Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

"I was not bored," she answers, simply; "I was quite happy. You see I did not know who was who, and I amused myself pairing the people: I find that I paired them all wrong, though."

"Gave every man his neighbour's wife, did you? I dare say that some of them would not have objected to the arrangement."

"I married that old man" (indicating with the slightest possible motion of her head the persons alluded to) "to that old woman; I wish it was not ill-manners to point. They both looked so red and pursy and consequential, as if they had been telling each other for the last thirty years what swells they were!"

"Which old man to which old woman? Oh! I see."

"They are rather like one another, too," she continues, gravely; "and you know people say that, however unlike they may be at starting, merely by dint of living together, man and wife grow alike."

"Do they?" he says, a transient thought flashing through his mind as to whether, after twenty years of wedlock, that blooming peach face would have gained any likeness to his hard, mahogany one. "But how did you find out your mistake?"

"He put down her cup for her so politely just now, that I knew he could not be her husband."

He looks amused. "You are rather young to be so severe upon wedded bliss."

"Was I severe?" she asks, naïvely; "I did not know it; but, you know, a man may be fond of his wife, may be kind to her, but can hardly be said to be polite: politeness implies distance."

"Does it?" he says, involuntarily drawing his chair closer to hers, and leaning forward under pretence of looking at the flowers that make a scarlet fire in her hair. "By-the-by, how does the gum answer?"

She forgets to reply to his harmless question, while her eyes fall troubled, half-frightened: the eyes that cannot, without a theft upon a third person, give him back his tender looks – the eyes in whose pupils Brandon is to see himself reflected for the next forty, fifty, sixty years.

There is a little stir and flutter among the company: Belinda Denzil moving to the piano; a music-stool screwed up and down; gloves taken off; then a polite hush, infringed only by a country gentleman in the distance saying something rather loud about guano, while Belinda informs her assembled friends in a faint soprano that "He will return; she knows he will." She has made the same asseveration any time the last ten years; but he has not returned yet, and her relatives begin to be afraid that he never will.

During the song Gerard falls into a reverie. At the end, coming out of it, he asks with an abrupt change of subject: "What did you say the name of your place was?"

"Glan-yr-Afon."

"Glan Ravvon?" (following her pronunciation.)

"Yes; you would never guess that it was sounded Glan Ravvon if you were to see it written: it is spelt quite differently."

"What does it mean? or does it mean anything?"

"It means 'Bank of the River;' so called, because it is not near the bank of any river."

"What part of the world is it in? – Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or the Polynesian Islands?"

"It is three miles from Naullan, if you are any the wiser."

"Naullan! Naullan!" he repeats, as if trying to overtake a recollection that eludes him. "Of course it does: why I was at Naullan once."

"Were you?" (eagerly.) "When?"

"Two years ago; no, three. I was staying in the neighbourhood with some people for fishing. No doubt you know them – the Fitz-Maurices?"

Esther's countenance falls a little. "I – I – have heard of them," she says, uncertainly.

"Why, they must be neighbours of yours."

"They are rather beyond a drive, I think," she replies, doubtfully.

"If you are three miles from Naullan, and they are only four, I don't see how that can be."

She does not answer for a moment, but only furls and unfurls her fan uneasily; then, looking up with a sudden, honest impulse, speaks, colouring up to the eyes the while. "Why should I be ashamed of what there is no reason to be ashamed of? They are within calling distance, and I do know them in a way; that is to say, Lady Fitz-Maurice bows to me whenever she recollects that she knows me; but, you see, they are great people, and we are small ones."

He looks thoroughly annoyed. The idea that the woman of his choice is by her own confession not exactly on his own level, grates upon his pride.

"Nonsense!" he says, brusquely, "one gentleman is as good as another, all the world over; and it must be the same with ladies."

"St. John, you are wanted to make up a rubber," interrupts Constance, sweeping up to them, resplendent but severe, in green satin and seaweed, like a nineteenth century Nereid, if such an anachronism could exist.

"Am I?" looking rather sulky, and not offering to move.

"We have got one already, but Sir Charles and Mrs. Annesley wish for another.'

"Let them play double-dummy!" settling himself resolutely in his chair, and looking defiantly at her out of his quick, cross eyes.

"Absurd!"

"If you are so anxious to oblige them, why cannot you take a hand yourself?"

"You know how I detest cards!"

"And you know how I detest Mrs. Annesley." (Mrs. Annesley is the vulture of Esther's lively imagination.)

Too dignified to descend to wrangling, Miss Blessington desists, and moves away, casting only one small glance of suppressed resentment at the innocent cause of Mr. Gerard's contumacy.

"How could you be so disobliging?" cries Esther, reproachfully, in childish irritation with him at having drawn her into undeserved disgrace.

"Why shouldn't I?" he asks, placidly. "Believe me, it is the worst plan possible to encourage the idea that you are good-natured among your own people; it subjects you to endless impositions. For the last thirty years I have been struggling to establish a character for never doing what I am asked; would you have me undo all my work at one blow?"

"St. John is impracticable," says Constance, returning from her fruitless quest, and stooping over the card-table her golden head and the sea-tang twisted with careless care about it. "You must accept of me as his substitute, please; he is good-naturedly devoting himself to my little friend. Did you happen to notice her, Lady Bolton? She is really looking quite pretty to-night. She does not know anybody, poor child! and he was afraid she might feel neglected."

CHAPTER XV

The world's life is shorter by a fortnight than it was on that last day I told you of, and during that fortnight the ordinary amount of things have happened. The usual number of people have had their bodies knocked to atoms and their souls into eternity by express trains; the usual number of men and maids have come together in the Times column in holy matrimony; and the usual number of unwelcome babies have been consigned to the canals. A great many players have laid down their cards, risen up, and gone away from the game of life; but whether winners or losers, they tell us not, neither shall we know awhile; and other players have taken their places, and have sat down with the zest of ignorance.

"Nature takes no notice of those that are coming or going."

She is briskly occupied at her old business – the business that seems to us so purposeless, progressless, bootless – the making only to unmake; the beautifying only to make hideous; the magnifying only to debase. Oh life! life! Oh clueless labyrinth! Oh answerless riddle!

September is waning mellowly into death, like a holy man to whom an easy passage has been vouchsafed; the land has been noisy with guns, and many partridges have been turned into small bundles of ruffled feathers – little round, brown corpses. Bob Brandon walks stoutly up the furzy hill sides and along the stony levels after the shy, scarce birds; he is out and about all day, but you do not hear him whistling or humming so often as you used to do. "He goeth heavily, as one that mourneth." The fortnight is past, and yet another week, and still Esther holds no speech of returning; her letters have waxed fewer, shorter, colder. Since that first one, mention of Gerard's name is there in them none. Bob is not of a suspicious nature, but he can add two and two together. He has been doing that little dreary sum all the last ten days, till his head aches. But though he can do this sum himself, he will not suffer any one else to do it – at least in his presence.

One day at dinner, when Bessy was beginning a little sour adaptation of the text, "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye," &c., to Esther, he interrupted her with downright outspoken anger and rebuke; and, though he apologised to her afterwards, and begged her pardon for having spoken rudely to her, yet she felt that that theme must not be dealt with again. He had promised to love her always in all loyalty, and whether she were loyal or disloyal to him made no difference. He will let no man, woman, or child speak evil of her in his hearing:

"… love is not loveThat alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove."

Jack Craven, too, is beginning to wonder a little when Esther is going to return to the old farmhouse – beginning to feel rather lonely as he sits by himself on the window-ledge of an evening, smoking his pipe, with no one to take it out of his mouth now, and thinking on his unpaid for steam ploughs and sterile mountain-fields, with no one to speak comfortably to him, or console him with sweet illogical logic.

"All is not gold that glitters." Care gets up behind the man, however fine a horse he may be riding. Care is sitting en croupe behind Miss Craven, and she cannot unseat him. It strikes her sometimes with a shock of fear that she is succeeding too well; that the admiration and liking and love she had hankered so greedily after, had striven unfairly for, had made wicked lightnings from her eyes to obtain, was ready to be poured out lavishly, eagerly, honestly at her feet, and she dare not put out a finger to take them up. She had been walking miles and miles of nights, up and down her bedroom, from door to window, from window to door, when all the rest of the house are abed and asleep.

"What shall I do? – what shall I do?" she cries out to her own heart, while her hands clasp one another hotly, and the candles, so tall at dressing time, burn short and low. "Oh! if I had some one to advise me! – not that I would take their advice, if it were to give up St. John! Give him up! How can I give up what I have not got? Oh Bob, Bob, if you only knew how I hate you! – Only less than I hate myself! Oh! why was not my tongue cut out before that unlucky day when I said I would try to like you? Try, indeed! If there is need for trying, one may know how the trial will end. Shall I tell St. John? What! volunteer an unasked confession? Warn him off Robert's territory when he is not thinking of trespassing? And if I were to tell him – oh Heaven! I had sooner put my hand into a lion's mouth – what would he think of me? He, with his fastidious, strict ideas of what a woman should be and do and look? Shall I write and ask Bob to let me off? It would not break his heart; he is too good; only bad people ever break their hearts, as I shall do some day, I dare say. Oh! poor Bob, how badly I am treating you! Poor Bob! and his yellow roses that St. John made such fun of! How I wish that the thoughts of your long legs and your little sour Puritan sisters did not make me feel so sick! Oh! if you would but be good enough to jilt me! What shall I do? – what shall I do? Wait, wait, go on waiting for what will never come, probably, and when I have degraded myself by waiting till hope is quite dead, go back whence I came, and jig-jog through life alongside of Bob in a poke bonnet like his mamma's. Ah Jack, Jack! why did I ever leave you? How I wish that all Bobs and St. Johns and other worries were at the bottom of the Red Sea, and you and I king and queen of some desert island, where there was nothing nearer humanity than monkeys and macaws, and where there was no rent nor workmen's wages nor lovers to torment us!"

One must go to bed at some time or other, however puzzled and pondering one may be; and in furtherance of this end, Esther, having reached this turn in her reflections, begins to undress. In so doing she misses a locket containing Jack's picture, which she always wears round her neck. She must have dropped it downstairs, where perhaps some housemaid's clumsy foot may tread upon it, and mar the dear, ugly young face within. She must go and look for it, though the clock is striking one. She takes up her candle, and runs lightly downstairs. The gas is out. Great shadows from behind come up alongside, and then stretch ahead of her; the statues glimmer ghostly chill from their dark pedestals. With a shock of frightened surprise she sees a stream of light issuing through the half-open door of the morning-room. Is it burglars, or are the flowers giving a ball, as in Andersen's fair, fanciful tale? She creeps gently up, and peeps in. The lamp still burns on the centre table, and pacing up and down, up and down, as she has been doing overhead, is a man buried in deepest thought. Fear gives place to a great, pleasant shyness. "I – I – I have lost my locket," she stammers.

He gives a tremendous start. "You up still!" he says, in astonishment. "Lost your locket, have you? Oh! by-the-by, I found it just now; here it is. Do you know (with a smile) I could not resist the temptation of looking to see who you had got inside it. Are you very angry?"

"Very!" she answers, drooping her eyes under his. She could sit and stare into Bob's eyes by the hour together, if she liked, only that it would be rather a dull amusement; with St. John it is different.

"Don't go; stay and talk a minute. It is so pleasant to think that we are the only conscious, sentient beings in the house – all the others sleeping like so many pigs," he says, coming over to her with an excited look on his face, such as calm, slow-pulsed English gentlemen are not wont to wear.

"No, no, I cannot – I must not."

She has taken the bracelets off her arms, and the rose from her hair: there she stands in her ripe, fresh beauty, with only the night and St. John to look at her.

"Five minutes," he says, with pleading humility, but putting his back against the door as he speaks.

"If you prevent my going, of course I cannot help myself," she answers, putting on a little air of offended dignity to hide her tremulous embarrassment.

"Don't be offended! Do you know" (leaving his post of defence to follow her) – "do you know what I have been doing ever since you went —not to bed apparently?"

"Drinking brandy and soda-water, probably" (looking rather surly, and affecting to yawn).

"That would have been hardly worth mentioning. I have been wondering whether my luck is on the turn. I have been da – I mean very unlucky all my life. I never put any money on a horse that he was not sure to be nowhere. Luck does turn, sometimes, doesn't it? Do you think mine is turning?"

"How can I tell?"

"You don't ask in what way I have been so unlucky. Why don't you? Have you no curiosity?"

"I never like to seem inquisitive," answers Esther, coldly, hoping that he does not notice how the white hands that lie on her lap are trembling.

"Do you recollect my telling you that I had made a great fool of myself once?"

"Yes."

"Do you care to hear about it, or do you not?" pulling at his drooping moustache, in some irritation at her feigned indifference.

"Yes, I care," she answers, lighting up an eager, mobile face – fear, shyness, and the sense of the impropriety of the situation all ceding to strong curiosity.

"Well, it was about a woman, of course. Cela va sans dire; a man never can get into a scrape without a woman to help him, any more than he can be born, or learn his A B C."

"Was she handsome?" looking up, and speaking quickly.

That is always the first question a woman asks about a rival. I do not know why, I am sure, as many of the greatest mischiefs that have been done on earth have been done by ugly women. Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot squinted ferociously.

"Pretty well. She had a thundering good figure, and knew how to use her eyes. By-the-by" (with an anxious discontent in his tone), "so do you. I often wish you did not; I hate being able to trace one point of resemblance between you and her."

"Did she refuse you?" asks Esther, hastily, too anxious for the sequel of the story to think of resenting the accusation made against her eyes.

"Not she! I should not have been the one to blame her if she had; one cannot quarrel with people for their tastes. She swore she liked me better than any one else in the world; that she would go down to Erebus with me, be flayed alive for me – all the protestations usual in such cases, in fact, I suppose," he ends bitterly.

"And threw you over?" says Essie, leaning forward with lips half apart, and her breast rising and falling in short, quick undulations.

"Exactly; had meant nothing else all along. I filled only the pleasant and honourable situation of decoy duck to lure on shyer game, and when the bird was limed – such a bird, too! a great, heavy, haw-haw brute in the Carabineers, with a face like a horse – she pitched me away as coolly as you would pitch an old shoe – or as you would pitch me, I dare say, if you had the chance."

"And what did you do?" asks Essie, breathlessly, her great eyes, black as death, fastened on his face.

St. John smiles – a smile half fierce, half amused.

"Run him through the body, do you suppose? – spitted him like a lark or a woodcock? – cut out his heart and made her eat it, as the man did to his wife in that fine old Norman story? No; I could have done any of them with pleasure if I had had the chance; with all our veneering and French polish, I think the tiger is only half dead in any of us; but I did not; I did none of them: I – prepare for bathos, please – I went out hunting; it was in winter, and, as misfortunes never come singly, I staked one of the best horses I ever was outside of: that diverted the current of my grief a little, I think."

He speaks in a jeering, bantering tone, scourging himself with the rod of his own ridicule, as men are apt to do when they are conscious of having made signal asses of themselves in order to be beforehand with the world.

"And she told you she was fond of you?" ejaculates Essie, raising her sweet face, sympathetic, indignant, glowing, towards him.

"Scores of times – swore it. I suppose it is no harder to tell a lie a hundred times than once; ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. Tell me," he says, vehemently, leaning over her, and taking hold of her hand, as if hardly conscious of what he was doing – "you are a woman, you must know – tell me, is there no difference between truth and lies? have they both exactly the same face? How is a man to tell them apart?"

They are both speaking in a low key, almost under their breath, for fear of drawing down upon themselves the apparition of Sir Thomas in déshabille and a blunderbuss. Their faces are close together; she can see the lines that climate and grief and passion have drawn about his eyes and mouth – can see the wild, honest anxiety looking through his soul's clear windows.

"I – I – don't know," she answers, stammering, and shivering a little, half with fear at his vehemence, half with the strong contagion of his passion.

"Do you ever tell untruths?" he asks, hurriedly, scanning her face with anxious eyes, that try to look through the mask of fair, white flesh, and see the heart underneath. "Don't be angry with me, but I sometimes fancy that you might."

"I! what do you mean?" snatching away her hand, and the angry blood rushing headlong to her cheeks.

"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Hazael was only the first of a long string who have asked that virtuously irate question.

His countenance clears a little. "You must forgive me," he says, repentantly. "I suppose it is my own unlucky experience that has made me so suspicious; because my own day has been cloudy, I have wisely concluded upon the non-existence of the sun. But, come" (smiling a little), "one good turn deserves another: have you nothing to tell me in return for the long list of successes I have been confiding to you?"

He watches her changing, flushing, paling face, with a keen solicitude which surprises himself. What can this downy, baby-faced rustic have to confess? Now for Bob! Now is the time – now or never! Sing, oh goddess, the destructive wrath of St. John, the son of Thomas! What time, place, situation, can be suitabler for such a tale? It is an hour and a half past midnight; they love one another madly, and they are alone.

Are they alone, though? Is this one of the statues stepped down from its pedestal in the hall that is coming in at the door, severely, chilly, fair, with a candle in its hand?

"Miss Craven!" ejaculates Constance (for it is she), stopping suddenly short, while a look of surprised displeasure ripples over her calm, smooth face.

Silence for a second on the part of everybody.

"It is a pity, St. John," says Miss Blessington, drawing herself up, and looking an impersonation of rigid, aggressive, pitiless virtue, "that you and Miss Craven should choose such a very unseasonable time for your interviews; it is not a very good example for the servants, if any of them should happen to find you here."

"The servants have something better to do than to come prying and eavesdropping upon their betters," retorts St. John, flushing angry-red to the roots of his hair, and not taking the most conciliatory line of defence.

"You are mistaken if you think I have been eavesdropping," says Constance, with dignified composure, her grave face looking out chastely cold from the down-fallen veil of her yellow hair. "I could not sleep, and came down to look for a book. Pray don't let me disturb your tête-à-tête!" making a movement towards going.

"Don't be a fool, Conny!" cries St. John, hastily, in bitter fear of having compromised Esther by his ill-advised detention of her: "it is the purest accident your having found Miss Craven and me together here!"

"I am well aware of that," she answers, with a little smiling sneer.

"You know what I mean, perfectly well: it is the purest accident our being here. Miss Craven lost her locket, and – "

"And" (smiling still) – "and you have been helping her to look for it. Yes, I see. Well, I – hope you will find it. Good-night!" going out and closing the door behind her.

"What did she say? – what does she mean?" cries Essie, panting, and with a face hardly less white than her dress.

"What does it matter what she means? She's a fool!" answers St. John, wrathfully. "Go to bed, and don't think about her; who cares?"

But he looks as if he did care a good deal.

CHAPTER XVI

The weekly clearance of mundane books has been made at Plas Berwyn; the skimp drab gowns, and the ill-made frock coat, whose flaps lap over one another so painfully behind, have been endured by the Misses Brandon and their brother respectively. At church has been all the Brandon household: son and daughters, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and sheep, camel and ass. I need hardly say that the last quartette have been introduced merely for the sake of euphony, and to give a fuller rhythm to the close of the sentence. The Misses Brandon always stand as stiff as pokers during the creed, with their backs to the altar. It amuses them, and it does not do anybody else any harm, so why should not they, poor women? Bob truckles to the Scarlet Woman; he bows, and turns his honest, serious face to the east. The service is in Welsh, of which he does not understand a word. He can pick his way pretty well through the prayers, however, by the help of a Welsh and English prayer book. There are several landmarks that he knows, whose friendly faces beam upon him now and again when he is beginning to flounder hopelessly among uncouth words of seven consonants and a vowel. These are his chief finger-posts: "Gogoniant ir Tad, ac ir Mab, ac ir Yspryd Glan;" that is, "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." "Gwared ni, Arglywd daionus!" "Good Lord, deliver us!" "Na Ladratta!" "Thou shalt not steal!"