbour amply. The novel is one written with a purpose; a dull one-sided tilt against Ritualism. Esther never found out an acrostic in her life, and has seldom been so completely vacant of employment as to try. She is, therefore, reduced to spending half the day in writing to Bob—half the day! and yet when the letter is finished it only covers three sides of a sheet. She has written, rewritten, and re-rewritten it. All around and about her lie half-covered, quarter-covered, whole-covered sheets, all stamped with the seal of condemnation. Gerard is the stumbling block; his name either will not come in at all, which looks unnatural, or else insists on thrusting itself in every second line. This is the form in which Miss Craven's billetdoux finally presents itself at Plas Berwyn:
"Dear Bob,—Thanks very much for your letter; please put a few stops next time. I had a very disagreeable journey here—bushels of dust and a sick baby. This is a very handsome place, and they are all very kind to me. (H'm! are they? I don't know about that;oneof them is.) Yesterday I went out riding with Sir Thomas and his ward (so I did; I set out with them), and I stupidly fell from my horse, a sort of thing that nobody but I would have done, and hurt my foot a little; but nothing to speak of. Miss Blessington, the ward, is remarkably handsome, but looks a great deal older than I do. My love to your mother, and thanks for her kind messages; the same to the girls. Tell Bessy that it is hardly worth while sending me 'The Sinfulness of Little Sins,' as I shall have more time for reading when I get home again."Yours affectionately,"E. C."P. S.—Mr. Gerard is not at all good-looking; he seems very fond of shooting; he has been out all to-day."
"Dear Bob,—Thanks very much for your letter; please put a few stops next time. I had a very disagreeable journey here—bushels of dust and a sick baby. This is a very handsome place, and they are all very kind to me. (H'm! are they? I don't know about that;oneof them is.) Yesterday I went out riding with Sir Thomas and his ward (so I did; I set out with them), and I stupidly fell from my horse, a sort of thing that nobody but I would have done, and hurt my foot a little; but nothing to speak of. Miss Blessington, the ward, is remarkably handsome, but looks a great deal older than I do. My love to your mother, and thanks for her kind messages; the same to the girls. Tell Bessy that it is hardly worth while sending me 'The Sinfulness of Little Sins,' as I shall have more time for reading when I get home again.
"Yours affectionately,"E. C.
"P. S.—Mr. Gerard is not at all good-looking; he seems very fond of shooting; he has been out all to-day."
"The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs."
Dinner is over; nothing to look forward to but bed-time. Yah! How dull! A knock comes at the door. Miss Blessington enters with flowers in her hand—jessamine, heliotrope, everything that smells sweetly and not heavily—unlike Bob's well meaning but annihilating double stocks.
"I hope you are in less pain now" (the usual formula, that comes as regularly and frequently as the doxology in church).
"Oh yes! thanks; I'm very well" (yawning and looking woefully bored.) "What lovely flowers!"
"St. John sent them to you" (rather shortly).
"Mr. Gerard?" (with animation, the bored look vanishing.) "How very kind of him!"
"He always is so good-natured," answers Constance, with a cold generality.
"It is so particularly kind of him, when he has such an overpowering aversion for strangers," continues Essie, with a malicious twinkle in her eyes.
Constance sweeps to the window, slightly discomfited.
"He told me to ask you whether you would like him to come and carry you downstairs for an hour or two?" she says, in a somewhat constrained voice; "but I daresay you would rather be left in peace up here; and I should think that the quieter you kept your foot the better for it."
"On the contrary, I should like it of all things," cries Essie, with perverse alacrity. "In your cheerful company downstairs, I shall be more likely to forget my sufferings, such as they are, than all by my dull self up here; to tell the truth, I was meditating asking your maid to come and talk to me about haberdashery."
Outside Miss Craven's door St. John pauses, as one that is devout hesitates on the threshold of a sanctuary. Chintz curtains rose-lined, white-dressed toilet-table, simple valueless ornaments lying about, two little slippers, that look as if they had been just kicked off—his eye takes in all the details. He feels like Faust in Marguerite's chamber. And Marguerite herself, lying careless, restful on her couch, her two arms flung lazily upwards and backwards, to make a resting-place for her head; the smooth elbows and shoulders gleaming warm, cream-white, through the colder blue-white of her dress; and the up-looking face, childish in its roundness, and blooming down—but oh! most womanish—in the shafts of quick fire that greet him from the laughing, sleepy eyes. Where did she learn that art of shooting? From the pigs and cabbages at Glan-yr-Afon? From old Mrs. Brandon? From Miss Bessie? From—"Stop the Leak?" Deponent sayeth not whence.
"Howgood of you!" she says, with emphasis, stretching out her hand to him, as he stands beside her sofa, looking rather fagged with his day's work. "I had just been calculating how many hours there would be before I could have a decent pretext for going to bed; one gets so tired of oneself."
"Not so tired as one does of one's family," answers St. John, rather ruefully.
"I have no family," she rejoins, simply.
"We Gerards have a particularly happy knack of rubbing each other the wrong way," he says, rather irritably. "I am sometimes tempted to think that we are the most unamiable family God ever put breath into."
"People always think that of their own family," answers Essie, laughing; "they know their own little crookednesses much better than any one else's."
"Has Miss Craven changed her mind, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington from the doorway.
St. John starts. "Not that I know of."
He stoops, and lifts her carefully, as a thing most precious; as he does so, a little foolish trembling passes over her, as a baby-breeze passes over some still pool's breast, hardly troubling the sky and the trees that lie far down in the blue mirror. Down the grand staircase he bears her, and Constance follows to see that there is no loitering by the way.
The morning-room at Felton (so called because the family always sit there in the evenings) is very lofty. You have to crane your neck up to see the stucco stalactites, faintly imitative of Staffa and Iona, pendant from the ceiling. There are statuettes in plenty standing about in niches and on pedestals. Venuses and Minervas and Clyties, all with their hair very elaborately dressed, and not a stitch of clothes on. There is a great litter of papers and magazines on the round table: theJustice of the Peace, that is Sir Thomas's; theField, that is St. John's; theCornhill, that is everybody's. Sir Thomas and miladi are playing backgammon; miladi is compelled to do so every night as a penance for her sins—four rubbers, and ifhewins, as she prays and endeavours that he may, five.
"Don't take the dice up in such a hurry, miladi," he says, snappishly; "how the deuce can I see what your throw is?"
"Seizes, Sir Thomas," responds miladi, meekly.
"Seizes! don't believe a word of it! much more like seize ace!"
Miss Blessington, dressed by Elise in Chambéry gauze, and by Nature in her usual panoply of beautiful stupidity, which she wears sleeping and waking, at home and abroad, living and dying, is at work at a little table, a nude Dian, with cold, chaste smile and crinkly hair, on a red velvet shrine just above her head.
"Do they play every evening?" asks Esther, from the recess where she has been deposited by St. John, whose eyes she encounters, considering her attentively over the top of theSaturday. Shams, Flunkeyism, Woman's Rights, Dr. Cumming, the Girl of the Period—they have all been passing through his eye into his brain, and, mixed with Esther Craven, make a fine jumble there.
St. John has been rather unlucky in his experiences of women hitherto. He has got rather into the habit of thinking that all good women must be stupid, and that all pleasant women must be bad. Esther is not stupid. Is she bad, then? Those glances of hers, they give a man odd sensations about the midriff; they inspire in him a greedy, covetous desire for more of them; but are they such as Una would have given her Red Cross Knight? Are they such as a man would like to see his wife bestow on his men friends? The wilder a man is or has been himself, the more scrupulously fastidious he is about the almost prudish nicety of the women that belong to him. He likes to see the sheep and the goats as plainly, widely separated as they are in the parable; it moves him to deep wrath when he sees a good woman faintly, poorly imitating a bad one. I do not think that good women believe this half generally enough; or, if they do, they do not act upon it.
"Do they play every evening?"
"Every evening, and Sir Thomas always accuses my mother of cheating."
"And you, what do you do?"
"Read, go to sleep, play cribbage or bézique with Conny."
"Does she live here always?"
"Always."
"You and she are inseparable, I suppose?"
"We get on very well in a quiet way; she is a very good girl, and comes and sits in my smoking-room by the hour with me."
"Wrong, but pleasant, as the monkey said when he kissed the cat," remarks Esther, flippantly. "You are very fond of her, I suppose?"
"H'm!" shrugging his shoulders. "I have a cat-like propensity for getting fond of anything that I live and eat and breathe with—like the fellow in the Bastille, don't you know, that got so fond of a spider. I never should have grown fond of a spider, though; they have got such a monstrous lot of long legs; but the principle is the same."
"Why are not you fond of Sir Thomas then?"
"So I am, I suppose,in a way;if he were to tumble into the pool, I suppose I should hop in and fish him out again; I'm not quite sure about that, either."
"We'll have another rubber, miladi?" shouts Sir Thomas's stentor voice, elate with victory; "that is the ninth game I have beat you to-night; you'll never win as long as you leave so many blots—I have told you so a score of times."
Poor miladi, strangling a gigantic yawn, begins to set her men again; she had hoped that her punishment was ended for the night, and that she might be dismissed to theotium cum dignitateof her armchair and nap.
St. John jumps up and walks over to the players; there are few things in life he hates so much as playing backgammon with his father, but he hates seeing his mother bullied even more. If a man is cursed with a necessity for loving something, the chances are that he will love his mother, even if she bear more resemblance to a porpoise than to a Christian lady.
"I'll have a rubber with you, Sir Thomas; my mother is tired."
"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she been doing to tire herself?—fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off half a dozen dead roses. Very good thing for her if she is."
But the man's will is stronger than the turkey-cock's, and the latter yields.
A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended. Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful nostrils—entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with. Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house, although not particularly young, and in general not particularly gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull, Devil; Pull, Baker!—Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain their point.
"Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning, addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together after breakfast.
"I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?"
"Well!"
"If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well——"
"I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he answers, picking up thePall Mall.
"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.
"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can 'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"
"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you, with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."
"Iamwonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of thePall Mall. "There is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is there?"
She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.
"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished, like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well'—what then?"
"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs than by being continually moved from place to place;thatis what I was going to say."
"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her limbs."
Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.
"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually carrying her about the house."
"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."
"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in your arms."
"What a horribly immoral picture—vice stalking rampant through the Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that cannot carry herself!"
"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her—to be haled about like a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her brother, I grant you, it would be different."
"If I were her brother itwouldbe different," assents Gerard, blandly.
The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation, it is made exactly to contradict itself.
"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure that it is not mistaken kindness."
"Thatwhatis not mistaken kindness?"
"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."
"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities, and explain; I am all attention."
"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts, with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken up and dropped again——"
"Like a hot chesnut!"
"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."
"Hardly."
"And when you drop her——"
"Literally or metaphorically?—on the stone floor, or out of the light of my favour?"
"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)——
"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her—"To be dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive voice of the verb to drop."
"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "thatisthe pride that apes humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when you drop her——"
"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and of the repetition of the phrase—"she will be no worse off than she was before that misfortune happened to her."
So Esther lies all day long in lazy contentment upon the sofa, looking out at the garden, and at the fountain where four bronze dolphins spout continual showers of spray in the autumn sunlight; dips into Owen Meredith's last poems; peeps between the crisp uncut leaves of new magazine or novel; and looks forward towards the ante-dinner hour, when St. John will come in from the day's amusement or occupation, and passive content will be exchanged for active enjoyment.
Esther has, as you know, made but light of her accident in her letters to her lover; fearing lest, in his eager anxiety on her account, he might get into the train, and give her the unexpected pleasure of seeing him arrive at Felton—seeing him arrive in his threadbare shooting jacket, through whose sleeves he always appears to have thrust his long arms too far, and his patched, creaking, Naullan boots. Imagine St. John introduced to those boots! A cold shiver runs down her spine at the bare idea. St. John is no dandy, it is true, but coats from Poole's are as much a matter of course to him as a knife and fork to eat his dinner with, or a bed to lie upon.
On the afternoon of the day on which the above-reported short dialogue took place, St. John and his father, converging from different points of the compass to one centre, enter almost at the same moment the library. Two canary-coloured Colossi have just deposited tea on a small table. St. John has neither neckerchief nor collar; his brown throat is bared in anégligéas becoming to most men as theà quatre épinglesexactitude of their park get-up is unbecoming.
A man in the loose carelessness of his every-day country clothes is a man: in the prim tightness of his Pall Mall toilette he is a little, stiff, jointless figure out of Noah's ark.
"Slops again!" says Paterfamilias, very gruffly. "I never come into this room at any hour of the day or night without finding you women drinking tea! Why on earth, if you are thirsty, cannot you drink beer or water, instead of ruining your insides with all that wash?"
At this courteous speech a silence falls on the company. Sir Thomas mostly brings silence with him; he is half-conscious that at his entry voices are choked and laughter quenched, and it serves to exasperate him the more.
"You sit with your knees into the fire in air-tight rooms all day long," pursues he, in his loud, hectoring voice, "and destroy your digestions with gallons of hot tea, and then you are surprised at having tallow in your cheeks, instead of lilies and roses, as your grandmothers had!"
"Perhaps," says St. John, drily, "the ladies deny the justice of your conclusions; Sir Thomas; perhaps they do not own the soft impeachment of tallowy cheeks which you so gallantly ascribe to them."
As he speaks, his eyes involuntarily rest on the clear, rose brilliance of the young stranger's happy, beautiful child-face.
"I don't mind being called 'tallow face,'" says Esther, with a low laugh—"Juliet was; her father said to her, 'Out, you baggage! you tallow face!'"
"He must have been an ancestor of Sir Thomas's in direct male line, must not he?" says the young man, gaily stooping over her and whispering.
Seeing them so familiarly and joyously whisper together, Constance looks up with an air of astonished displeasure, which Gerard perceiving, instantly turns towards her.
"What are you making, Conny?"
"Braces."
"For me, no doubt? With your usual thoughtfulness, you recollected that my birthday falls next week, and you were preparing a little surprise for me. Well, never mind; though I have made the discovery rather prematurely, I'll be as much surprised as ever when the day of presentation arrives."
"They are not for you, St. John; they are for the bazaar."
"The bazaar!" he repeats, a little testily. "For the last month all your thoughts have tended bazaarwards; you neither eat, nor sleep, nor speak, nor hear, nor smell, without some reference to the bazaar."
"Bazaar! Humbug!" growls Sir Thomas, rising and walking towards the door. "A parcel of idle women getting together to sell trash and make asses of themselves!"
Then he goes out, and bangs the door.
"I would not for worlds have given him the satisfaction of agreeing with him while he was in the room," says St. John, insensibly speaking in a louder key now that the autocrat before whom all voices sink has removed himself; "but, for once in my life, I must confess to coinciding in opinion with aged P.: to be pestered with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy things that one would far rather be without—to be lavishly generous, and get no credit for it—to be swindled without any hope of legal redress; this is the essence of a charitable bazaar!"
"Dear me!" says Esther, with a crestfallen sigh. "And I had been looking forward to it so much!"
He sits down on a low chair beside her sofa. "Looking forward to a bazaar!" he echoes, with a half-incredulous smile. "My dear Miss Craven, what a revelation as to your past history that one sentence is! Why, I should as soon think of looking forward to a visit to the dentist, or to my mother's funeral!"
"No one expects toenjoyit; it is a necessary evil," says Miss Blessington, with resignation.
"Like dancing with married men, or going to church?"
"Conny! Conny!" shouts Sir Thomas from somewhere in the unseen distance.
Conny rises, though reluctantly, and leaves the other twotête-à-tête.
"Miss Blessington is going to have a stall," says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something, catching a little nervously at the first remark that occurred to her.
"Yes."
"And I am to help her."
"Yes."
"But I will promise not to pester you with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy my wares."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"Miss Blessington has two friends coming to stay with her for it."
"Yes."
"Are you glad or sorry?"
"Glad is a weak word to express my feelings; I am in ecstasies!"
"They are beautiful, I suppose—refined, witty, as I always picture the women of your world?" she says, a little enviously.
"On the contrary, it would be impossible to find two more faded, negative specimens of Belgravian womanhood: they have not a single angle in either of their characters."
"Do you thinkthata recommendation?"
"I did not say so."
"But you implied it, by expressing such exaggerated joy at their coming."
"So I did—so I do: and if they were to rise in number from two to fifty, like Falstaff's highwaymen, I should express greater joy still."