Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

He obeys, and walks on. Her dignity does not allow her to hurry her pace to overtake him, nor does his permit him to slacken his steps till she come up with him; and they walk on in single file, goose-fashion, through two fields and a half.

Dividing and watering the third field, as the four ancient rivers divided and watered the rose gardens and asphodel fields of Paradise, a little beck, with many turns and bends and doublings back upon itself, strays babbling, like a silver ribbon twisted among the meadow's green hair. It is not like the Welsh brooks, fretful and brawling, making little waterfalls and whirlpools and eddies over and about every water-worn stone; smoothly it flows on, as a holy, eventless life flows towards the broad sea whose tides wash the shores of Time. In dry weather it is slow-paced enough, and crystal clear; now the late heavy rains have quickened its current, and rolled it along, turbid and muddy. Even though swollen, however, it is still but a narrow thread, and St. John clears it at a jump.

"Shall I go on still?" he asks, with a malicious smile from the other side, addressing Esther, who stands looking down rather ruefully at the quick, brown water at her feet.

"I believe you knew of this, and brought me here on purpose to make a fool of me," she cries, reproachfully.

"I did nothing of the kind," he answers, quietly. "Last time I was here there was a plank thrown across; but you see the stream has been higher than it is now" (pointing to the drenched grass and little deposit of sticks and leaves on the bank), "and has probably carried it away."

"How am I to get over?" she asks, hopelessly, with a look of childish distress on her face.

"I'll carry you," he answers, springing back to her side; "the brook is shallower farther down; I can lift you over with the greatest ease imaginable."

"That you shan't!" answers Esther, civilly turning her back upon him.

"May I ask why?" he asks, coolly. "After the number of times I have carried you up and down stairs at Felton, you can hardly be afraid of my letting you fall?"

"The very fact of my having already had so many obligations to you makes me resolved not to add to their number," she replies, stiffly, with an effort to look dignified, which her laughing, débonnaire, seductive style of beauty renders peculiarly unsuccessful.

"If you can suggest any better plan, I shall be delighted to assist you in carrying it out," rejoins he, smothering a smile.

"I'll jump!" she says, desperately, eyeing meanwhile the hurrying stream and space between bank and bank with calculating look.

"You cannot," he cries, hastily; "you'll get a ducking as sure as I stand here. Don't be so silly!"

The word "silly" acts as a whip and spur to Essie's flagging courage. She retreats a few yards from the edge, in order to get a little run to give her a better spring.

"As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!" remarks Gerard, resignedly, quoting Mrs. Malaprop and folding his arms.

Neither the preparatory run, nor the tremendous bound she takes, avail to save Miss Craven from the fate which her obstinacy and the comparative shortness of her legs render unavoidable. She jumps short, and falls forward on the wet bank; her lavender kid gloves digging convulsively into it, and her legs disporting themselves fish-like in the brook.

He is at her side in an instant, raises gently and lifts her on to the grass, unmindful of the pollution caused to his coat by the muddy contact.

"What a fool I was!" she cries, passionately, sinking down among a grove of huge burdock leaves, smothered in shame and angry blushes.

St. John thinks it rude to disagree with her, so holds his peace.

"Why don't you laugh at me? why don't you jeer me?" she continues, vehemently; "why don't you tell me you are very glad of it, and that I richly deserve it, as I see you are longing to do? Anything would be better than standing there like a stock or a stone!"

"It is not of much consequence how I stand or how I look," he replies, coldly. "It would be more to the purpose to know how you are to get home!"

"I will walk as I am," she cries impulsively, springing to her feet; "it will be a fit penance for my idiocy, and you shall go on ahead. I don't want you to be disgraced by being seen in company with such an object."

"That is very probable, isn't it?" he answers, laughing good-humouredly. "No, I have a better proposition than that, I think. It has just occurred to me that an old servant of ours lives at no great distance from here, her cottage is not more than three or four fields off. If you can manage to get there she would dry your clothes for you in a minute."

Rendered docile by her late disaster, feeling very small, and hanging her head, Esther acquiesces. Her gown, from which every particle of starch or stiffness has fled, clings to her limbs and defines their form; the water drips down from her in a thousand little spouts and rivulets: bang, bang, go her soaked petticoats against her ankles at every step she takes.

"You have had almost enough of taking me out to walk, I expect," she remarks presently, rather grimly.

"You have had almost enough of jumping brooks, I expect," he retorts, drily; and then they walk on in silence till they reach a little whitewashed cottage, with its slip of potato ground and plot of pinks and marigolds and lark-spurs – an oasis of tilled ground among the wilderness of pasturage.

St. John knocks at the half-open door and puts his head in. "Are you at home, Mrs. Brown? How are you?" says he, in that frank, friendly voice that goes far to make the Felton tenants wish that Sir St. John reigned in Sir Thomas's stead.

"Quite well, thank you, Mr. St. John; I hope I see you the same," replies the person addressed, coming to the door with a jolly red face and a voluminous widow's cap that contradict one another; "it's a long time since we've seen you come our way."

"So it is, Mrs. Brown; but, you see, I have been after the partridges."

"And Sir Thomas, I hope he keeps pretty well, Mr. St. John?"

"Yes, thanks."

"And Miladi, I hope she has her health."

"Yes, thanks."

"And Miss Bl – ?"

"Yes, thanks," interrupts St. John, rather impatiently, breaking through the thread of her interrogatories. "Do you see, Mrs. Brown, that this young lady has met with an accident: she has tumbled into the brook. Do you think you could let her dry herself at your fire a bit?"

"Eh dear, Miss, you are in a mess!" ejaculates Mrs. Brown, walking round Esther, and surveying her curiously, as she stands close behind Gerard, dripping still, with a hang-dog air and chattering teeth. "Why, you have not a dry stitch upon you; you are one mask of mud! Would you please to step in?"

Mrs. Brown and Essie retire into an inner chamber for the purpose of removing the wet clothes and replacing them temporarily with some of the contents of Mrs. Brown's wardrobe.

St. John remains in the outer room, looks at the clock, behind whose dial-plate a round china-moon-face peeps out; takes up the mugs on the dresser: "For a Good Boy," "A Keepsake from Melford," "A Present from Manchester," hiding amongst numberless gilt flourishes; chivies the tabby cat; counts the flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters; walks to the door, and watches the bees crawling in and out of the low door of their straw houses, and the maroon velvet nasturtiums trailing along the borders, and lifting their round leaves and dark faces up to the knees of the standard rose.

As he so stands, whistling softly and musing, some one joins him in the doorway. He turns and beholds Esther, bashful, shame-faced, metamorphosed. To Mrs. Brown's surprise, she has declined the magnanimous offer of her best black silk. There is nothing coquettish or picturesque, as she is aware, about an ill-made dress that tries to follow the fashion and fails – destined, too, for a woman treble her size. She has chosen in preference, a short, dark, linsey petticoat and lilac cotton bedgown, which, by its looseness, can adapt itself to the round slenderness of her tall, lissom figure. Her bonnet was not included in the ruin of her other garments, but she has taken it off, as destructive to the harmony of her costume.

St. John surveys her for some moments: looks upward from petticoat to bedgown, and downward from bedgown to petticoat, but observes a discreet silence.

"Does it become me?" she asks at last, with shy vanity. "Why do not you say something?"

"I have been so unlucky in two or three of my remarks lately," replies he, with a concluding glance at the round, bare arms that emerge whitely from the short cotton sleeves, "that I have become chary of making any more."

"You need not be afraid of offending me by telling me that it is unbecoming," she says, gravely – "quite the contrary!" – she continues rather discontentedly – "think that it suits me too well, as if it were a dress that I ought to have been born to. Upon Miss Blessington now such a costume would look utterly incongruous."

St. John bursts out laughing. "A goddess in a bedgown! Diana of the Ephesians in a linsey petticoat! Perish the thought!"

Esther looks mortified, and turns away.

The cleansing of Miss Craven's garments is a lengthy operation. Mrs. Brown retreats into her back kitchen, draws forward a washtub, kneels down beside it, turns up her sleeves, and with much splashing of hot water and s lathering of soap, rubs and scrubs, wrings out, dries, and irons the luckless gown and petticoat.

It is latish and duskish by the time that St. John and his companion set out on their homeward way. Two or three starflowers have already stolen out, and are blossoming, infinitely distant, in the meadows of the sky. They are not loquacious: it is the little shallow rivulet that brawls; the great deep river runs still. Silently they walk along; her little feet trip softly through the rustling grass beside him: the evening wind blows her light garments against him. He has taken her little gloveless hand as he helps her over a stile (adversity has made her abject, and she no longer spurns his assistance), and now retains it, half absently. Bare palm to bare palm, they saunter through the rich, dim land. It is dusk, but not so dusk but that they can see their dark eyes flashing into one another: sharp, stinging pleasure shoots along their young, full veins. The vocabularies of pain and of delight are so meagre, that each has to borrow from the other to express its own highest height and deepest depth. As they pass along a lane, whose high grass banks and overgrown hawthorn hedges make the coming night already come, Esther's foot stumbles over a stone. The next moment she is in his arms, and he is kissing her repeatedly.

"Esther, will you marry me?" he asks, in a passionate whisper, forgetting to make any graceful periphrasis to explain his meaning, using the plain words as they rise in his heart.

No answer. Emotions as complicated as intense check the passage of her voice. Even here, on this highest pinnacle of bliss – pinnacle so high that she had hardly dared hope ever to climb there – the thought of Bob and his despair flashes before her: her own remarks about the senselessness of kissing – about its being a custom suited only to savages, and her own great aversion to it – recur to her with a stab of remorse.

"You won't?" cries St. John, mistaking the cause of her silence, in a voice in which extreme surprise and profound alarm and pain are mixed in equal quantities.

Still no answer.

"If you have been making a fool of me all this time, you might, at least, have the civility to tell me so," he says, in a voice so sternly cold that remorse, coyness, and all other feelings merge into womanish fear.

"Don't blame me before I deserve it," she says, with a faint smile. "I will mar – "

She finishes her sentence on his breast.

Perfect happiness never lasts more than two seconds in this world; at the end of that time St. John's doubts return. He puts her a little way from him, that she may be a freer agent. "Esther," he says, "I half believe that you said 'yes' out of sheer fright; you thought I was going to upbraid you; and I am aware" (with a half smile) "that there are few things you would not do or leave undone to avoid a scolding; you did not say it readily, as if you were glad of it. I know that you have only known me three weeks, that I am not particularly likeable, especially by women, and that I always show to the worst possible advantage at home. All I beg of you is, tell me the truth: Do you like me, or do you not?"

"I do like you."

"Like is such a comprehensive word," he says, with a slight, impatient contracting of his straight brows. "You like Mrs. Brown, I suppose, for washing your clothes?"

"I like you better than Mrs. Brown."

"I did not doubt that," he answers, laughing; "probably you like me better than Sir Thomas, than my mother, than Constance, perhaps; but such liking as that I would not stoop to pick off the ground. I must be first or nowhere. Am I first?"

"No, you are not," she answers firmly.

His countenance falls, as Cain's did.

"I am not!" he repeats, in a constrained voice. "Who is then, may I ask?"

"Jack, my brother – he is, and always will be!"

"Bah!" cries Gerard, laughing, and looking immensely relieved. "How you frightened me! I believe you did it on purpose, as you said to me about the brook this afternoon. After him, am I first?"

"Yes."

"Before – what's his name? – the fellow that writes such a remarkably good hand – before Brandon?"

"Why do you always worry me about him?" she exclaims, angrily, turning away.

"Why do you so strongly resent being worried about him?" retorts St. John suspiciously.

"It is wearisome to hear a person always harping on one string," she answers coldly. "Believe me or not, as you choose; but please spare me the trouble of these repeated and useless asseverations."

"I beg your pardon!" he says, his countenance clearing, and passing his arm round her half-shrinking, half-yielding form. "I will never dig him up as long as I live. Peace to his ashes! Oh darling!" he continues, his voice changing to an emphatic, eager, impassioned key – "I have been so little used to having things go as I wish, that I can hardly believe it is I that am standing here. Pinch me, that I may be sure that I am awake! Oh Esther! is it really true? Can you possibly be fond of me? So few people are! Not a soul in the wide world, I do believe, except my old mother. The girl that I told you about last night lay in my arms, and let me kiss her as you are doing; she kissed me back again, as you do not do; I looked into her eyes, and they seemed true as truth itself, and all the while she was lying to me: my very touch must have been hateful to her, as it is to you, perhaps?"

"You are always referring to that – that person," says Esther, lifting great jealous eyes, and a mouth like a ripe cleft cherry, through the misty twilight towards him. "I perceive that I am only a pis aller after all. If you had ceased to care for her, you would have forgiven her long ago, and have given up measuring everybody else by her standard."

"I have forgiven her fully and freely," he answers, magnanimously, and standing heart to heart with a woman

"… fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;More lovely than the monarch of the sky,In wanton Arethusa's azured arms."

He may afford to be magnanimous. "I not only forgive her, but hale down blessings on her own and her plunger's ugly head. To be candid," he ends, laughing, "I forgave her a year ago, when I met her at Brainton Station, grown fat, with a red nose, and a tribe of squinting children, who, but for the finger of Providence interposing, might have been mine."

Speaking, he lays his lips upon the blossom of her sweet red mouth; but she, pricked with the sudden smart of recollected treachery, draws away from him.

"Come," she says, with a slight shiver, "let us go home. We shall get into dreadful disgrace as it is; what will Sir Thomas say?"

"I can tell you beforehand," says St. John, gaily; "he will say, with his usual charming candour, that, if we ask his opinion, we are a couple of fools to go gadding about to strange churches just to see a parcel of lighted candles and squeaking little boys and popish mummeries; that, for his part, he has stuck to his parish church for the last fifty years, and means to do so to the end of the chapter; and that, if we don't choose to conform to the rules of his house, &c."

"Does he always say the same?" asks Esther, smiling.

"Always. A long and affectionate study of his character has enabled me to predicate with exactness what he will say on any great subject, Esther."

"How do you know that my name is Esther?" she asks naïvely. "You have never heard any one call me so."

"Do you forget the flyleaf of the Prayer-book that – Hang it! I was on the point of uttering the forbidden name!"

Smiling, he looks for an answering smile from her, but finds none.

"I have heard of you as Esther Craven from my youth up," he continues. "Before you came we speculated as to what 'Esther' Craven would be like; it was only when you arrived in propriá personâ that you rose into the dignity of 'Miss' Craven."

"I hate being called Esther," she says, plaintively, with eyes down-drooped to the lush-green grasses that bow and make obeisance beneath her quick feet; "it always makes me feel as if I were in disgrace. Jack never calls me Esther unless he is vexed with me. Call me Essie, please."

"Essie, then."

"Well?"

"I think it right to warn you" (putting an arm of resolute possession, bolder than ever poor Brandon's had been, round her supple figure – for who is there in these grey evening fields to witness the embrace?) – "I think it right to warn you that I may very possibly grow like Sir Thomas in time; they tell me that I have a look of him already. I do not see that myself; but, even if that does come to pass, can you promise to like me even then?"

"Even then."

"I may very probably d – n the servants, and be upset for a whole evening if there are lumps in the melted butter; I may very probably insist on your playing backgammon with me every evening, and insist, likewise, on your being invariably beaten. Can you bear even that?"

"Even that."

They both laugh; but in Esther's laugh there is a ring of bitterness, which she herself hears, and wonders that he does not.

As they near the house, they see thin slits of crimson light through the dining-room shutters. Esther involuntarily quickens her pace.

"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asks, his eyes shining eager with reproachful passion in the passionless white starlight. "Who knows? to-morrow we may be dead; to-day we are as gods, knowing good and evil. This walk has not been to you what it has to me, or you would be in no haste to end it."

"I don't suppose it has," she answers, half-absently, with a sigh.

He had expected an eager disclaimer, and is disappointed.

"There can be but one explanation of that," he says, angrily.

"If you only knew – ," begins Esther, with an uncertain half-inclination to confess, though late.

"If you are going to tell me anything disagreeable," he says, quickly putting his hand before her mouth, "stop! Tell me to-morrow, or the day after, but not now – not now! Let there be one day of my life on which I may look back and say, as God said when he looked back upon His new world, 'Behold, it is very good!'"

She is silent.

"And yet, perhaps, it would be better if I knew the end of your sentence; if I only knew – what? – how little you care about me?"

"You are mistaken," she answers, roused into vehemence. "I love you so well, that I have grown hateful to myself!" and having spoken thus oracularly, she raises herself on tiptoe, lifts two shy burning lips to his, and kisses him voluntarily. Then, amazed at her own audacity, clothed with shame as with a garment, she tears herself out of his arms, as in delightful surprise he catches her to his heart, and flies with frenzied haste into the house.

CHAPTER XVII

The sweetness of September is that of the last few days spent with a friend that goeth on a very long journey; and we know not whether, when he returneth, we shall go to meet him with outstretched arms, or shall smile up at him only through the eyes of the daisies that flower upon our straight green graves.

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,"

and our sweetest seasons are, to my thinking, those in which the ecstasies of possession are mixed with the soft pain of expected parting. A September sun – such a one as warmly kissed the quiet faces of our young dead heroes, as they lay thick together on Alma's hill-side – is shining down with even mildness upon the just and the unjust, upon Constance Blessington's grass-green gown as she sits at breakfast, and on the hair crown of yellow gold with which Providence has seen fit to circle her dull fair brows.

"I think that you must have regretted being in such a hurry to run away from the garden and us," she is saying, with a gentle smile of lady-like malice, to Esther, à propos of her yesterday's misadventure.

"Sitting in the shade eating nectarines is certainly pleasanter occupation than grovelling on your hands and knees on a mud-bank," replies Esther, demurely.

"St. John is so terribly energetic!" says Miss Blessington, rather lackadaisically; "he would have walked me off the face of the earth long ago if I had let him."

Remembering the Chinese invitation, Esther cannot repress an involuntary smile.

"What about St. John?" says the young man, entering; having caught his own name, with that wonderful acuteness of hearing with which every one is endowed when themselves are in question.

"Much better have stuck to your parish church," says Sir Thomas, brandishing a large red and yellow bandanna, which is part of the old English costume, "than gone scrambling heigh-go-mad over hedges and ditches after new-fangled Puseyite mummeries!"

Gerard and his betrothed exchange a glance of intelligence. Gerard is looking slightly sentimental; his head is a little on one side; but on his discovering that he is an object of attention to Constance, it returns rather suddenly to the perpendicular.

Esther's eyes are brillianter than their wont; her cheeks are flushed with a deeper hue than the crimson lips of a foreign shell, but it is not the flush of a newly-departed sleep. The angel of slumber has passed by the portals of her brain, as the destroying angel passed by the blood-painted lintels of Israel. Thoughts sweeter than virgin honey, thoughts bitterer than gall, have kept her wakeful. Ere she went to bed, she spent three hours in writing letters of dismissal to Brandon, and at the end left him undismissed. "I cannot write it to him!" she cries, sitting up in bed in the dark, and flinging out blind arms into the black nothingness around her; "anything written sounds so harsh, so abrupt, so hard. I must tell him myself very gradually and gently, and tell him how sorry I am, and beg him to forgive me, and cry – go down on my knees, perhaps. No; I should look such a fool if I did that! After all, no one cries long over spilt milk – least of all any one so sensible and utterly unimaginative as poor dear Bob." And with that, thinking in a disparaging, hold-cheap way of him and his love, she turns the pillow over to try and find a cooler place on the under side for her burning face to rest on.

"Two dissyllabic names now passing many mouths by three dissyllabic names are here expressed," reads Miss Blessington, with distinct gravity, after breakfast that morning, out of an acrostic book that lies on the work-table before her, while Esther sits opposite with pencil and paper, ready to write down the products of the joint wisdom of their two minds. But the top of the pencil is being bitten by the young scribe's short white teeth, and her eyes are straying away absently – away through the open window and out to the sunshiny sward, where two of St. John's dogs, forbidden by Sir Thomas on pain of death, to set paw within the house, are rolling over one another, making abortive bites at each other's hind legs, and waggishly, with much growling and mumbling, taking each other's heads into their mouths.