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Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

by Rhoda Broughton · English · Gutenberg #45178 · 793,613 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

Author: Rhoda Broughton


        
Release date: March 20, 2014 [eBook #45178]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RED AS A ROSE IS SHE: A NOVEL ***
RED AS A ROSE IS SHE.


A Novel.


BY

RHODA BROUGHTON,

AUTHOR OF "COMETH UP AS A FLOWER," "GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!"
"SECOND THOUGHTS," ETC.


_ELEVENTH EDITION._


LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,

Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.

1887.


[Illustration: Frontispiece: ESTHER CRAVEN.
ELISH LA MONTI. PINX.  JOSEPH BROWN. SC.]


RED AS A ROSE IS SHE.




CHAPTER I.


Have you ever been to Wales? I do not ask this question of any one in
particular; I merely address it to the universal British public, or,
rather, to such member or members of the same as shall be wise enough
to sit down and read the ensuing true and moving love story--true as
the loves of wicked Abelard and Heloise, moving as those of good Paul
and Virginia. Probably those wise ones will be very few; numerable
by tens, or even units: they will, I may very safely aver, not form
the bulk of the nation. However high may be my estimate of my own
powers of narration, however amply Providence may have gifted me with
self-appreciation, I may be sure of that, seeing that the only books
I know of which enjoy so wide a circulation are the Prayer-book and
Bradshaw. I am not going to instruct any one in religion or trains,
so I may as well make up my mind to a more limited audience, while I
pipe my simple lay (rather squeakily and out of tune, perhaps), and may
think myself very lucky if that same kind, limited audience do not hiss
me down before I have got through half a dozen staves of the dull old
ditty.

Have you ever been to Wales? If you have ever visited the pretty,
dirty, green spot where Pat and his brogue, where potatoes and
absenteeism and head-centres flourish, _alias_ Ireland, you have
no doubt passed through a part of it, rushing by, most likely, in
the Irish mail; but in that case your eyes and nose and ears were
all so very full of dust and cinders--you were so fully employed in
blinking and coughing and enjoying the poetry of motion--as to be
totally incapable of seeing, hearing, or smelling any of the beauties,
agreeable noises, or good smells, which in happier circumstances might
have offered themselves to your notice. Perhaps you are in the habit,
every midsummer, of taking your half-dozen male and female olive
shoots to have the roses restored to their twelve fat cheeks by blowy
scrambles about the great frowning Orme's Head, or by excavations in
the Rhyl Sands. Perhaps you have gone wedding-touring to Llanberis on
the top of a heavy-laden coach, swinging unsafely round sharp corners,
and nearly flinging your Angelina from your side on to the hard Welsh
road below. Perhaps you have wept with Angelina at the spurious grave
of the martyred Gelert, or eaten pink trout voraciously at Capel Curig,
and found out what a startlingly good appetite Angelina had. But have
you ever lived in the land of the Cymri? Have you ever seen how drunk
the masculine Cymri can be on market days, or what grievous old hags
the feminine Cymri become towards their thirtieth year? Have you ever,
by bitter experience, discovered the truth of that couplet--

    "Taffy was a Welshman,
     Taffy was a thief?"

I _have_ lived in Wales, so I speak with authority; and for my part
I don't think that Taffy is much more given to the breaking of the
eighth commandment than the _canaille_ of any other country. He is not
a bright fellow, is not Taffy; happiest, I think, when rather tipsy,
or when yelling psalms in his conventicle or schism-shop--for Taffy is
addicted to schism; he will tell you plenty of lies, too, and will not
season them with the salt of a racy, devil-me-care wit, as Pat would.
But he is very civil-spoken, and rather harmless; seldomer, I think,
than his cleverer neighbour over the border does he hanker feloniously
after his neighbour's spoons, or hammer his wife's head with the
domestic poker.

But why am I drivelling on, like a sort of Murray and water, on the
manners and character of this, to my thinking, not very interesting
nation? I will waste no more "prave 'ords" upon them, as the few men
and women whom I am going to tell you about, and whom I shall want
you to like a little, or dislike a little, as the case may be, are
not Taffies, only they happen to have stuck up their tent-poles in
Taffy-land when they first make their low bow to you. These men and
women were nothing out of the way for goodness, or beauty, or talent;
they did a hundred thousand naughty things, each one of them. Some
of them did them with impunity, as far as this world goes; some of
them, capricious Megæra and Tisyphone lashed with scorpions for their
derelictions. This is going to be neither a "Life of Saints," nor a
"History of Devils;" these are memoirs neither of a "Hedley Vicars,"
nor of a "Dame aux Camellias;" so, whoso expects and relishes either of
those styles of composition may forthwith close this volume, and pitch
it (if it be his own, and not the battered property of a circulating
library) into the fire. Those who love a violent moral, or violent
judgment for sins and follies--a man struck dead for saying "damn,"
or a woman for going to a ball, as the _Record_ would charitably have
us believe is the way of Providence--equally with those who enjoy the
flavour of violent immorality, will be disappointed if they look this
way for the gratification of their peculiar idiosyncracies. Of my
friends presently to be made known to you, and criticised by you, "the
more part remain unto this present, but some have fallen asleep."

Once upon a time--I like that old, time-honoured opening; it makes
one so nobly free, gives one so much room to stretch one's wings in,
ties one down to no king's reign, no hampering, clogging century--once
upon a time there was a valley in Taffy-land; there is still, unless
some very recent convulsion has upheaved it to the top of a mountain,
or submerged it beneath the big Atlantic waves; a valley lovelier
than that one in "Ida," where "beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,"
pastured his sheep and his jet-black goats, and inaugurated his rakish
course; a valley where there are no dangerous, good-looking Parises,
only one or two red-headed Welsh squires, who have each married, or
will in the fulness of time each marry, one lawful wife--red-headed,
too, very likely; and have never made, will never make, love to any
Enones or other ill-conducted young shepherdesses. In fact, in that
Arcadia there are no such shepherdesses; the daughters of the Cymri do
not "ply the homely shepherd's trade," nor would they shed much romance
over it if they did; for with sorrow be it spoken, blowsy are they
mostly, hard-featured, toothless; and, moreover, the little nimble,
lean sheep that go scrambling and jumping and skurrying about the
rough crags and steep hill-sides do not need any crook'd and melodious
Dowsabellas or Neæras to look after them and guide them in the way they
should go.

In that valley there are plenty of houses, squires' houses and
peasants' houses, where the propagation of the Cambrian is conducted
with much success; houses big and little, red-faced and white-faced
and dirty-faced, old and new. But we have at present to do with only
one of those houses, and it comes under the head of the littles and
the olds. Halfway up a hill-side it stands, looking across the valley
to other higher hills that swell out softly against the sky, and go
sloping gently down to the sea twenty miles away. They always remind
me--I don't know why--of the distant hills in Martin's picture of the
"Plains of Heaven;" so mistily do they rise in their hazy blueness. It
is a snug, unpretending little house enough, with its black and white
cross-beamed front and unwalled kitchen-garden straggling steeply up
the slope at the back. Many and many a day has it stood there, seeing
generations and fashions come in and go out; has stood there since the
far-away days when men wore curly wigs half-way down their backs, and
sky-blue coats, and fought and died for prerogative and King Charles,
or fought and lived for England and liberty: when most houses were
black and white, like its little elderly self, before plate glass or
stucco, or commodious villa residences, five minutes' walk from a
station, were dreamed of. The name of the little house is Glan-yr-Afon.




CHAPTER II.


"Jack and I got in our last hayload to-day, without a drop of rain; the
first bit of good luck that has come to us, I don't know when. If we
had any land, I should imagine that we must have a bit of consecrated
ground among it, to account for our ill-fortune; but as we have not
of our own enough to pasture a goose upon, that cannot be it. Such an
odd thing happened to-day--Robert Brandon proposed to me: it is the
first offer I ever had, though I was seventeen last month. If it is
never a more pleasant process than it was to-day, I hope sincerely it
may be the last. I said 'Yes,' too; at least, a species of Yes after
half-a-dozen Noes; I cannot imagine why, for I certainly did not feel
Yes. I suppose I must have been pleased at any one wishing for my
company during the term of his natural life."

The name on the fly-leaf of this journal-book is Esther Craven,
Glan-yr-Afon, and the date July 10, 186-. July is very often a rather
wet month--not so this year; all through its one-and-thirty days the
sky was like brass, as it looked to Elijah (the Seer's) eyes on the top
of Carmel, when, by his faith, he brought up the tarrying rain from the
sea's chambers. London is pouring out her noble army of haberdashers
and greengrocers into Ramsgate and Margate, and Scarborough and
Llandudno. The John Gilpins of to-day are not satisfied with a modest
outing to the "Bell" at Edmonton, "all in a chaise and pair."

Armies of schoolboys are devouring arid sandwiches and prime old buns
in railway refreshment rooms--schoolboys emptied out of every school
and seminary and college all over the country. Highly paid instructors
of youth are stretching their cramped legs up the steep sides of
Helvellyn and Mont Blanc, and surveying the "frozen hurricane" of the
glaciers through their academic spectacles. And young Craven's (of
Glan-yr-Afon) last hayload is safely stacked, as you heard from his
sister's diary. This morning the highest lying of the upland fields was
hilly with haycocks: to-night it is as flat as Salisbury Plain. All
day long the waggons have gone grinding and crunching up and down the
rocky mountain road between field and rick-yard. All day long Evan and
Hugh and Roppert (_sic_) with their waistcoats open and their brown
arms bared, aided and abetted by various Cambrian matrons, with bonnets
standing upright on their heads, and pitchforks in their lily hands,
have been tossing the scented bundles--sweeter in death than in life,
like a good man's fame--into the carts; loading them till of the shaft
horse nought but ears and nose and forelegs appeared, save to the eye
of faith. All day long Esther has been sitting under a haycock, as one
might fancy Solomon's wise woman doing, "looking well to the ways of
her household." The hay moulds itself pliably into a soft arm-chair for
her young, slight figure, and the big hay-spiders walk up her back at
their leisure, and explore the virgin forests of her thick dusk hair.
She has had her luncheon brought out to her there--bread and milk in a
white bowl. It is unsocial, surly work, eating alone; one feels reduced
to the level of a dog, cracking bones, and lapping up gravy out of his
trencher, all by himself, with tail well down, like a pump handle, and
a growl and a snap for any brother dog who may approach to share his
feast.

The haymakers were much cheerier--"couched at ease" under the nutty
hedgerow; bringing slices of unnaturally fat bacon out of blue and
white spotted pocket-handkerchiefs, gabbling to one another in the
Welsh tongue, which, to one who occupies the room of the unlearned, has
always a querulous, quarrelsome, interrogative sound; and digging their
clasp knives into the ground to clean them, when their services were no
longer required. Jack is out for the day, and the place feels stupid
without him. There is not much melody in "I paddle my own canoe," but
one misses it when one is accustomed to hear it echoing gaily over the
crofts and through the farm-yard and orchard. It would be impossible
to talk more dog-Welsh than Jack does to his workmen; but even the
mellifluous tongue of the Cymri, with its three or four consonants
standing together, undissevered by any vowel, is made harmonious,
enunciated by a young, clear voice, that sounds as if it had never been
the vehicle for sorrowful words.

    "The village seems asleep or dead,
     Now Lubin is away,"

and Esther, though she has entered upon her eighteenth year (an age
which a century ago would have been rather overripe--Chloe and Cynthia
and Phyllis being considered in their prime at fifteen, and toasted
accordingly), has as yet no Lubin but her brother. Now and again, Gwen
the cook, and Sarah the housemaid, came panting up the hill in lilac
cotton gowns and trim white aprons, bearing beer in every jug and
mug and tin pipkin that Glan-yr-Afon affords, as Evangeline brought
the nut-brown ale to the reapers of the village of Grand Pré. And
the haymakers drink insatiably, and wipe the thirsty mouth upon the
convenient sleeve as artless Nature bids. By-and-by artless Nature
makes them rather unsteady on their legs. As they lead the heavy-laden
cart to the last remaining haycock, the one on which their mistress
sits enthroned, I am not at all sure that they do not see two haycocks,
two wide-leaved white hats, two Esthers. Perceiving their condition,
though too old an inhabitant of Wales to be in any degree surprised
at what is, after all, the normal condition of the Welsh, Miss Craven
rises precipitately. Driven from her fortress, she picks up her needles
and threads, and Jack's shirt, from which, as usual, the frequent
button is missing, and runs lightly down the mountain path in her
strong country boots, which bid defiance to the sharp stones that crop
out at every step through the limestone soil. At the hall door--a
little arched door like a church's, with a trellised porch and benches,
such as one sees Dutch boors sitting on with their beer and schnapps,
in Teniers' pictures---Sarah meets her. Sarah is an Englishwoman.

"Mr. Brandon is in the parlour, 'm."

"Parlour! My good Sarah, how many times shall I adjure you, by all you
hold most sacred, to say drawing-room?"

"He has been there best part of half-an-hour, 'm."

"Poor man! how lively for him! why on earth didn't you come and call
me?"

"He said as he wasn't in no partikler hurry, and he'd as lieve as not
wait till you come in. Stop a bit, Miss Esther, you have got some hay
on your frock behind."

"People of seventeen wear gowns, not frocks, Sarah. Oh! there, that
will do. If I had a haystack disposed about my person, he would never
be a bit the wiser."

Half-an-hour passes, and Mr. Brandon is still in the "parlour." It
is seven o'clock, and dinner-time. Would you like to know what it is
that Mr. Brandon takes so long in saying, and whether it is anything
likely to reconcile Miss Craven to the loss of her dinner? A little
room that looks towards the sun-setting; a little room full of evening
sunshine and the smell of tea-roses; a light paper, with small, bright
flower-bunches on the walls; white muslin curtains; a general air of
crisp freshness, as of a room that there are no climbing, crawling,
sticky-fingered children to crumple and rumple. A young woman, rather
red in the face, standing in one corner. She has been driven thither
apparently by a young man, who is standing before her, and who is still
redder. At a rough calculation, you would say that the young man was
seven feet high; but put him with his back against the wall, with his
heels together, and his chin in, and you will find that he is exactly
six feet four; that is, four inches taller than any man who wishes to
do work in the world, and find horses to carry him, ought to be. His
clothes are rather shabby, and he looks poor; but, from the crown of
his close-clipped head to the sole of his big feet, a gentleman, every
inch of him, though he has no "gude braid claith" to help to make him
so. His features may be Apollo's or Apollyon's, for all you can see of
them, so thickly are they planted out with a forest of yellow hair; but
tears do not seem to be at any immense distance from eyes blue as the
sky between storm clouds, fearless as a three-years' child's.

"Don't you think that we do very well as we are?" says the young woman,
suggestively.

"I don't know about you, I'm sure. I know I've lost a stone and a half
within the last year," replies the young man, very ruefully.

Esther laughs. "There is some little of you left still," she says, with
rather a mischievous glance up at the two yards and a half of enamoured
manhood before her.

This is what has been over-roasting the mutton. He has been asking
her to take his heart, his large hand, and the half of one hundred
and twenty pounds a year (the exorbitant pay of a lieutenant in Her
Majesty's infantry), of an old hunting watch, and a curly retriever
dog; and she has been declining these tempting offers, one and all.
The minute hand of the gilt clock, on which Minerva sits in a helmet
and a very tight gown, with her legs dangling down, has travelled from
6.30 to 7.5, and within these five-and-thirty minutes Miss Craven
has refused three proposals, all made by the same person: the first,
very stoutly and mercilessly, from Jack's arm-chair, where she had
originally taken up her position; the second, decisively still, but
with less cruelty, from the music-stool, to which she had next retired;
and the third, in a hasty and wavering manner, from the corner, in
which she has taken final refuge, in a strong, fortified entrenchment
behind the writing-table.

"But--but--" says Esther, her rebellious mouth giving little
twitches every now and then as at some lurking thought of the
ridiculous--"it's--it's such a very _odd_ idea! I don't think I ever
was more surprised in my life. When Sarah told me that you were here,
I thought that, of course, you had come to say something about that
bone-dust. Why, you never said anything at all tending this way before."

"Didn't I?" answers the young giant, with a crestfallen look. "I tried
several times, but I don't think that you could have understood what I
meant, for you always began to laugh."

"I always do laugh at civil speeches," answers the girl simply. "I
don't know how else to take them: I suppose it is because I have had so
few addressed to me; they always sound to me so _niais_."

"I'm not a bit surprised at your not liking me," he says, with
humility. "I don't see how any one could at first. I know that I'm ugly
and awkward, and don't understand things quick----"

"I don't _dis_-like you," interrupts Esther, with magnanimity, quite
affected by her lover's description of his own undesirability.
"Why should I? There is nothing in you to dislike; you are very
good-natured, I'm sure," damning with faint praise, in the laudable
effort not to be unqualifiedly uncomplimentary.

"I know what an unequal exchange it is that I am offering,"
says Brandon, too humble to resent, and yet with a dim sense of
mortification at the quantity and quality of praise bestowed upon him.
"I know of how much more value you are than I!"

She does not contradict him; her own heart echoes his words. "I am of
more value than he; I shall find it out practically some day."

"That was why I was in such a hurry to speak," he says eagerly. "I felt
sure that if I did not, you would be snapped up directly by some one
else."

She laughs rather grimly. "You might have laid aside your alarms on
that head, I think. I don't know who there is about here to snap me up."

Silence for a few minutes: Esther takes up a penwiper, fashioned into
a remote resemblance to a chimney sweep, and studies its anatomy
attentively. "Shall I upset the writing-table and make a rush past
him? No, the ink would spoil the carpet, and he would only come again
to-morrow, and hunt me into the other corner. Poor fellow! I hope he is
not going to cry, or go down on his knees!"

Whether mindful or not of the fate of Gibbon the historian, who, having
thrown himself on his knees before his lady-love, was unable, through
extreme fat, to get up again, Brandon does not indulge in either of the
demonstrations that Esther apprehended. He stands quiet, cramming half
a yard of yellow beard into his mouth, and says presently:

"Well, I suppose I must not worry you any more; it is not good manners,
is it? A man ought to be satisfied with one No; I have given you the
trouble of saying three."

"It's very disagreeable, I'm sure," says Esther, wrinkling up her
forehead in an embarrassed fashion, "and I hate saying No to any one: I
don't mean in this way, because nobody ever asked me before, but about
anything; but what can I do?"

"Try me!" he says very eagerly, stretching out his hand across the
narrow table (all but upsetting the standish _en route_). "I don't want
to threaten you, saying that I should go to the dogs if you threw me
over, for I should not; that always seemed to me a cowardly sort of
thing to do; and, besides, I should have my mother left to live for if
the worst came to the worst; but you must see that it is everything
in the world to a fellow to have one great hope in it to keep him
straight."

Soft music in the distance; some one whistling "I paddle my own
canoe" somewhere about the house; Esther, in an agony between the
fear of subversing the table, and the hundredfold worse fear of being
discovered by Jack in an unequivocally sentimental position, of which
she would never hear the last. "Very well, very well, I'll--I'll
_think_ about it; could you be so very kind as to loose my hand?"

He complies reluctantly, and she, that there may be no further
discussion about it, hides it discreetly away in her jacket pocket. "I
paddle my own canoe" dies away in the distance; apparently it was on
its way to dress for dinner. Esther draws a sigh of relief. "I thought
that some one was coming."

"And if they had?"

"Why, I did not relish the idea of being found driven into a corner,
like a child at a dame's school, and you, like the dame, standing
over me," answers she, abandoning the struggle with the corners of
her mouth, and bubbling over with the facile laughter of seventeen.
Utterly unable to join in her merriment, he stands leaning in awkward
misery against the wall; all other griefs are at least respectable;
love-sorrows, alone, are only ludicrous.

"It really is so silly," says Esther, presently, compassionate but
impatient. "Do try and get the better of it!"

"Easier said than done," he answers ruefully. "I might as well advise
you to get the better of your affection for Jack."

"I don't see the parallel," rejoined she, coldly, feeling as if there
was sacrilege in the comparison. "My love for Jack is a natural
instinct, built too upon the foundation of lifelong obligations,
endless benefits, countless kindnesses. What kindness have I ever shown
you? I sewed a button on your glove once, and once I pinned a rose on
your coat."

"I have the rose still."

She says "Pshaw!" pettishly, and turns away her head.

"Perhaps you are afraid of marrying on small means?" suggests Brandon,
diffidently, after a while.

The gentle clatter and click of dishes carried into the dining-room
enters faintly through the shut door. Esther's heart sinks within
her. Is he going to begin all over again?--round and round, like a
thunderstorm among hills?

"I am afraid of marrying on _any_ means," she says, comprehensively.
"I particularly dislike the idea; marriage seems to me the end of
everything, and I am at the beginning."

"But I don't want you to marry me _now_," cries Robert, stammering.

"Don't you? You told me just now that you did."

"For pity's sake, Esther, don't laugh! it may be play to you, but it is
death to me."

"I'm not laughing."

"Perhaps some day you will feel what I am feeling now."

"Perhaps" (doubtfully).

"And you will find then that it is no laughing matter."

"Perhaps" (still more doubtfully).

The clamour of a fresh cohort of plates shaking noisily upon a tray
warns Brandon that his time is short.

"Esther!" with a sort of despair in his voice, clashing the ridiculous
with the pathetic--they are always twin sisters--"I could live upon
such a little hope."

"What would you have me say?" she cries, standing with fluttering
colour, tapping feet, and irritated eyes. "I have told you the plain
truth, and it does not please you; must I dress up some pretty
falsehood, and tell you that I fell in love with you at first sight, or
that after all I find that you are the only man in the world that can
make me really happy?"

"Say nothing of the kind!" he answers, wincing under her irony. "I
have not much to recommend me, we all know that, and I start with the
disadvantage of your thinking me rather a bore than otherwise; but
other men have overcome even greater obstacles; why should not I? Give
me at least a trial!"

She is silent.

"Say that you will _try_ to like me; there need be no untruth in that."

"But if I fail!" says Esther, wavering--partly in sheer weariness of
the contest, partly in womanly pity for sufferings which owe their rise
to the excess of her own charms.

"If you fail you will not have to tell me so; I shall find it out for
myself, and--and I shall bear it, I suppose." He ends with a heavy sigh
at that too probable possibility.

"And you will console yourself by telling all your friends what a flirt
I am, and how ill I treated you." Apparently he does not think this
suggestion worthy of refutation; at least he does not refute it. "Or,
if you don't, your mother will."

"Not she" (indignantly).

"Or, if she does not, your sisters will."

"Not they" (less indignantly).

"And if--if--after a long while--a very long while--I succeed in liking
you a little--mind, I don't say that I shall; on the contrary, I think
it far more probable that I shall not--but if I do, you won't expect me
to _marry_ you?"

He smiles, despite himself. "I can hardly promise that."

"I mean not for many years, till Jack is married, and I am quite,
_quite_ old--five-and-twenty or so?"

"It shall be as you wish."

"And if, as is most likely, I continue not to care about you, and am
obliged to tell you so, you will not think the worse of me."

"No."

"You are certain?"

"Certain. Whatever you do, I shall love you to-day, and to-morrow, and
always," says the young fellow, very solemnly; and his eyes go away
past her, through the window, and up to the blue sky overhead, as if
calling on the great pale vault to be witness between him and her.

As for her, her prosaic soul has wandered back to the mutton; she takes
the opportunity of his eyes being averted to steal a glance at the
clock. Apparently, however, he has eyes in the back of his head, for he
says hastily, with rather a pained smile: "You are longing for me to
go."

"No--o."

"I ought not to have come at this time of night. I ought to have waited
till to-morrow, I know."

"It is rather late."

"But to-morrow seemed such a long time off, that I thought I must know
the worst or the best before the sun came up again. I don't quite know
which it is now; which is it, Esther?"

"It's neither the one nor the other; it's the second best," she
answers, all smiles again at seeing some prospect of her admirer's
departure, and forgetting, with youthful heedlessness, the price at
which that departure has been bought. "It is that I really am very much
obliged, though, all the same I wish you would think better of it, and
that I'll try; I will, really; don't look as if you did not believe me."

So with this half-loaf he goes, passes away through the little wooden
porch, that is so low it looks as if it were going to knock his tall
head, past the stables, and through the oak woods, home.




CHAPTER III.


    "It is the hour when from the boughs
       The nightingale's high note is heard;
     It is the hour when lovers' vows
       Seem sweet in every whispered word--"

As saith that most delicious of love poems that makes us all feel
immoral as we read it. It is the hour when chanticleer retires to his
perch in the henhouse, lowers his proud tail, sinks his neck into his
breast, and goes to sleep between his two fattest wives. It is the hour
when animal life and wild humanity retire to bed; the hour when tamed
humanity sits down to dinner. The more we advance in civilisation the
farther back we push the boundaries of sleep and forgetfulness. When
we reach our highest point of culture, I suppose we shall hustle the
blessed, the divine Nepenthe, off the face of the earth altogether.

The dining-room at Glan-yr-Afon is, like the rest of the house,
rather small and rather pleasant. It will not dine more than twelve
comfortably; it is seldom asked to dine more than two; and these two,
being young and void of gluttony, do not spend much of their time in
it. In youth the dining-room is not our temple, our sanctuary, our
holy of holies, as it often is in riper years. In youth our souls are
great, and our bodies slender; in old age our bodies are often great
and our souls slender. The one wide open window looks on the gay little
garden--the window, all around and about which the climbing convolvulus
is blowing great white trumpets. There are two or three pictures on
the walls; good ones, though dim and dusty. Thomas Wentworth, Lord
Strafford, very dark and haughty and saturnine, in blue grey armour,
scowling at whosoever looks at him, as he might have scowled at Pym
and Hollis. Erasmus, astute and lean, in a black skull cap: and Mary,
Queen of Scots, very pale and peaky and indistinct, for time has
washed and scrubbed all the carmine out of the cheeks and lips that
sent Europe mad three centuries ago. An old sheep-dog is lying on the
hearth-rug, with his wise old eyes fixed on his master, licking his
chops every now and then when he sees some morsel more tempting than
ordinary conveyed to another mouth than his.

This evening Lord Strafford is scowling, Mary Stuart simpering, down
upon two people dining together, and on a third person whisking about
in a clean cap and an aggressively well-starched print dress in
attendance upon them. There is a great pot, full and brimming over with
roses--a beanpot our forefathers would have called it--in the middle
of the table. They were plucked but half an hour ago, and their faces
were still wet with the dew-tears that they wept at being torn away
from their brothers and sisters on the old gnarled rose trees up the
kitchen-garden walk.

But the freshest, the sweetest, the largest of the roses is not in
the beanpot with the others; it is on a chair by itself; there are no
dew-tears on its cheeks, it has no prickles, and its name is Esther.

"Have some roast chips, Essie? I cannot offer you any roast mutton,
because there isn't any; I dare say there was an hour ago, but there
certainly isn't now."

This speech is made by Jack. Jack is a young person with not a single
good feature in his face; with a baby moustache, which, like the
daguerreotypes of fifteen or sixteen years ago, is only visible at rare
intervals in one particular light; and with cheeks and nose and chin
and throat all as brown as any berry that ever ripened under the mellow
autumn sun.

"It's a fault on the right side, dear boy; it's better than quivering
and being purple," says Esther, with a pout which a lover would have
thought entrancing, but which a prosaic brother, if he perceived it at
all, considered rather a distortion than otherwise.

"I wish that people would remember that there is a time to call and a
time to dine, and that the two times are not the same," he grumbles, a
little crossly.

A man may bear the untimely cutting off of his firstborn, the
disposition evinced by the wife of his bosom to love his neighbour
as himself, the sinking of his little all in the Agra Bank, with
resignation and fortitude truly Christian; but what hero, what sage,
what archbishop, can stand the over-roasting or under-boiling of his
mutton, the burning of his soup, or the wateriness of his potatoes, and
bear an _æquam mentem?_

Esther looks rather conscious, purses up her pink mouth into the shape
of a noiseless "Hush!" and says "_Pas avant_," which idiomatic phrase
is intended to convey to her brother the indiscreetness of making
comments in Sarah's presence on Mr. Brandon's enormities.

From long familiarity with the sound, Sarah has become entirely
acquainted with Esther's specimen of Parisian French, and always pricks
up her ears when it appears on the scene.

Then they are silent for a little space. One is not apt to say very
brilliant things in one's family circle; it requires the friction of
mind with mind before bright sayings spring into being, as the flint
and the steel must be married before the spark leaps into life.

"How long the days are now!" Jack says presently, as he looks out on
the evening light lying like a great bright cloak all over the land.

The earth is so very fair, all pranked with "smalle flowres" and green
leaves, that the sun is grievously loth to leave her. Fair-weather
friend as he is, he cannot be in too great a hurry to desert her, when
she lies poor and bare and faded in the dull November days.

"One always says that this time of year," Esther says, smiling. "It
would be much more worthy remark if they didn't get longer; if one kept
a journal of one's remarks for a year, what an awful tautology there
would be in them! What a pity that one cannot say a thing once for all,
and have done with it!"

"If you resolved never to say anything that anybody had said before,
you would make mighty few observations, I take it," Jack answers, a
little drily. "Most remarks have been pretty well aired in the course
of the last six thousand years, I fancy."

So, with a little flagging talk, the dinner passes, and the modest
dessert appears: scarlet pyramids of strawberries, great bag-shaped
British Queens, and little racy, queer-tasted hautbois.

Sarah retires, and the embargo is taken off Esther's speech.

"Is she gone--finally gone?" she cries, very eagerly. "Heaven be
praised for that! I thought she would never have done clattering those
spoons. Oh, Jack, what a heavy weight a piece of news is to carry! How
I sympathise with the woman who had to whisper to the rushes about
Midas' ears! I have been dying all through dinner for some rushes to
whisper to."

"To whisper _what_ to?" asks the boy, his eyes opening very wide and
round.

"Jack, do I look taller than usual to-night?"

"No."

"Broader?"

"Not that I perceive."

"More consequential?"

"Much as usual. You never are a woman with 'a presence.'"

"Is it possible that there's no difference at all in me?"

"None whatever; except that, now I look at you, your cheeks are, if
possible, redder than usual. Why should there be any?"

"Because" (drawing herself up) "I have to-day passed a turning-point in
my history. I have had--a proposal."

"Who from?--one of the haymakers?"

"No. That would not have surprised me much more, though. Let me get
it out as quick as I can, now that the string of my tongue is loosed.
Robert Brandon was here to-day."

"As I know to my cost," says Jack, with rather a rueful face at the
recollection of his unpalatable dinner.

"And--and--how shall I word it prettiest?--asked me to be his."

"The devil he did!" exclaims Jack, surprised into strong, language.

"Yes, the devil he did! as you epigrammatically remark."

"And you, what answer did you give?" asks the boy, quickly, his mouth
emulating the example of his eyes, and opening wide, too.

"I said I was much obliged, but that, for the present, I preferred
being my own."

"You said 'No,' of course?"

"Yes, I did; ever so many 'Noes.' I did not count them, but I'm sure
their name was Legion."

Jack gives a sigh of relief, and throws a biscuit to the ceaselessly
attent sheep-dog. "Poor beggar!" he says. "Here, Luath, old man.
You old muff! why did you not catch it? He is as good a fellow as
ever I came across, and now, I suppose, it will be all different and
disagreeable. Hang it! what a plague women are!"

"But, Jack----"

"Well, Essie, not done yet? Any more unlucky fellows sent off with
their tails between their legs?"

"No, no; but, Jack" (looking down, and staining her fingers with the
henna of the strawberries), "I--I'm not quite sure that, after all
those 'Noes,' I did not say something that was not quite 'No.'"

"That was 'Yes?'"

"No, not 'Yes' either; not positive, actual 'Yes;' something betwixt
and between; a sort of possible, hypothetical 'Yes.'"

"More fool you!" said Jack, briefly.

"Don't scold me, you bad boy!" she cries, running over to him and
putting her gentle arms about his neck in the caressing way which
sisters affect so much, and which brothers, in general, disrelish so
highly, "or I vow I'll cry, and you know you hate that."

"I hate your making a fool of yourself worse," growls Jack, mollified,
but struggling. "I say, you need not strangle a fellow."

"Wait till I do make a fool of myself," she says, very gaily. "I'm only
talking about it as yet, and there's a good wide ditch between saying
and doing."

"More shame for you to say what you don't mean."

"Jack, dear boy, don't you know that I hate saying things that vex a
person? I never had a faculty for telling people home-truths; I'd far
sooner tell them any amount of stories; and I got so tired of saying
'No,' and he seemed to take it so much to heart, that I said 'Yes,'
just for a change--just for peace. In fact, 'anything for a quiet life'
is my motto."

"And may I ask what you intend to live upon?" asks Jack (the romantic
side of whose mind lies at present fallow and uncultivated, and whose
thoughts, Briton-like, speedily turn from "love's young dream" to the
pound, shilling, and pence aspect of the matter).

"On love, to be sure. On--what is it?--6s. 6d. a day; and perhaps I may
take in soldiers' washing," Esther says, bursting out into a violent
fit of laughing.

"Uncommonly funny, no doubt!" Jack says, laughing too, but sorely
against his will. "And do you mean to tell me that you like Brandon all
of a sudden enough to be such an abject pauper with him for the rest
of your days? Why it was only yesterday that you were laughing at him,
saying he danced like a pair of tongs."

Esther has slidden down to the floor, and sits there tailor-fashion.

"I don't mean to tell you anything of the kind," she answers, gravely.
"Poor dear fellow!--it is very odious of me--but between you and me I
think I should survive it if I were to know that I should never see him
again; only, please don't tell him I said so."

  "Love, who to none beloved to love again remits----"

she repeats softly, musing to herself; "that is a very lovely line, but
it is horribly untrue."

"What do you mean to do then, if it is not an impertinent question?"
asks Jack, throwing back his young head, and looking in an
inquisitorial manner at the penitent at his feet from under his
eyelids. "Marry a man that you don't like, and who has not a farthing
to keep you on, merely because he is the first person that asked you?"

"Nothing is farther from my intentions," says Esther, getting rather
red. "And how unkind of you to twit me with my dearth of admirers. I
mean _you_ to interpose your parental authority and forbid the banns; I
intend to shift the odium of the transaction on to your shoulders," she
says, relapsing into levity,--"poor, dear shoulders!" (patting them
very fondly) "they are not very wide, but they are broader than mine,
at all events; to them I transfer my difficulties."

"_That_ you shan't!" cries Jack, with animation, shaking off her hand,
and looking very indignant and honest. "You are to do shabby things,
and I am to have the credit of them! Thanks, very much, but I don't
admire that division of labour. I don't think I ever heard a meaner
proposition."

Esther's little head, rich in a soft plenitude of dusky love-locks,
sinks low down towards her lap; she is very easily snubbed, especially
by Jack.

"A nice name you'll make for yourself, Miss Essie," pursues the young
Solomon, severely, still brandishing the metaphorical birch-rod over
his sister. "I expect you'll make the country too hot to hold us in a
short time."

Esther lifts up two sudden, tearful eyes, that look like great jewels
seen through running water, and says, piteously, "But, Jack, you know,
as you said just now, it was the first time; one never does things well
the first time one tries; one is always clumsy at them; I shall know
better next time."

"I don't see what 'next time' you are likely to have," says Jack,
inexorable in his young severity. "It will be rather late in the day
for people to propose to you when you are Bob Brandon's half-starved or
whole-starved wife."

"But I'm not, Jack," cries Esther, very eagerly.

She looks grave enough now; rather alarmed at the little gay sketch her
brother has drawn of her future destiny.

"I'm not going to marry him or any one else, _ever_. Do you think I'd
leave you to marry the Angel Gabriel, if he came down from heaven on
purpose to ask me?"

"Why did you tell Brandon that you would then?" asks the young fellow,
not a bit disarmed by her sweet flattery.

"I did not tell him so; I said I would try; but even if I do try, I
need not succeed; and even if I do manage to get up a sort of liking
for him, I need not _marry_ him. You are in such a hurry to jump at
conclusions; _there's_ the beauty of his being so poor, don't you see?
He cannot expect me to marry him, when he has no bread and butter to
put into my mouth."

"Then why be engaged to him at all, my good girl?" asks honest Jack,
rather bewildered by these new lights--these subtleties on the subject
of betrothal.

"Why do people give babies gin?--it is not good for them, but it keeps
them quiet; _that_ is precisely my principle. Being engaged to me may
not be good for Robert, but it is _gin_ to him; it keeps him quiet,"
answers Esther, on the battle-field of whose small face smiles and
tears are fighting.

Her brother does not seem to see the beauty of this ingenious mode of
reasoning in a very strong light.

"I won't have you playing fast and loose with him," he says, very
decisively, shaking a stern young head--stern, despite its curliness
and its total dearth of those care-lines that are supposed to be
Wisdom's harsh footprints. "He is much too good a fellow to be played
tricks with; mind that, Miss Esther!"

"I have not the slightest desire in life to play tricks with him; if
I ever do play tricks, I hope it will be with some one more amusing,"
answers Essie, very pettishly, looking excessively mutine and
ill-humoured. "I don't care if I never hear his ugly name again; he
has spoilt the dinner and made you as cross as two sticks; and--and--I
wish he was _dead, that_ I do!" concludes happy Mr. Brandon's _fiancée_
weeping.




CHAPTER IV.


Morning is come again. The sun cannot bear to be long away from
his young sweetheart, the earth, so he has come back hasting, with
royal pomp, with his crown of gay gold beams on his head, with his
flame-cloak about his strong shoulders, and with a great troop of
light, flaky clouds--each with a reflex of his red smile on its
courtier face--at his back. He has come back to see himself in the
laughing blue eyes of her seas and streams, and to rest at noontide,
like a sleepy giant, on her warm green lap.

The daily miracle--the miracle that none can contest, to which all
are witness, has been worked--the resurrection of the world. And this
resurrection is not partial, not limited to humanity, as that final one
is towards which the eyes of the Christian church have been looking
steadfastly for eighteen centuries and a half; but every beast and
bird and flower has shaken off Death's sweet semblance, his gentle
counterfeit, and is feeling, in bounding vein and rushing sap, the
ecstatic bliss of the mystery of life. If we never slept, we should not
know the joy of waking; if we never woke, we should not know the joy of
sleep. How, I marvel, shall we _feel_ the happiness of heaven, if we
never lose, and consequently regain it?

The thrushes and blackbirds are already in the midst of their glees
and madrigals and part songs. They sing the same songs every day, so
that they are quite perfect in them; and they are all very joyful ones.
In their sweet flute-language there are no words expressive of sorrow
or pain; they know of no minor key. There were twenty roses born last
night, and the flowers are all rejoicing greatly. They are smiling and
whispering and gossiping together; the sweet peas, like pink and purple
butterflies,

       ".....on tiptoe for a flight,
    With wings of delicate flush o'er virgin white,"

each half-inclined to hover away with the young west wind that is
sighing such a little gentle story all about himself into their ears.
The lambs, grown so big and woolly that one might almost mistake them
for their mothers, are leaping and racing and plunging about in the
field below the house, in the giddiness of youth, unprescient of the
butcher. Hated of Miss Craven's soul as much as ever were the blind and
lame of King David's are those too, _too_ agile sheep. Grievously prone
are they to ignore the low stone wall of partition, and work havoc and
devastation among the aster tops and cabbage shoots of her garden.

    "The king was in his counting-house,
       Counting out his money;
     The queen was in the parlour,
       Eating bread and honey."

The King of Glan-yr-Afon is not counting out his money, because he has
not any to count, poor young fellow. He is sitting on a garden-chair,
reading the _Times_, and thinking how much better he would rule the
Fatherland, how much less mean and shabby and selfish he would make
her in other nations' eyes, if he might but have the whip and reins
for six months or so. Old Luath lies at his feet, with dim eyes half
closed, snapping lazily at the flies, and catching on an average about
one every quarter of an hour. Esther is in the stack-yard, holding a
levy of ravenous fowls. She has tied a large white kitchen-apron round
her waist; with one hand she is holding it up, with the other she
is scattering light wheat among a mixed multitude. Baby Cochins, in
primrose velvet; hobbledehoy Cochins, _au naturel_, with not a stitch
of clothes on their bare, indecent backs; adult Cochins, muffled and
smothered up to the chin in a wealth of cinnamon feathers, and with
cinnamon stockings down to their heels; Rouen ducks, and scraggy-necked
turkeys. She is doing her very best to administer justice to her
commonwealth, to protect the weak, to prevent aggression and violence;
but like many another lawgiver she finds it rather up-hill work. Strive
as she may, the ducks get far the best of it. They have no sense of
shame, and can shovel up such a quantity at a time in their long yellow
bills. The turkey-cock, on the other hand, gets much the worst, by
reason of the long red pendant to his nose, that gets in his way and
hinders him. They say that Nature never makes anything for ornament
alone, divorced from use; but I confess to being ignorant as to what
function that long flabby dangler has to fulfil. The stack-yard is all
on the slant; it slopes down with its many stack-frames, to the old
rough grey barn that is stained all over--walls and roof and door--with
the stormy tears of a score of winters. There is no lack of voices all
about the farm to-day: voice of Sarah chattering in the drying ground,
where she is hanging Esther's cotton gowns and Jack's shirts on the
lines; voice of Evan Evans, the carter, talking friendly to his heavy
team in that deplorable tongue which, we trust, will soon be among the
abuses of the past; voice of Seryn (Welsh for Star), from the pasture,
lowing for her calf, which a day ago became veal, and a day hence (Oh
blessed short memory! why cannot we take lessons from a cow?) she
will have forgotten utterly. Presently comes another voice, clearer,
stronger, nearer than the others--comes sailing up through the July air.

"Es--ther!"

"Ye--es!" responds Esther at the tip-top of her voice, and consequently
not particularly harmonious. It is only the lark that can talk at the
top of his voice and yet not be shrill.

"Where are you?" (_Forte_.)

"In the stack-yard." (_Fortissimo_).

Obedient to this direction, in about two minutes the owner of the
voice, and of the excellent lungs which sent it out, makes his
appearance in loose cool clothes and a smile--Jack, in fact, looking
very ugly and pleasant and good-natured.

"Jack, dear boy, open the gate. Quick! Out of the way! Don't let him
get under the stack-frame. Shoo!" cries Esther, in great excitement,
rushing wildly about in her big apron, in pursuit of a large drake with
a grasping soul, and a wonderful rainbow neck, who, with bill wide
open and wings half extended, is waddling, flying, quacking away from
Nemesis as hard as his splay feet and his full crop will let him.

Jack obeys. "There is a person in the drawing-room wanting to speak to
you," he says, leaning his arms on the top of the gate, and looking
rather malicious.

"What sort of a person?" Esther asks abstractedly, craning her long
neck round the corner of the barn, to see whether the drake shows
symptoms of returning. "There he is again! Shoo!"

"What was the name of Esther's husband? the man that bullied his first
wife so. Oh! I know; his name, oh Queen Esther, is Ahasuerus, which,
being interpreted, is Bob."

Esther's apron drops from her fingers and the wheat rolls down in a
shower on to the broad backs of the Cochin householders. Fiercely the
war of chickens--the pushing, the fluttering, the pecking--rages about
her feet. "Already!" she says: and in her voice there is none of love's
sweet quiver, nor on her cheeks is there any sign of love's pretty flag
being hung out, neither the red nor the white one. She only looks a
little blank--a little troubled.

"Yes, already," says Jack, mercilessly; "and not only has he come
himself, but he has brought all his household gods with him. He has
come with a great company of old women at his back. I fancy they have
brought a notary or a scrivener, or what do you call it? with them, and
that there is to be a grand betrothal in form."

"Nonsense!" says Esther, and she comes all over to the gate, and clasps
two little petitioning hands on his shoulder. "You will come with me,
won't you, Jack?"

"Not I!" says Jack, stoutly. "I would not trust myself with those old
maids, in their present excited state, if you were to give me my next
half-year's rent: they would be employing the notary in my case too
before I knew where I was."

"Jack, is my hair pretty tidy?" stroking it down with the improvised
brush and comb of her slim fingers.

"Extremely so: it looks as if the chickens had got into it, and been
scratching there by mistake."

Meanwhile Master Brandon and his old women, to wit, his mother, Mrs.
Brandon, and his sisters, the two Misses Brandon, are posed about the
drawing-room, waiting. Waiting is always a painful process, from the
modified form of suffering involved in the ten minutes before dinner,
when every man's tongue is tied, and his wits congealed by the frost
of expectant hunger; upward to the Gehenna of a dentist's antechamber.
Robert is all on wires this morning: he cannot sit still; he keeps
shuffling and twisting his long, awkward legs about, beating the
devil's tattoo on the floor with his nailed boots, and hammering an
ugly little tune with a paper knife on an old Book of Beauty on the
table. "How you fidget, Bob!" cries his sister Bessy.

Miss Elizabeth Brandon is ten years older and about ten feet shorter
than her brother; she is in process of souring, like cowslip wine that
has been kept too long, or small beer in thunder. She is not so very
sour, after all, poor little virgin! only ten years ago she was, and
ten years hence she will be mellower than she is now.

"All right!" says Bob, "I won't;" and he stops, only to commence, two
seconds later, a new noise, seven times worse than the first; a very
disagreeable sort of scraping with the hind legs of his chair. Is not
it one of Miss Yonge's goody heroes, who, when he feels disposed to be
impatient, sits down and strums away at the "Harmonious Blacksmith?"
Bob could not get through a bar of that soothing melody this morning.
Mrs. Brandon is just beginning to say, "Do you think the servant could
have told her?" when the door opens, and a little vision comes in with
delicate hair ruffling about her sweet, shining eyes; a little vision
that ought to be walking on rosy clouds, Bob thinks, with cherubim and
seraphim holding up her train, instead of on shabby oil-cloth and faded
carpet, dragging her train behind her.

"I--I'm very sorry; I'm afraid I have kept you waiting: I did not" (did
not expect you so early is on the tip of her tongue, but she remembers
just in time that it would be about the impolitest remark she could
make. Never, until the millennium, will the marriage of Truth and
Civility be solemnized)--"did not know you were here till Jack came and
told me a moment ago," she substitutes so adroitly that none of her
auditors perceive the rivet that joins the two halves of her sentence
together.

"I don't know what your brother will say to us for taking his house by
storm, but you must blame _him_, my dear, you must blame _him!_" says
Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head towards Bob, and looking as if there
was something peculiarly humorous in the idea of Esther being in a
condition to blame him for anything he could do or leave undone.

Mrs. Brandon is an old woman, with a smooth, holy face, and a
villainous black poke bonnet: she kisses Esther, and the Misses Brandon
likewise come forward and inflict a prim sisterly salute with their
thin old-maid lips, on the velvet rose-leaf of her cheek. They had
never kissed her before, and she felt as if the manacles were being
fastened round her wrists, and the gyves about her ankles. She longs to
cry out and say, "What are you all about? you are quite mistaken, every
one of you; Mrs. Brandon, I am not your daughter; Miss Bessy, I am not
your sister; I don't want to be: take back those kisses of yours, if
you please, if they mean that!" Had she been alone with Robert, she
would probably have said this; have said it without much difficulty,
but now the words seemed infinitely, impossibly hard to frame. There is
upon her the shyness of a young woman with an old one; the shyness of
one against three. She feels, too, that it seems ungracious, churlish,
when they are so glad to take her in to themselves, to adopt her as
their own, not to be very glad too. When a person says to one, if
not in words, yet with looks and gestures, "Our people shall be thy
people, and our God thy God," it is not easy for a plastic, gracious
nature to say "No, they shall not!" however little they may relish the
arrangement. So, in her muteness, Esther accepts the Brandon God and
people as hers.

Wordless and demure, she sits down on a little low seat as far removed
as may be from Robert. Esther will, no doubt, be an ugly old woman;
she makes rather an ugly photograph; but who can deny that she is a
delicious bit of colour as she sits there right in the eye of the
morning sun, and not at all afraid of his strict scrutiny? So many
women, now-a-days, are neutral-tinted, drabbish, greyish, as if the
colours that God painted with were not fast, but faded, like Reynolds'.
Esther's colouring is as distinct, as decided, as clean and clear as
that on a flower's petal or a butterfly's wing. Nobody speaks, except
the clock with the short-waisted Minerva on it, and it does not say
anything particularly original. Then the old woman bends towards the
young one, and says in a kind, low voice, "You see Robert has told us
his news, my dear." There is flowing in through the French window a
broad river of yellow light from the great fountain in the sky; it is
deluging Mrs. Brandon's bonnet and Esther's hair. The bonnet is black,
and the hair is black; but there are blacks and blacks. The May grass
is green, and a beer bottle is green; but the resemblance between the
two is not striking. Esther has not the remotest idea what answer to
make; so she chooses one of the shortest words she knows of, and says
"Yes!" half-assentingly, half-interrogatively.

"And we could not rest till we came and told you what good news we
thought it," pursues the old lady, encouragingly.

Esther says nothing. Her eyelids feel glued down to her cheeks; she is
conscious, with inward rage and vexation, of looking blushing, bashful,
everything that a young betrothed should look.

"I'm an old woman," concludes Mrs. Brandon, rather moved by her own
eloquence, "and I cannot expect a great many more years of life. You
know what the Psalmist sweetly says, love; but I trust I may be spared
to see God bless both my children, and make them His happy servants for
this world and the next."

As she speaks she lays one hand on Esther's head. Bob is happily too
far off, or she would lay the other on his, while the two little
virgin clerks from the sofa cry "Amen!" in a breath. Esther is
half-frightened. What with the serious words, with the three women's
solemn faces, she half feels as if she were being married on the spot;
her thoughts fly to Jack and the notary; after that "Amen!" she is not
quite sure that her name is not Esther Brandon. She shrinks away a
little, but not at all rudely.

"You are very kind," she says, in her gentle voice, "and it was so good
of you coming all through the wood--such a long walk for you, too; but
I think--I'm afraid that there is some mistake about--this--about me;
there is nothing settled--nothing at all, I assure you. I told your son
so yesterday quite plainly, only I'm afraid he did not understand me,"
she concludes, looking rather reproachfully over at him.

"I did understand you," protests poor Bob, eagerly, jumping up,
upsetting his chair, and never thinking of picking it up again, "I did,
indeed. I told mother your very words, only she would have it that they
meant--what we all wished they should mean," he ends, looking very
downcast and snubbed and disconsolate.

There is another pause, then Mrs. Brandon rises and puts out her hand
to Esther--in farewell this time.

"I'm afraid I've been in too great a hurry, my dear," she says, trying
not to speak stiffly, and not succeeding quite so well as she deserved.
"But you'll forgive me, I'm sure; you see, mothers are apt to be
partial people, and I could not imagine any one trying to love my boy,
and not succeeding."

But Miss Craven can never let well alone. She would marry Old Nick
himself sooner than that his mother or sister should look askance at
her, or seem hurt and grieved with her for expressing any want of
relish for him, hoofs and tail and horns and all.

"Oh no, you must not go!" she cries, in her quick, eager way, putting
up two anxious hands in deprecation; "you must not be vexed with me;
I did not mean to be disagreeable. I shall like very much to belong
to you, I'm sure. I was only afraid of your expecting more from me
than I had to give _yet_," she ends, with head drooped a little, and
cheeks reddened like a peach's that the sun has been kissing all the
afternoon.

The stiffness goes away: nobody can be stiff for long with Esther
Craven, any more than a snow-ball can remain a snow-ball under the
fire's warm gaze.

"We don't want you to belong to us if you don't wish it yourself," the
old woman says, very gravely, yet not ill-naturedly.

"I hardly know what I wish," answers the girl, naïvely, in a sort of
bewilderment.

Then they go, and Robert walks off with his old mother on his arm.
He would walk down Pall Mall with her in that identical poke bonnet,
and the two little dowdy vestals pottering behind in the most perfect
unconsciousness and simplicity, even if he were to know that his
brother officers, to a man, were looking out at him from the "Rag"
windows.

"Oh, my cheeks! my cheeks! will they ever get cool again!" cries
Esther, flinging herself down on the oak bench in the porch, and laying
her face against the cold ivy leaves.

"You look rather as if you had been poking your countenance between
the bars of the kitchen grate," responds Jack, with all a brother's
candour. Jack has been dodging behind the laurel bushes, after the
fashion in which the English gentleman is fond of receiving his friends
when they come to call on him.

"Why did not you come to my rescue, you unnatural brother? What chance
had I, single-handed, against those three Gorgons? Pah! it makes my
head ache to think of mamma's coiffure."

"When a person gets into a scrape themselves, I make it a rule to let
them get out of it themselves, as it makes them more careful for the
future," replies Jack, with philosophy.

"But I'm not getting out of it; I'm floundering deeper and deeper and
deeper in, like a man in an Irish bog," says Esther, ruefully. "Oh,
Jack!" she concludes, laughing, yet vexed (laughter is as often the
exponent of annoyance as of enjoyment, I think), "if you could have
heard the stories I was forced to tell, I'm sure I deserve to be wound
up, carried out, and buried, as much as ever Ananias did."




CHAPTER V.


This world is divided into poor and rich; into those who do things
for themselves, and those who get other people to do them for them.
The Cravens belong to the former class. On the afternoon of the day
mentioned in my last chapter, Miss Craven is doing for herself what she
had much rather that some one else should do for her. She is sitting at
her sewing-machine, with a pile of huckaback cut up into towel-lengths
beside her. As long as civilization remains at its present ridiculous
pitch of elevation, people must have towels, and there is a prejudice
in favour of hemmed versus ravelled edges. In the kitchen garden
the maid-servants are all busy, picking currants and raspberries
for preserving. Owen, the gardening man, is helping them; they are
combining business with pleasure; fruit-picking with persiflage. How
loudly and shrilly they laugh! and yet loud, shrill laughter expresses
mirth and cause for mirth, as well as low and silvery. Esther, grave
and alone, catches herself wondering what the joke was that caused such
general merriment two minutes ago. Probably, did she know it, she would
not laugh at it, would see no point in it, perhaps, but she would be
glad to hear it. The huckaback is thick and heavy; bending down one's
head over one's work sends all the blood in one's body into it. Phew!
How hot! How much pleasanter to be out of doors, tweaking off dead rose
heads, watching the great red poppies straightening out their folded
creases, pulling the green nightcaps off the escholtzia buds! A shadow
darkens the French window, causing Miss Craven to give one of those
starts that make one feel as if one literally jumped out of one's skin,
and fill one with ungodly wrath against the occasion of them.

"I rang several times," says Robert Brandon, apologetically, "but
nobody came."

"Oh! it's you, is it?" she says, with a tone not exactly of rapture
in her voice; "our servants always manage to be out of the way on the
rare occasions when any one calls. They are all in the garden, picking
currants; one would have been plenty, but they prefer working, like
convicts or navvies, in gangs."

"I came to see whether you were inclined to take a walk?" he says,
hesitatingly, for her manner is not encouraging.

"Too hot!" she answers, lazily, leaning her head on the back of her
chair, and closing her eyes, as if his presence disposed her to sleep.

"Not in the wood?" he rejoins, eagerly. "Under our oaks it is as cool
and almost as dark as night, and there is always a breeze from the
brook."

"I am busy!" she says, pettishly, annoyed at his persistence, and
taking in with a dissatisfied eye his _tout ensemble_--yellow beard,
frayed coat-sleeves, vigorous rustic comeliness.

He does not pursue the subject further, but stands leaning wistfully
and uncertain against the window.

"Jack is not at home, I'm afraid," she says, stiffly, by-and-by.

"I did not come to see Jack," he answers, bluntly. She does not invite
him to come in, but he, crossing the threshold diffidently, takes a
seat near, but not aggressively near, her. "Don't let me interrupt
you!" he says, deprecatingly.

She takes him at his word, and continues her homely occupation. Up and
down, up and down her foot goes, keeping the wheel in motion; prick,
prick, prick, the needle travels with its quick, regular stabs. If, as
I have said, the process of bending over work on a July afternoon is
heating, the consciousness that another person is watching every quiver
of your eyelids, counting every breath you draw, and every displaced
hair that straggles about brow or cheek, does not conduce to make it
less so. The magnetic influence that sooner or later compels the eyes
of the looked at to seek those of the looker, obliges Esther, after
awhile, to raise hers--reluctant and protesting--to Robert's.

"I wish my mother could see you!" he says, with a smile of placid
happiness. Mr. Brandon carries his mother metaphorically upon his back,
almost as much as pious Æneas did the old Anchises literally. Esther
suspends her employment for a moment.

"I beg your pardon; this machine makes such a noise that I did not
catch what you said."

"I was only wishing that mother could see you now."

"It is a pleasure she enjoys pretty frequently. Why _now_ particularly?"

"She would see how thrifty and housewifely you can be."

"I am glad she does not, then," answers the girl, drily, beginning to
work again faster than ever, and flushing with annoyance; "she would
form a most erroneous estimate of me. I dislike particularly to be
found by people in one of my rare paroxysms of virtue; they take it for
my normal state, and judge and expect of me accordingly."

"I shall tell her that, at all events, my judgment of you was nearer
the truth than hers," says Robert, triumphantly.

Esther laughs awkwardly.

"I don't know whether you are aware of it, but you are conveying
to my mind the idea that your mother has been pronouncing a very
unfavourable verdict upon me and my character."

"She thinks you are too pretty and lively, and--and--" (frivolous had
been the word employed by Mrs. Brandon, but Robert cannot find it in
his heart to apply it to his idol)--"too fond of society to care about
being useful in tame, humdrum, everyday ways."

Esther gives her head a little impatient shake.

"Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed by
some one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be good
than pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible with
the other."

So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into his
vigilant dumb observation of her. At the end of a quarter of an hour,
as he still shows no signs of moving, finding the present position of
affairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heap
of huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forced
resignation:

"I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same a
hundred years hence."

"I am perfectly happy as I am," he answers with provoking good humour,
looking up in blissful unconsciousness at her charming cross face, and
the plain yet dainty fit of her trim cheap gown.

"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day;
please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of;
I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."

She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her
appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing
glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or
crooked.

The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain
woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another.
Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a
mist-blue cloak of hyacinths--what could be prettier?--but now it has
laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked
here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple
orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest,
fancifullest of all our singers?

    "And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
     That led through this garden along and across,--
     Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
     Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,--

    "Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
     As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
     And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,
     Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,
     To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."

They describe Glan-yr-Afon wood much better than I can. It is a great
green cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and where
the rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.

"Had we not better walk arm in arm?" asks Esther, sardonically, as
they march along in silence. "I believe it is the correct thing on
these occasions; at least Gwen and her sweetheart always do on Sunday
evenings."

He turns towards her; an expression of surprised delight upspringing
into his eyes.

"Do you mean _really?_"

She is mollified, despite herself, by the simple joy beaming in his
poor, good-looking face--face that would be more than good-looking if
only some great grief would give it fuller expression; if only a few
months of late hours and mundane dissipations would wear off its look
of exuberant bucolic healthiness.

"No, no; I was only joking."

"Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seat
that stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliaged
than its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeam
pierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up so
pleasantly from below."

Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is too
secluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin and
Dowsabel might sit fluting and weaving

    ".... belts of straw and ivy buds,"

and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.

"I don't fancy it," she says, beginning to walk on; "it looks
_earwiggy_."

"Only the other day you said it was quite a lovers' seat!" he exclaims,
in surprise.

"Exactly; and for that very reason I prefer waiting till I am more
qualified to sit upon it."

By-and-by Miss Craven finds a position that suits her better; one
nearer the edge of the wood, in full view of the Naullan road, along
which market women, coal carts, stray limping tramps, go passing, and
where loverly blandishments are out of the question.

The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rock
fragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at the
birch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mosses
and little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it is
such a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the boulders
that lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with a
coaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrels
brought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shells
are lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them again
in idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through the
birch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther's
gown and Robert's recumbent figure, as he lies in the repose of warmth,
absolute idleness, absolute content at her feet. An hour and a half,
two hours to be spent in trying to like Robert! Faugh! She yawns.

"That is the seventh time you have yawned since we have been here,"
remarks her lover, a little reproachfully.

"I dare say; and if you wait five minutes longer, you will probably be
able to tell me that it is the seventy-seventh time."

"You did not yawn while we were indoors."

"I had my work; what is a woman without her work? A dismounted
dragoon--a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily,
to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted as
tedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me the
other day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It is
putting one's felicity on rather a low level, but I believe it is true."

"In the same way as no man can be good-tempered who is not fond of
smoking," says Bob, starting a rival masculine proposition.

"I don't know anything at all about men," replies Esther, exhaustively.
"No woman in the world can have a more limited acquaintance with the
masculine gender than I have."

"You are young yet," says Brandon, consolingly.

"I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, her
thoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is

    "Wooed and married and a'"

before her sixteenth birthday.

"You are eight years younger than I am."

"Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly
uninteresting to her.

"Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us."

"Why?"

"Because you are the more likely to outlive me."

She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I
shall _certainly_ outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly
outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer
lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a
tortoise, to a hundred."

"But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly.

She shrugs her shoulders. "_Cela dépend_. I shall live here as long as
Jack remains unmarried."

"That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "A
farmer requires a wife more than most men."

"More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile.

He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makes
ineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has he
never yet shown even a _preference_ for any one?" he asks, feeling a
more personal interest than he had ever before experienced in Jack's
amours and amourettes.

"Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one,
nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal too
poor to be in any demand."

"I am glad of it."

"You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one ever
showed the slightest inclination to be your rival."

"So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody else
wants you."

"Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, I
suppose?"

A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides by
along the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orange
handkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm.

Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate,
fortunate old woman! she has no lover!

"I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly,
flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at her
companion.

"Why should not I? I _am_ happy."

"But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries,
emphatically.

"I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seem
pretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining."

"You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," she
says drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now."

At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in this
speech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks down
with a snubbed expression.

"I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says, humbly,
"because I have always been such a lucky fellow; my profession suits me
down to the ground; I have never had an ache or a pain in all my life,
and I have the best woman in England for my mother."

A body free from disease, a commission in a marching regiment, a
methodistical, _exigeante_ old mother. These would seem but a poor
_chétif_ list of subjects of thankfulness to Fortune's curled and
perfumed darlings.

"Your acquaintance amongst old ladies must be extensive to justify you
in that last statement," says Esther, with a smile.

"The best woman I know, then."

"It is a pity that when you went, like Coelebs, in search of a wife,
you did not try to find some one more like her," rejoins Esther, piqued
and surprised, despite her utter indifference to his opinion of her, at
finding that, notwithstanding the imbecile pitch of love for herself
at which she believes him to have arrived, he can still set a dowdy,
havering, brown old woman on a pedestal, above even that which she,
with all the radiant red and white beauty of which she is so calmly
aware, all the triumph of her seventeen sweet summers, occupies in his
heart.

"You are young and she is old," says Robert, encouragingly; "I don't
see why you should not be like her when you are her age."

"I think not; I hope not," says Miss Craven, coolly, strangling her
twenty-fifth yawn. "Without meaning any insult to Mrs. Brandon, I
should be sorry to think that, at any period of my life, I should be a
mere reproduction of some one else."

Another long pause. (Have we been here an hour yet?) The brown bees go
humming, droning, lumbering about, velvet-coated: a high-shouldered
grasshopper chirps shrilly: the dim air vibrates.

"Just listen to that cricket!" says Esther, presently, for the sake
of saying something. "How noisy he is! I read in a book the other day
that if a man's voice were as strong in proportion to his size as a
locust's, he could be heard from here to St. Petersburg."

"Could he?" says Bob, absently, not much interested in his betrothed's
curious little piece of entomological information; "how unpleasant!"
Then dragging himself along the grass and the flowers still closer to
her feet, he says, "Esther, mother hopes to see a great deal more of
you now than she has done hitherto."

"Does she? she is very good, I am sure," answers Esther, formally, with
a feeling of compunction at her utter inability to echo the wish.

"She bid me tell you that she hopes you will come in as often as you
can of an evening. We are all sure to be at home then; the girls read
aloud by turns, and mother thought that----"

"That it might improve my mind, and that it needs improving,"
interrupts Esther, smiling drily; "so it does. I quite agree with her;
but not even for that object could I leave Jack of an evening; he is
out all day long, and the evening is the only time when I have him to
myself."

"You find plenty to say to _him_ always, I suppose?" says Robert, with
an involuntary sigh and slight stress upon the word _him_.

"Not a word, sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other in
sociable silence."

"_How_ fond you are of that fellow!" says Robert, sighing again, and
thinking, ruefully, what a long time it would be before any one would
say to her, "_How_ fond you are of Bob Brandon!"

"He is the one thing upon earth that I could not do without!" she
answers shortly, turning away her head.

There are some people that we love so intensely that we can hardly
speak even of our own love for them without tears.

"I should be afraid to say that of any one," says Bob, bluntly, "for
fear of being shown that I _must_ do without them."

"What have I in all the world but him?" she cries, a passionate
earnestness chasing the slow languor from her voice, all her soft face
afire with eager tenderness; "neither kith nor kin; neither friends
nor money. I am as destitute, in fact, though not in seeming, as that
girl that passed just now, shuffling her bare feet along in the dust,
and with three boxes of matches--her whole stock-in-trade--in her dirty
hand. But for Jack," she continues, in a lighter strain, "you might at
the present moment be carrying half a pound of tea or four penn'orth of
snuff as a present to me in the Naullan almshouses."

Robert looks attentive, and says "Hem," which is a sort of "Selah" or
"Higgaion," and does not express much beyond inarticulate interest.

"I often think that he is too good for this world," says the young
girl, mournfully, picking an orchis leaf, and looking down absently on
the capricious black splashes that freak its green surface.

Bob is a little embarrassed between his love of truth and his desire to
coincide in opinion with his beloved.

Jack is not in the least like the little morbid boys and girls in his
sister Bessy's books, who retire into corners in play-hours to read
about hell-fire, to whom marbles and toffee and bull's-eyes are as
dung, and who are inextricably entangled in his mind with the idea of
"too good for this world." He evades the discussion of the alarming
nature of young Craven's goodness by a judicious silence.

"I am such an expense to him," continues Esther, lugubriously, the
corners of her mouth drooping like a child's about to cry--"what with
clothes, and food, and altogether. Even though one does not eat very
much every day, it comes to a great deal at the end of the year, does
it not?"

"If you come to me, you would be no expense at all to him," Robert
answers, stroking his great, broad, yellow beard (beard that will have
to disappear before he rejoins his gallant corps in Bermuda), and
looking very sentimental; yet not that either, for sentimental implies
the existence of a little feeling, and the affectation of a great deal
more.

"He would have to provide me with a trousseau and a wedding-cake, even
in that case."

"I would excuse him both."

"Would you?" she says, jestingly; "I wouldn't; it has always seemed to
me that the best part of holy matrimony is the avalanche of new clothes
that attends being wed."

"You shall have any amount of new clothes."

"I should be an expense to you, then," she says, giving him a smile
that is grateful and bright and cold, all in one, like a January
morning. Cold as her smile is, it is a smile, and he is encouraged
by it to refer to a subject nearer his heart than Jack Craven's
excellences.

"If you cannot spare time to come to us of an evening, would you let
me--might I--would you mind my joining you and Jack--now and then--for
half an hour or so--if I should not be in the way?"

Her countenance falls, more visibly than she is herself perhaps aware
of.

"Of course," she answers, in a constrained voice, "if you wish; we
shall always be glad to see you, of course."

"I would not come often," says the poor young man wistfully; "once a
week perhaps--so that we might get to know one another better; mother
says----"

"Don't tell me any more of your mother's speeches to-day, or we shall
have none left for to-morrow," interrupts Esther, with a sort of
ironical playfulness, flapping about with her pocket-handkerchief at a
squadron of young midges, and looking mild exasperation at the unlucky
six-foot slave at her feet. Then she stretches out her hand, plucks a
dandelion, or what was a dandelion a week ago, but is now a sphere of
delicatest, fragilest, downspikes, and blows it like a child to see
what o'clock it is. "One, two, three, four, five, six. Time to go
home!" she says, flinging away the hollow stalk and springing up.

"It seems only five minutes since we came," says Robert, with a great
sigh of good-bye, looking down at the long stretch of bruised grass
that indicates his late resting-place.

"Do you think so?" exclaims Esther, opening her eyes very wide, and the
most violent negative could not have expressed dissent more clearly.

So they pass home through the loudly vocal wood, and he parts from
her under the porch. He had meant to squeeze her hand at parting;
perhaps still bolder forms of adieu flitted before his mind's eye, but
a certain expression in her face makes all such plans take to their
heels. He looks as if he would come in if he were asked; but he is
not asked, therefore, courage failing him, he departs. She stands in
the shadow watching him, and thinks, "What bad boots! and is not one
shoulder rather higher than the other?" It is not the least bit higher;
no young fir is straighter than he; but when a thing belongs, or may
possibly belong, to oneself, one waxes marvellous critical.




CHAPTER VI.


"Something new! something new!" cried the Athenians; and across two
thousand years we catch up and echo their greedy cry. But why do we?
We all know well enough that there is nothing new; there was not even
in King Solomon's time--not even in all his treasure-house, nor among
his seven hundred wives. What an advantage those ancients who saw the
world's infancy had over us--over us, who have to content ourselves
with the lees of the wine, which the few dropped ears scattered about
the great reaped harvest field! Who would not fain have lived in the
days when nothing had yet been said--when everything, consequently,
remained to be said? Who could be trite then, in that blest epoch when
platitudes were unborn, when _Tupper_ was an impossibility, and even
the statement that two and two make four had something startlingly
novel about it? _Then_ a man's thoughts were his own, his _very_ own,
his own by the best of all rights--creation; _now_ they are the bastard
product of ten thousand buried men's dead ideas.

Original is a pleasant word, is it not?--fair and well-sounding; but it
is like the sample figs at the top of the box: it represents nothing,
or something infinitely smaller than itself behind and underneath it.
Is it too much to say that it is impossible to find an original idea in
any writer we wot of? You meet, perhaps, some day in a book a thought,
an image that strikes you. You say, "This is this thinker's own; there
is the stamp of this one individual mind upon it;" when lo! mayhap but
a few hours later you are reading the thoughts of some elder scribe,
one that has been dust nigh ten or twenty centuries back, and you find
the same thought, half fledged or quarter fledged, only in the egg,
perhaps--but still it is there. There is nothing new under the sun.

And if this is true of other subjects, how much truer of that most
outworn, threadbare old theme, Love! The world has been spinning
round six thousand years at the lowest, most exploded computation;
in any thousand years there have been thirty or forty generations,
and each unit in every one of those generations, if he has lived to
man's estate, has surely loved after one fashion or another. Whosoever
has done any worthy thing, whosoever has sent out his thoughts in
writing or speech or action to the world, has felt the stirrings of
this strange instinct; unconsciously it has moulded and permeated his
deeds and his words: and yet, old as it is, we are not tired of it,
any more than we are of the back-coming green of the spring, or the
never-extinguished lamps of the stars.

"The harvest is past, the summer is ended;" at least well nigh ended.
Jack and Esther are at breakfast: outside the scarlet geraniums are
blazing away in the morning sun, trying their best to shine as brightly
as he is doing, and the gnats are dancing round and round on the
buoyant floor of their ball-room--the air. I wonder that that incessant
valsing does not make them giddy. I am not sure that human beings, like
the lions and tigers and uneasy black bears in the Zoological, look
their best at feeding-time; but such as they are, here they are.

Esther in a chintz gown, sown all over with little red carnations as
thickly as the firmament with heavenly bodies. She looks as fresh as
a daisy--as an Englishwoman, to whom morning _déshabille_, wrapper,
slippers, undressed hair, are unknown Gallic abominations--and is
eating porridge with a spoon. Jack reading his letters, which look all
bills and circulars, after the fashion of men's correspondence; for
what man made after the fashion of a man, would sit down to indite an
epistle to another man, were it his _alter ego_ unless he had something
to say about a horse or a dog or a gun? Presently he finishes this
cursory survey, crumples up the last blue envelope in his hand, flings
it with manly untidiness into the summer-dressed grate, and says,
resuming a conversation which had been interrupted a quarter of an hour
ago by the entrance of prayers and the urn, "I cannot imagine what you
have done to the fellow! he used not to be half a bad fellow to talk
to. Never a genius, you know, but still I used to like to have him to
walk over the farm with me--not that he knows a swede from a mangold:
don't see much sign of his old mother's farming mantle falling upon
him. But now he has not a word to throw to a dog; he is as stupid as a
stuck pig."

"I have not cut out his tongue or tied it up in a bag, if that is what
you are hinting at," says Esther, with a smile as confused as a dog's,
when, not quite sure of his reception, he sneaks up to you sideways,
lifting his upper lip, and from tail to muzzle one nervous wriggle.
"Perhaps he is like the birds, and gets silent towards the end of the
summer."

"Why you keep him dangling after you, like the tail of a kite, I
cannot conceive," Mr. Craven cries, crumbling his bread with a little
irritation. "It must be such a nuisance having a great long thing like
him knocking about under your feet morning, noon, and night."

Esther is silent; only her head droops lower, lower, till her little
nose almost immerses itself in her stirabout.

"Whereas," pursues Jack, helping himself to a great deal of cold
beef, "if you were to give him his _congé_ now (Jack is by no means
neglectful of the _g_ in the French word), he would be all right again
in a fortnight, ready for the shooting."

"He would, would he?" says Esther, lifting up her nose and reddening
with vexation.

No woman likes to think of her empire as anything short of eternal.

"If you don't like to do it yourself, I'll do it for you," pursues her
brother, making a magnanimously handsome offer. "I would say to him,
'My dear fellow, it is no good, she does not seem to care about you,'
as soon as look at him."

"What a delicate way of breaking the news!" cries Esther, ironically.
"Commend me to a man for gentle _finesse_."

"I don't believe in _breaking_ news," replies Jack, sturdily. "If
you were to go off in a fit, or the bay colt was to break his leg, or
anything to go wrong, I'd far sooner people would tell me so without
any humming and hawing and keeping me on the tenter hooks. Breaking
news is like half cutting your throat before you are hanged, making you
die two deaths instead of one."

"But suppose I do seem to care a little about him?" suggests Esther,
blushing furiously, but holding up her head bravely, and looking
straight at her brother.

"Suppose the cow jumped over the moon," replies Jack with incredulity.

"I don't know whether the cow has accomplished her feat, but I have
accomplished mine," says Esther, trying to make her face as brass, and
failing signally.

Jack puts up his hand, and strokes the future birthplace of his
moustache, to hide an unavoidable smile.

"I don't wish to be rude," he says; "but may I ask, since when? Was it
a week ago, or less, that you requested me to accompany you on one of
your joint excursions to that everlasting wood, and told me you thought
your watch wanted cleaning, the time seemed to go so slow?"

"A week!" cries his sister, indignantly. "Three weeks, or a month, at
least."

"Wrong, Essie, wrong; it was this day fortnight, Ryvel Horse Fair,
which was the reason why I had to decline your invitation."

"What does a week one way or another signify?" she cries, becoming
irrational, as a worsted woman mostly does.

"Nothing to a woman or a--weathercock."

This last insult is too much for Miss Craven.

"I see you are determined to turn me into ridicule; I see you don't
believe me!" she cries, preparing to rush from the room like a tornado.

"My good Essie," says Jack, jumping up, taking her two hands, and
manfully repressing his inclination to laugh--"here I am; tell me
_anything_, and I'll swear by the tomb of my grandmother to believe it."

"Why should not I like him? What is there in him so hateful as to make
my being fond of him incredible?" asks Essie, unreasonable and sobbing.

"Nothing that I know of--except his _boots_, and you told me _they_
were--"

"So they are," she says, smiling through her tears--"more than hateful;
they haunt one like a bad dream."

"He is not the least penitent about them, I can tell you: only
yesterday he showed them me with ungodly glee, told me he had got them
at Hugh Hughes's, at Naullan, and advised me to go and do likewise."

"But--but--his boots are not he; he is not his boots, I mean," remarks
Miss Craven, with meek suggestion; "mercifully, they are separable."

"He was not born in them, you mean? I did not suppose he was; he would
have been worse than Richard the Third, who made his appearance with
all his teeth in his head--didn't he?--if he had."

"It is quite true--perfectly true," continues Esther, leaning her
two hands on the back of a chair, and tilting it up and down, "what
you say about his being so stupid; he _is_ extremely stupid: often
I feel inclined to box his ears, for the thing he says, and for not
understanding things, and having to have them explained to him; but
after all, do you know, I am not sure that it is the people who say
clever things, and snap one up all in a minute, that are the best to
live with."

"You contemplate living with him then, eh? Last time I was favoured
with your plans, you were to be a vestal to the end of the chapter."

"A provision for old age: I cannot expect you to be satisfied with
me always," she answers, with rather a sad smile. "And when I am
superseded, a good worthy simpleton, with obsolete chivalrous ideas
of _Woman_ in the abstract--_Woman_ with a big _W_--who will laugh at
my worst jokes whether he sees them or not, and make none himself, is
better than nothing."

"All right," says Jack, calmly, walking towards the door, and unfolding
the _Times_ with a crackling that nearly drowns his voice: "please
yourself and you'll please me: only be so good as to tell me when the
wedding day is fixed, as I must get a new coat. I suppose that the one
I had for Uncle John's funeral will not do, will it?"

Who is it says in the "Tempest," if neither Ferdinand nor any
other beautiful young Prince had come on the scene, yet if Miranda
had remained alone with her father, and the storms and winds and
water-spirits, she would have ended by loving Caliban? I do not know
about Miranda, but I am sure that if Esther had been in Miranda's place
she would have so ended; would have carried faggots in her slender arms
for the shaggy monster--have called him caressing diminutives, and
asked him little interested questions about his dam Sycorax.

The desire to be loved is strong enough in us all; in this girl
it amounted to madness: it is the key to all the foolish, wicked,
senseless things you will find her doing through this history's short
course. If she could have had her will, every man, woman, and child,
every cow and calf and dog and cat that met her, would have watched her
coming with joy and her going with grief. Add to which, in the summer
time most women like to have a lover; it is almost as necessary to them
as warm clothes at Christmas. In winter the fire is lover enough for
any one. The frosty splendour of the stars and the chill flashing of
the northern lights provoke no yearning in any one human soul towards
any other; we peep at them through our icy casements, then drop the
curtain shivering, and leave them alone to their high cold play in the
sky. But who can look at a July moon alone?

You will say that Esther was not alone, that she had her brother
to look at it with her; but who will deny that a brother who makes
agricultural remarks about the Queen of Night, and observes that
the haze round her royal head looks well for the turnips, is worse,
immeasurably worse than nobody? To me it seems that there is nothing
absolute, positive in all this shifting, kaleidoscope world; everything
is comparative. There is nothing either good, bad, pretty, ugly, large,
small, except as compared with something better, worse, prettier,
uglier, larger, smaller. Measure two men together, and you find one
tall and the other short; put the short one by himself or among a world
of pigmies, and straightway he grows tall. Lacking a standard to go by,
we make egregious errors. I have known many a woman to pass through
life with a pigmy beside her, taking him for a giant all the while, nor
undeceived to the end. Esther has no man to measure her Robert by; none
at all, save the cowman, the carter, and the groom. Intellectually,
morally, physically, he outtops them in stature, and that is all she
can as yet know about him. Moonlight, propinquity, total absence of
objects of comparison--these three must be Esther's excuses.

Robert is not much like her ideal, certainly--the ideal whose picture
she has been painting life-size on the canvas of her mind during the
vacant moments of the last two transitional years; but if we all waited
to be wed till our ideal came knocking at our doors, the world would
be shortly dispeopled of legitimate inhabitants. Miss Craven's ideal
is dark; at seventeen, most ideals are dark: he has long, fierce,
sleepy, unfathomable eyes. Robert is straw-coloured: his eyes are
blue; very wide awake: they say exactly what his tongue does, neither
more nor less, and there is absolutely no harm in them--a doubtful
recommendation to a woman. The ideal's nose is fine cut, delicately
chiselled; his cheeks are a little haggard, slightly hollowed and
paled by five and thirty years or so of the reckless life of one that
has lived, not existed. Robert's nose is broad and blunt; his cheeks
have the roundness and bloom of a countryman's five and twenty. The
ideal breaks most of the commandments with easy grace; is inclined to
be sceptical and a little sarcastic over the old world beliefs, and
facts hoary with time and reverence. Robert nightly prays on bent knees
to be "not led into temptation but delivered from evil;" he believes
firmly every thing that he ever was taught, from the Peep of Day
upwards, and he could no more shape his honest lips into a sneer than
he could square the circle. Before the fell shafts of the ideal's eyes
women lie slain as thick as Greeks lay beneath the arrows of Apollo in
the Iliad's opening clash; the number of Robert's female victims is
represented by a duck's egg.

"Je ne comprends pas l'amour sans effroi," says one of the characters
in the best French novel I have read this many a day. The ideal
inspires fear equally with love; you can imagine his being harsh,
fierce, cruel, to the woman he loves. In none of the most hard-hearted
of created beings could Robert provoke alarm. Children who see him for
the first time come and thrust their little dimpled hands into his,
and laugh up with confident impudence in his face. Dogs to whom he
has never been introduced come and rub their shaggy heads against his
knees, and curl and wriggle about his friendly feet.

Esther can indulge no faintest hope that he will bully her. The ideal
rides straight as a die, and is as much a part of his horse as a
centaur. Robert is very fond of getting a day's hunting when he can
afford the two guineas requisite for the hiring of a horse, which is
not very often; and he likes to get his money's worth by blundering
blindly over everything that comes in his way, but he has about as
much idea of _riding_ as a tailor or a cow. The ideal is an idol to be
set up and worshipped--a Baal to be adored with tears and blood and
knife-gashings. Robert is a worshipper to be encouraged by a cold look
and smile flung to him every now and then, like a bone to a dog, or
spurned away with disapproving foot, as Cain was from his unaccepted
altar. To worship is to a woman always sweeter than to be worshipped.
To worship one must look up; to be worshipped one must look down....

Come with me this August Sunday through the wood from Glan-yr-Afon to
Plas Berwyn--from Esther's home to Robert's. It is but a few hundred
yards of shade and shine, a small, scarce trodden wood-path whose
narrow, faint track the ripe grasses and the seeded ferns have wellnigh
obliterated, flinging themselves across it in all the _abandon_ of
their unspeakable grace. The apples' round faces are reddening in the
little Plas Berwyn orchard; the shorn fields slope barely, slantwise
along the hill-side in their yellow stubble. For weeks and weeks the
corn has been whitening under the sun's hard, veilless stare, and now
at last it has fallen; the barley has bowed its bearded head beneath
the sickle's stroke, and the oats their tremulous ringlets. They are
all gathered in, and garnered in Mrs. Brandon's stout, well-thatched
stacks; to thatch a stack is the one thing a Welshman can do.

It is an hour past noon, and the Reverend Evan Evans has released the
bodies of his congregation from that white-washed, tumble-down old barn
that he is pleased to call his church, and their minds from the tension
necessary to take in the ill-strung-together, misapplied texts that he
is pleased to call his sermon.

Plas Berwyn is a house of about the same size as Glan-yr-Afon, but
the rooms do not look so large, they are so full of large things and
large people. The dining-room is crowded up with a great mahogany
table, a great mahogany sideboard, great mahogany chairs--inconvenient
relics, fondly clung to by people who from a larger house have subsided
into a smaller one--a sort of warranty of past respectability like
the cottager's japanned tea-tray and brass candlesticks. There is an
atmosphere of lumbersome age and gravity about the whole place; none
of the fragrance and light and melody that youth, sheer youth, even
divorced from any other attractive qualities, brings with it.

Of all the gods of the Greek mythology I will bring my votive crowns
and my salt cakes to Bacchus. Not the bloated old gentleman striding
drunk over a barrel, as we figure him, but Bacchus eternally young.
What is there so worthy of adoration in this aging, wrinkling world as
never ending youth?

Most people are cross and most people are unusually hungry on Sunday.
I do not know why it is, but if you observe your acquaintance you
will find it to be true. Hungry or not, the Brandons are at dinner,
dining frugally and sparely on cold roast beef and cold apple tart.
Nothing hot ever figures on the Brandons' Sabbath table, not even
potatoes; indeed, unless they boiled themselves, and hopped out of
the pot judiciously when they found themselves done, I do not see how
they could, as on the Sabbath morn every living soul at Plas Berwyn,
every reluctant scullion and recalcitrant housemaid, is trundled off to
church, the house-door locked, and the key deposited in Mrs. Brandon's
pocket.

All the Brandons hate dining in the middle of the day, consequently
they always dine in the middle of the day on Sunday. Everybody knows
that there are few things more distinctly unpleasant than to sit in
the same room in which you have your meals; to live with the unending
smell and steam of departed viands up your nose and eyes and ears:
consequently the Brandons always sit in the dining-room on Sunday.
Sunday is to them a sort of aggravated Ash Wednesday and Good Friday
rolled into one. On Saturday night Miss Bessy Brandon swoops down upon
all novels, travels, biographies, magazines, poetry books, that may be
lying about, makes a clean sweep of them and consigns them to disgrace
and a cupboard till the return of Monday releases them.

The Brandon family at the present moment have got their Sunday faces
and their Sunday clothes on, and they misbecome most of them very
sorely. Very few men look their best in their Go-to-Meeting clothes.
For some unexplained reason, a black coat made by a country tailor
shows its shortcomings more plainly than a coloured one. The garment
that cases Bob's broad shoulders would draw tears from Mr. Poole's
eyes, could he see it. As for Mrs. Brandon, she always has more or less
of a Sunday face on--which I do not say in any dispraise, but merely
to express a sober, steadfast face, unfurrowed by any violent gust of
mirth or blast of anger. She is like Enid and her mother,

    "clad all in faded silk,"

and on her breast she has a miniature of the departed Brandon, in
Geneva gown and bands, about as big as a teacup, and with two small
glutinous curls of the departed's hair at the back. It is so long ago
since he died, that she must have forgotten all about him--what he was
like, even; but she still wears his effigy, as an old inn continues to
hang out the sign of the Saracen's Head, though it is centuries since
ever a Saracen has been seen on the earth's face.

Opposite each other, like little bad mirrors of one another, sit the
Misses Brandon, in melancholy little gowns of no particular stuff and
no particular colour, and little wisps of thin, fine hair well down
over their ears, and minute chignons on the napes of their necks--their
little, bustless, waistless, hipless figures, long plaintive noses, and
meek, dull eyes proclaiming them of that virgin band to whom St. Paul
has awarded the palm of excellence. The Sunday literature is scattered
about on the hard-bottomed chairs. "Stop the Leak" lies on the pit of
its stomach, open at the spot where Miss Bessy abandoned it in favour
of the cold beef; the "Saturday Night of the World," with its mouth
open, and a paper-knife in it.

"Cut two or three good large slices, Bob, dear; they will be so nice
for old John Owen," Mrs. Brandon is saying, in her benignant, cracked,
old voice.

"We can leave them as we go by to church; Bob can carry them," says
Miss Brandon, with authority.

Robert is silent.

"Bob does not like the idea of being seen carrying a basket; he thinks
it would spoil his appearance."

"Hang the appearance!" says Bob, with an easy laugh. "If a man is a
gentleman, it does not make him any the less a gentleman even if he
were seen wheeling a perambulator down Regent Street; but, to tell the
truth, I don't think I shall go to church this afternoon."

"Not go to church! Not go to church!! Not go to church!!!" in three
different keys, rising from astonishment to horrified incredulity.

But seldom has Mr. Brandon missed attending divine service from the
auspicious day, two and twenty years ago, when, at the tender age of
three years, being, Eutychus-like, overcome with sleep, he fell down
with much clamour from a high bench, and raised a mountainous red lump
on his baby forehead, coming into contact with the hard pew floor:

    "And his head, as he tumbled, went knicketty-knock,
     Like a pebble in Carisbrook well."

Robert feels the weight of public opinion to be heavy, but he sticks
like a man to what he said.

"Not to-day, mother, I think. Esther said she would be coming in
by-and-by to say good-bye to you all, and, as it is her last day, I
thought I might as well have as much as I could of her."

"What _do_ you mean, Bob? Is the girl going to die to-night?" inquires
Miss Brandon, perking up her little tow-coloured head sharply.

"God forbid!" he cries, with a hasty shudder; "don't suggest anything
so frightful; but she is off to-morrow for a week or ten days on a
visit to some friends."

"Going away without mentioning a word about it!"

"Going away _now!_"

These two sentences shoot out with simultaneous velocity from two
mouths.

"Are you surprised at her not telling _us_ where she is going? Does she
ever tell _us_ anything? Does she make _us_ her confidants!" subjoins
Miss Bessy, with mild spite.

Spite is permissible on the Sabbath, though hot potatoes and novels are
not.

"She did not know herself till yesterday," says Bob, briefly, cutting
away rather viciously at the beef.

"But who are these sudden friends that have sprung up all at once? What
are their names? Where do they live? Tell us all about them, dear boy,"
says the old woman, gently, seeing that her son is chafed.

"Their names are Sir Thomas and Lady Gerard; they are old friends of
the Cravens' father, and they live in ----shire; that is all I know
about them."

"A steady-going old couple, I suppose? Will not that be rather dull for
a little gay thing like Esther?"

"There is a girl of about her own age, I believe, a ward of Sir
Thomas's."

"A ward!--oh!"

"And also a son."

"A son! o--h!"

"Well, why should not there be a son? What harm is there in that?" asks
Robert, raising his voice a little in irritation.

"No harm whatever! Much better thing than a daughter! Can push his own
way in the world. Not that I know in the least what you are talking
about," cries a young, saucy voice, which, with the little sleek, dark
head it belongs to, appears uninvited at the door at this juncture.
"Oh! I see you are all at dinner, so I'll stay outside till you have
finished; it is so horrible to be watched when one is eating, isn't
it? I hate it myself." And the head and the voice disappear again as
quickly as they came.

A ruddier tinge rushes into Robert's already ruddy cheek--ruddy as King
David's when he tended his few sheep in the Syrian pastures, before the
weight of the heavy Israelitish crown, and of his own wars and murders
had blanched it. Down go the carving knife and fork with a clatter,
and, "like a doting mallard," he flies after the little vision, banging
the door behind him with an impetus that makes his sisters bound up
from their horsehair chairs like two small parched peas. Presently he
brings her back in triumph.

"So you are going to run away from us, my love?" says Mrs. Brandon,
holding Esther's young white hand in her old veiny one.

"Yes, I'm afraid so; it is a great bore, isn't it?" answers Esther,
trying her best to lengthen her round face and look miserable.

"If it is a bore, why do you go?" inquires Miss Bessy, drily.

"Because I think I ought to make some friends for myself; I never
met anybody before that had no friends, as Jack and I have not; we
literally have not one--except all of you, of course," she ends with a
happy after-thought.

"When you come to my age, my dear," says Mrs. Brandon, shaking her
head, and all the innumerous stiff frillings of her cap, and bringing
to bear on Esther's sanguine youth the weight of her own gloomy
experiences, in the infuriating way that old people do, "you will have
found out that a few good friends are worth more than a great many
indifferent ones."

"But why should not these people be good friends?" asks the girl, a
little incredulously. "Who knows? Surely there must be more good people
in the world than bad ones; so the chances are in favour of them."

"We are expressly forbidden to judge," begins Miss Bessy, charitably;
"otherwise----There's the first bell beginning; we had better go and
put on our things, Jane."




CHAPTER VII.


Five minutes more, and three large brown parasols, a large black poke
bonnet and two little dirt-coloured ones, are seen slowly pacing
down the hill to the House of Prayer. The lovers have Plas Berwyn to
themselves. Bob has gained his point, despite a parting fleer from
Bessy as to the undesirability of neglecting the Creator for the
creature.

"Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler!" cries Esther, joyously, jumping
about the room like a child, and mimicking the one church bell which
is heard clearly tinkling through the valley. "Listen, Bob! Does it
not say 'Tim Dowler' just exactly as if it were speaking it? Oh! look
here: I'll lose all their places for them in their good books, and I
bet anything they'll never find them again." So saying, she proceeds
to remove the paper-knife from the "Saturday Night of the World," and
carefully closes "Stop the Leak."

"What spirits you are in to-day, Essie!" says Bob, balancing himself
on the window-sill, with his long legs dangling lugubriously, and
following her about the room with his eyes, as a child does a
butterfly. "I believe it is because you are going to be rid of me for a
fortnight."

"Partly, I think," replies Esther, nonchalantly. "It seems as if all
my life I had seen and heard of nothing but Glan-yr-Afon and Plas
Berwyn, Plas Berwyn and Glan-yr-Afon, and now I'm going to see and hear
something fresh; it may be better and it may be worse; but, at all
events, it will be something different. Perhaps I shall come back as
the country mouse did, more in love than ever with my own cheeseparings
and tallow-candle ends; perhaps"--swinging her Sunday bonnet by the
strings and looking up maliciously--"perhaps I shall see some one I
like better than you, and not come back at all."

"Hush!" he cries, hurriedly, putting up his hand before her mouth.
"Don't say that; it is bad luck. I should not mind your saying it if it
were not so horribly probable."

Esther subsides into gravity.

"I wish to Heaven you were not so fond of me!" she says, hastily;
"please do try not to be: it makes me feel as if I were cheating all
the time--having things and not paying for them."

"I could have given you up _at first_, if you had told me it must be
so positively; I'm sure I could have made shift to do without you, as I
have made shift to do without many a thing that other fellows consider
necessaries of life; but now----"

He has seized her two hands, and now holds her standing there before
him. To hold her hand is the one familiarity Robert is permitted; not
once in all his life has he kissed his betrothed.

"It was a foolish, silly custom," she said one day, pettishly--"no
sensibler than rubbing noses together, as the Feejee islanders did; for
her part, she hated it, &c."

"But now, what? finish your sentence, please," says the little captive,
gaily.

"Esther, I wish these people had not got a son."

"What people?"

"These Gerards."

"Why so? Do you think that they would have left you their money if they
had not?"

"No, not that," smiling against his will. "But, Essie, you'll promise
to write and tell me what he is like?"

"Yes."

"What sort of age?"

"Yes."

"Whether you see much of him?"

"Yes."

"What he says to you?"

"Come, I cannot promise that," says Esther, bursting out laughing. "Oh
you dear old goose! are you jealous of a name, a shade, an imagination?"

"I _am_ jealous," he answers, reddening. "I can no more help it than
a man in the gout can help having twinges. I shall always be jealous
until you are really mine past stealing or taking back again: after
that I never shall."

"I should hope not," retorts she, with levity: "if you were, I should
think it my duty to try and give you some cause."

The church bell has ceased; there is no sound in the quiet room but
that of one fat-bodied bluebottle, labouring and buzzing up the pane,
and then tumbling back again. Robert has abandoned the window-sill,
finding it a painful and not luxurious seat: he is walking up and down,
up and down; one stride and a half of his long legs taking him from end
to end of the little room. Esther has thrown herself into an American
rocking chair, and is rocking violently backwards and forwards, trying
her best to tip herself over.

"Promise me, Essie," says the young man, coming to a sudden standstill
beside her--"promise me that you'll talk seriously of--you know
what--when you come home; I give you till then? Good heavens! what
sort of stuff could Jacob have been made of to have held out all those
fourteen years!"

      "'The little maid replied,
        Some say a little sighed,
    And what shall we have for to eat, eat, eat?
        Will the love that you're so rich in
        Make a fire in the kitchen,
    Or the little god of love turn the spit, spit, spit?'"

answers Esther, evading her lover's urgency by a quotation.

"If I could get an Adjutancy of Volunteers," pursues he, resuming
his walk, with his eyes bent on the ground, and frowning away in the
intensity of his thinking, "or, better still, a Militia one, or a Chief
Constableship, or the Governorship of a gaol: there are always some of
those sort of things going about. Why should I not come in for one as
well as another fellow? We want so little----"

"Want so little?" interrupts Esther, briskly. "Speak for yourself,
please: I want a great deal; only, as far as I can see, want is likely
to be my master."

"You are no fine lady," pursues he, talking more to himself than to
her, "that requires to be waited on; you can make your own bonnets and
gowns, cannot you? My sisters always do."

"So I should imagine," says Esther, drily.

"What do you mean? Are not they all right? is there anything the matter
with them?" inquires he, stopping short and looking surprised, as if
the idea of there being any deficiency in his sisters' costumes was an
entirely new light to him. But Miss Craven purses up her pretty mouth
in a silence more damnatory of the Misses Brandon's toilettes than any
words could be.

"If we had not a large enough income to live by ourselves," says he,
beginning again his tramp, tramp, "we might join housekeeping with
mother and the girls; they would not object, I'm sure."

"But I should, _strongly_," cries Esther, springing up, and getting
crimson with vexation. "Why, we should all be by the ears in a week.
Robert, how many times will you make me tell you that I like you well
enough to go sailing along beside you on the sea of life as long as it
is nice and smooth, but I really do not love you enough to go bumping
over rocks and into breakers with you? I would do it for Jack, and
welcome, but for no other human being on the face of the earth."

"Will you never like me as well as you do Jack?" he inquires, sadly,
looking at her with eyes so loving, that one would think her own must
catch the infection. But, no; they remain coldly bright, with the cold
brightness of friendship.

"Never."

"Not after ten years?"

"No."

"Nor twenty?"

"No."

"Nor thirty?"

"No, nor a thousand. Cannot you see what a different thing it is? If
one loses a lover one can get a hundred more just as good as, if not
better than, the one lost; but if I were to lose Jack--oh, God! how can
I suggest anything so awful--who could give me another brother?"

"So be it, then, since it must be that I am to play second fiddle all
my life (sighing); but, Essie, you'll promise to write to me every day,
won't you?"

"Certainly not."

"Every second day, then?"

"Certainly not."

"Twice a week, then?"

"Per--haps; if I have anything to say."

"And you'll be sure not to stay beyond the fortnight?"

"That depends. If they are _fine_, and inclined to 'country cousin' me,
I shall probably be back the day after to-morrow: if they make a great
fuss with me, and if Mr. Gerard is young and handsome and civil-spoken,
I dare say you will not see me again under two months."

He looks so sincerely pained that her conscience smites her.

"There," she says, "I have teased you enough for one day; let us kiss
and make friends,--that is, figuratively. Come," putting out her hand
to draw him along with her, "let us go to the kitchen garden and see if
the wasps have left us any apricots. If Bessy were here, she would tell
us some pleasing anecdote of how some people went and picked apricots
on the Sabbath, and got stung in the throat and swelled, and died in
great agonies; but I'm willing to run the risk if you are."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nine o'clock! The maid-servants are at evening church, combining the
double advantage of _making their souls_ and meeting their sweethearts.
Esther, happily rid of hers, is sitting on the ground at the French
window of the study, beside her brother. The rooks that blackened the
meadow awhile ago have flapped heavily home to the mile-off rookery. It
is such a great, still world; who would fancy that there were so many
noisy men, barking dogs, snorting steam-engines in it? It seems a world
of stars and flowers, as one would imagine it after reading one of Mrs.
Heman's poems.

Jack is smoking; now and then Esther takes the pipe out of his mouth,
gives a little puff, coughs and chokes, and puts it back again. Oh,
blessed state of intimacy, when you may sit by a person for hours and
never utter to them! Esther is thinking what a pretty, pleasant Idyllic
life hers is; like an Arcadian shepherdess's in this lovely valley,
far away from smoky towns and vulgar cares and sordid toils. Young and
beautiful (what pretty woman is mock-modest to her own thoughts?),
living with a brother who is to her what father, mother, brothers,
sisters, husband, children, are to other women; a brother who is only
three years older than herself, consequently not likely to die much
before her. She is thinking, a little regretfully, that, fair and
poetic as this life is, it is passing, and that as it passes she does
not feel its beauty as acutely as she ought--does not suck out all its
sweetness, as a man swallows a delicious draught hastily, carelessly,
without tasting and dwelling upon its rare flavour. It is the same
_sort_ of thought (only much weaker) as those that torment us as we sit
alone by the hearth mourning our dead, and reproach ourselves, with a
yearning pain, that while they were yet with us we did not draw our
chairs half close enough to theirs--did not take hold of their hands
and kiss their faces half often enough--did not half often enough tell
them, with eager lips, how preciouser than life they were to us.

"What will you be doing this time to-morrow, Essie?" asks Jack,
breaking in upon her reverie; and has not he a right, for is not he
king and hero of it?

"Wishing myself back again, to a dead certainty," answers Essie,
emphatically. "Jack" (rubbing her cheek up and down softly against his
shoulder--Jack is but a young, slight stripling), "I do believe that if
I were in heaven, and saw you sitting all alone here smoking your pipe,
I should have to throw away my harp and crown, and come down to keep
you company."

"If you were in heaven," returns Jack, gravely, "I think you would be
so surprised and pleased to find yourself there that you would be in no
hurry to come out again for me or anybody else."

"Perhaps so, but I think not," she answers, sighing, and thrusting her
arm gently through his.

"Have you got any money, Essie?"

"Plenty."

"How much?"

"Plenty."

"But how much?"

"Never you mind."

"But I do mind."

"Enough to take me there and bring me back again, and I don't suppose
they'll charge me for board and lodging."

"Servants at those sort of swell places expect such a lot of tipping,"
says Jack, pensively, knocking the ash out of his pipe.

"They may expect, then; a little disappointment is very wholesome for
us all. They are much better able to tip me than I them."

"There are sure to be charity sermons, too," continues the boy, with a
forethought worthy of riper years. "I don't know how it is, but I never
went to a strange place in my life without there being a collection for
the Kaffirs or the Jews or the Additional Curates or something the very
first Sunday after I got there."

"I would pretend I had forgotten my purse."

Jack puts his pipe in his pocket, rises, retires into his sanctum,
lights a candle, rummages in a drawer, and presently returns with a
five-pound note. Bank notes grew but in scanty crops at Glan-yr-Afon.

"Here, Essie."

"No! _no!_ NO!" cries Essie, volubly, jumping up and clasping her hands
behind her back.

"Yes! _yes!_ YES!"

"No! no! You won't have enough money to pay the men on Saturday night."

"Talk about what you understand," says Jack, gruffly. "Do you think I'm
going to let my sister go about like a beggar and whine for halfpence?"

"Oh, Jack, Jack!" throwing herself about his neck, and burying her face
in his sunburnt throat. "How bitter it is always to take, and never to
give! Oh! if I had but something to give you; but you know I have got
nothing in the world."

"You have got Bob."

"Ah! so I have" (making a little grimace); "and if he would do you any
good, you might have him, and welcome, to make mincemeat of, if you
liked."




CHAPTER VIII.


The 2.25 train from Brainton is due at Felton at 5.30. It is drawing
near Hither now, escorted by a vanguard, bodyguard, and rearguard of
dust-clouds; it rushes along, with the sun beating down on the roofs
of the carriages, making them like little compartments of Hades. If
the devil took a hint from the Coldbath Fields cells for "improving
the prisons of Hell," he certainly might take a hint from the Brainton
train for improving the travelling conveyances of the same locality.

In one of the first-class carriages there is a baby: it has got a cold,
and seems rather inclined to be sick; so both the nurse, on whose lap
it lies gaping and blowing bubbles, and the idolising mother, who sits
over against it, insist on keeping its window tight up. There is a
rusty old divine, in gilt-rimmed spectacles and a jowl, reading the
_Guardian;_ a commercial traveller, with his hat off, his legs up, and
a gaudy cap on his head, fast asleep; and, lastly, a little young lady,
sitting facing the engine, with the dusty blast driving hot and full
in her face, blinking, coughing, choking, with the utmost patience. On
her lap lies a huge bunch of red and yellow roses and heavy-scented
double-stocks, all limp and drooping and soiled. Bob gave them to her
when he came down to the station to see her off--and very kind of him
too, and very nice they are; but all the same, as she has already a
bag, a box, and a parasol to carry, she thinks (though she barely owns
it to herself) that she would almost as soon have been without them.

The dusty blast blows gentler, moderates to a dusty zephyr; the
train is slackening speed. "Fel--ton!" "Fel--ton!" cry a row of
green-fustianed porters, as the long bulk draws up at the platform.

"Please 'm, are you Miss Craven?" inquires a tall footman in powder and
a cockade, touching his hat to Esther, as she stands all by herself,
trying to take several beams out of her own eye.

"Yes."

"The carriage is here for you, 'm. Would you please to show me which is
your maid and luggage?"

"I have no maid, and there's my luggage," responds Esther, pointing
with one grimy kid finger to a small trunk standing on its head, and
looking half inclined to burst asunder in the midst. She is ashamed of
her destitute condition, and ashamed of herself for being ashamed of it.

"Will it change into a pumpkin?" thinks Miss Craven, as she steps into
a large yellow barouche, with two fidgety, showy greys, that is waiting
for her at the station gate. After the yammering of the baby, the dull
rumble-rumble of the train, how delicious! "If it were only my own,"
she says to herself, throwing herself back with a consequential feeling
on the soft cushions, as some country people pass and pull their
forelocks to the well-known liveries.

"Well, odder things have happened! _But_ for Bob! The Prince fell in
love with Cinderella at first sight; why should not Prince Gerard with
me? I dare say I'm quite as good-looking as Cinderella was!"

As they pass Lady Gerard's model school, twenty little charity girls
come trooping out in the uniformity of their cotton frock and straw
bonnet livery, and drop twenty bob courtesies to Esther, who feels as
the man in the "Arabian Nights" did who woke and found himself Sultan.
Labouring men go stumping heavily home, with their tools over their
shoulders and their heads bent earthwards, as is always the case with
the tillers of the soil, who must--oh, hard necessity!--be ever looking
down.

Park palings, through which the strong brake fern is thrusting itself,
slide past; then a red lodge, picked out with blue bricks, where an
obsequious old woman rushes out from the washtub, with hands all
soapsuds, to open the gates; then a grassy, knolly park; then a great
red house, likewise picked out with blue bricks; then stones clattering
under an echoing portico; then the pumpkin stops, and Cinderella
descends.

"Miss Craven!" announces the butler, opening a tall door; and Miss
Craven, plucking up heart, marches into a high, dark library, lined
with high, dark books--marches in, looking very much like a chimney
sweep. Dust lies in ridges on her once white bonnet; dust, instead of
belladonna, in streaks under her eyes; dust on the parting of her hair,
on her eyelashes, up her nose (on which there is also, though, happily
for her, she does not know it, a large smut), and a double portion of
dust on the great, faded, yellow roses, to which she cleaves with as
much pertinacity as the idiot in "Excelsior" clave to that senseless
banner which he was so determined to run up hill with.

As she enters, a goddess rises like an exhalation (as Pandemonium did),
and comes floating on lilac clouds towards her. This is as things
seem to her; in reality, a large, fair, young woman comes forward in
a long-tailed mauve muslin. Simultaneously a man's two legs are seen
disappearing over the window-sill.

"How do you do?" says the goddess, sweetly. "I think the train must
have been rather late; we expected you half an hour ago."

"Yes."

A little pause, each taking stock.

"Won't you have some tea?"

"Thanks."

The tea is poured out; it has been standing on the table an hour, and
is perfectly cold. The goddess and the little female collier examine
each other stealthily.

"Rather alarming," thinks the latter: "talks in such a low voice, and
has such a difficulty in pronouncing her _r_'s. So that is the correct
thing, is it? Well, I'll always call Robert _Wobert_ for the future."

"Might be pretty, if she were not so filthy," thinks the other.

"Same age as I am, indeed! She looks five years older."

"I think, if you don't mind, we had perhaps better be going to dress.
Sir Thomas is so very particular as to punctuality."

"Is he? was that Sir Thomas that got out of the window just as I came
in?"

"Oh no! that was St. John."

("St. John! What a pretty name! How much prettier than Bob!")

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir Thomas Gerard is walking up and down the library, with his watch
in his hand, prepared the instant the clock strikes to ring the bell
violently, and inquire what is the meaning of dinner being so late.
Sir Thomas is a big man, who affects the country squire, the good,
old English gentleman--plain Sir Thomas, without any nonsense about
him; dresses to the character, and succeeds in looking not unlike the
Frenchman's idea of an English _milord_, as depicted in _Punch_ some
years ago, where he is represented in low-crowned hat and breeches,
with the face of a truculent butcher, cracking a whip, and exclaiming,
with equal coherency and elegance, "Rosbif! I send my wife to Smiffel!
God dam!"

Sir Thomas does not use such strong language when speaking of Lady
Gerard, but in other respects the portrait is not unfaithful. Lady
Gerard is lying in an arm-chair. She is fat to make you shudder; she
has a short, turn-up nose, short legs, a red skin, and next to no
hair--all very good points in a pig, but hardly so good in a lady. The
clock strikes, and at the same instant the butler opens the door, and
announces "Dinner!"

"Come along, Conny!" says Sir Thomas, sticking out his elbow to his
ward.

"Are not you going to wait for Miss Craven? And St. John is not down,
either," suggests Lady Gerard, who is hoisting herself slowly up out of
her chair.

"Wait for 'em? Not I," responds Sir Roger de Coverley. "If people don't
choose to conform to the rules of my house, they may go without their
dinner for all I care, and serve 'em right, too. Come along, Conny!"

The soup is nearly ended when two people, who have come together by a
fortuitous concourse of atoms at the door, make a simultaneous entry
into the dining-room.

"Companions in iniquity!" says St. John, with a sarcastic look at his
father, bowing to Esther, as he seats himself beside Miss Blessington.

"How do?" says Sir Thomas, putting out his left hand (his right is
still grasping his spoon). "Never wait for anybody here; would not let
the soup get cold for the Queen nor the Lord Chancellor either."

"Miss Craven mistook you for Sir Thomas before dinner," says Miss
Blessington, in her sweet, smooth way to her neighbour.

"Did she? Unintentional compliments are always the most flattering,"
replies Mr. Gerard, quietly.

Then he looks across through the partition wall of great bigonias in
silver pots, and sees a little face peeping at him under and over the
broad crimson leaves.

No one would ever call Esther's a Madonna face. No artist would ever
ask her to sit for St. Catherine, or St. Cecilia, or St. Anybody else;
hers is essentially _beauté du diable_--one of those little, sparkling,
provoking, petulant faces that have a fresh dress of smiles or tears,
or dimples or blushes, for every trivial, passing question; one of
those little faces that have been at the bottom of half the mischiefs
the world has seen.

"I only saw a pair of legs," replies the face, exculpating itself; "how
could I tell whether they were young or old legs?"

Miss Blessington looks rather shocked, as if she thought that Esther's
modes of expression were somewhat _libre;_ and indeed at the rate of
purity at which we are advancing, _legs_ will soon walk off into the
limbo of silence and unmentionableness; _arms_ will probably follow
them, and then perhaps noses.

Although Miss Blessington looks shocked, St. John only laughs. He looks
pleasant when he laughs; he did not look pleasant just now, when he was
turning up his nose at his cold soup. When he is in an ill-humour he
has a decided look of his father, though it puts him into an awful rage
to tell him so. He is not handsome, certainly; not a straight-nosed,
pink-cheeked, flaxen-curled, fairy prince at all; neither is he very
young--not a boy, that is to say--five-and-thirty, or thereabouts;
his face has a weather-beaten look, as of one that has felt many an
icy wind and many a tropic sun beat against it. No lily-handed, curled
woman's darling.

"What do you mean?" cries Sir Thomas, raising his voice, and turning
round in a fury (with his stiff grey hair standing upright, and the
veins in his forehead swelling) upon an unlucky footman, who has had
the _maladresse_ to drop three spoons that he was carrying upon a tray.
"You stupid hound, mind what you are about, or else keep out of the
room, one or the other!"

Esther's mouth opens; she feels a sensation of shamefaced aghastness;
but the rest of the company sit with the composure induced by long
familiarity with the good old English gentleman's courtesies. Only one
little flash of indignant contempt shoots from St. John's grey eyes.
"How I hate my father!" would be his reading of the great statesman's
dying ejaculation, "How I love my country!"

Nobody ever speaks much at dinner at Felton. St. John because he knows,
if he trusted himself to speak at all, it would be to contradict his
father flat _whatever_ he said, for the mere pleasure of contradicting
him; Lady Gerard because she has heard that it is impossible to do two
things well at the same time, and as she is quite resolved upon doing
the eating part well, she thinks she will leave the talking alone; Miss
Blessington because, having contributed her hard, cold beauty to the
entertainment, she thinks she has done enough.

The company being rather silent, Esther turns her eyes round the room,
and scans the pictures. Two or three Gerards, by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
in very full dress; a large copper-coloured woman by Rubens, in no
dress at all; "Susanna and the Elders;" "Jupiter and Leda" (twice
life-size); a "Venus Sleeping, surprised by Satyrs" (a great gem);
and many other like subjects, such as one mostly meets with in the
dining-rooms of English nobles and gentles--subjects pleasant and
profitable, to employ the eyes and minds of their daughters while
engaged in eating their dinners. Esther is staring hard at Susanna's
fat, coy face, when her attention is recalled by Mr. Gerard's voice
addressing her. She starts and blushes furiously, like a child whose
fingers have been found straying among the jam-pots. He looks amused at
her confusion.

"I have just been thinking, Miss Craven, how pleasant your first
impressions of us must be. What a well-mannered, courteous family you
must think us!--I tumbling out of the window at the risk of breaking
my neck to avoid you, and my father and mother going to dinner without
you."

"If you had been a little quicker in your movements, I should have
known nothing about you," responds she, the carmine called forth by her
detection dying slowly out of her cheeks, and noticing only the half of
his sentence that refers to himself.

"Ah! I am not so young as I was" (with a sigh); "but, to tell the
truth, we had just been dragging the pool, like Boodles in 'Happy
Thoughts,' and I was such a mass of mud that I had not moral courage to
face you."

"We should have met on equal terms. I was as black as a coal, was not
I?"

"Railroads do make one wonderfully dusty," replies Miss Blessington,
with a polite, evasive platitude.

"I had a worse infliction than any dust to bear," says Esther,
stretching her long throat around the bigonia to get a fuller view of
her _vis-à-vis_.

"A baby, of course?" replies he, stretching his neck too for a like
purpose.

"An aggravated case of baby--a baby that had something odd the matter
with it."

"Not so bad as a man drinking sherry," says he, his grey eyes and a bit
of his nose laughing through the leaves; "a woman eating gingerbread
is bad enough. I travelled once with a woman who ate gingerbread from
London to Holyhead without stopping."

"And did not offer you any?"

"Good heavens, no! What a prodigious suggestion!--that would have been
adding insult to injury."

"If I had been travelling with you I should undoubtedly have offered
you some. I should have judged you by myself, and I am very fond of
gingerbread."

"Indeed!"

"And" (with a mischievous look) "fonder still of peppermint lozenges,
particularly in church on hot Sunday afternoons."

They were getting quite voluble, chatting and chirping like a nest of
magpies--like children playing and laughing in a garden, unmindful that
in a cave in a corner is a great old bear who may pounce out on them at
any moment. The Felton bear pounces.

"What the devil do you mean leaving that door open? Morris! John!
George! Here, some of you! there's a door open somewhere between here
and the kitchen. Don't contradict me, sir! I say there is; if I catch
you propping those swing doors open," &c. &c.

       *       *       *       *       *

The birds have gone to bed, and the slugs come out to walk on the damp
garden paths. Now and then a little wind gets up, whispers a word or
two to the polished laurel leaves, and lies down again. There is a
carpet of thin, smoke-grey clouds over heaven's blue floor. The two
girls are strolling up and down the terrace walk. Esther has got a red
cloak thrown about her shoulders; she is not in the least afraid of
taking cold, and declined the offer of it in the first instance; but on
second thoughts, reflecting that the dining-room windows look on the
terrace, and that the fairy prince may see and like the combination of
black eyes and red cloth (fairy princes being always partial to gay
colours), accepted it.

I have called Esther "little," and Miss Blessington "large" but the
truth is they are much of a height. The difference between them is,
that one is a young, slight sapling that has been so busy shooting up
skywards, that it has had no leisure to grow broad, and that the other
is a full-grown, spreading, stately forest tree. And yet they are the
same age; but some women develop, mind and body, much quicker than
others.

From the unshuttered dining-room windows comes a great square of yellow
lamplight, and lies smooth upon the gravel. Looking in you see rifled
fruit dishes, half-filled wine-glasses, moths flying round and round
the lamp globes, trying their best to find an entrance to fiery death.

Sir Thomas, in his red velvet easy chair, with his white duck legs
stretched out before him--duck trousers and a blue coat and brass
buttons are, I need hardly say, the fine old English gentleman's dinner
costume--with his head thrown back, till you can see either up into his
brains or down his throat, whichever you choose. St. John, with his
elbow resting on the shining oak table, which reflects it as a mirror
would, and his head on his hand, in a brown study.

"Do you always walk up and down here, Miss Blessington?" inquires
Esther, who is getting rather tired of pacing along, along, along
monotonously, with her gown sweeping a little avalanche of pebbles
behind her.

"Generally" (with a pretty smile).

Miss Blessington has a very pretty smile--an "angelic smile"--people
say who see her only once; but it is only one, and is aired every hour
of the day--comes out for Sir Thomas, for Lady Gerard, for servants,
for dogs, for callers, for old almswomen, for St. John--so that none
can take it personally, can they?

"By yourself?"

"Not generally."

The pretty smile is dashed with a faint complacency.

("H'm! That means with St. John--

    "'Walking in a shady grove
      With my Juliana.'

"Pleasant look-out for me! A bad third! What a pity that Bob is not
here! we should be a _partie carrée_, and might change partners every
now and then; Miss Blessington should have Bob, and I would have St.
John!")

Below the terrace spreads a large square of grass, uninvaded by
flower-bed or shrub, mowed and rolled, rolled and mowed, into the
similitude of a pancake for flatness. There croquet-hoops glance
whitely in the soft half-light; mallets lie strewn like dead soldiers
after a battle; balls red, blue, and yellow, like great ripe fruit
tumbled among the grass.

"Is this your croquet-ground?"

"Yes."

"Nice and level?"

"Yes."

"Like a billiard table, only a prettier green?"

"Yes; would you like a game?"

"Better than doing nothing, isn't it?" answers Esther, cheerily; she
being a young woman to whom the words _rest_ and _enjoyment_ are not
synonymous, as they mostly grow to be to people in later years.

From the dining-room comes the faint melody of the trombone, played
with the skill of much practice by Sir Thomas's nose. Some one comes
to the window, looks out, puts a hand on the sill, and jumps down. St.
John apparently has an aversion from going out and coming in by the
authorised modes of exit and entrance. Now that one can see him without
any bigonia interposing, one notices that he has kind, eager eyes--eyes
that seem to be looking, looking for something that they have not found
yet--and rather a long nose, that the sun has got hold of and browned,
as a cook browns mashed potatoes.

"Won't you join us, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington, stooping to
reinstate a fallen hoop, and looking calm invitation at him out of her
great, fine, passionless, cow eyes.

St. John hesitates, and looks towards Esther to see whether she is not
going to second the invitation; but she is balancing herself with her
two feet on a croquet-mallet, and does not appear to see him.

"Gooseberry I may be," she thinks, "but, at all events, I won't be
instrumental in making myself so."

"Do I ever play?" asks he, with petulance, walking off in a huff.

"He did not accept your invitation with the exultant gratitude one
would have expected, did he?" says Miss Craven, maliciously.

"He hates the game," replies Miss Blessington, rather sharplier than is
her wont--"particularly playing with odd numbers."

"Oh!"

The match begins; it is about as fair as a foot race between Deerfoot
and a lame baby. Esther has played about six times in the course of her
life; Miss Blessington about six thousand. Miss Blessington makes the
round of the hoops in triumphant solitude, while poor Essie struggles
feebly, ignorantly, unscientifically, to ring a bell that refuses to
emit the faintest tinkle.

"Hare and tortoise!" cries she, laughing at her own discomfiture;
"you'll go to sleep presently, and I shall crawl in and win."

"Since you wish me, I don't mind taking a mallet," says St. John,
appearing suddenly round a big Wellingtonia, and looking confusedly
conscious of being seen descending very awkwardly from his high horse.

"How do you know we wish you to take one?--we never said so," says
Essie, flashing at him with her wicked, laughing, half-lowered eyes.
("Since I am another's and he is another's, I don't see why we should
not try to amuse each other," she says to herself.)

"It is your turn to play, Miss Craven," interposes Constance, coldly.

"Come to my rescue, won't you?" says Esther, making her seventy-second
careless, abortive attempt at the bell, and throwing twice as much
_empressement_ into her voice from the amiable motive that she thinks
such _empressement_ is displeasing to Miss Blessington.

"You snubbed me so just now that I don't think I will. I'll leave you
to perish miserably," answers he, looking at her as he speaks with an
intentness only excusable by the dim light, and the indistinctness of
all objects in it.

"Constance, if you don't mind I'll take one of Miss Craven's balls."

"If you remember, I asked you to join us half an hour ago," replies
Constance, in her measured way.

"I make one stipulation before we start," cries Esther, gaily, "and
that is, that you make no remarks upon my play except such as are of a
laudatory nature."

"I'll make no stipulation of the kind," answers he, gaily too; "if I
see anything reprehensible I shall testify."

Fate does not smile upon the union of St. John and Esther. Disgrace and
disaster attend their arms; in ignorance, unskilfulness, and general
incapacity, St. John is no whit inferior to his partner.

"Why, you play worse than I do," cries she, delighted at the discovery.

"I know I do," he answers, not too amiably; "I should be ashamed of
myself if I did not; it is the vilest, stupidest game ever any idiot
invented; no play in it whatever. All luck! all chance! Look there!"
pointing with a sort of ill-tempered resignation to Constance, who,
with dress delicately lifted with one hand, and foot gracefully
poised, is inflicting heavy chastisement, with a calm, satisfied
vindictiveness, on his ball.

"Take that, you fool you!" (this is addressed to the ball, not to Miss
Blessington) hurling his mallet at it as it scuds swiftly over the
sward and lodges in the pink and purple breast of an aster bed. The
head and handle of the mallet fly asunder from the violence of their
passage through the air, and Mr. Gerard is reduced to the ignominy of
picking up the _disjecta membra_ and hammering them together again.

"You must make a sensation when you go to a croquet party," remarks
Esther, sarcastically.

"Do you think so badly of me as to suppose I ever do? is thy servant
a curate that he should do this thing?" he answers, coming over and
standing close to her.

"Please attend to the game, St. John! It is you to play!" exclaims
Constance, with suppressed, lady-like irritation, from the other end of
the ground, where she stands in majestic solitude.

It is the penalty of greatness to be lonely. A few more egregious
blunders on the part of the firm of Gerard and Craven, a few more
masterstrokes by Miss Blessington, and the game draws to a conclusion.

"It is ridiculous playing against such luck as yours, Constance," cries
St. John, flinging down his weapon in an unjust, unreasonable fury.
"It is always the same; it does not matter what--whist, billiards,
anything--always the same story. Take my advice" (turning to Essie,
and speaking eagerly), "never play at anything, or do anything, or
be anything with me, or you'll be sure to be a loser. I am the most
unlucky devil under the sun." Then he feels that he is making a fool of
himself, and walks off in a rage.

"Why, he is _really_ cross," says Esther, opening her great eyes and
looking a little blankly after him.

"He is rather odd-tempered," answers Miss Blessington, composedly; "and
the most singular thing is, that it is always the people he is fondest
of with whom he is most easily irritated."

"How fond he must be of you!" says Esther, internally.




CHAPTER IX.


Death and the sun are very much alike in one respect, and that is,
their utter impartiality and stupid want of discernment. They make no
difference between those who love them and those who hate. They pay
their visits equally to those who are longing for and lifting up eager
hands towards them, and those who would much prefer to be without them.

I will drop the parallel, which cannot be carried much farther, and
talk of the sun only. He certainly shows very little judgment, and less
taste, in these matters. He gives his great, warm light just as readily
to a scullery as a boudoir, to an ill-smelling dunghill as to a bed of
mignonette; kisses with just as much relish the raddled cheeks of an
old fish-wife as the fresh scarlet lips of a young countess.

This present August morning he is blazing full and hot on that very
grievous daub of Mrs. Brandon in a no-waisted black satin, out of which
she appears to be bursting, like a chrysalis from its sheath, in the
Plas Berwyn dining-room, and not a whit more fully or more hotly on the
exquisite "Monna Lisa" of Da Vinci, which is the chief jewel of the
Gerard collection.

The same sunbeam that brings out with such clearness Monna Lisa's
faint, weird smile, takes in also within its compass Esther's small,
swart head, round the back of which coils a great, loose, careless
twist of burnished hair, like a black snake. She is standing outside
the dining-room door, with her lithe, _svelte_ figure stooped forward a
little. The family are at prayers, as she ascertained by applying her
ear to the key-hole, and hearing a harsh, elderly voice going at a good
round trot through a variety of petitions, for himself, his children
(he has only one, and hates him), his friends, his enemies, his queen,
his bishops and curates, his black brethren, &c., all without the
vestige of a comma between them.

"What! eavesdropping?" asks St. John, coming down the handsome, shallow
stairs in knickerbockers and heather-mixture stockings that his old
mother made him.

"Hush!" holding up her forefinger; "they are at prayers."

St. John listens too, and a sneer comes and settles on his mouth.

"Isn't he a worthy rival for the man who said he would give any one as
far as Pontius Pilate in the Creed, and then beat him?"

"You ought not to abuse your own father" (in a whisper).

"I know I ought not" (in another whisper).

"Why do you, then?" casting down her eyes, that he may see how large a
portion of downy cheeks her long curly lashes shade.

"I only do for him what I know he would do for me if he had the chance."

"Hush! they are nearly over."

"... be with us all evermore. Amen. Morris!"

"Yes, Sir Thomas."

"What the deuce do you mean sticking the legs of that chair against the
wall knocking all the paint off the wainscot?"

    "Oh! blessings on his kindly voice,
     And on his silver hair!"

says St. John, in ironical quotation; and then the door opens, and a
long string of servants issue out, and the two culprits again, as on
the previous evening, together enter.

Lady Gerard never appears at breakfast. About twenty years ago she had
an illness, and, on the strength of it, has kept up a character for
invalidhood ever since. Miss Blessington takes her place at the head
of the table; she is sitting there now. Her shapely hands are busy
among the teacups; her white lids drooped over her calm eyes. There
is a great gold cross on her breast, that rises and falls in soft,
even undulations. Eve, as she was when first she grew into separate
entity and embodiment out of Adam's side; Eve, of creamiest flesh,
and richest, reddest blood, before a soul--a tormenting, puzzling,
intangible, incomprehensible soul--was breathed into her.

When Constance marries, her husband will gaze at her as a man might
gaze at Gibson's "Venus," supposing that he had bought for a great
price that marvel of modern sculpture, and had set it up in the place
of honour in his gallery. He would half-shut his eyes, the better
to appreciate the exquisite turn of the cold, stately throat, the
modelling of the little rounded wrist; would put his head on one side,
and look at it this way and that, to determine whether he liked the
tinting.

    "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,"

as the pithy line that everybody knows, and that next to nobody could
have written, hath it. At forty Constance will be a much handsomer
woman than Esther. At forty those clean-cut, immovable, expressionless
features will be hardly the worse for wear; that colourless marble skin
will be hardly less smoothly polished than it is now. At forty Esther
(if she live so long) will have cried and laughed, and fretted and
teased herself into a mere shadow of her present self.

Every one's letters at Felton are put on their plate for them. As
Esther takes her seat, she perceives that there is one for her--one
directed in a scrawling, schoolboy hand. The blood rushes to her face,
as it does to a turkeycock's wattles when he is excited or angry, and
she thrusts it hastily into her pocket. To her guilty imagination it
seems that written all over it, in big red letters, legible to every
eye, is, "From Bob Brandon, Esther Craven's lover." As her eyes lift
themselves shyly, to see whether St. John is observing her, they meet
his, looking at her curiously, interestedly, puzzledly.

"We allow people to read their letters at breakfast here," he says,
with a friendly smile; "we are not particular as to manners, as I dare
say you have found out by this time."

"Oh! thanks, I'm in no hurry; it's of no consequence--it will keep,"
answers Esther, disjointedly, with would-be indifference, and the
turkeycock hue spreading to the edge of her white gown.

The morning hours at Felton are not exciting. Sir Thomas is building
a new orchid house, and spends much of his time standing over the
bricklayers, like an Egyptian overseer, telling them with his usual
courteous candour how much more he knows about their trade than they
themselves do, who have been at it all their lives. St. John disappears
too, and Constance and Esther are left _tête-à-tête_.

Esther has plenty of time to read Bob's letter, and to understand it,
which latter requires some ingenuity, as, from the greater rapidity of
his thoughts than of his pen, he omits most of the little words--_tos_
and _ands_ and _whichs_ and _whos_ and _hes_ and _shes_. There is a
good deal about his mother in it: several messages from her; a great
many questions as to what Mr. Gerard was like, with solemn adjurations
to answer them; a sheet devoted to the exposition of the luxury in
which it is possible to live on £300 a year; and, lastly, a sentence
or two as to his great loneliness, and his eager longing to have his
darling Esther back again--not much on that head, as if he were afraid
of marring her enjoyment by intruding upon her the picture of his own
disconsolateness. It was not an eloquent letter; in fact, it was rather
a stupid one, and had evidently been written with a very nasty scratchy
pen; but for all that it was a nice one, and so Esther felt, and wished
that it had been less so.

Bob is a dear fellow; and, no doubt, when she goes back to
Glan-yr-Afon, she will be very glad to see him, and be very fond of
him; but, for the present, she would like to forget him altogether--to
have a holiday from him: he seems to come in incongruously now somehow.

"Where's St. John?" grunts miladi, who makes her appearance towards
luncheon time, from the arm-chair which is witness to so many gentle
dozes on her part.

Miladi likes St. John; he is very good to her, and often stands in the
breach between her and Sir Thomas.

"Vanished," answers Miss Blessington, in her slow, sweet drawl. "I
think Miss Craven must have frightened him away."

It is very pleasant, is not it? when you think you have been making a
highly favourable impression on a person, to hear that they have fled
before you in abject fear.

"I had no idea that he was such a timid fawn," answers Essie, nettled.

"He is very peculiar," says Constance, her white fingers flying
swiftly in and out among the coloured silks of the smoking cap she is
embroidering; "and has a most unfortunate shrinking from strangers."

"The greatest friends must have been strangers once," objects Essie,
feeling rather small.

"Quite true, so they must; but he is so very _difficile_, we never can
get him to admire any one--can we, aunt?"

But "aunt" has fallen sweetly asleep.

"With the exception of two or three fortunate blondes--I prefer dark
people myself infinitely, don't you?"

"Infinitely," replies Esther, with emphasis.

It is not true--she does nothing of the kind; but, after all, what is
truth in comparison of the discomfiture of an adversary?




CHAPTER X.


Luncheon comes, but no St. John. After luncheon Sir Thomas, Miss
Blessington, and Miss Craven go out riding. Miss Craven's knowledge
of horsemanship is confined to her exploits on a small, shaggy,
down-hearted Welsh pony, concerning whom it would be difficult to
predicate which he was fullest of, years or grass. Miss Blessington has
lent her an old habit; it is much too big in the waist and shoulders
for her, but a well-made garment always manages to adapt itself more or
less to any figure, and she does not look amiss in it. It is a matter
of very little consequence to her at the present moment how she looks;
she is the arrantest coward in Christendom, and her heart sinks down to
the bottom of her boots as she sees three horses that look unnaturally
tall and depressingly cheerful issue through the great folding-doors
that open into the stable-yard.

"Oh, Sir Thomas! it is a chesnut, is it? Don't they say that chesnuts
always have very uncertain tempers? Oh! please--I'm rather frightened.
I think, if you don't mind, I'd almost as soon----"

"Fiddlesticks!" answers Sir Thomas, roughly. "Cannot have my horses
saddled and unsaddled every half-hour because you don't know your own
mind. God bless my soul, child! Don't look as if you were going to be
hanged! Why, you might ride her with a bit of worsted. Here, Simpson,
look sharp, and put Miss Craven up."

After two abortive attempts, in the first of which she springs short,
and glides ignobly to earth again, and in the second takes a bound that
goes near to carrying her clean over her steed, after having given
Simpson a kick in the face, and torn a hole in her borrowed habit, Miss
Craven is at length settled in her seat.

It is a hot afternoon; after all, I think that miladi has the best of
it, sitting in a garden-chair under a tulip tree, eating apricots.
The deer, with dappled sides and heavy-horned heads, are herding
about the rough, knotted feet of the great trees that stand here and
there in solitary kingship about the park. They spread their ancient,
outstretched arms between earth and heaven, and man and beast rejoice
in the shade thereof. The dust lies a hand-breadth thick upon the road;
the nuts in the hedgerow, the half-ripe blackberries, the rag-wort in
the grass--all merge their distinctive colours in one dirty-white mask.

"Is she going to kick, do you think?" asks Esther, in a mysterious
whisper of Miss Blessington, across Sir Thomas. "Does not it mean that
when they put their ears back?"

"I don't think you need be alarmed," answers Constance, with
politely-veiled contempt; "it is only the flies that tease her."

The animal that inspires such alarm in Esther's mind, is a slight,
showy thing, nearly thoroughbred; a capital lady's park hack. It is
quiet enough, only that the quietness of a young, oats-fed mare, and
of an antediluvian Welsh pony blown out with grass, are two different
things. She is sidling along now, half across the road, coquetting with
her own shadow.

"Oh, Sir Thomas!" (in an agonised voice) "why does not she walk
straight? Why does she go like a crab?"

"Pooh!" answers Sir Thomas, in his hard, loud voice; "it's only play!"

"If I'm upset, I don't much care whether it is in play or earnest,"
rejoins Esther, ruefully.

The glare from the road, the dust and the midges, make people keep
their eyes closed as nearly as they can: so that it is not till they
are close upon him that they perceive that the man who is dawdling
along to meet them on a stout, grey cob, with his hat and coat and
whiskers nearly as white as any miller's, is St. John. He looks rather
annoyed at the rencontre.

"I have been over to Melford, Sir Thomas, to see that pointer of
Burleigh's. It will not do at all; it's not half broken."

"You had better turn back with us, St. John," suggests Constance,
graciously.

"No, thanks; much too hot!"

"_Au revoir_, then," nodding her head and her tall hat, and about a
million flies that are promenading on it, gracefully.

Esther's fears vanish.

"Three is no company," she says in a low voice, and making rather a
plaintive little face as he passes her.

Drawn by the magnet that has succeeded in drawing to itself most things
that it wished--viz., a woman's inviting eyes--he turns the cob's head
sharp round.

"But four is," he answers, with an eager smile, putting his horse
alongside of hers.

She was rather compunctious the moment she had said it. It is reversing
the order of things--the woman after the man; "the haystack after the
cow;" as the homely old proverb says.

The road is broad, and for a little while they all four jog on abreast,
as in a Roman chariot-race or a city omnibus--rather a dreary squadron.

"This is very dull," thinks Esther. "Oh! if I could lose my
handkerchief, or my veil, or my gloves! Why cannot I drop my whip?"

No sooner said than done.

"Oh! Mr. Gerard, I am so sorry, I have dropped my whip!"

Mr. Gerard, of course, dismounts and picks it up; Sir Thomas and his
ward pass on.

"What a happy thought that was of yours!" says St. John, wiping the
little delicate switch before giving it back to her.

"_Happy thought!_ What do you mean?" (reddening).

"Oh! it was accident, was it? I quite thought you had dropped it on
purpose, and was lost in admiration of your ingenuity."

He looks at her searchingly as he speaks.

"I _did_ drop it on purpose," she answers, blushing painfully. "Why do
you make me tell the truth, when I did not mean to do so?"

"Don't you always tell truth?" (a little anxiously).

"Does anybody?"

"I hope so. A few men do, I think."

"As I have no pretensions to being a man, you cannot be surprised that
my veracity is not my strongest point."

"You are only joking" (looking at her with uneasy intentness). "Please
reassure me, by saying that you do not tell any greater number of fibs
than every one is compelled to contribute towards the carrying on of
society."

"Perhaps I do, and perhaps I do not."

He looks only half-satisfied with this oracular evasion; but does not
press the point farther.

"It is not often that my papa and I take the air together; we think we
have almost enough of each other's society in-doors."

"He is your father," says Esther, rather snappishly; a little out of
humour with him for having put her out of conceit with herself.

"I never could see what claim to respect that was," answers he,
gravely; "on the contrary I think that one's parents ought to apologise
to one for bringing one, without asking one's leave, into such a
disagreeable place as this world is."

"Disagreeable!" cries Esther, turning her eyes, broad open, in childish
wonder upon him. "Disagreeable to _you!_ Young and----"

"Beautiful, were you going to say?"

"No, certainly not----and with plenty of money to make it pleasant?"

"But I have not plenty of money. I _shall_ have, probably, when I'm too
old to care about it! _he_ is good for thirty years more, you know,"
nodding respectfully at Sir Thomas's broad, blue back.

"It _must_ be tiring, waiting for dead men's shoes," says Esther, a
little sardonically.

"_Tiring!_ I believe you," says St. John, energetically; "it is worse
than tiring--it is degrading. Do you suppose I do not think my own life
quite as contemptible as you can? Take my word for it" (emphasising
every syllable), "there is no class of men in England so much to be
pitied as heirs to properties. We cannot dig; to beg we are ashamed."

"I never was heir to anything, so I cannot tell."

"I should have been a happier fellow, and worth something then,
perhaps, if I had been somebody's tenth son, and had had to earn my
bread quill-driving, or soap-boiling, or sawbones-ing. I think I see
myself pounding away at a pestle and mortar in the surgery" (laughing).
"I should have had a chance, then, of being liked for myself too, even
if I did smell rather of pills and plaister; whereas now, if anybody
looks pleasant at me, or says anything civil to me, I always think it
is for love of Felton, not of me."

"You should go about _incognito_, like the Lord of Burleigh."

"He was but a landscape painter, you know. Do you know that once,
not a very many years ago, I had a ridiculous notion in my head that
one ought to try and do some little good in the world? Thanks to Sir
Thomas's assistance and example, I have very nearly succeeded in
getting rid of that chimera. If I am asked at the Last Day how I have
spent my life, I can say, I have shot a few bears in Norway, and a
good many turkeys and grebe in Albania; I have killed several salmon
in Connemara: I have made a fool of myself once, and a beast of myself
many times."

"How did you make a fool of yourself?" pricking up her ears.

"Oh! never mind; it is a stupid story without any point, and I have not
quite come to the pitch of dotage of telling senile anecdotes about
myself. Here, let us turn in at this gate, and take a cut across the
park: it is cooler, and we can have a nice gallop under the trees,
without coming in for the full legacy of Sir Thomas's and Conny's dust,
as we are doing now."

"But--but--is not it rather _dangerous?_" objects Esther, demurring.
"Don't they sometimes put their feet into rabbit-holes, and tumble down
and break their legs?"

"Frequently, I may almost say _invariably_," answers St. John,
laughing, and opening the gate with the handle of his whip.

The soft, springy, green turf is certainly pleasanter than the hard,
whity-brown turnpike road, and so the horses think as they break into a
brisk canter. The quick air freshens the riders' faces--comes to them
like comfortable words from Heaven to a soul in Purgatory--as they dash
along under the trees, stooping their heads every now and then to avoid
coming into contact with the great, low-spreading boughs.

Laughing, flushed, half-fright, half-enjoyment:

    "She looked so lovely as she swayed
       The rein with dainty finger-tips;
     A man had given all other bliss,
     And all his worldly worth for this--
     To waste his whole heart in one kiss
       Upon her perfect lips."

"Delicious! I'm not a bit afraid now; I bid defiance to the
rabbit-holes," she cries, with little breathless pauses between the
words.

Let no one shout before they are out of the wood. Hardly have the words
left her mouth, when all at once, at their very feet almost, from
among the seven-foot-high fern, where they have been crouching, rise
a score of deer with sudden rustling; and, their slender knees bent,
spring away with speedy grace through the mimic forest. Esther's mare,
frightened at the sudden apparition (many horses are afraid of deer),
swerves violently to the left; then gets her head down, and sets to
kicking as if she would kick herself out of her skin.

"Mind! Take care! Hold tight! Keep her head up!" shouts St. John, in an
agony.

Next moment the chesnut, with head in the air, nostrils extended, and
bridle swinging to and fro against her fore legs, tears riderless past
him. In a second he is off, and at the side of the heap of blue cloth
that is lying motionless among the buttercups.

"I'm not dead," says the heap, raising itself, and smiling rather a
difficult smile up at him, as he leans over it or her, his burnt face
whitened with extremest fear. "Don't look so frightened!"

"Thank God!" he says, hardly above his breath, and more devoutly than
he is in the habit of saying his prayers. "When I saw you there, lying
all shapeless, I half thought--Oh!" (with a shudder) "I don't know what
I thought."

"I must be tied on next time, mustn't I?" says Essie, putting up her
hand to her head with an uncertain movement, as if she were not quite
sure of finding it there. "Oh! Mr. Gerard,"--the colour coming back
faintly to her lips and cheeks--"I _do_ hate riding! it's horribly
dangerous! quite as bad as a battle!"

"Quite!" acquiesces St. John, laughing heartily in his intense relief.
"And you are quite sure you are not hurt?"

"Quite!"

"Really?"

"Really!"

To prove how perfectly intact she is, she jumps up; but, as she does
so, her face grows slightly distorted with a look of pain, and she
sinks back on her buttercup bed.

"Not quite sure, either; I seem to have done something stupid to my
foot--turned it or twisted it."

So saying, she thrusts out from under her habit a small foot. It _is_
a small--a _very_ small--foot; but the boot in which it is cased is
country made, and about three times too big for it; so that it might
rattle in it, like a pea in a drum. Even at this affecting moment St.
John cannot repress a slight feeling of disappointment.

"I'm awfully sorry! Whereabouts does it hurt? There?" putting his
fingers gently on the slender, rounded ankle.

"Yes, a little."

"I'm awfully sorry!" (You see there is not much variety in his
laments.) "What can I do for it? gallop home as hard as I can, and make
them send the carriage?"

"With a doctor, a lawyer, and a parson in it? No, I think not."

"But you cannot sit here all night. Could you _ride_ home, do you
think?"

"On that dreadful beast?" with a horrified intonation.

"But if I lead her all the way?"

"Very well" (reluctantly); "but (brightening a little) I cannot ride
her; she is not here."

"I suppose I must be going to look after her," says St. John, dragging
himself up very unwillingly. "Brute! she is as cunning as Old Nick! And
you are sure you don't mind being left here by yourself for a minute or
two?"

"Not if there are no horses within reach," she answers, with an
innocent smile, which he carries away with him through the sunshine and
the fern and the grass.

Essie spends full half an hour pushing out, pinching in, smoothing and
stroking Miss Blessington's caved-in hat; full a quarter of an hour in
picking every grass and sedge and oxeye that grew within reach of her
destroying arm; and full another quarter in thinking what a pleasant,
manly, straightforward face St. John's is--what a thoroughly terrified
face it looked when she met it within an inch of her own nose after her
disgraceful _bouleversement_--what a much better height five feet ten
is for all practical purposes than six feet four.

At the end of the fourth quarter Mr. Gerard returns, with a fire hardly
inferior to St. Anthony's in his face; with his hair cleaving damply to
his brows, and without the mare.

"Would not let me get within half a mile of her! far too knowing!
Brute! and now she'll be sure to go and knock the saddle to pieces, and
then there'll be the devil to pay!"

"I'm so sorry," says Esther, looking up sympathisingly, with her lap
full of decapitated oxeyes.

"So am I, for your sake: you'll have to ride the cob home."

"I shall have to turn into a man, then," she says, glancing rather
doubtfully at the male saddle.

"No, you won't," (laughing).

He rises, and unfastens the cob from the tree-branch to which he has
been tied. He has been indulging a naturally greedy disposition--biting
off leaves and eating them--until he has made his bit and his mouth as
green as green peas.

"You must let me put you up, I think," says Gerard bending down and
looking into his companion's great, sweet eyes, under the rim of her
battered, intoxicating-looking hat.

"Must I?" (lowering her eyelids shyly.)

"Yes; do you mind much?"

"No--o."

He stoops and lifts her gently. He is not a Samson or a prize-fighter,
and well grown young women of seventeen are not generally
feather-weights; but yet it seems to him that the second occupied in
raising her from the ground and placing her in the saddle was shorter
than other seconds.

A man's arms are not sticks or bits of iron, that they can hold a
beautiful woman without feeling it. St. John's blood is giving little
quick throbs of pleasure. His arms seem to feel the pressure of that
pleasant burden long after they have been emptied of it.

"I think you must let me hold you," he says, gently and very
respectfully passing his arm round her waist.

"No, no!" she cries, hastily, pulling herself away--"no need!--no need
at all! I shall not fall."

She feels an overpowering shrinking from the enforced, unavoidable
familiarity. It does not arise from any distaste for St. John
certainly, nor yet from any quixotic loyalty to Bob; it springs from a
new, unknown, uncomprehended shyness.

"Very well," he answers, quietly, releasing her instantly, and taking
the bridle in his hand. "But I'm afraid you will find that you are
mistaken."

They set forward across the park, at a foot's pace and in silence.
Esther twists her hands in the cob's mane, and tries to persuade
herself that pommelless pigskin does not make a slippery seat. Every
two paces she slides down an inch or so, and then recovers herself with
an awkward jerk. The sun is hot. Now and then, as the cob puts his foot
on a mole-hill, or some other slight inequality in the ground, her
ankle bumps against the saddle-flap. She feels turning giddy and sick
with the heat and the pain.

"Mr. Gerard! Mr. Gerard! I'm falling!" she calls out loud, stretching
out her arms to him, and clutching hold of his shoulder with a violence
and tenacity that she herself is not in the least aware of.

He is magnanimous. He does not exult over her; he does not say, "I
knew how it would be; I told you so!" He only says, in a kind, anxious
voice, and plainlier still with kind, anxious eyes, "I'm afraid you are
in great pain?" and replaces the rejected arm in its former obnoxious
position.

As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward
advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great
favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever
speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."

"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly;
"even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."

"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks,
explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance.

"Broken the mare's knees, I suppose?" cries Sir Thomas, loudly, taking
no notice whatever of Miss Craven's casualties. "Some fool's play, of
course; larking over the palings, I dare say. Well, sir, what have you
done with her? where have you left her? out with it!" (lashing himself
up into an irrational turkeycock fury.)

"Damn the mare!" answered St. John in a rage, growing rather white, and
forgetting his manners.

St. John's rages, when he does get into them, which is not very often,
are far worse ones than his papa's, and so the latter knows, and is
cowed by the first symptoms of the approach of one.

Miss Blessington looks up shocked. This _jeune personne bien élevée_
always is shocked at whatever people ought to be shocked at--Colenso,
Swinburne, skittles, &c.

"You are not much hurt, _really_, I hope?" she says, suavely, walking
along beside Esther, while Sir Thomas and his heir wrangle in the
background. "Which way did you come, and what _has_ become of your
horse?"

"We came through the park," answers Esther, holding on by her eyelids
to the cob's slippery back; "so I suppose the horse is there still. Mr.
Gerard tried to catch it, and could not."

"Through the park!" repeats Miss Blessington, with a slight smile of
superior intelligence. "Oh! I see; a short cut home! Poor St. John has
such a horror of taking a ride for riding's sake, that he always tries
to shorten his penance as much as possible!"




CHAPTER XI.


It is the 1st of September, and the seal of impending destruction is
set upon many a little plump brown bird; but ignorance is bliss, and
the little brown birds do not know it, and are walking about the turnip
ridges and amongst the stubble fields as confidently as if there were
no such man as Purdey, and no such infernal machine as a gun. St.
John and his papa go out shooting together. Sir Thomas knocks up by
luncheon time, and returns to his orchid-house, and to the goading
the bricklayers, as King Agamemnon did his fellow-chiefs, with bitter
words. Esther spends the day in her bedroom, lying in state on a sofa
with her ankle bandaged up. It hurts her acutely if she attempts to
walk on it; but if she keeps quiet, she is hardly aware of there being
anything wrong with it. It is very annoying having to play the invalid
for an ailment that is purely local when you feel in riotous health and
spirits--to have your dinner sent up to you on a tray when you are so
hungry that you could eat double your allotted portion, if it were not
that, being an invalid, you are ashamed to say so. One has a sense of
shamming, malingering.

Poor Miss Craven passes a very dull day; the red rose on one side
the window, and the travellers' joy on the other, look in and say,
"Why is this lazy child lying all day on a couch, when we and so many
other flowers have been calling to her with our voiceless voices to
come out into the breeze and shine?" A bee comes in sometimes, and
goes buzz--buzzing about, telling himself how busy he is, and that
he has no time to waste now that his honey-harvest is drawing so
near to its sweet close. The room is so still that, but for feeling
intensely alive, and not having her chin tied up, Esther might almost
imagine herself laid out previous to her interment. Now and again
Miss Blessington enters noiselessly, says "I hope you are feeling a
little easier," in her soft monotone, and then rustles gently away
again. She has provided Esther with a novel and a book of acrostics,
and thinks she has done her duty by her neighbour amply. The novel is
one written with a purpose; a dull one-sided tilt against Ritualism.
Esther never found out an acrostic in her life, and has seldom been so
completely vacant of employment as to try. She is, therefore, reduced
to spending half the day in writing to Bob--half the day! and yet when
the letter is finished it only covers three sides of a sheet. She has
written, rewritten, and re-rewritten it. All around and about her lie
half-covered, quarter-covered, whole-covered sheets, all stamped with
the seal of condemnation. Gerard is the stumbling block; his name
either will not come in at all, which looks unnatural, or else insists
on thrusting itself in every second line. This is the form in which
Miss Craven's billetdoux finally presents itself at Plas Berwyn:

      "Dear Bob,--Thanks very much for your letter; please
      put a few stops next time. I had a very disagreeable
      journey here--bushels of dust and a sick baby. This
      is a very handsome place, and they are all very kind
      to me. (H'm! are they? I don't know about that; _one_
      of them is.) Yesterday I went out riding with Sir
      Thomas and his ward (so I did; I set out with them),
      and I stupidly fell from my horse, a sort of thing
      that nobody but I would have done, and hurt my foot
      a little; but nothing to speak of. Miss Blessington,
      the ward, is remarkably handsome, but looks a great
      deal older than I do. My love to your mother, and
      thanks for her kind messages; the same to the girls.
      Tell Bessy that it is hardly worth while sending me
      'The Sinfulness of Little Sins,' as I shall have more
      time for reading when I get home again.

                               "Yours affectionately,
                                                  "E. C.

      "P. S.--Mr. Gerard is not at all good-looking; he
      seems very fond of shooting; he has been out all
      to-day."


    "The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs."

Dinner is over; nothing to look forward to but bed-time. Yah! How dull!
A knock comes at the door. Miss Blessington enters with flowers in her
hand--jessamine, heliotrope, everything that smells sweetly and not
heavily--unlike Bob's well meaning but annihilating double stocks.

"I hope you are in less pain now" (the usual formula, that comes as
regularly and frequently as the doxology in church).

"Oh yes! thanks; I'm very well" (yawning and looking woefully bored.)
"What lovely flowers!"

"St. John sent them to you" (rather shortly).

"Mr. Gerard?" (with animation, the bored look vanishing.) "How very
kind of him!"

"He always is so good-natured," answers Constance, with a cold
generality.

"It is so particularly kind of him, when he has such an overpowering
aversion for strangers," continues Essie, with a malicious twinkle in
her eyes.

Constance sweeps to the window, slightly discomfited.

"He told me to ask you whether you would like him to come and carry you
downstairs for an hour or two?" she says, in a somewhat constrained
voice; "but I daresay you would rather be left in peace up here; and I
should think that the quieter you kept your foot the better for it."

"On the contrary, I should like it of all things," cries Essie, with
perverse alacrity. "In your cheerful company downstairs, I shall be
more likely to forget my sufferings, such as they are, than all by my
dull self up here; to tell the truth, I was meditating asking your maid
to come and talk to me about haberdashery."

Outside Miss Craven's door St. John pauses, as one that is devout
hesitates on the threshold of a sanctuary. Chintz curtains rose-lined,
white-dressed toilet-table, simple valueless ornaments lying about, two
little slippers, that look as if they had been just kicked off--his eye
takes in all the details. He feels like Faust in Marguerite's chamber.
And Marguerite herself, lying careless, restful on her couch, her two
arms flung lazily upwards and backwards, to make a resting-place for
her head; the smooth elbows and shoulders gleaming warm, cream-white,
through the colder blue-white of her dress; and the up-looking face,
childish in its roundness, and blooming down--but oh! most womanish--in
the shafts of quick fire that greet him from the laughing, sleepy eyes.
Where did she learn that art of shooting? From the pigs and cabbages at
Glan-yr-Afon? From old Mrs. Brandon? From Miss Bessie? From--"Stop the
Leak?" Deponent sayeth not whence.

"_How_ good of you!" she says, with emphasis, stretching out her hand
to him, as he stands beside her sofa, looking rather fagged with his
day's work. "I had just been calculating how many hours there would
be before I could have a decent pretext for going to bed; one gets so
tired of oneself."

"Not so tired as one does of one's family," answers St. John, rather
ruefully.

"I have no family," she rejoins, simply.

"We Gerards have a particularly happy knack of rubbing each other the
wrong way," he says, rather irritably. "I am sometimes tempted to think
that we are the most unamiable family God ever put breath into."

"People always think that of their own family," answers Essie,
laughing; "they know their own little crookednesses much better than
any one else's."

"Has Miss Craven changed her mind, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington
from the doorway.

St. John starts. "Not that I know of."

He stoops, and lifts her carefully, as a thing most precious; as he
does so, a little foolish trembling passes over her, as a baby-breeze
passes over some still pool's breast, hardly troubling the sky and the
trees that lie far down in the blue mirror. Down the grand staircase he
bears her, and Constance follows to see that there is no loitering by
the way.

The morning-room at Felton (so called because the family always sit
there in the evenings) is very lofty. You have to crane your neck up
to see the stucco stalactites, faintly imitative of Staffa and Iona,
pendant from the ceiling. There are statuettes in plenty standing about
in niches and on pedestals. Venuses and Minervas and Clyties, all with
their hair very elaborately dressed, and not a stitch of clothes on.
There is a great litter of papers and magazines on the round table:
the _Justice of the Peace_, that is Sir Thomas's; the _Field_, that is
St. John's; the _Cornhill_, that is everybody's. Sir Thomas and miladi
are playing backgammon; miladi is compelled to do so every night as a
penance for her sins--four rubbers, and if _he_ wins, as she prays and
endeavours that he may, five.

"Don't take the dice up in such a hurry, miladi," he says, snappishly;
"how the deuce can I see what your throw is?"

"Seizes, Sir Thomas," responds miladi, meekly.

"Seizes! don't believe a word of it! much more like seize ace!"

Miss Blessington, dressed by Elise in Chambéry gauze, and by Nature in
her usual panoply of beautiful stupidity, which she wears sleeping and
waking, at home and abroad, living and dying, is at work at a little
table, a nude Dian, with cold, chaste smile and crinkly hair, on a red
velvet shrine just above her head.

"Do they play every evening?" asks Esther, from the recess where she
has been deposited by St. John, whose eyes she encounters, considering
her attentively over the top of the _Saturday_. Shams, Flunkeyism,
Woman's Rights, Dr. Cumming, the Girl of the Period--they have all been
passing through his eye into his brain, and, mixed with Esther Craven,
make a fine jumble there.

St. John has been rather unlucky in his experiences of women hitherto.
He has got rather into the habit of thinking that all good women must
be stupid, and that all pleasant women must be bad. Esther is not
stupid. Is she bad, then? Those glances of hers, they give a man odd
sensations about the midriff; they inspire in him a greedy, covetous
desire for more of them; but are they such as Una would have given her
Red Cross Knight? Are they such as a man would like to see his wife
bestow on his men friends? The wilder a man is or has been himself, the
more scrupulously fastidious he is about the almost prudish nicety of
the women that belong to him. He likes to see the sheep and the goats
as plainly, widely separated as they are in the parable; it moves him
to deep wrath when he sees a good woman faintly, poorly imitating a bad
one. I do not think that good women believe this half generally enough;
or, if they do, they do not act upon it.

"Do they play every evening?"

"Every evening, and Sir Thomas always accuses my mother of cheating."

"And you, what do you do?"

"Read, go to sleep, play cribbage or bézique with Conny."

"Does she live here always?"

"Always."

"You and she are inseparable, I suppose?"

"We get on very well in a quiet way; she is a very good girl, and comes
and sits in my smoking-room by the hour with me."

"Wrong, but pleasant, as the monkey said when he kissed the cat,"
remarks Esther, flippantly. "You are very fond of her, I suppose?"

"H'm!" shrugging his shoulders. "I have a cat-like propensity for
getting fond of anything that I live and eat and breathe with--like the
fellow in the Bastille, don't you know, that got so fond of a spider. I
never should have grown fond of a spider, though; they have got such a
monstrous lot of long legs; but the principle is the same."

"Why are not you fond of Sir Thomas then?"

"So I am, I suppose, _in a way;_ if he were to tumble into the pool,
I suppose I should hop in and fish him out again; I'm not quite sure
about that, either."

"We'll have another rubber, miladi?" shouts Sir Thomas's stentor voice,
elate with victory; "that is the ninth game I have beat you to-night;
you'll never win as long as you leave so many blots--I have told you so
a score of times."

Poor miladi, strangling a gigantic yawn, begins to set her men again;
she had hoped that her punishment was ended for the night, and that she
might be dismissed to the _otium cum dignitate_ of her armchair and nap.

St. John jumps up and walks over to the players; there are few things
in life he hates so much as playing backgammon with his father, but
he hates seeing his mother bullied even more. If a man is cursed with
a necessity for loving something, the chances are that he will love
his mother, even if she bear more resemblance to a porpoise than to a
Christian lady.

"I'll have a rubber with you, Sir Thomas; my mother is tired."

"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she been
doing to tire herself?--fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off
half a dozen dead roses. Very good thing for her if she is."

But the man's will is stronger than the turkey-cock's, and the latter
yields.




CHAPTER XII.


A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended.
Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's
lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of
the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents
of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful
nostrils--entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington
had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being
made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with.
Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude
for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing
solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of
mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house,
although not particularly young, and in general not particularly
gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull,
Devil; Pull, Baker!--Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by
St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain
their point.

"Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning,
addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together
after breakfast.

"I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?"

"Well!"

"If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her
usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well----"

"I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he
answers, picking up the _Pall Mall_.

"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.

"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon
than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can
'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for
imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"

"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you,
with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make
of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."

"I _am_ wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly
to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the _Pall Mall_. "There
is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is
there?"

She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of
being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.

"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished,
like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to
get well'--what then?"

"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think
that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs
than by being continually moved from place to place; _that_ is what I
was going to say."

"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs
with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her
limbs."

Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.

"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually
carrying her about the house."

"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."

"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in
your arms."

"What a horribly immoral picture--vice stalking rampant through the
Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that
cannot carry herself!"

"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her
former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her--to be haled about like
a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her
brother, I grant you, it would be different."

"If I were her brother it _would_ be different," assents Gerard,
blandly.

The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation,
it is made exactly to contradict itself.

"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure
that it is not mistaken kindness."

"That _what_ is not mistaken kindness?"

"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."

"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening
to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities,
and explain; I am all attention."

"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts,
with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her
original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken
up and dropped again----"

"Like a hot chesnut!"

"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."

"Hardly."

"And when you drop her----"

"Literally or metaphorically?--on the stone floor, or out of the light
of my favour?"

"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)----

"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his
face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her--"To be
dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex
has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive
voice of the verb to drop."

"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that _is_ the pride that apes
humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely
to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no
attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when
you drop her----"

"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and
of the repetition of the phrase--"she will be no worse off than she was
before that misfortune happened to her."

So Esther lies all day long in lazy contentment upon the sofa, looking
out at the garden, and at the fountain where four bronze dolphins
spout continual showers of spray in the autumn sunlight; dips into
Owen Meredith's last poems; peeps between the crisp uncut leaves of
new magazine or novel; and looks forward towards the ante-dinner hour,
when St. John will come in from the day's amusement or occupation, and
passive content will be exchanged for active enjoyment.

Esther has, as you know, made but light of her accident in her letters
to her lover; fearing lest, in his eager anxiety on her account, he
might get into the train, and give her the unexpected pleasure of
seeing him arrive at Felton--seeing him arrive in his threadbare
shooting jacket, through whose sleeves he always appears to have thrust
his long arms too far, and his patched, creaking, Naullan boots.
Imagine St. John introduced to those boots! A cold shiver runs down her
spine at the bare idea. St. John is no dandy, it is true, but coats
from Poole's are as much a matter of course to him as a knife and fork
to eat his dinner with, or a bed to lie upon.

On the afternoon of the day on which the above-reported short dialogue
took place, St. John and his father, converging from different points
of the compass to one centre, enter almost at the same moment the
library. Two canary-coloured Colossi have just deposited tea on a small
table. St. John has neither neckerchief nor collar; his brown throat is
bared in a _négligé_ as becoming to most men as the _à quatre épingles_
exactitude of their park get-up is unbecoming.

A man in the loose carelessness of his every-day country clothes is a
man: in the prim tightness of his Pall Mall toilette he is a little,
stiff, jointless figure out of Noah's ark.

"Slops again!" says Paterfamilias, very gruffly. "I never come into
this room at any hour of the day or night without finding you women
drinking tea! Why on earth, if you are thirsty, cannot you drink beer
or water, instead of ruining your insides with all that wash?"

At this courteous speech a silence falls on the company. Sir Thomas
mostly brings silence with him; he is half-conscious that at his entry
voices are choked and laughter quenched, and it serves to exasperate
him the more.

"You sit with your knees into the fire in air-tight rooms all day
long," pursues he, in his loud, hectoring voice, "and destroy your
digestions with gallons of hot tea, and then you are surprised at
having tallow in your cheeks, instead of lilies and roses, as your
grandmothers had!"

"Perhaps," says St. John, drily, "the ladies deny the justice of your
conclusions; Sir Thomas; perhaps they do not own the soft impeachment
of tallowy cheeks which you so gallantly ascribe to them."

As he speaks, his eyes involuntarily rest on the clear, rose brilliance
of the young stranger's happy, beautiful child-face.

"I don't mind being called 'tallow face,'" says Esther, with a low
laugh--"Juliet was; her father said to her, 'Out, you baggage! you
tallow face!'"

"He must have been an ancestor of Sir Thomas's in direct male line,
must not he?" says the young man, gaily stooping over her and
whispering.

Seeing them so familiarly and joyously whisper together, Constance
looks up with an air of astonished displeasure, which Gerard
perceiving, instantly turns towards her.

"What are you making, Conny?"

"Braces."

"For me, no doubt? With your usual thoughtfulness, you recollected
that my birthday falls next week, and you were preparing a little
surprise for me. Well, never mind; though I have made the discovery
rather prematurely, I'll be as much surprised as ever when the day of
presentation arrives."

"They are not for you, St. John; they are for the bazaar."

"The bazaar!" he repeats, a little testily. "For the last month all
your thoughts have tended bazaarwards; you neither eat, nor sleep, nor
speak, nor hear, nor smell, without some reference to the bazaar."

"Bazaar! Humbug!" growls Sir Thomas, rising and walking towards the
door. "A parcel of idle women getting together to sell trash and make
asses of themselves!"

Then he goes out, and bangs the door.

"I would not for worlds have given him the satisfaction of agreeing
with him while he was in the room," says St. John, insensibly speaking
in a louder key now that the autocrat before whom all voices sink
has removed himself; "but, for once in my life, I must confess to
coinciding in opinion with aged P.: to be pestered with unfeminine,
unladylik

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