"And why?" raising herself from her cushions to get a straighter, truer look into his bright, grave eyes.
"Because," he says, lowering his voice a little, and leaning closelier over her, "the larger the party the better chance there is of undisturbedtête-à-têtesbetween congenial spirits. Do you see?"
And Estherdoessee, and thinking on Robert Brandon, is uneasily joyful.
Ere the arrival of the looked-for bazaar, Miss Craven's cure is complete. On the day preceding the one appointed for that philanthropic festivity, she has been walking in the late evening about the moon-coloured garden, free from any remaining lameness, leaning on St. John's arm. She does not need the slight stay, but it pleases him to give and her to receive it. It does not please Miss Blessington, however, watching them from an upper chamber—watching Esther dabble her small hands in the opal water in the great bronze water-lily leaf that makes the basin of the fountain—watching St. John, rapt and absorbed in her pretty foolish chatter. And yet their talk, if she could but hear it, holds nothing obnoxiously fond orflirtatious;it might be proclaimed by the bellman in the streets.
"How nice it is to be no longer a devil upon two sticks!" the young girl is saying, joyfully; and the man makes answer, "You will be up to another gallop across the park to-morrow?"
"Never,never!" she cries, bringing together emphatically her two gleaming, wet hands. "You have witnessed my first and last equestrian feat; with my own free-will I will mount never a horse again, unless it is the rocking-horse at the end of the north gallery: it is frisky, yet safe; gallops and plunges, yet stands still: that is the horse for me."
He laughs, and then they are silent.
A star falls, hurling itself mysteriously down the sky, and into the dark; two bats glide past, dusky, noiseless. Bats always seem to me like the ghosts of dead birds, that haunt the green gardens and copses they used to love.
St. John speaks presently. "One forms mistaken estimates of people's characters; I should not have imagined you a coward."
"But I am one, physically and morally," she answers, sighing.
As the ladies retire to bed, Miss Blessington enters Esther's room—a familiarity which somewhat surprises that virgin, as it is the first time that it has been accorded to her.
"I have come to congratulate you!" Constance says, civilly; "you have made a wonderful recovery."
"Yes, wonderful!"
"You can walk perfectly well without assistance, cannot you?"
"Perfectly" (turning away her head, in the guilty consciousness of having, despite her soundness of limb, not walked without assistance).
"St. John is very useful as a walking-stick, isn't he?" (playfully.)
"He thought it would tire me less," replies the other, flushing; "he has been most kind!"
"He always is," answers Miss Blessington, quickly: "it is his nature; old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, dirty children in the gutter—it is all one to him."
"Really!"
"That universal geniality amounts almost to a weakness, though an amiable one; it has often been the cause of exciting hopes that, of course, he had neither the wish nor the power to gratify."
"What! in old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, and dirty children in the gutter?" says Esther, smiling merrily, yet with scorn.
"If I did not take an interest in you," continued Constance, leaning in a graceful artistic pose against the mantelpiece, "I should, of course, not take the trouble to mention the subject; but, as I do, I thought it the kindest thing I could do to you to set you on your guard against attentions to which you, who do not know him, might, without vanity, attribute some importance, but which I, who know him so thoroughly, know to mean absolutely nothing, beyond a sort of generalbonhomietowards the whole of the human race."
"I am deeply grateful," answers the young girl, with sarcastic emphasis; "but in my part of the world, girls are not in the habit of cherishing vague hopes because a man has the civility to offer them his arm when they are disabled by an accident from walking by themselves."
"Well, forewarned is forearmed, you know" (nodding and smiling); "and from some careless, slighting remarks that St. John let fall the other day, I thought I should not be acting the part of a friend by you if I did not warn you against a snare into which I have seen others older, and knowing more of the world than you do, fall. Good night!"
"Stay!" cries Esther, springing up, and catching hold of her companion's gauzy dress in detention. "It is unfair to tell a person half, and not the whole. What were the slighting remarks that Mr. Gerard madeà proposof me?"
"Really, I—I—don't remember exactly," replies Constance, with reluctance, half-feigned, half-real; "I did not pay much attention at the time; it was an admission that slipped out without my intending it."
"But now that it has slipped out," cries the other, authoritatively, "you must explain it fully, please."
"Well, really—please don't look so tragic, it can be of so very little consequence to you what he said or did not say about you——"
"Infinitesimally little! but still I mean to hear it."
"Well" (with rather an awkward laugh), "the situation is hardly worth such Mrs. Siddons' airs: it was only that, when I was remonstrating with him the other day on his manner to you, he said, in his off-hand, abrupt way, something to the effect thatwhenhe threw you over—never for a moment denying that sooner or later he would do so—you would get over it soon, or something of that description. I cannot recall the exact phrase. Good night."
But beautiful Esther, standing there stricken, credulous, with eager, angry eyes, forgets to make the answering greeting.
The Bazaar day has arrived; so likewise have Constance's chosen friends, the Misses De Grey; so likewise has their brother, commonly called Dick De Grey, for no other reason that we wot of but that at his baptism he received the name of Charles. The large open carriage which had so impressed Esther on her first arrival at Brainton station, and St. John's smart T.-cart, with his big, black horse, at whose head, or rather at some distance below whose nose, a cockaded infant stands trim and tidy, are at the door.
"How are we to divide?" says Miss Blessington, coming out under the portico and unfurling her white Honiton parasol. "How many of us are there? Adeline, Georgina, Miss Craven, and myself, four, and you two gentlemen six. St. John, will you drive Miss De Grey?"
"I should be delighted," he answers, slowly and tardily, not looking up from the gardenia which he is fastening on his coat; "but I believe I am under an old engagement to drive Miss Craven. You have never been in a T.-cart, have you?" (looking at her imploringly, to back him up in the ready lie to which, for love of her, he has just given vent.)
"Never!" she answers, smiling coldly. "And now that I see to what a height one has to climb, and in what close proximity one must be to that huge quadruped's heels, I am in no hurry to make the experiment. I release you from your engagement, Mr. Gerard, if it ever existed; if it is all the same to everybody, I prefer the—I never can recollect the names of carriages—barouche, sociable, landau, which is it?"
He stares at her for an instant in blank astonishment; then, turning away quickly to hide the mortification which he knows to be legible on his face, without a word or a groan helps the oldest, plainest, languidest of the Misses De Grey into the T.-cart and drives off with her. And Esther steps into the sociable, and tries to feel triumphant and dignified, contemplating, for a dozen miles, Miss Georgina De Grey's gold-dusted hair and featureless face, and submitting meekly to having the modest proportions of her own toilette covered up and smothered in the abundance and volume of hervis-à-vis' laces and frillings.
"Since he means to throw me over, it is as well to be beforehand with him," she says to herself, her eyes fixed pensively on the revolving black and yellow wheel; "in such cases it is always best to take the initiative. It would have been very pleasant, so high up out of the dust; but what have I to do with aristocratic vehicles? A gig, a wheelbarrow, a pig-tub—such are the only conveyances I am likely to have experience of in after-life; why then inoculate myself with a taste for luxuries that are for my betters?"
And meanwhile St. John holds dreary converse with himself, while a river of sound, on which the words Nilsson, Romeo e Giulietta, Schneider, drums, Holland House, garden party float, pours into his ear from the direction of his companion. "She is honest, at all events; does not relish my society, and does not affect to do so; tolerated me only as long as I was useful, like a dog, in fetching and carrying. Why am I so unpopular with women? Is it what I do, what I say, or what I am, that makes me so? Is it anything mendable or unmendable?"
Precisely seventeen minutes past two of the clock, the Melford town-hall clock, and visitors are beginning to arrive pretty thickly; three or four barouches, seven or eight waggonettes, and nine or ten pony-carriages, are trotting and walking and crawling up the steep Melford street. Climbing the side of a house is child's play to the ascent of that most perpendicular of high streets. The doctor's house, red, and with redder berries thick about its plate-glass windows, stands on your right as you go up the town. The Doctor and the Doctress are issuing from the brass-knockered hall door—she in a grey moire antique, that old Mrs. Evans' quinsy paid for, and gold bracelets that took their rise from Mr. Watkin's decline and fall.
The town-hall stands in its grey limestone respectability in the market place, over against the Bell Inn; it has an arched doorway, and under this arch man, woman, and child go pacing in little, smart tulle bonnets and black hats, with their purses full of small change, and their hearts of that most excellent virtue—Christian charity. Round the hall counters are ranged, and behind these counters stand a phalanx of young women, prepared to exert their little abilities in overreaching and circumventing their fathers, lovers, and brothers, to the utmost.
Miss Blessington's stall is next-door neighbour to poor Mrs. Tomkins', the Felton curate's fat, childridden wife—as, in some foreign city, they tell us that you may see marble palaces and mud hovels cheek by jowl; for, as is a mud hovel to a marble palace, so is poor Mrs. Tomkins in the Melford table of valuation to Miss Blessington.
Mrs. Tomkins' main hope is in her sister, pretty, second-rate, pert Miss Smith, who, with a dog-collar round her waist, to demonstrate its tenuity, and two long, uncurled curls, vulgarly known as "Follow me, lads!" floating over her fat shoulders, has been kissing strawberries and rose-buds, and selling them at half-a-crown apiece, to such attorneys' clerks and doctors' assistants of weak intellect as inhabit Melford town.
On Miss Blessington's other side the Misses Denzil hold sway—daughters of a neighbour baronet, whom for twenty years past Sir Thomas has hated with the hate of hell, because he once beat him in a contest for the county. Belinda Denzil, an elderly young lady, tall and yellow and stately; likest to a dandelion among the flowers of the field; and Priscilla, a beady-eyed, brisk brune, of whom her admirers predicate that she could talk the hind leg off a mule!
Mr. Gerard and Mr. De Grey are strolling about together arm in arm; criticising the wares a little and the saleswomen a good deal. They are not particularly fond of one another; but no more was Alexander Selkirk, I dare say, of his next-door neighbour, when he lived in town, if he ever did. All the same, if the said next-door neighbour had happened to land on that most irreligious of desert islands, where the benighted valleys and rocks never heard the sound of the church-going bell, don't you suppose that he would have rushed into his arms? So in this desert island of Melford, St. John and Dick, the only two respectable fellows, as they think, among a savage horde of squireens, march about, hooked on together for mutual defence against the barbarians.
"You seem to be driving a thriving trade," remarks St. John, who, after his wanderings, has at length come to anchor at Miss Blessington's stall, addressing Esther, but addressing her diffidently, as one that, after the severe and uncalled-for snubbing he had this morning received, was by no means sure of the reception his civilities might meet with, while three old women and a parson squeeze in beside himself and his friend.
"Perhaps you will kindly contribute towards making it more thriving, by buying something;" replies Miss Craven, coolly and drily. "Let me recommend this cigar case to your notice; it is rather ugly, and very dear, but one must not mind trifling drawbacks of that kind on an occasion like the present."
"Did you make it?"
"Yes; but please don't be so polite as to buy it on that account, as, upon the same grounds, you would have to buy a large proportion of the beautiful works of art before you."
So speaking, she turns away from him to another customer, as if glad to be rid of him.
"May I ask what the price of this is?" asks Mr. De Grey, leaning with languid familiarity over Miss Smith's counter (everybody is familiar with Miss Smith; that is one of her great charms), and holding up a gorgeously-embroidered smoking cap between his finger and thumb.
"One pound eleven and sixpence halfpenny," replies the young lady, with glib obsequiousness, all a-twitter with excitement at being addressed by an august being in a cutaway coat who is known throughout the room to be a visitor at Felton Hall. "But, dear me!" (fussing about with unnecessaryempressement) "I have got a much more stylish one somewhere, if I could but lay my hands on it—one that I made myself, if that is any recommendation! He! he!" (with a giggle.)
"Can you doubt it?" retorts he, sucking the top of his cane, and staring at her with lazy impertinence.
Meanwhile the room is getting very crowded and stuffy: it is a very small town-hall, and all Melford and the southern half of ——shire are compressed into it—the result being much animal heat, some ill-humour, and infinite grief over rent garments; which is reversing the case of the ancients, who rent their garments in sign of grief. And in and through and about this warm throng, many girls, emissaries from different stalls, go pushing and elbowing to enlist unwilling subscribers to raffles. Philanthropy has gone nigh to unsexing them; it has turned modest, reserved ladies into forward importunate Mænads.
Foremost, most energetic, most unrebuffable of these emissaries is Miss Priscilla Denzil. She flies about hither and thither, with her white gown all limp and tumbled, and her rough hair pushing its way resolutely from under the blue ribbons which make a vain show of confining ità la Grecque. She is not thinking a bit of how she is looking; her whole soul is intent on doing a good stroke of business, and none can escape her.
Sir Thomas Gerard has just entered the hall. Having ridden into Melford on magisterial business, the idea has struck him of how much better and more cuttingly he will be able to abuse the bazaar at dinner this evening if he has had the advantage of seeing it. With a dog-whip in his hand, and an intense desire to lay it about the shoulders of the company expressed in his cross face, he is pushing his way along when attacked by the dauntless Priscilla.
"Oh! Sir Thomas, please let me put you down in the raffle for a fender-stool;sohandsome! white arums on a red ground;dolet me,sohandsome!"
"Awhat, Miss Priscilla?"
"A fender-stool."
"Humph! the stupidest things that ever were invented," answers the baronet, snarling. "If they had been made expressly to trip people up, and pitch them head-foremost into the fire, they could not have answered the purpose better."
"Did they ever pitch you head-foremost into the fire?" asks Miss Prissy, insinuatingly ("because [aside], if so, I wonder whoever was fool enough to pick you out again!")
"No, and they shall never have the chance as long as I can prevent them," replies the gracious elder, walking off.
For a minute Priscilla stands still, rebuffed; but recovering herself, speedily rushes off again, charges with her fender-stool an old maid who has one already, and a poor little whity-brown curate who has no house to put one in, &c., &c.
"I am afraid I have not done them up very neatly," Esther is saying, as she gives a parcel into Mr. De Grey's hands—Miss Smith having at length frightened that gentleman from her side by the rapid strides to intimacy which she was making with him—"My fingers toil in vain after the nimbleness with which shopmen whisk a parcel into shape and compactness before you have time to look round."
Mr. De Grey has spent a small fortune in pincushions, kettle-holders, dressed dolls, and many other such-like articles which no young man of fashion should be without.
"What have I done to be so neglected, Miss Craven?" asks Gerard, elevating his eyebrows plaintively. "Am I expected to put on these slippers on the spot, that I am given no paper to pack them up in?"
"Oh! I beg your pardon; I thought that Miss De Grey was attending to you," answers Esther, in the most business-like, shop-woman voice, without smiling, or lifting her eyes.
"I thought no one ever gave change at a bazaar," he says, trying to make her look up at him, as she puts a few shillings into his hand.
"I do not approve of such extortion," she answers, demurely; "honesty is the best policy."
"That proverb must have been invented, as Whately justly observed, by some one who had tried the other alternative."
She smiles a little against her will. "I wish you two would go now," she says, addressing both young men indifferently: "you are only making me idle. Look! there are three old maids ready to storm the position, and only deterred by you."
"Rhadamantha, Hebe, and Niobe!" says St. John, laughing.
"Please go; I know you are not thinking of buying anything more."
"Don Ferdinando can do no more than he can do, and at present he is pretty well cleaned out."
At Miss Blessington's stall trade is certainly very brisk; it is considered a fitting mark of respect to the family to buy their goods, and so the honest burgesses of Melford make it a point of honour to buy Miss Blessington's and Miss De Grey's blotting books and babies' socks in preference to anyone else's, however superior in fabric and less exorbitant in price anybody else's might be.
Miss Blessington has just sunk upon a chair, with an affectation of great fatigue, and is saying languidly, "If ever any one deserved the martyr's crown, that person isI;within the last ten minutes I have sold nine cushions and fifteen pairs of muffetees."
"There's plenty of cool tea and warm ices at the other end of the room, if you think they are likely to restore you," suggests Gerard, who is still leaning his elbow on the counter, and has not gone away as commanded.
"It makes one quite hot," pursues Miss Blessington, leaning back and fanning herself vigorously, "merely to look at Prissy Denzil rushing about like a Mæenad, worrying every one to put into raffles."
"Providence made a great mistake when it made that girl a lady," says St. John, following, with a look of half-disgust in his fastidious eyes, Priscilla's little dishevelled figure; "she would have been much happier haggling for halfpence at a huckster's stall."
The afternoon draws towards its close; people have come and bought, and raffled and gone again, carrying manifold ill-tied paper parcels with them. The farmeresses and yeomen's wives of the Melford district have departed, carrying with them, in their mind's eye, for imitation against next Sunday, the cut of Miss Blessington's skirt, and the profuse curls andbandeauxof Miss De Grey's intricatecoiffure. The room is emptying, and the day's duty approaching its end.
"I say, old fellow," remarks Mr. De Grey, touching St. John on the shoulder as he leans against the wall, gazing somewhat morosely at his own boots, "don't you think we might as well be saying Ta-ta? I don't know what you have, butIhave had nearly enough of this gay and festive scene."
"All right," answers the other, shaking off dull care; "I have put into exactly twenty-five raffles, and only got a christening robe and a squirt, so I think I may be supposed to have done my duty."
At the door there is a little confusion—carriages driving up, carriages driving away; a small crowd gathered to see the smart ladies; two policemen.
The Felton equipage and Mr. Gerard's T.-cart stand at some little distance down the street. St. John offers Esther his arm, and she, having no decent excuse for declining, takes it. As they walk along, he speaks to her hurriedly and not without temper. "If you have no special ground of quarrel against me—and Heaven knows why you should have—but feel only that weariness to which most women seem, in my society, to be more or less subject, be unselfish, and let me drive you home. I will not speak, neither need you, if you will have it so; there are many things more unsociable than absolute silence."
"Why cannot you be satisfied with this morning's arrangements?" she asks, demurring; the recollection of his reported insult rankling in her mind.
He shrugs his shoulders expressively. "If you had had three fourths of 'Le Follet' and half theMorning Postpoured into your reluctant ears, as I have, you would not have asked that question."
"If you have heardhalftheMorning Post, is it not a thousand pities that you should not hear the other half?" she inquires, drily.
They have reached the T.-cart, the big black horse, the baby-tiger; in the low, red sun the new harness shines brightly.
"I almost wish you could sprain your other ankle," Gerard says, recovering his good humour. "As long as you were lame, you were much more amiable."
Ten minutes more, and the Melford steep street and railway bridge are left behind them, they are trotting with smooth briskness between the nutty, briary hedgerows. At first the silence which Gerard had guaranteed threatens to remain unbroken; it is infringed at last by Esther, out of whose heart the fair late breeze, the happy yellow stillness, and lastly, the proximity to and solitude with the beloved one, are smoothing all angry creases. ("If he did speak lightly of me," she thinks, sorrowfully, "we shall not have the chance of many more drives together; whether he think ill or well, highly or meanly, of me, let me be happy with him while I may!")
"What a pleasant vehicle this would be to make a driving tour in!"
"A tour of all the cathedral towns throughout England, as the Heir of Redclyffe proposed spending his honeymoon in making!"
She laughs.
"I remember long ago theSaturday Reviewsaying of some she-novelist's men, that they were like old governesses in trousers: it was not a bad simile, was it?"
Silence falls on them again; broken this time by Gerard, who, turning abruptly towards his companion, says, "You arenotbored by my society, Miss Craven? Unless you are cast in a mould different from the rest of humanity, youmustbe bored by the society of the Misses De Grey. Why, then, were you so resolute this morning in rejecting the one and accepting the other? This is the problem that has been puzzling me for the last half mile."
She hangs her head like a scolded school-child.
"Whatwasyour motive?"
"A prudential one, partly," she answers, rallying her spirits. "I knew that in after life I should have small experience of T.-carts and such rich man's luxuries, so I thought it wiser not to run the risk of contracting a taste for them."
"How do you know what the experience of your after life may be?"
"One may argue from the known to the unknown; I can give a pretty shrewd guess."
"And was that your sole motive?"
"What does it matter to you whether it was or not?"
"Nothing; except that, to a philosophical mind like mine, woman and her caprices are an interesting psychological study. Did you ever hear of an essay of Addison's entitled 'Dissection of a Coquette's Heart?'"
"I am not a coquette," she cries, indignantly, answering the indirect accusation directly.
"I did not say you were. I hope you are not—I hope to God you are not!" he answers, with more vehemence than the occasion seems to demand.
"And yet," she says, feeling oppressed by the solemnity of his manner and trying to speak lightly, "I have heard it said that no woman can be thoroughly attractive who is not something of a flirt."
"I had rather that she should be thoroughlyunattractive then," he answers, shortly and grimly.
"Men always wish to have a monopoly of all pleasant sins," she retorts, a little cynically.
"If you think that the reason why I wish you not to flirt is that I want a monopoly of that occupation, you are mistaken," he says, gravely; "it is an art that I have not either the will or the power to practise."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Confess that, after that admission, your opinion of me is considerably lowered."
No answer but a smile.
"Confess that you feel for me as sovereign a contempt as the ladies of the last century felt for a man that never got drunk."
"I feel," she says, averting her head and speaking under an impulse that kindles her cheeks and makes her voice falter—"I feel a surprise that the words you say and the words you are reported to say donottally better together."
"What am I reported to say?" (a little impatiently.) "Aréchaufféof one's own stale speeches is not an appetising dish, but may be wholesome as an exhortation to consistency."
"A person—I was told—" begins Esther, floundering in confusion among different forms of speech—"I was told—by a person that ought to have known—that you had spoken in a slighting, disparaging way of—of—of—a person."
"Who told you so?" (breathlessly.)
"That can be of no consequence."
"Without your telling me I know," he says, his face growing hot with the red of indignant anger, not guilt. "God forgive her for such a lie!"
"It was not true, then?" she asks, eagerly, lifting her eyes, brimful of joyful relief, to his.
"Such an accusation is not worth rebutting," he answers, contemptuously. "Is a man likely to speak slightingly of——" He stops abruptly. ("Not yet! not yet! it is impossible that she can like me yet. Am I an Antinous, to be loved as soon as seen? Let me be patient—be patient!")
"I am afraid that their names will not convey much idea to your minds, as you do not know our part of the world, but you may have met some of them in London: Sir Charles and Lady Bolton; Mr. and Mrs. Tredegar; Mr., Mrs., and Miss Annesley; the Misses Denzil (by-the-by, you saw them at the bazaar yesterday); and two or three stray men."
This remark is addressed by Miss Blessington to her two friends on the afternoon following the bazaar, and contains a list of the guests expected at dinner at Felton that evening.
"So there's to be a party?" says Esther, from a window recess, where, hidden by a drooped curtain, she has been lyingperdueup to the present moment, deeply buried in the unwonted luxury of a French novel.
Constance gives a little start. "I did not know that you were there! Yes; there are a few people coming to dine!"
"Don't you like parties?" asks Miss De Grey, half turning round her head, and a coquettish little lace morning cap, in the direction whence Esther's voice proceeds.
"I—I—think so; I hardly know."
"I suppose that you have only just left the schoolroom?"
Esther laughs. "I can hardly be said to have left it, for I was never in it."
"Did you never have a governess, do you mean? What a fortunate person!"
"Never."
"I am not sure that the other alternative, going to school, is not worse."
"I never went to school."
"Is it possible? Do you mean (raising herself, and opening her eyes) that you have never had any education at all?"
"I suppose not," answers Esther, reluctantly; regretting having made an admission which evidently tells so much against her.
"How very odd!"
"What's very odd?" asks her brother, who, with St. John, lounges in from the billiard-room, where they have been knocking the balls about and getting tired of one another.
"Miss Craven has just been telling us that she has had no education," answers Constance, in her even voice—perhaps not sorry of an opportunity to let Gerard know hisprotégée'sdeficiencies. "I am sure (civilly) that we should never have found it out if she had not told us."
Theprotégéedroops her black eyes in mortification over her book, in which she has already found several things that amuse, several things that startle, and several other things that profoundly puzzle her innocent mind.
How unnecessary to make the admission of her own illiterateness, and how needless for Constance to be in such a hurry to repeat the confession!
"What an awful sensation it must be being such an ignoramus!" says Gerard's voice, low and laughing, as he sits down on the window-seat beside her. "What does it feel like?"
She looks up with a re-assured smile.
"At all events," continues he, glancing at her book, "you are doing your best to supply your deficiencies,however late in life."
She colours a little, and involuntarily puts her hand over the title.
"What is it? May I see?"
She hesitates, and her other hand goes hastily to its fellow's help; then, changing her mind, she offers the book boldly to him.
He looks at the title, and a slightly shocked expression dawns on his features: men are always shocked that women shouldread aboutthe things thatthey do.
"Where did you get this?" (quickly).
"I climbed up the ladder in the library; pleasant books always rise to top shelves, as the cream rises to the top of the milk."
"Will you oblige me by putting it back where you took it from?"
"When I have read it? Of course."
"Beforeyou have read it."
"Why should I?" (rather snappishly).
"Why should you," he repeats, impatiently—not much fonder of opposition than are most of his masterful sex. "Why, because it is not a fit book for a—achildlike you to read."
"Achildlike me!" (sitting bolt up and reddening). "Do you know what age I am?"
"I have not an idea; forty, perhaps."
She laughs.
"Don't you know that all women are children till they are twenty-one; and you are particularly childish for your age."
"I am, am I?"
"Child or no child, this is a book that no modest woman ought to read."
"But that all modestmenmay, with pleasure and profit for themselves," rejoins she, ironically. "Well, when I have finished it I shall be better able to tell you whether I agree with you or not."
"Do you mean to say that, after what I have told you, you are still bent on reading it?" he asks, astonishment and displeasure fighting together for the mastery in his voice.
"Certainly!" (looking rather frightened, but speaking with a sort of timid bravado). "Do you suppose that Eve would have cared to taste the apple if it had been specially recommended to her notice as a particularly good, juicy Ribstone pippin? Give it me, please!"
"Take it!" he says, throwing it with hasty impoliteness into her lap. "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest every word of it; and since you have a taste for such literature, I can lend you a dozen more like it."
So speaking, he rises abruptly, and leaves her side and the room at almost the same moment.
When he is gone, finding that the rest of the company have likewise slipped away in different directions, Esther relieves her feelings by flinging the disputed volume on the floor; sits for a quarter of an hour staring uncertainly at it; then, pocketing her pride, picks it up, sneaks off with it to the library, and, climbing the high, steep ladder, deposits it in the hole whence she had ravished it, between two of its fellows, as agreeably lax and delicately indelicate as itself. Half an hour later, passing through the hall, she sees the door of Gerard's sanctum ajar, and hears some one walking to and fro within. To one so praise-loving, the temptation to trumpet forth her own excellence is irresistible. She knocks timidly.
"Come in!"
"I don't want to come in," she answers, standing in beautiful, bashful awkwardness in the aperture.
"Is there anything that I can do for you?" he asks, advancing towards her, looking slightly surprised.
"No, nothing; I—I—only came to tell you that I had put—itback."
At the end of her sentence her eyes, downcast at first, raise themselves to his with the innocent, eager expectancy of a child that waits for approbation of some infantile good action.
"You have, have you?" he cries, joyfully, catching both her hands; "and was it because I asked you?"
"I don't know for what other reason," she answers, unwillingly.
"And have not read a word more of it?"
"Not a word."
"Not even looked at the end?"
"No."
"Well, youarea good child!"
"Child! child!—alwayschild!" she cries, puckering up her low forehead into the semblance of a frown. "I have a good mind to go and fetch it down again!"
"A good old woman, then! a good old lady!—which is best? which is most respectful? Don't go!" (seeing that she is about to withdraw.)
"It is dressing-time!"
"Not for half an hour yet," pulling her gently in, and closing the door.
"See!" she says, half embarrassed by thistête-à-têtethat she has herself invited, holding up a bunch of scarlet geraniums that she has lately reft from one of the garden's dazzling squares—"I have been stealing! I hope Sir Thomas won't prosecute me; but as a new dress is with me a biennial occurrence, these are the only contributions I can make to the evening's festivity."
"Red, of course!" he answers, smiling. "I never saw you that you had not something red or yellow about you. But why scarlet geraniums? Don't you know that the least imaginable shake (suiting the action to the word, and gently jogging the hand that holds the flowers)—there!" as a little scarlet shower confirms his prognostications.
She stoops to pick up the scattered blossoms.
"If I had some gum, I would drop a little into the centre of each flower;thatkeeps the petals quite firm; I have often done it at home," she says, kneeling on one knee, and looking up gravely for advice and assistance into his friendly, dark face: "but I have no gum."
"Haven't you? I have—somebody has" (ringing the bell). "Please sit down" (drawing an armchair forwards for her). "This is Constance's chair: and don't look as if you were racking your brains for a decent excuse to get away from the only comfortable room in the house."
She obeys, and her eyes wander curiously round. Pipes, whips, saloon pistols, prints of Derby winners; photographs of Nilsson tricked out in water-weeds as "Ophelia;" of Patti gazing up, as "Marguerite," into Mario's fortunate eyes; a table strewn with books—two or three yellow-paper backed, with enticing Gallic titles, similar to the one she has just so heroically foregone. Looking up from these latter, she involuntarily catches his eye.
"You are thinking that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," he says, laughing rather consciously; "but I assure you that it is not so. The gander is not nearly such a delicate bird, and takes much stronger seasoning."
The gum arrives. She holds the flowers, while he with a paint-brush delicately insinuates one drop into the scarlet heart of each. Their heads are bent so close together that his crisp brown locks brush against the silk-smooth sweep of hers.
"Gently, gently!" cries Esther, pleasantly excited by the consciousness of doing something ratherhors de règlein that prim household, in having this impromptutête-à-têtewith its heir—"not so much! the leastsoupçonimaginable—there! does not it look like a sticky dewdrop?"
"These people that are coming ought to be very much flattered by the efforts you are making in their honour," says Gerard, half jealously.
"Are they worth making efforts for?"
"Youmust tellmethat to-morrow."
"Who will take me in to dinner, do you think?" she asks, confidentially, looking up at him with childish inquisitiveness.
"I have not an idea; but make your mind easy; it won't be Sir Thomas or me."
"Hardly; but I am sorry that you do not know who it will be, as you might have told me what to talk about."
"Do you always get up your subject beforehand, like Belinda Denzil, out of theSaturdayorEchoes of the Clubs?"
"Oh no! but—"
"St. John! St. John!" shouts Sir Thomas, banging a swing-door, behind him, and coming heavy-footed through the hall.
"It's Sir Thomas!" says Esther growing suddenly pale: and if she had said, and had had reason to say, "It's the Devil!" she could not have made the communication in a more tragic whisper: then, not waiting for any advice as to her conduct, snatching up her bouquet, she flies as if shot from a crossbow, out of the window and into the garden.
Was not it Lord Chesterfield who said that the guests at a dinner party should never be less than the Graces or more than the Muses? Kant preferred the Grace number, and had daily two friends, never more, to dine with him. The guests at the Felton banquet greatly exceed the Chesterfieldian limits. Those who have come only to dinner have been bemoaning themselves heavily, as they came along, on the hardship of being forced away from garden and croquet-ground, and obliged to drive three, four, five miles bare-necked and bare-backed—and a woman nowadays in full dress is verily and indeed bare-necked and bare-backed—through the mellow crimson evening.
To even these grumblers, however, destiny now appears kinder—now, I say, that the too candid daylight is shut out, that the amber champagne—
"With beaded bubbles winking at the brim—"
is creaming gently in every glass, and theentréesare making their savoury rounds.
Esther has fallen to the lot of one of the stray men of whom Miss Blessington spoke—a man who, when bidden to dinner, complies with the letter of his invitation, anddineschiefly and firstly; looks upon the lady whom he escorts to the social board as a mere adjunct—an agreeable or disagreeable one, as the case may be, but as merely an adjunct, as the flowers in the vases, or the silver Cupids that uphold the fruit baskets. In the intervals of the courses he has no objection to being amused: it is too much exertion to be very amusing himself, but he is not unwilling to smile and lend an indulgent ear to his companion's prattle, so as that prattle does not infringe upon the succulent programme that he has, by diligent study of themenu, laid out for himself.
Baffled on her left hand, Miss Craven turns to her right, to be baffled there also. Not that this right-hand neighbour labours under any excessivegourmandise—he is willing, on the contrary, that the unknown, black-eyed innocent and the turtle cutlet should share and share alike in his regards; but ere a quarter of an hour their conversation has come to a shipwreck. In it he takes too much for granted: as, for example, that she has been to London this season; that she has seen Faed's last picture; that she has been at Lady ——'s ball; that, by having seen both, she is in a position to judge of the comparative merits of Mademoiselle Nilsson's and Madame Carvalho's rendering of "Marguerite." Tired at length of saying, "I was not there," "I have not seen it," "I never heard of her," she relapses into a mortified silence; thinking, what an impostor must I be to have thrust myself in among all these fine people—I, who cannot even catch their jargon for five minutes!
Foiled in her own little conversational ventures, she tries to listen to other people's. In vain: if, above the general hum, she catches the beginning of one sentence, it is immediately joined on to the end of another. As well, listening to the sultry buzz of a swarm of bees, might one try to distinguish each separate voice. But the dumb show, at least, is left her: the waggling heads, the moving jaws—poor jaws, that have to talk and eat both at once! To put a history to each of these heads—to pick out characters by watching the delicate shades of difference with which each person sits; says, "No, thank you;" laughs—this is not unamusing. Yes, to study the faces, and find similitudes for them: one nut-cracker; several flowers; one plum-pudding; one horse, one vulture, one door-knocker. She is puzzled to find a resemblance for all; for Belinda Denzil, for instance, who, virginally clad in white muslin, that seems to mock her thirty celibate years, is apparently forcing the suave yet weary De Grey into an up-hill, one-sided flirtation. No man has hired Belinda, and it is, with her, the eleventh hour. What fowl, or fish, or quadruped, or article of furniture is she most like? Before Esther can decide this point quite to her mind, the signal of retirement is given, and each maid and wife rises obedient and vanishes.
It is the general complaint in the Felton neighbourhood that at that house the men sit unfashionably, wearisomely long over their wine. Sir Thomas belongs to that excellent school that in their hearts regret the good old days, when a man never rejoined the ladies without seeing double their real number. Half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, an hour and a quarter have passed. Several girls are beginning to yawn behind their fans; the Misses De Grey are driving heavily through a long duet, with never a squire to turn over the leaves (in the wrong place) for them. The door opens, and a fat, bald head appears; the most uninteresting always come first, but, like Noah's dove, he is the harbinger of better things. Five minutes more, and the room is as full of broadcloth as of silk and satin. The younger men are still hovering about uncertainly, unfixed as yet in their minds as to which elaborate fair one they shall come to final anchor by.
The epicure, now that there is nothing to eat, casts his eyes round in search of the finest woman and the comfortablest chair to be found in the great gilded room. Both requisites he finds united in Esther's neighbourhood. Accordingly he is moving towards her, when his attention is happily arrested by a remark that he overhears as to the best method of dressingbeccaficos. Instantly Miss Craven's white, silky shoulders and red-pouted lips go out of his head. White shoulders and red lips are good things in their way, but what are they tobeccaficos!Esther draws a long breath of relief. What an escape! In a minute more suspense is ended, and the low armchair beside her is occupied by the person for whom it was intended—for whom, indeed, she has been slyly keeping it half-covered by her dress.
"Well! and how are you getting on?" says Gerard, asking a silly question for want of a wiser one occurring to him, and looking rather affectionate.
St. John is not in the very least degree elevated; but it is useless to deny that the best and fondest of men are still fonder after dinner than before: it must be a very,verydeep love that cannot be a little deepened by champagne.
"Better than I thought I should be a few seconds ago, when that odious gourmand seemed to be steering this way," she answers, not taking any great trouble to hide her pleasure in his neighbourhood.
"Poor devil! he must not come to you for a character, I see."
"I could forgive a manmostsins," she says, rather viciously, "but Inevercould forgive him the making me feel in his estimation I stood on a lower level than red mullet and ortolans."
"Well, you know, theyarevery good things," answers Gerard, chiefly to tease her, but partly also because he really thinks so. "Don't look so disgusted," he continues, laughing. "I was afraid you were bored at dinner: you looked absent; I tried to catch your eye once or twice, but you would not let me."
"I was not bored," she answers, simply; "I was quite happy. You see I did not know who was who, and I amused myself pairing the people: I find that I paired them all wrong, though."
"Gave every man his neighbour's wife, did you? I dare say that some of them would not have objected to the arrangement."
"I marriedthatold man" (indicating with the slightest possible motion of her head the persons alluded to) "tothatold woman; I wish it was not ill-manners to point. They both looked so red and pursy and consequential, as if they had been telling each other for the last thirty years what swells they were!"
"Whichold man towhichold woman? Oh! I see."
"They are rather like one another, too," she continues, gravely; "and you know people say that, however unlike they may be at starting, merely by dint of living together, man and wife grow alike."
"Do they?" he says, a transient thought flashing through his mind as to whether, after twenty years of wedlock, that blooming peach face would have gained any likeness to his hard, mahogany one. "But how did you find out your mistake?"
"He put down her cup for her so politely just now, that I knew he could not be her husband."
He looks amused. "You are rather young to be so severe upon wedded bliss."
"Was I severe?" she asks, naïvely; "I did not know it; but, you know, a man may be fond of his wife, may be kind to her, but can hardly be said to bepolite: politeness implies distance."
"Does it?" he says, involuntarily drawing his chair closer to hers, and leaning forward under pretence of looking at the flowers that make a scarlet fire in her hair. "By-the-by, how does the gum answer?"
She forgets to reply to his harmless question, while her eyes fall troubled, half-frightened: the eyes that cannot, without a theft upon a third person, give him back his tender looks—the eyes in whose pupils Brandon is to see himself reflected for the next forty, fifty, sixty years.
There is a little stir and flutter among the company: Belinda Denzil moving to the piano; a music-stool screwed up and down; gloves taken off; then a polite hush, infringed only by a country gentleman in the distance saying something rather loud about guano, while Belinda informs her assembled friends in a faint soprano that "He will return; she knows he will." She has made the same asseveration any time the last ten years; but he has not returned yet, and her relatives begin to be afraid that he never will.
During the song Gerard falls into a reverie. At the end, coming out of it, he asks with an abrupt change of subject: "What did you say the name of your place was?"
"Glan-yr-Afon."
"Glan Ravvon?" (following her pronunciation.)
"Yes; you would never guess that it was soundedGlan Ravvonif you were to see it written: it is spelt quite differently."
"What does it mean? or does it mean anything?"
"It means 'Bank of the River;' so called, because it is not near the bank of any river."
"What part of the world is it in?—Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or the Polynesian Islands?"
"It is three miles from Naullan, if you are any the wiser."
"Naullan! Naullan!" he repeats, as if trying to overtake a recollection that eludes him. "Of course it does: why I wasatNaullan once."
"Were you?" (eagerly.) "When?"
"Two years ago; no, three. I was staying in the neighbourhood with some people for fishing. No doubt you know them—the Fitz-Maurices?"
Esther's countenance falls a little. "I—I—have heard of them," she says, uncertainly.
"Why, they must be neighbours of yours."
"They are rather beyond a drive, I think," she replies, doubtfully.
"If you are three miles from Naullan, and they are only four, I don't see how that can be."
She does not answer for a moment, but only furls and unfurls her fan uneasily; then, looking up with a sudden, honest impulse, speaks, colouring up to the eyes the while. "Why should I be ashamed of what there is no reason to be ashamed of? Theyarewithin calling distance, and I do know them in a way; that is to say, Lady Fitz-Maurice bows to me whenever she recollects that she knows me; but, you see, they are great people, and we are small ones."
He looks thoroughly annoyed. The idea that the woman of his choice is by her own confession notexactlyon his own level, grates upon his pride.
"Nonsense!" he says, brusquely, "one gentleman is as good as another, all the world over; and it must be the same with ladies."
"St. John, you are wanted to make up a rubber," interrupts Constance, sweeping up to them, resplendent but severe, in green satin and seaweed, like a nineteenth century Nereid, if such an anachronism could exist.
"Am I?" looking rather sulky, and not offering to move.
"We have got one already, but Sir Charles and Mrs. Annesley wish for another.'
"Let them play double-dummy!" settling himself resolutely in his chair, and looking defiantly at her out of his quick, cross eyes.
"Absurd!"
"If you are so anxious to oblige them, why cannot you take a hand yourself?"
"You know how I detest cards!"
"And you know how I detest Mrs. Annesley." (Mrs. Annesley is the vulture of Esther's lively imagination.)
Too dignified to descend to wrangling, Miss Blessington desists, and moves away, casting only one small glance of suppressed resentment at the innocent cause of Mr. Gerard's contumacy.
"Howcouldyou be so disobliging?" cries Esther, reproachfully, in childish irritation with him at having drawn her into undeserved disgrace.
"Why shouldn't I?" he asks, placidly. "Believe me, it is the worst plan possible to encourage the idea that you are good-natured among your own people; it subjects you to endless impositions. For the last thirty years I have been struggling to establish a character for never doing what I am asked; would you have me undo all my work at one blow?"
"St. John is impracticable," says Constance, returning from her fruitless quest, and stooping over the card-table her golden head and the sea-tang twisted with careless care about it. "You must accept of me as his substitute, please; he is good-naturedly devoting himself to my little friend. Did you happen to notice her, Lady Bolton? She is really looking quite pretty to-night. She does not know anybody, poor child! and he was afraid she might feel neglected."
The world's life is shorter by a fortnight than it was on that last day I told you of, and during that fortnight the ordinary amount of things have happened. The usual number of people have had their bodies knocked to atoms and their souls into eternity by express trains; the usual number of men and maids have come together in theTimescolumn in holy matrimony; and the usual number of unwelcome babies have been consigned to the canals. A great many players have laid down their cards, risen up, and gone away from the game of life; but whether winners or losers, they tell us not, neither shall we know awhile; and other players have taken their places, and have sat down with the zest of ignorance.
"Nature takes no notice of those that are coming or going."
She is briskly occupied at her old business—the business that seems to us so purposeless, progressless, bootless—the making only to unmake; the beautifying only to make hideous; the magnifying only to debase. Oh life! life! Oh clueless labyrinth! Oh answerless riddle!
September is waning mellowly into death, like a holy man to whom an easy passage has been vouchsafed; the land has been noisy with guns, and many partridges have been turned into small bundles of ruffled feathers—little round, brown corpses. Bob Brandon walks stoutly up the furzy hill sides and along the stony levels after the shy, scarce birds; he is out and about all day, but you do not hear him whistling or humming so often as you used to do. "He goeth heavily, as one that mourneth." The fortnight is past, and yet another week, and still Esther holds no speech of returning; her letters have waxed fewer, shorter, colder. Since that first one, mention of Gerard's name is there in them none. Bob is not of a suspicious nature, but he can add two and two together. He has been doing that little dreary sum all the last ten days, till his head aches. But though he can do this sum himself, he will not suffer any one else to do it—at least in his presence.
One day at dinner, when Bessy was beginning a little sour adaptation of the text, "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye," &c., to Esther, he interrupted her with downright outspoken anger and rebuke; and, though he apologised to her afterwards, and begged her pardon for having spoken rudely to her, yet she felt that that theme must not be dealt with again. He had promised to love her always in all loyalty, and whether she were loyal or disloyal to him made no difference. He will let no man, woman, or child speak evil of her in his hearing:
"..... love is not loveThat alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove."
Jack Craven, too, is beginning to wonder a little when Esther is going to return to the old farmhouse—beginning to feel rather lonely as he sits by himself on the window-ledge of an evening, smoking his pipe, with no one to take it out of his mouth now, and thinking on his unpaid for steam ploughs and sterile mountain-fields, with no one to speak comfortably to him, or console him with sweet illogical logic.
"All is not gold that glitters." Care gets up behind the man, however fine a horse he may be riding. Care is sittingen croupebehind Miss Craven, and she cannot unseat him. It strikes her sometimes with a shock of fear that she is succeedingtoowell; that the admiration and liking and love she had hankered so greedily after, had striven unfairly for, had made wicked lightnings from her eyes to obtain, was ready to be poured out lavishly, eagerly, honestly at her feet, and she dare not put out a finger to take them up. She had been walking miles and miles of nights, up and down her bedroom, from door to window, from window to door, when all the rest of the house are abed and asleep.
"WhatshallI do?—whatshallI do?" she cries out to her own heart, while her hands clasp one another hotly, and the candles, so tall at dressing time, burn short and low. "Oh! if I had some one to advise me!—not that I would take their advice, if it were to give up St. John! Give him up! How can I give up what I have not got? Oh Bob, Bob, if you only knew how I hate you!—Only less than I hate myself! Oh! why was not my tongue cut out before that unlucky day when I said I wouldtryto like you? Try, indeed! If there is need for trying, one may know how the trial will end. Shall I tell St. John? What! volunteer an unasked confession? Warn him off Robert's territory when he is not thinking of trespassing? And if I were to tell him—oh Heaven! I had sooner put my hand into a lion's mouth—whatwouldhe think of me? He, with his fastidious, strict ideas of what a woman should be and do and look? Shall I write and ask Bob to let me off? It would not break his heart; he is too good; only bad people ever break their hearts, as I shall do some day, I dare say. Oh! poor Bob, how badly I am treating you! Poor Bob! and his yellow roses that St. John made such fun of! How I wish that the thoughts of your long legs and your little sour Puritan sisters did not make me feel so sick! Oh! if you would but be good enough to jilt me! WhatshallI do?—whatshallI do? Wait, wait, go on waiting for what will never come, probably, and when I have degraded myself by waiting till hope is quite dead, go back whence I came, and jig-jog through life alongside of Bob in a poke bonnet like his mamma's. Ah Jack, Jack! why did I ever leave you? How I wish that all Bobs and St. Johns and other worries were at the bottom of the Red Sea, and you and I king and queen of some desert island, where there was nothing nearer humanity than monkeys and macaws, and where there was no rent nor workmen's wages nor lovers to torment us!"
One must go to bed at some time or other, however puzzled and pondering one may be; and in furtherance of this end, Esther, having reached this turn in her reflections, begins to undress. In so doing she misses a locket containing Jack's picture, which she always wears round her neck. She must have dropped it downstairs, where perhaps some housemaid's clumsy foot may tread upon it, and mar the dear, ugly young face within. She must go and look for it, though the clock is striking one. She takes up her candle, and runs lightly downstairs. The gas is out. Great shadows from behind come up alongside, and then stretch ahead of her; the statues glimmer ghostly chill from their dark pedestals. With a shock of frightened surprise she sees a stream of light issuing through the half-open door of the morning-room. Is it burglars, or are the flowers giving a ball, as in Andersen's fair, fanciful tale? She creeps gently up, and peeps in. The lamp still burns on the centre table, and pacing up and down, up and down, as she has been doing overhead, is a man buried in deepest thought. Fear gives place to a great, pleasant shyness. "I—I—I have lost my locket," she stammers.
He gives a tremendous start. "You up still!" he says, in astonishment. "Lost your locket, have you? Oh! by-the-by, I found it just now; here it is. Do you know (with a smile) I could not resist the temptation of looking to see who you had got inside it. Are you very angry?"
"Very!" she answers, drooping her eyes under his. She could sit and stare into Bob's eyes by the hour together, if she liked, only that it would be rather a dull amusement; with St. John it is different.
"Don't go; stay and talk a minute. It is so pleasant to think that we are the only conscious, sentient beings in the house—all the others sleeping like so many pigs," he says, coming over to her with an excited look on his face, such as calm, slow-pulsed English gentlemen are not wont to wear.
"No, no, I cannot—I must not."
She has taken the bracelets off her arms, and the rose from her hair: there she stands in her ripe, fresh beauty, with only the night and St. John to look at her.
"Five minutes," he says, with pleading humility, but putting his back against the door as he speaks.
"If youpreventmy going, of course I cannot help myself," she answers, putting on a little air of offended dignity to hide her tremulous embarrassment.
"Don't be offended! Do you know" (leaving his post of defence to follow her)—"do you know what I have been doing ever since you went—notto bed apparently?"
"Drinking brandy and soda-water, probably" (looking rather surly, and affecting to yawn).
"That would have been hardly worth mentioning. I have been wondering whether my luck is on the turn. I have been da——I mean very unlucky all my life. I never put any money on a horse that he was not sure to be nowhere. Luck does turn, sometimes, doesn't it? Do you think mine is turning?"
"How can I tell?"
"You don't ask in what way I have been so unlucky. Why don't you? Have you no curiosity?"
"I never like to seem inquisitive," answers Esther, coldly, hoping that he does not notice how the white hands that lie on her lap are trembling.
"Do you recollect my telling you that I had made a great fool of myself once?"
"Yes."
"Do you care to hear about it, or do you not?" pulling at his drooping moustache, in some irritation at her feigned indifference.
"Yes, I care," she answers, lighting up an eager, mobile face—fear, shyness, and the sense of the impropriety of the situation all ceding to strong curiosity.
"Well, it was about a woman, of course.Cela va sans dire;a man never can get into a scrape without a woman to help him, any more than he can be born, or learn his A B C."
"Was she handsome?" looking up, and speaking quickly.
That is always the first question a woman asks about a rival. I do not know why, I am sure, as many of the greatest mischiefs that have been done on earth have been done by ugly women. Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot squinted ferociously.
"Pretty well. She had a thundering good figure, and knew how to use her eyes. By-the-by" (with an anxious discontent in his tone), "so do you. I often wish you did not; I hate being able to trace one point of resemblance between you and her."
"Did she refuse you?" asks Esther, hastily, too anxious for the sequel of the story to think of resenting the accusation made against her eyes.
"Not she! I should not have been the one to blame her if she had; one cannot quarrel with people for their tastes. She swore she liked me better than any one else in the world; that she would go down to Erebus with me, be flayed alive for me—all the protestations usual in such cases, in fact, I suppose," he ends bitterly.
"And threw you over?" says Essie, leaning forward with lips half apart, and her breast rising and falling in short, quick undulations.
"Exactly; had meant nothing else all along. I filled only the pleasant and honourable situation of decoy duck to lure on shyer game, and when the bird was limed—such a bird, too! a great, heavy, haw-haw brute in the Carabineers, with a face like a horse—she pitched me away as coolly as you would pitch an old shoe—or as you would pitchme, I dare say, if you had the chance."
"And what did you do?" asks Essie, breathlessly, her great eyes, black as death, fastened on his face.
St. John smiles—a smile half fierce, half amused.
"Run him through the body, do you suppose?—spitted him like a lark or a woodcock?—cut out his heart and made her eat it, as the man did to his wife in that fine old Norman story? No; I could have done any of them with pleasure if I had had the chance; with all our veneering and French polish, I think the tiger is only half dead in any of us; but I did not; I did none of them: I—prepare for bathos, please—I went out hunting; it was in winter, and, as misfortunes never come singly, I staked one of the best horses I ever was outside of: that diverted the current of my grief a little, I think."
He speaks in a jeering, bantering tone, scourging himself with the rod of his own ridicule, as men are apt to do when they are conscious of having made signal asses of themselves in order to be beforehand with the world.
"And she told you she was fond of you?" ejaculates Essie, raising her sweet face, sympathetic, indignant, glowing, towards him.
"Scores of times—swore it. I suppose it is no harder to tell a lie a hundred times than once;ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. Tell me," he says, vehemently, leaning over her, and taking hold of her hand, as if hardly conscious of what he was doing—"you are a woman, you must know—tell me, is there no difference between truth and lies? have they bothexactlythe same face? How is a man to tell them apart?"
They are both speaking in a low key, almost under their breath, for fear of drawing down upon themselves the apparition of Sir Thomas indéshabilleand a blunderbuss. Their faces are close together; she can see the lines that climate and grief and passion have drawn about his eyes and mouth—can see the wild, honest anxiety looking through his soul's clear windows.
"I—I—don't know," she answers, stammering, and shivering a little, half with fear at his vehemence, half with the strong contagion of his passion.
"Do you ever tell untruths?" he asks, hurriedly, scanning her face with anxious eyes, that try to look through the mask of fair, white flesh, and see the heart underneath. "Don't be angry with me, but I sometimes fancy that you might."
"I!what do you mean?" snatching away her hand, and the angry blood rushing headlong to her cheeks.
"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Hazael was only the first of a long string who have asked that virtuously irate question.
His countenance clears a little. "You must forgive me," he says, repentantly. "I suppose it is my own unlucky experience that has made me so suspicious; because my own day has been cloudy, I have wisely concluded upon the non-existence of the sun. But, come" (smiling a little), "one good turn deserves another: have you nothing to tell me in return for the long list of successes I have been confiding to you?"
He watches her changing, flushing, paling face, with a keen solicitude which surprises himself. What can this downy, baby-faced rustic have to confess? Now for Bob! Now is the time—now or never! Sing, oh goddess, the destructive wrath of St. John, the son of Thomas! What time, place, situation, can be suitabler for such a tale? It is an hour and a half past midnight; they love one another madly, and they are alone.
Are they alone, though? Is this one of the statues stepped down from its pedestal in the hall that is coming in at the door, severely, chilly, fair, with a candle in its hand?
"Miss Craven!" ejaculates Constance (for it is she), stopping suddenly short, while a look of surprised displeasure ripples over her calm, smooth face.
Silence for a second on the part of everybody.
"It is a pity, St. John," says Miss Blessington, drawing herself up, and looking an impersonation of rigid, aggressive, pitiless virtue, "that you and Miss Craven should choose such a very unseasonable time for your interviews; it is not a very good example for the servants, if any of them should happen to find you here."
"The servants have something better to do than to come prying and eavesdropping upon their betters," retorts St. John, flushing angry-red to the roots of his hair, and not taking the most conciliatory line of defence.
"You are mistaken if you think I have been eavesdropping," says Constance, with dignified composure, her grave face looking out chastely cold from the down-fallen veil of her yellow hair. "I could not sleep, and came down to look for a book. Pray don't let me disturb yourtête-à-tête!" making a movement towards going.
"Don't be a fool, Conny!" cries St. John, hastily, in bitter fear of having compromised Esther by his ill-advised detention of her: "it is the purest accident your having found Miss Craven and me together here!"
"I am well aware of that," she answers, with a little smiling sneer.
"You know what I mean, perfectly well: it is the purest accident ourbeinghere. Miss Craven lost her locket, and——"
"And" (smiling still)—"and you have been helping her to look for it. Yes, I see. Well, I—hope you will find it. Good-night!" going out and closing the door behind her.