"What did she say?—what does she mean?" cries Essie, panting, and with a face hardly less white than her dress.
"What does it matter what she means? She's a fool!" answers St. John, wrathfully. "Go to bed, and don't think about her; who cares?"
But he looks as if he did care a good deal.
The weekly clearance of mundane books has been made at Plas Berwyn; the skimp drab gowns, and the ill-made frock coat, whose flaps lap over one another so painfully behind, have been endured by the Misses Brandon and their brother respectively. At church has been all the Brandon household: son and daughters, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and sheep, camel and ass. I need hardly say that the last quartette have been introduced merely for the sake of euphony, and to give a fuller rhythm to the close of the sentence. The Misses Brandon always stand as stiff as pokers during the creed, with their backs to the altar. It amuses them, and it does not do anybody else any harm, so why should not they, poor women? Bob truckles to the Scarlet Woman; he bows, and turns his honest, serious face to the east. The service is in Welsh, of which he does not understand a word. He can pick his way pretty well through the prayers, however, by the help of a Welsh and English prayer book. There are several landmarks that he knows, whose friendly faces beam upon him now and again when he is beginning to flounder hopelessly among uncouth words of seven consonants and a vowel. These are his chief finger-posts: "Gogoniant ir Tad, ac ir Mab, ac ir Yspryd Glan;" that is, "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." "Gwared ni, Arglywd daionus!" "Good Lord, deliver us!" "Na Ladratta!" "Thou shalt not steal!"
Jack Craven has been to church too, and has, as he always does, been reading the inscriptions on the coffin-plates, nailed up, Welsh fashion, against the dilapidated, whitewashed walls, in lieu of monumental tablets. Esther has also been to church; has been in state in a great, close carriage, in company with Sir Thomas, Miladi, and Miss Blessington. Sir Thomas has been storming the whole way about a gap he detected in a hedge that they passed, through which some cattle have broken, so that they all arrive at the church door in that calmly devout state of quietude which is the fittest frame of mind for the reception of Divine truth.
The Gerard pew in Felton church is as large as a moderate-sized room, and is furnished with arm-chairs and a fire-place. In winter, Sir Thomas spends fully half the service time in poking the fire noisily and raking out the ashes. There is no fire now, and he misses it. A high red curtain runs round the sacred enclosure, and through it the farmers' wives and daughters strain their eyes to catch a glimpse of Miladi's marabout feathers, and Miss Blessington's big, golden chignon, and little green aerophane bonnet. St. John generally pulls the brass rings of his bit of curtain aside along the brass rods, to make a peep-hole for himself over the congregation. The shape and size of the pew do away with the necessity for any wearisome conformity of attitude among the inmates. During the prayers, Sir Thomas stands bolt upright, with one bent knee resting on his chair; his bristling grey head, shaggy brows, and fierce spectacles looming above the red curtain, to the admiration and terror of the row of little charity girls beneath. Constance kneels forward on a hassock, with a large, ivory prayer book, gold-crossed, red-edged, in one hand, and a turquoise and gold-topped double scent-bottle and cobweb cambric handkerchief in the other. She confesses in confidence to her pale lavender gloves that she has done that which she ought not to have done, and has left undone that which she ought to have done; making graceful little salaams and undulations of head and body every two minutes. Miladi confesses that she has gone to sleep. St. John makes no pretence of kneeling at all: he leans, elbow on knee and head on hand, and looks broken-hearted, as men have a way of doing in church.
In the afternoon, no one at Felton thinks of attending Divine service. It is a fiat of Sir Thomas's that no carriage, horses, or servants are to be taken out more than once a day, and the two miles' walk is an insuperable impediment to Lady Gerard, and hardly less so to Constance.
After luncheon the three ladies are sitting in the garden, with the prospect of four unbroken hours of each other's companionship before them. Masses of calceolarias, geraniums, lobelias, are flaring and flaunting around them—masses in which the perverted eye of modern horticulture sees its ideal of beauty. Nature, in her gardening, never plants great, gaudy squares and ovals and rounds of red and blue and yellow, without many shades of tenderest grey and green to soften and relieve them. Across the grass St. John comes lounging; his Sunday frock coat sitting creaseless to his spare, sinewy figure. Esther hates the sight of that coat: it reminds her so painfully, by its very unlikeness, of the singular garment that forms the head and crown of her betrothed's scant wardrobe.
"Do you know, I have half a mind to go to Radley church this afternoon. Will any one come with me?—will you, Conny?" turning, mindful of last night, with a conciliatory smile to Miss Blessington.
"How far is it?" she asks, indolently, divided between her hatred of walking and her desire to frustrate thetête-à-têteshe sees impending between St. John and Esther.
"Three or four miles; four, I suppose."
She lifts her large blue eyes languidly, "Four miles there, and four miles back! Are you mad, St. John? What do you suppose one is made of?"
"Willyoutake pity on me then, Miss Craven?" turning eagerly to Esther.
She tilts her hat low down over her little, straight, Greek nose, looks up at him with shy coquetry under the brim, but answers not.
"A man who delights in solitude must be either a wild beast or a god, don't you know? I have no pretence to be either: I hate my own society cordially. Come" (with a persuasive ring in his pleasant voice); "you had much better."
"Don't be so absurd, St. John!" cries Miss Blessington, pettishly. "Miss Craven would far rather be left in peace."
"Would you?" (appealing to her.)
"No—o; that is—I mean—I think I should like the walk, if I may. May I, Lady Gerard? do you mind?" (turning sweet red cheeks and quick eyes towards her hostess.)
"I, my dear! Why should I mind?" responds Miladi, leaning back and fanning herself with a large fan (I believe that fat women often suffer a foretaste of the torments of the damned in the matter of heat)—"so as you don't ask me to go with you (with a fat smile). And, St. John, be sure that you are back in time for dinner, there's a good boy! You know what a fuss Sir Thomas is always in on Sunday evening?"
"I know that Sir Thomas is digging his grave with his teeth as fast as he can," answers St. John disrespectfully.
"Shall not we be rather late for church if we have four miles to go?" asks Esther, as she steps out briskly beside her companion, while heart and conscience keep up a quarrelsome dialogue within her.
"It is not four miles; it is only three."
"You told Miss Blessington four?"
"So I did; but I drew for the extra mile upon the rich stores of my imagination."
"Why did you?" she asks, turning a wondering rosy face set in the frame of a minute white bonnet towards him.
"Did you ever hear of the invitations that the Chinese give one another?" he asks, laughing, and switching off a fern-head with a baby umbrella—"which, however pressing they may be, are always expected by the giver to be declined. My invitation to Conny was a Chinese one: I was not quite sure that she would understand it as such, and I was so afraid that she would yield to my importunities, that I had to embroider a little in the matter of distance; do you see?"
There has been rain in the morning; now the clouds have rent themselves asunder, and broken up into great glistering rocks, peaks, and spires, such as no fuller on earth could white:
"Blue isles of heaven laugh between."
The breeze comes more freshly over the wet grasses and flowers, and blows in little fickle puffs against St. John's bronzed cheeks and Esther's carnation ones. The girl's heart is pulsing with a keen, sharp joy; all the keener, as the heaven's blue is deeper for the clouds that hover about it.
"I shall have him all to myself for three hours," she is saying inwardly; "he will speak to no one but me; he will hear no one else's voice (she forgets the parson and the clerk). Surely Bob may spare me these three hours, and just a few more, out of the great long life during which I shall tramp-tramp at his side! Three hours:
"Then let come what come mayNo matter if I go mad,I shall have had my day."
"Let me carry your prayer book?"
"No, thanks; it is not heavy" (retaining it, mindful of a certain inscription in the fly-leaf).
"I am like a retriever; I like to have something to carry" (taking it from her with gentle violence).
"'Esther CravenfromRobert Brandon.' WhoisRobert Brandon when he is at home?" (speaking rather shortly.)
Esther's heart leaps into her mouth. Shall she tell himnow, this minute, without giving herself time for second thoughts, which are not by any means always best? Shall she lift off the weight of compunction, anxiety, shame, that has been pressing upon her for the last fortnight?—let it fall down, as the dead albatross fell from the Ancient Mariner's neck—
"Like lead into the sea?"
The subject has introduced itself naturally, easily, without any of the dragging in by the head and shoulders of the officiously-volunteered confessions that she had salved her conscience by deprecating. Shall she, with strong, brave hand, push away all hope of the fine house and the broad lands, of the carriages and horses, the roses and pine-apples, the down pillows and fragrances of life? Shall she courageously, nobly, and yet in mere bare duty, turn away from the fairy prince and return to her hovel and scullionship? Shall she, or shall she not?
"WhoisRobert Brandon?" repeats St. John, rather crossly.
In the second that follows Esther's life destiny is settled. She refuses the good and chooses the evil. ("He is the man I am engaged to," that is what she ought to have said.)
"He is in the ——th foot." This is what she does say, blushing till the tears come into her eyes, turning away her head, and feeling stabbed through and through with shame.
"An ally of yours?" (quickly.)
"I have known him all my life," she answers, evasively.
"I thought he was a very young child, from this specimen of his caligraphy," remarks Gerard, superciliously, examining Bob's sprawly, slanty characters. "He would be none the worse for a few writing lessons."
Esther is a mean young woman: she feels ashamed of her poor lover, and his pothooks and hangers, and yet vexed with St. John for sneering at them.
"It was a fact worth inscribing, I must say," continues he, ironically—"the making of such a very handsome present," holding the poor little volume between his lavender kid finger and thumb, and surveying it with a disparaging smile. "He must have had a great deal of change out of sixpence, I should think."
"If you have nothing better to do than abuse my property," cries Esther, impulsively, snatching it out of his hand, "you may give it me back," looking half disposed to whimper.
"I apologise," responds St. John, gravely. "I did not mean to offend you; I give youcarte blancheto insult mine" (holding out a very minute Russia leather one). "But may I ask, is Mr. Robert Blandon, or Brandon, or what's his name, your godfather?"
"No; why?"
"Because I never heard of any one being given a prayer book except as a wedding present, or by their godfathers and godmothers at their baptism. As you are not married, I know it could not have been the first case, and so I concluded it must be the last."
"Robert is not old enough to be my godfather," says Essie, overcoming by a great effort the repugnance to pronouncing the fateful name: "he is quite young; a great deal younger than you," she ends, rather spitefully.
"He might easily be that," replies St. John, coldly. "Once, not so very many years ago, in whatever company I was, I always was the youngest present; now, on the contrary, in whatever company I am, I always feel the eldest present. I don't suppose I always am, but I always feel as if I were."
"I believe old people have the best of it, after all," says Esther, recovering a little of her equanimity: "they have certainly fewer troubles than young ones. I should say that Sir Thomas was decidedly a happier man than you are."
"A man's happiness is proportioned to the simplicity of his tastes, I suppose," answers St. John, sardonically. "Sir Thomas's happiness lies in a nutshell: he has two ruling passions—eating and bullying; he has a very fair cook to satisfy the one, and my mother always at hand for the gratification of the other."
"We have all our ruling passions," rejoins Esther, with a light laugh, "only very often we will not own them. Mine is burnt almonds; what is yours?"
"Going to church," he replies, in the same tone; "as you may perceive by the strenuous efforts I have made to get there this afternoon."
Radley church stands on a knoll. Radley parishioners have to go upwards to be buried—a happy omen, it is to be hoped, for the destination of their souls. The church has a little grey tower, pretty, old, and squat, and a peal of bells—these are its claim to distinction—a merry peal, as people say; but to me it seems that in all the gamut of sad sounds there is nothing sadder, sorrowfuller, than bells chiming out sweetly and solemnly across the summer air.
Rung in by the grave music of their invitation, St. John and Esther enter. Verger or pew-opener is there none, so they slip into the first of the open sittings that presents itself. The clergyman is young and energetic: he has rooted up the tall, worm-eaten, oak pews—disfiguring compromises between cattle-pen and witness-box—has clothed several
"Dear little soulsIn nice white stoles,—"
and is trying to teach himself intoning. He produces at present only prolonged whining groans, but it is a step in the right direction.
Rest is good after exertion, and so Essie thinks. The south wind has been playing tricks with the dusk riches of her hair. Nature has been laying on her bistre under the great liquid eyes, and emptying a whole potful of her rouge on the rose velvet round of her cheeks. She is not in apple-pie order at all, and yet
"She was most beautiful to see,Like a lady from a far countree."
If Esther were to murder any one, and her guilt were to be brought home to her as plainly as the eye of day shines in the sky at noon, judge and jury would combine to acquit her.
"Blessed be God, who has made beautiful women!" says the Bedouin, and Gerard echoes the benediction, as he stands with his big lavender thumb on one side of the hymn book, and her small, lavender thumb on the other, while the "dear little souls" are singing sweetly and quickly:
"There God for ever sitteth,Himself of all the Crown;The Lamb, the Light that shineth,And goeth never down."
Grand words, that make one feel almost good and almost happy merely to say them!
There is only one hymn-book in the pew, and St. John is glad of it. There is something pleasant in the sense of union and partnership, though it be only a three minutes' partnership in a dog's-eared psalter.
"Is not there some different way of going home?" asks Essie, as they stand side by side, after service, in the high churchyard, looking down on the straggling damson trees, the grey smoke spiring northwards under the south wind's faint blowing, the dark-blue green of the turnip fields. "I hate going back the same way one came; it shows such a want of invention!"
"There is another way," answers St. John, scooping out a little plump green moss from a chink in the wall with the point of his umbrella, while the parson and the parson's sister, on their homeward way, turn their heads to look at them—the parson at Esther, the parson's sister at St. John—Jack at Jill, and Jill at Jack as is the way of the world; "but it is a good deal longer and a great deal muddier than the one we came by."
"I like mud," says Essie, gaily, stooping and picking a daisy from a little child's grave at her feet; "it is my native element; at home we are up to our knees in mud in winter, and over our ankles in summer."
So they chose the longer and the muddier way. It is its length that is its recommendation to them both, I think.
Down the village street, past the Loggerheads and the Forge, and along a long country lane, paved unevenly with round stones after a way our forefathers in some of the northern counties had of paving, in imperfect prophetic vision of MacAdam. To-day no broad waggon-wheel groans, nor hoofed foot clatters along; only a few cottagers and smart-bonneted servant girls trudge along to the Primitive Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, built A.D. 1789, that stands in simple, dissenting ugliness at the hill-foot, while over its newly-painted, gingerbread-coloured door stands this modest announcement: "This is the Gate of Heaven."
"It strikes me," says St. John, rousing himself out of a reverie which has lasted a quarter of an hour—"it strikes me as one of the few instances in which one's experience tallies with what one reads in novels, the awkward knack people have of interrupting one at the wrong moment."
"How do you mean?" asks Essie, coming out of a reverie, too.
"I never," pursues he, taking off his hat, and passing his hand over the broad red mark it has made on his forehead—"I never read aloud to any one in my life—I was rather fond of reading poetry at one period of my history, I leave you to guess which—not that she cared about it—she did not know Milton from Tommy Moore; but I never read to her in the course of my life without the footman coming in to put coals on at the most affecting passages—Arthur's parting from Guinevere, say, or Medora's death—and clattering down the tongs and shovel, making the devil's own row."
Esther laughs.
"These reflections areà proposof—what?"
"Of Conny's most ill-timed entry last night," he answers, with energy. "I don't suppose she makes such a midnight raid once in five years, and she certainly could not have found you and metête-à-têteat two in the morning more than once in fifty years. Why could not she leave us in peace that once? We did not grudge her any amount of pleasant dreams; why need she grudge us our pleasant wakefulness?"
"Do you think she came on purpose, then?" asks Essie, her eyes opening as round in alarmed surprise as a baby's when a grown-up person makes ugly faces at it.
He shrugs his shoulders slightly. "Cannot say, I'm sure. Conny is not much in the habit of burning the midnight oil in the pursuit of knowledge generally. If itwasaccident, she came in at a wonderfullyà propos, or rathermal à propos, moment. Tell me," he says, crossing over to her side of the road, and fixing frankly-asking eyes upon her; "I may be mistaken—it is a misfortune to which I am often incident—but I could not help thinking that, just as that unlucky candle appeared round the corner last night, you were going to tell me something—something about yourself? I thought I saw it in your face. I think I deserved some little reward for raking up for your behoof the ashes of that old fire that I burnt my fingers at so badly once."
Esther still remains silent, but turns her long neck from one side to the other with a restless, uneasy motion.
"Are lamplight and the small hours indispensable accessories?" he asks, with gentle pleading in look and words—"or could not you tell me as well now?"
"Tell you what?" she says, turning round sharp upon him, and snapping, as a little cross dog snaps at the heels of the passer-by—"must I invent something?"
"Are you sure that it isnecessaryto invent?" he asks, scanning the fair, troubled face with searching gaze.
She pulls a bunch of nuts out of the hedge from among their rough-ribbed green leaves, and begins to pick them out of their sheath. "What am I to tell you?" she says, petulantly, a suspicion that he may have heard a rumour of her engagement crossing her mind: "that I live in an old farmhouse with my brother Jack, and that we are very hard up—you know already; that 'Su dry da chi' is Welsh for 'How do you do?' and that our asparagus has answered very badly this year?"
"Of course, I cannot force your confidence," he answers, rather coldly.
"Why do you insist upon my having something to confide? What reason have you for supposing that I have?" she cries, with increased irritation.
"None whatever, but what you yourself have given me!"
"I!"
"Yes,you;not your words, but your face now and then. Don't think me impertinent. You know what unhappy reason I have had to be suspicious. But tell me" (trying his best to get a look round the corner into the averted, perturbed face of his companion)—"tell me whether there is not something between you and—and—that fellow that gave you the prayer-book?"
Esther's heart gives one great bounding throb; the thin muslin of her dress but poorly conceals its hard, quick pulsings.
One more chance for her! Fate generally gives us two or three chances before it allows us to consign ourselves irrecoverably to the dogs. One more choice between loyalty and disloyalty—a plain question, to be answered plainly, unequivocally—Yes or No; Robert or St. John. The man whose conversation bores her, whose proximity and whose gaze leave her colder than snow on an alp's high top an hour before sunrise, and with whom she has promised to live till death do them part; or the man, no whit better or handsomer, whose coming, felt, though unseen, makes her whole frame vibrate, as a harp's strings vibrate under the player's hands—beneath whose eyes hers sink down bashful, yet passionate—the man whom, after this week, she must see never again until death do them unite. Woman-like, she tries to avoid the alternative.
"What is that to you?" she retorts, abruptly, endeavouring to be playful, and succeeding only in being rude.
"Nothing whatever," he replies, flushing angrily; and then they walk on for some distance in silence.
"Are you angry?" asks Esther, presently, with a smile, half saucy, half frightened.
"I?not in the least," he replies, with an air of ostentatious indifference, but with a complexion undoubtedly florider than nature made his.
"You look excessively cross, and have not uttered a word for the last half mile," she says, pouting out her full red under-lip, and then looking (a little alarmed at her own audacity) to see in what spirit he takes her impertinence.
"When I do not get civil answers to civil questions, I think it best to hold my tongue," he says, stalking along with his head up, and hitting viciously with his umbrella at the tall, yellow mulleins in the hedge.
"People's ideas differ as to whatarecivil questions," says Essie, trying to stalk too, and to elevate nose and chin in emulation of his. "Suppose that I had asked you how many times you had been refused, would you have answered me?"
"Undoubtedly I should," he replies, gravely.
"How many times have you?" she asks, coming down from her elevation of offended dignity with a jump, and looking up at him with naïve, eager curiosity.
"Questions should be answered in the order of priority in which they are asked," he replies, with a smile of amusement at her simplicity, but with a good deal of dissatisfied doubt underlying the smile. "Answer my question, and I'll answer yours."
Esther turns away, and passes her hand along the hedge, catching idly at any grasses or flowers that come in her way, to the great detriment of her Sunday gloves. His anxiety overcomes his hurt pride.
"Give me an answer one way or another," he says, breathing rather short. "Is there not something between you and him?"
Esther is silent. "No" is a plain downright lie, at which conscience demurs, and "Yes" a cannon-ball that will knock her away from St. John's side out into the drear, great world for ever.
"For God's sake answer me!" he says again, in great agitation at a dumbness that seems to him ominous.
Hearing the sharp pain and angry fear in his voice, she hesitates no longer. Lie or no lie, she takes the plunge.
"Nothing!" she says, faintly, turning first milk-white, then red as a rose in her burning prime.
"Why do you turn away your face? Are you quite certain?" he asks, quickly, only half convinced by her weak negation.
"Certain," she replies, indistinctly, as if just able to echo his words, but not to frame any of her own.
"Why do you stammer and blush, then, whenever his name is mentioned?" he asks, with jealous impatience.
"I won't stand being catechised in this way," she cries, blazing out angrily, and stopping short, while sparks of fire, half quenched in tears of vexation, dart from the splendid night of her eyes. "I have answered a question which you ought never to have asked; you must be a person of very little observation," she continues, sharply, "not to have discovered during the three weeks that I have been with you that I blush at everything and nothing; I should be as likely as not to blush when Sir Thomas's name was mentioned, or—or——"
"Or mine," suggests St. John, ironically; "put it as strongly as you can."
"Or yours, if you like," she answers, hardily, but crimsoning painfully meanwhile in confirmation of her words.
At a little distance farther on, their path forsakes the road and leads across a line of grass fields. St. John crosses the first stile, and waits politely on the other side to help Esther over.
"No, no!" she cries, petulantly, withdrawing her foot from the first rung—"I hate being helped over stiles. Go on, please."
He obeys, and walks on. Her dignity does not allow her to hurry her pace to overtake him, nor does his permit him to slacken his steps till she come up with him; and they walk on in single file, goose-fashion, through two fields and a half.
Dividing and watering the third field, as the four ancient rivers divided and watered the rose gardens and asphodel fields of Paradise, a little beck, with many turns and bends and doublings back upon itself, strays babbling, like a silver ribbon twisted among the meadow's green hair. It is not like the Welsh brooks, fretful and brawling, making little waterfalls and whirlpools and eddies over and about every water-worn stone; smoothly it flows on, as a holy, eventless life flows towards the broad sea whose tides wash the shores of Time. In dry weather it is slow-paced enough, and crystal clear; now the late heavy rains have quickened its current, and rolled it along, turbid and muddy. Even though swollen, however, it is still but a narrow thread, and St. John clears it at a jump.
"Shall I go on still?" he asks, with a malicious smile from the other side, addressing Esther, who stands looking down rather ruefully at the quick, brown water at her feet.
"I believe you knew of this, and brought me here on purpose to make a fool of me," she cries, reproachfully.
"I did nothing of the kind," he answers, quietly. "Last time I was here there was a plank thrown across; but you see the stream has been higher than it is now" (pointing to the drenched grass and little deposit of sticks and leaves on the bank), "and has probably carried it away."
"HowamI to get over?" she asks, hopelessly, with a look of childish distress on her face.
"I'll carry you," he answers, springing back to her side; "the brook is shallower farther down; I can lift you over with the greatest ease imaginable."
"Thatyou shan't!" answers Esther, civilly turning her back upon him.
"May I ask why?" he asks, coolly. "After the number of times I have carried you up and down stairs at Felton, you can hardly be afraid of my letting you fall?"
"The very fact of my having already had so many obligations to you makes me resolved not to add to their number," she replies, stiffly, with an effort to look dignified, which her laughing,débonnaire, seductive style of beauty renders peculiarly unsuccessful.
"If you can suggest any better plan, I shall be delighted to assist you in carrying it out," rejoins he, smothering a smile.
"I'll jump!" she says, desperately, eyeing meanwhile the hurrying stream and space between bank and bank with calculating look.
"You cannot," he cries, hastily; "you'll get a ducking as sure as I stand here. Don't be so silly!"
The word "silly" acts as a whip and spur to Essie's flagging courage. She retreats a few yards from the edge, in order to get a little run to give her a better spring.
"As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!" remarks Gerard, resignedly, quoting Mrs. Malaprop and folding his arms.
Neither the preparatory run, nor the tremendous bound she takes, avail to save Miss Craven from the fate which her obstinacy and the comparative shortness of her legs render unavoidable. She jumps short, and falls forward on the wet bank; her lavender kid gloves digging convulsively into it, and her legs disporting themselves fish-like in the brook.
He is at her side in an instant, raises gently and lifts her on to the grass, unmindful of the pollution caused to his coat by the muddy contact.
"What a fool I was!" she cries, passionately, sinking down among a grove of huge burdock leaves, smothered in shame and angry blushes.
St. John thinks it rude to disagree with her, so holds his peace.
"Why don't you laugh at me? why don't you jeer me?" she continues, vehemently; "why don't you tell me you are very glad of it, and that I richly deserve it, as I see you are longing to do? Anything would be better than standing there like a stock or a stone!"
"It is not of much consequence how I stand or how I look," he replies, coldly. "It would be more to the purpose to know how you are to get home!"
"I will walk as I am," she cries impulsively, springing to her feet; "it will be a fit penance for my idiocy, and you shall go on ahead. I don't want you to be disgraced by being seen in company with such an object."
"That is very probable, isn't it?" he answers, laughing good-humouredly. "No, I have a better proposition than that, I think. It has just occurred to me that an old servant of ours lives at no great distance from here, her cottage is not more than three or four fields off. If you can manage to get there she would dry your clothes for you in a minute."
Rendered docile by her late disaster, feeling very small, and hanging her head, Esther acquiesces. Her gown, from which every particle of starch or stiffness has fled, clings to her limbs and defines their form; the water drips down from her in a thousand little spouts and rivulets: bang, bang, go her soaked petticoats against her ankles at every step she takes.
"You have had almost enough of taking me out to walk, I expect," she remarks presently, rather grimly.
"You have had almost enough of jumping brooks, I expect," he retorts, drily; and then they walk on in silence till they reach a little whitewashed cottage, with its slip of potato ground and plot of pinks and marigolds and lark-spurs—an oasis of tilled ground among the wilderness of pasturage.
St. John knocks at the half-open door and puts his head in. "Are you at home, Mrs. Brown? How are you?" says he, in that frank, friendly voice that goes far to make the Felton tenants wish that Sir St. John reigned in Sir Thomas's stead.
"Quite well, thank you, Mr. St. John; I hope I see you the same," replies the person addressed, coming to the door with a jolly red face and a voluminous widow's cap that contradict one another; "it's a long time since we've seen you come our way."
"So it is, Mrs. Brown; but, you see, I have been after the partridges."
"And Sir Thomas, I hope he keeps pretty well, Mr. St. John?"
"Yes, thanks."
"And Miladi, I hope she has her health."
"Yes, thanks."
"And Miss Bl——?"
"Yes, thanks," interrupts St. John, rather impatiently, breaking through the thread of her interrogatories. "Do you see, Mrs. Brown, that this young lady has met with an accident: she has tumbled into the brook. Do you think you could let her dry herself at your fire a bit?"
"Eh dear, Miss, youarein a mess!" ejaculates Mrs. Brown, walking round Esther, and surveying her curiously, as she stands close behind Gerard, dripping still, with a hang-dog air and chattering teeth. "Why, you have not a dry stitch upon you; you are onemaskof mud! Would you please to step in?"
Mrs. Brown and Essie retire into an inner chamber for the purpose of removing the wet clothes and replacing them temporarily with some of the contents of Mrs. Brown's wardrobe.
St. John remains in the outer room, looks at the clock, behind whose dial-plate a round china-moon-face peeps out; takes up the mugs on the dresser: "For a Good Boy," "A Keepsake from Melford," "A Present from Manchester," hiding amongst numberless gilt flourishes; chivies the tabby cat; counts the flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters; walks to the door, and watches the bees crawling in and out of the low door of their straw houses, and the maroon velvet nasturtiums trailing along the borders, and lifting their round leaves and dark faces up to the knees of the standard rose.
As he so stands, whistling softly and musing, some one joins him in the doorway. He turns and beholds Esther, bashful, shame-faced, metamorphosed. To Mrs. Brown's surprise, she has declined the magnanimous offer of her best black silk. There is nothing coquettish or picturesque, as she is aware, about an ill-made dress that tries to follow the fashion and fails—destined, too, for a woman treble her size. She has chosen in preference, a short, dark, linsey petticoat and lilac cotton bedgown, which, by its looseness, can adapt itself to the round slenderness of her tall, lissom figure. Her bonnet was not included in the ruin of her other garments, but she has taken it off, as destructive to the harmony of her costume.
St. John surveys her for some moments: looks upward from petticoat to bedgown, and downward from bedgown to petticoat, but observes a discreet silence.
"Does it become me?" she asks at last, with shy vanity. "Why do not you say something?"
"I have been so unlucky in two or three of my remarks lately," replies he, with a concluding glance at the round, bare arms that emerge whitely from the short cotton sleeves, "that I have become chary of making any more."
"You need not be afraid of offending me by telling me that it is unbecoming," she says, gravely—"quite the contrary!"—she continues rather discontentedly—"think that it suits metoo well, as if it were a dress that I ought to have been born to. Upon Miss Blessington now such a costume would look utterly incongruous."
St. John bursts out laughing. "A goddess in a bedgown! Diana of the Ephesians in a linsey petticoat! Perish the thought!"
Esther looks mortified, and turns away.
The cleansing of Miss Craven's garments is a lengthy operation. Mrs. Brown retreats into her back kitchen, draws forward a washtub, kneels down beside it, turns up her sleeves, and with much splashing of hot water and s lathering of soap, rubs and scrubs, wrings out, dries, and irons the luckless gown and petticoat.
It is latish and duskish by the time that St. John and his companion set out on their homeward way. Two or three starflowers have already stolen out, and are blossoming, infinitely distant, in the meadows of the sky. They are not loquacious: it is the little shallow rivulet that brawls; the great deep river runs still. Silently they walk along; her little feet trip softly through the rustling grass beside him: the evening wind blows her light garments against him. He has taken her little gloveless hand as he helps her over a stile (adversity has made her abject, and she no longer spurns his assistance), and now retains it, half absently. Bare palm to bare palm, they saunter through the rich, dim land. It is dusk, but not so dusk but that they can see their dark eyes flashing into one another: sharp, stinging pleasure shoots along their young, full veins. The vocabularies of pain and of delight are so meagre, that each has to borrow from the other to express its own highest height and deepest depth. As they pass along a lane, whose high grass banks and overgrown hawthorn hedges make the coming night already come, Esther's foot stumbles over a stone. The next moment she is in his arms, and he is kissing her repeatedly.
"Esther, will you marry me?" he asks, in a passionate whisper, forgetting to make any graceful periphrasis to explain his meaning, using the plain words as they rise in his heart.
No answer. Emotions as complicated as intense check the passage of her voice. Even here, on this highest pinnacle of bliss—pinnacle so high that she had hardly dared hope ever to climb there—the thought of Bob and his despair flashes before her: her own remarks about the senselessness of kissing—about its being a custom suited only to savages, and her own great aversion to it—recur to her with a stab of remorse.
"You won't?" cries St. John, mistaking the cause of her silence, in a voice in which extreme surprise and profound alarm and pain are mixed in equal quantities.
Still no answer.
"If you have been making a fool of me all this time, you might, at least, have the civility to tell me so," he says, in a voice so sternly cold that remorse, coyness, and all other feelings merge into womanish fear.
"Don't blame me before I deserve it," she says, with a faint smile. "I will mar——"
She finishes her sentence on his breast.
Perfect happiness never lasts more than two seconds in this world; at the end of that time St. John's doubts return. He puts her a little way from him, that she may be a freer agent. "Esther," he says, "I half believe that you said 'yes' out of sheer fright; you thought I was going to upbraid you; and I am aware" (with a half smile) "that there are few things you would not do or leave undone to avoid a scolding; you did not say it readily, as if you were glad of it. I know that you have only known me three weeks, that I am not particularly likeable, especially by women, and that I always show to the worst possible advantage at home. All I beg of you is, tell me the truth: Do you like me, or do you not?"
"I do like you."
"Like is such a comprehensive word," he says, with a slight, impatient contracting of his straight brows. "YoulikeMrs. Brown, I suppose, for washing your clothes?"
"I like you better than Mrs. Brown."
"I did not doubt that," he answers, laughing; "probably you like me better than Sir Thomas, than my mother, than Constance, perhaps; but such liking as that I would not stoop to pick off the ground. I must be first or nowhere. Am I first?"
"No, you are not," she answers firmly.
His countenance falls, as Cain's did.
"I am not!" he repeats, in a constrained voice. "Who is then, may I ask?"
"Jack, my brother—he is, and always will be!"
"Bah!" cries Gerard, laughing, and looking immensely relieved. "How you frightened me! I believe you did it on purpose, as you said to me about the brook this afternoon. After him, am I first?"
"Yes."
"Before——what's his name?—the fellow that writes such a remarkably good hand—before Brandon?"
"Why do you always worry me about him?" she exclaims, angrily, turning away.
"Why do you so strongly resent being worried about him?" retorts St. John suspiciously.
"It is wearisome to hear a person always harping on one string," she answers coldly. "Believe me or not, as you choose; but please spare me the trouble of these repeated and useless asseverations."
"I beg your pardon!" he says, his countenance clearing, and passing his arm round her half-shrinking, half-yielding form. "I will never dig him up as long as I live. Peace to his ashes! Oh darling!" he continues, his voice changing to an emphatic, eager, impassioned key—"I have been so little used to having things go as I wish, that I can hardly believe it is I that am standing here. Pinch me, that I may be sure that I am awake! Oh Esther! is it really true? Can you possibly be fond of me? So few people are! Not a soul in the wide world, I do believe, except my old mother. The girl that I told you about last night lay in my arms, and let me kiss her as you are doing; she kissed me back again, as you do not do; I looked into her eyes, and they seemed true as truth itself, and all the while she waslyingto me: my very touch must have been hateful to her, as it is to you, perhaps?"
"You are always referring to that—thatperson," says Esther, lifting great jealous eyes, and a mouth like a ripe cleft cherry, through the misty twilight towards him. "I perceive that I am only apis allerafter all. If you had ceased to care for her, you would have forgiven her long ago, and have given up measuring everybody else by her standard."
"I have forgiven her fully and freely," he answers, magnanimously, and standing heart to heart with a woman
"...... fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;More lovely than the monarch of the sky,In wanton Arethusa's azured arms."
He may afford to be magnanimous. "I not only forgive her, but hale down blessings on her own and her plunger's ugly head. To be candid," he ends, laughing, "I forgave her a year ago, when I met her at Brainton Station, grown fat, with a red nose, and a tribe of squinting children, who, but for the finger of Providence interposing, might have been mine."
Speaking, he lays his lips upon the blossom of her sweet red mouth; but she, pricked with the sudden smart of recollected treachery, draws away from him.
"Come," she says, with a slight shiver, "let us go home. We shall get into dreadful disgrace as it is; what will Sir Thomas say?"
"I can tell you beforehand," says St. John, gaily; "he will say, with his usual charming candour, that, if we ask his opinion, we are a couple of fools to go gadding about to strange churches just to see a parcel of lighted candles and squeaking little boys and popish mummeries; that, for his part, he has stuck to his parish church for the last fifty years, and means to do so to the end of the chapter; and that, if we don't choose to conform to the rules of his house, &c."
"Does he always say the same?" asks Esther, smiling.
"Always. A long and affectionate study of his character has enabled me to predicate with exactness what he will say on any great subject, Esther."
"How do you know that my name is Esther?" she asks naïvely. "You have never heard any one call me so."
"Do you forget the flyleaf of the Prayer-book that——Hang it! I was on the point of uttering the forbidden name!"
Smiling, he looks for an answering smile from her, but finds none.
"I have heard of you as Esther Craven from my youth up," he continues. "Before you came we speculated as to what 'Esther' Craven would be like; it was only when you arrivedin propriá personâthat you rose into the dignity of 'Miss' Craven."
"I hate being called Esther," she says, plaintively, with eyes down-drooped to the lush-green grasses that bow and make obeisance beneath her quick feet; "it always makes me feel as if I were in disgrace. Jack never calls me Esther unless he is vexed with me. Call meEssie, please."
"Essie, then."
"Well?"
"I think it right to warn you" (putting an arm of resolute possession, bolder than ever poor Brandon's had been, round her supple figure—for who is there in these grey evening fields to witness the embrace?)—"I think it right to warn you that I may very possibly grow like Sir Thomas in time; they tell me that I have a look of him already. I do not see that myself; but, even if that does come to pass, can you promise to like me even then?"
"Even then."
"I may very probably d—n the servants, and be upset for a whole evening if there are lumps in the melted butter; I may very probably insist on your playing backgammon with me every evening, and insist, likewise, on your being invariably beaten. Can you bear even that?"
"Even that."
They both laugh; but in Esther's laugh there is a ring of bitterness, which she herself hears, and wonders that he does not.
As they near the house, they see thin slits of crimson light through the dining-room shutters. Esther involuntarily quickens her pace.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asks, his eyes shining eager with reproachful passion in the passionless white starlight. "Who knows? to-morrow we may be dead; to-day we are as gods, knowing good and evil. This walk has not been to you what it has to me, or you would be in no haste to end it."
"I don't suppose it has," she answers, half-absently, with a sigh.
He had expected an eager disclaimer, and is disappointed.
"There can be but one explanation of that," he says, angrily.
"If you only knew——," begins Esther, with an uncertain half-inclination to confess, though late.
"If you are going to tell me anything disagreeable," he says, quickly putting his hand before her mouth, "stop! Tell me to-morrow, or the day after, but not now—not now! Let there be one day of my life on which I may look back and say, as God said when he looked back upon His new world, 'Behold, it is very good!'"
She is silent.
"And yet, perhaps, it would be better if I knew the end of your sentence; if I only knew—what?—how little you care about me?"
"You are mistaken," she answers, roused into vehemence. "I love you so well, that I have grown hateful to myself!" and having spoken thus oracularly, she raises herself on tiptoe, lifts two shy burning lips to his, and kisses him voluntarily. Then, amazed at her own audacity, clothed with shame as with a garment, she tears herself out of his arms, as in delightful surprise he catches her to his heart, and flies with frenzied haste into the house.
The sweetness of September is that of the last few days spent with a friend that goeth on a very long journey; and we know not whether, when he returneth, we shall go to meet him with outstretched arms, or shall smile up at him only through the eyes of the daisies that flower upon our straight green graves.
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,"
and our sweetest seasons are, to my thinking, those in which the ecstasies of possession are mixed with the soft pain of expected parting. A September sun—such a one as warmly kissed the quiet faces of our young dead heroes, as they lay thick together on Alma's hill-side—is shining down with even mildness upon the just and the unjust, upon Constance Blessington's grass-green gown as she sits at breakfast, and on the hair crown of yellow gold with which Providence has seen fit to circle her dull fair brows.
"I think that you must have regretted being in such a hurry to run away from the garden and us," she is saying, with a gentle smile of lady-like malice, to Esther,à proposof her yesterday's misadventure.
"Sitting in the shade eating nectarines is certainly pleasanter occupation than grovelling on your hands and knees on a mud-bank," replies Esther, demurely.
"St. John is so terribly energetic!" says Miss Blessington, rather lackadaisically; "he would have walked me off the face of the earth long ago if I had let him."
Remembering the Chinese invitation, Esther cannot repress an involuntary smile.
"What about St. John?" says the young man, entering; having caught his own name, with that wonderful acuteness of hearing with which every one is endowed when themselves are in question.
"Much better have stuck to your parish church," says Sir Thomas, brandishing a large red and yellow bandanna, which is part of the old English costume, "than gone scrambling heigh-go-mad over hedges and ditches after new-fangled Puseyite mummeries!"
Gerard and his betrothed exchange a glance of intelligence. Gerard is looking slightly sentimental; his head is a little on one side; but on his discovering that he is an object of attention to Constance, it returns rather suddenly to the perpendicular.
Esther's eyes are brillianter than their wont; her cheeks are flushed with a deeper hue than the crimson lips of a foreign shell, but it is not the flush of a newly-departed sleep. The angel of slumber has passed by the portals of her brain, as the destroying angel passed by the blood-painted lintels of Israel. Thoughts sweeter than virgin honey, thoughts bitterer than gall, have kept her wakeful. Ere she went to bed, she spent three hours in writing letters of dismissal to Brandon, and at the end left him undismissed. "Icannotwrite it to him!" she cries, sitting up in bed in the dark, and flinging out blind arms into the black nothingness around her; "anything written sounds so harsh, so abrupt, so hard. I must tell him myself very gradually and gently, and tell him how sorry I am, and beg him to forgive me, and cry—go down on my knees, perhaps. No; I should look such a fool if I did that! After all, no one cries long over spilt milk—least of all any one so sensible and utterly unimaginative as poor dear Bob." And with that, thinking in a disparaging, hold-cheap way of him and his love, she turns the pillow over to try and find a cooler place on the under side for her burning face to rest on.
"Two dissyllabic names now passing many mouths by three dissyllabic names are here expressed," reads Miss Blessington, with distinct gravity, after breakfast that morning, out of an acrostic book that lies on the work-table before her, while Esther sits opposite with pencil and paper, ready to write down the products of the joint wisdom of their two minds. But the top of the pencil is being bitten by the young scribe's short white teeth, and her eyes are straying away absently—away through the open window and out to the sunshiny sward, where two of St. John's dogs, forbidden by Sir Thomas on pain of death, to set paw within the house, are rolling over one another, making abortive bites at each other's hind legs, and waggishly, with much growling and mumbling, taking each other's heads into their mouths.
"That is the whole," continues Constance. "These are the proofs; a woman, a wise man, a king, a poet, a beauty!"
Silence.
"A woman!" says Miss Blessington, cogitatively, resting her smooth chin on her hand, and looking vaguely round at the cabinets and busts for inspiration.
Esther makes no suggestion.
"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, raising her voice a little.
Esther comes back to consciousness with a little jump. "Oh! I beg your pardon; I don't think I was attending. A——what did you say?"
"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, for the third and last time.
"A woman!" echoes Esther, vacantly; "that is rather vague, is it not? There have been a good many women, one way or another."
"Let us try the next, then," says Constance, obligingly: "A wise man."
"Solomon!" answers Esther, glibly.
"I said adissyllable name," remarks Constance, with gentle asperity.
The door opens, and St. John enters.
"Tell us a wise man's name?" "Who was a wise man?" cry they both in a breath.
"Solomon!" replies St. John, brilliantly.
"So I said," says Esther, smiling; "but, unluckily, it must be atwo-syllabled wise man. I'm afraid that it would be disrespectful to abbreviate him intoSolmon, wouldn't it?"
"One ought to be provided with a Bible, a Lemprière, and an encyclopædia before one attempts to grapple with these devices of Satan," says Gerard, sitting down on the arm of the sofa beside Constance and looking over her shoulder.
"A woman! Who is the woman?"
"We have not found out yet."
"A king! Who is the king?"
"We have not found out yet."
"You seem to be on the highroad to success," says he, laughing, and throwing himself back lazily.
"We have only just begun," says Miss Blessington, a little reproachfully. "You and Miss Craven are always so impatient."
"There are a great many two-syllabled kings' names," says Esther, with a prodigious effort to look intelligent and interested: "Edward, Henry, Louis, Ahab, Alfred, Joash!"
"I daresay it is one of those Jewish kings," says Constance, reflectively; "they are always fond of introducing Bible names into acrostics. Is there a Bible anywhere about, St. John?"
St. John walks slowly round the well-laden tables; looks over photograph books, Doré's "Elaine," Flaxman's "Dante;" but in vain. He comes back, and shakes his head.
"I will go and fetch one," says Constance, rising with noiseless grace, and rustling softly away among the console tables.
"May she long be occupied in searching the Scriptures for a dissyllabic king!" cries Gerard, drawing a long breath, and yawning as the door closes behind her.
"I am glad she is gone," says Esther, looking rather embarrassed, "as I have something to say to you."
"Say on."
"I must go home to-morrow," she continues, drawing hideous faces and wooden-legged cows on her bit of paper.
"Are you beginning to try experiments on me already?" he asks, incredulously, leaning his folded arms on the little table which forms a barrier between them.
"No; but I have received a letter from Jack this morning, which——"
"Which you are going to read to me?"
"Oh, no—no!" she answers, hastily, putting her hand in involuntary protection over her pocket; "it—it—wouldn't interest you." (It would have interested him rather too much.) "He seems to be missing me a good deal."
"Be honest," says St. John, stretching out his hand and taking hers captive, pencil and all. "Does he miss you as much as I shall?"
"More, a good deal, I should say," she replies, looking up with an arch smile; "I don't make your tea, and order your dinner, and darn your socks. One, two, three, four weeks," continues she, marking each number with her slender fingers on the table. "I have actually been here nearly a month, and" (with a half-absent sigh), "do you know, the very day I left home I told them——"
"Who's them?"
She blushes furiously. "Them—did I say them? Oh! I meanthim, of course—Jack."
"Does he always speak of himself in the plural, like a king, or a reviewer?"
"Nonsense!" cries Esther, pulling away her hand rather impatiently. "Do you never make slips of the tongue?"
"Frequently. Well, you must write and tellthem" (with a laughing emphasis on thethem) "that they must get some one else to darn their socks, for that you have found something better to do."
"I could not have anything better," she answers, reddening with indignation. "You don't understand about Jack, or you would not make jokes!"
"It is a fault I'm not often guilty of; being funny never was my besetting sin," he answers, drily. "Essie, whenever you do go home, I have a great mind to go with you—if you will invite me."
"Oh, no, don't!" she cries, with involuntary eagerness, the pencil dropping from between her fingers.
"I believe you are ashamed of me," he says, angrily, walking off to the window to hide the flush of vexation which is invading his weather-worn cheeks.
"Ashamed of myself more likely," she cries, jumping up suddenly and following him.
"Why?"
"You fine gentlemen do not understand the
"'short and simple annals of the poor,'"
she answers, with a forced laugh. "You would probably be in the position of Mother Hubbard's singularly ill-used dog;
"When you came there,The cupboard was bare.'"
"You think that gluttony, like gout, must be hereditary," says Gerard, laughing again, and yet looking very tender withal—not with the puling, milk-and-water tenderness of a green love-sick boy, but with the condensed, strong passion of a world-worn, world-tainted, half world-weary-grown man.
"There are other reasons too," says Essie, drooping her eyelids, over which the small blue veins—
"wandering, leave a tender stain—"
with a maiden's shyness, under the new-known fire of a lover's gaze.
"What other reasons?"
"I have never mentioned anything about you to Jack!" she answers, twisting her one paltry ring round her finger. "I don't suppose he is aware of your existence, unless he has bought a new 'Baronetage' since I left home—a piece of extravagance that I do not think he is likely to have been guilty of: and he would think it so odd if I were to appear suddenly on the scene, dragging you in tow."
"That would be easily explained," replies St. John, gravely, drawing himself up, and looking rather too conscious of the eight centuries of Norman blood in his strong veins. "I suppose that a man may be allowed to travel for a few hours in company with his future wife without any one being straightlaced enough or behind the world enough to call itodd!"
"Your future wife!" she repeats, with a dreamy, mournful smile. "Am I that? I think not. I shallneverbe your wife," she says, a look of melancholy inspiration crossing and darkening, as a travelling cloud crosses and darkens the blue eyes of a June brook, the sweet red and sweeter white of her little piquante face.
"Do you know any just cause or impediment why you should not be?" he asks, gaily.
"None," she answers, shuddering a little, as she has got into the habit of doing lately—"except" (throwing herself impulsively into his glad arms) "that it would make me so intolerably happy!"
There is a pause—a little brief pause—in which that shyest, fleetest-winged of earth's visitants—Happiness—folds her pinions and settles down for a little minute on two beating, trembling human hearts.
"Do you know," continues Essie, after awhile—raising herself, and looking up, with tears glistening, like dew on the autumn grass, upon her long swart lashes—"Do you know that in a book I was reading the other day I met this sentence: 'Le bonheur sur terre est un crime puni de mort comme le génie, comme la divinité'? It has haunted me ever since yesterday."
"As far as that goes," he answers, thoughtfully, "there is nothing in this world that is not punished with death, except Death himself. Well" (smiling fondly, and stroking her ruffled, scented love-locks), "may I come? may I be Mother Hubbard's dog?"
"Why do you want to comenow, particularly?" she asks, in rather a troubled voice.
"Because I am a coward," he answers, laughing—"because I like a quiet life, and I imagine that there will be squally weather here when I announce my intention of taking you as a helpmeet for me."
"Iamamésalliance, I suppose?" she answers, rather sadly. "What will Sir Thomas say? Anything very bad?"
"Oh, nothing out of the way," answers Gerard, with a careless shrug. "He will call me an ass, and tell me that I always was, from a boy, the biggest fool he ever came across; and that, for his part, he'll wash his hands of me: and he'll probably conclude with a threat of cutting me off with a shilling."
"And will he?" asks Esther, quickly, looking up eager-eyed, parted-lipped.
"Why do you ask?" said the young man, sharply.
"Do you think that I want to marry abeggar?" inquires she, playfully, not detecting his suspicion.
"You need not be alarmed," he replies, coldly, and his arms slacken their fond hold a little. "He will not, for the very excellent reason that he cannot."
The door handle, turning, rattles. With one spring, Esther returns to her seat—to her deserted cows and impossible profiles. St. John looks out of the window. No transformation scene at Drury Lane could be more complete.
"Ahab—Jehu—Zimri—Omri—Joash!" recites Miss Blessington, entering, with an open Bible in her hand.
"I am afraid you must think it very rude of us, leaving you alone on the last evening of your visit," says Miss Blessington next day to Esther, as the two girls stand together in the conservatory, picking bits of heliotrope and maidenhair, and regardless of the ten and twenty little pots that their long gowns have knocked down; "but, you see, it is such a long-standing engagement, and we can so seldom induce Sir Thomas to go to a ball, that we really could hardly get out of it."
She speaks politely, with that friendly suavity that one feels on the ultimate and penultimate days of their stay to a guest that one is glad to be rid of.
"Oh, never mind me," says Essie, lightly; "I can always amuse myself: and, besides, it will be very nearly bedtime by the time you go."
"They intend me to go with them," St. John had said to her overnight,à proposof this ball, "and of course I intend it too; only some prophetic instinct tells me that my head will begin to ache prodigiously towards dressing-time. I am half divided between that and toothache, only I suppose that the latter necessitates the simulating of acute bodily torture, and subjects one to unlimited offers of boiled figs, hopbags, laudanum, and the Lord knows what."
Gerard had found his betrothed stubborner than he had expected as to her expressed resolution of departure. Looking at the childish roundness of her soft face, at the dewy meekness of her heavenly eyes, he had fancied her malleable by his hand, as clay by the potter's; and so, in most things, she would have been. In most things, it was to her easier to yield than to resist—less trouble—and, besides, it pleased people; but in the one prime passion of her life, her love for her brother, you might as well try to move the Tower of London with your finger and thumb as to stir her. After half an hour of arguments, persuasions, caresses, St. John is constrained vexedly to own to himself that in that young faithful heartlover-love holds as yet only the second place. The sole concession he could win from her was that of one day, the day of the ball.
"We may imagine the clock put on thirty years, and ourselves already in possession," he says, laughing—"only minus the gout and wrinkles and spectacles we shall also have come into possession of by then."
"What the devil do people mean," says Sir Thomas, entering the morning-room that evening after dinner, with his hair brushed up into a stiff cockatoo, and tugging away at a huge pair of white kid gloves, off which he has already succeeded in bursting both buttons, "dragging a man away from his own fireside to see a lot of fools cutting capers, and flourishing their heels in each other's faces?"
From Sir Thomas's description one would imagine that the Cancan was habitually danced at the balls he frequents.
The door opens, and Miss Blessington makes her appearance; looking, not vain or conscious, but calmly defiant of any one to make a better—a triumph of lace and tulle and flowers, and milk-white flesh, and grand, cold curves and contours.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cries Essie, clasping her little hands, with the unaffected admiration of one handsome woman for another. "I know it is rude to make personal remarks; but is not she, Lady Gerard?"
"It is a pretty dress," replies miladi, whose unwieldy bulk not even the cunningest of Parisiancouturièreshas been able to fashion into anything nearer than an approximation to any shape at all; "but I never think that Elise's taste is as good as Jane Clarke's used to be."
Constance has walked to a pier-glass, and is examining with anxiety a bite that a gnat has been savage enough to inflict on her face, a little under the lower lip, and which has been disturbing her wonted composed serenity ever since 3 p.m., when the catastrophe took place.
"Does it show much?" she asks, turning with a concerned, serious look to Esther.
"Oh no! hardly at all."
"I think I will put a little bit of sticking-plaster on it," she continues, gravely. "It will only look like a patch; and patches are always so becoming."
"Let me go and get you a bit!" cries Essie, good-naturedly, running off.
When she returns Sir Thomas is saying, fussily: "Now, why is not that boy dressed? Always the same! Always late! Never in time for anything!"
"He is not coming, Sir Thomas; he has got a headache, and is gone to lie down—at least he said so," replies Constance, coldly, but casting a scrutinising glance at Esther (who is deftly, with a small pair of scissors, cutting out a little circle of sticking-plaster) as she speaks.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cries "that boy's" papa, angrily—"a pack of lies! A fine Miss Molly you have made of your son, miladi! He'll be afraid of going out shooting next year for fear of getting his feet wet!"
"Is that about the right size?" inquires Esther, timidly, raising a pair of guilty pink cheeks, and exhibiting the result of her labours on the point of the scissors.
"Good God! miladi, do take that plaguy long tail of yours up! How the devil can I help treading on it?"
These are the last sweet words of Sir Thomas, as he follows wife and ward into the carriage. They are gone, and Essie sits down in the large empty room to await the resurrection of her lover. The sort of shy half-fear which always assails her at his expected approach comes over her more strongly than ever. A distant door bangs faintly somewhere about the house; then another nearer. "He is coming!" she says to herself, and the quick blood rushes tingling to her fingers' ends.
It is a hot night, and the tall French windows stand unshuttered and open. Some impulse of timid coquetry urges her to flee from before him: she is ashamed that he should see the plain letters of joy written on her face at his coming: she would fain have yet a few moments of the happiness of expectancy, to whose delights those of reality are but seldom comparable. From the terrace a flight of stone steps leads down, with many a twist, to the mere. In a minute Essie has run lightly down, and is standing by the water's edge.
The dahlias are nodding their round drowsy heads, and the sentinel hollyhocks stand up stiff and pompous with their clustered flower-spikes—rulers and law-givers among the flower-people; the little ripples are biting with playful tooth the low sedge-banks, and the tall bulrush forest, whence the coot and the waterhen families sailed out into life in the warm spring weather. To and fro rock the heavy, lazy, water-lily leaves, whose bloom-time is past two months ago. Through her garden, the sky, the high moon walks stately, holding her silver lamp, in whose light all things shine deliciously.