Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

Another longer silence. Brandon is wrestling with that adversary of his, that deadly anger and pain; that riotous, tigerish jealousy, that makes us all murderers for the time, in thought at least; that mad, wild longing – madder, wilder than any love ardour, than any paroxysm of religious zeal – to have his hands, for one moment of strong ecstasy, about the throat of the rich man that has robbed him of his one ewe lamb. The sweat of that combat stands cold upon his brow, but he overcomes. After a while he speaks gently, as one would speak to a little sick child: "Were you very fond of him, Esther?"

"I suppose so," she answers with reflective calmness, looking straight before her. "I must have been, or I should not have said and done the mean things I did. I should not have degraded myself into begging him to take me back again, when I might as well have begged of this rock" (thrusting her soft hand against it) "to turn to grass and flowers. He told me that he would never forgive me, either in this world or the next! I thought it very dreadful at the time, but I don't much care now whether he forgives me or not."

"Have you forgotten him so completely already?" asks Bob, forgetting his own misery for the moment, in sheer blank amazement.

"Forgotten him!" she repeats thoughtfully. "No, not that! not that! I might as well try to forget myself. I remember every line of his face, his voice, and his ways, and every word he said almost; but if I were to see him standing close to us here, I should not feel the slightest inclination to go to him, or to call him to come to me. I feel all dead everywhere." They remain in the same attitude for several minutes, neither of them stirring nor uttering a word. Then Esther speaks, with a certain uneasy abruptness. "Well!" she says, "I am waiting! – waiting for you to call me a murderess and a bad woman, and all the other names that St. John gave me, on much less provocation. Make haste!" she says, with a nervous forced laugh; "I am in a hurry to hear that I have succeeded in getting rid of my last friend. Quick! quick! – tell me that you hate me, and have done with it!"

"Hate you!" he repeats, tenderly; his brave voice trembling a little in spite of himself, and the meekness of a great heroism ennobling his face. "You, poor soul! Why should I hate you because another man is better and more loveable than I, and because you have eyes to see it?"

The eyes he speaks of turn upon him, wide and startled, in astonished disbelief of his great generosity.

"You don't understand!" she says, quickly. "You don't take it in. I was engaged to him; I was going to marry him, and all the time I never once mentioned your name to him, of my own accord; and when he asked me about you, I said you were only a common acquaintance. You must hate me!" she ends, vehemently; "don't pretend that you don't!"

"Hush!" he answers sorrowfully, but very gently, "that is nonsense! I don't even hate him; at least" (pausing a moment, to thrust down and trample under foot one more spasm of that intolerable burning jealousy) – "at least, I try not. It was my own fault. I knew all along that I was poor, and stupid, and awkward, that I had nothing but sheer love to give you, and I hoped against hope that that might win you at last. We all set our affections upon some one thing, I suppose," he says, with a patient, pitiful smile, "and I daresay it is all the better for us in the end that we don't often get it: but oh, love! love! you might have told me!" Then his resolution breaks a little, and, covering his face with his hands, he groans aloud, in a man's dry-eyed agony – how much awfuller to see than a woman's little tears, that flow indifferently for a dead pet dog, or a dead husband! Esther sits looking at him during several minutes, awestruck, as a child that has made a grown-up person cry; then one of those quick impulses that carry some women away seizes her.

"Bob!" she says, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, while her gentle, vibrating voice thrills down to his stricken soul, "I have been very bad to you, but I will make up for it!"

"Will you?" he says, looking up with a mournful, sceptical smile; "how?"

"I'll marry you, if you'll have me, and make a very good wife to you," she says, simply, with unblushing calmness, eyelids unlowered, and voice unwavering.

"Child!" he cries, "you are very generous, but do you think I cannot be generous too?"

"It is not generosity," she says, eagerly; "I wish to marry you!"

He shakes his head sadly. "You don't know what you are saying," he answers, taking her little hand between both his – holding it almost fatherly, in a tender prison. "You don't know what marriage is. You don't understand that a union so close with a person you don't love would be infinitely worse than being tied to a dead body; the one could not last very long, the other might for years."

She looks at him silently, with her grave, innocent eyes, for an instant or two while she tries to get down to the depth of her own heart – tries to feel something besides that numb vague indifference to everything. "If I don't love you," she says, doubtfully, "I love nobody; I like you better than anyone else in the world! Didn't Jack die in your arms?" she says, breaking out into sudden and violent tears. "Wasn't his head resting on your shoulder when he went away? Oh, dear, dear shoulder!" she cries, kissing it passionately. "How can I help loving you for that?"

At the touch of her soft mouth, that has been to him hitherto, despite his nominal betrothal, a sealed book, his steadfast heart begins to pulse frantically fast: if a river of flame instead of blood were poured through his veins, they could not have throbbed with an insaner heat: his sober head swims as one that is dizzy with strong drink; reels in the overpowering passion of a man that has not frittered away his heart in little bits, after our nineteenth-century fashion, but has cast it down, whole, unscarred by any other smallest wound, at one woman's feet. Oh, if he might but take her at her word! Or, if there must be no marriage between them, why may not there be a brief sweet marriage of the lips? It would do her no harm – since kisses, happily for the reputation of ninety-nine hundredths of the female world, leave no mark – and it would set him for an instant on a pinnacle of bliss that would equal him with the high gods.

But the paroxysm is short. Before she who has caused it has guessed at its existence, it is put down, held down strongly. Women are very often like naughty children, putting a lighted match to a train of gunpowder, and then surprised and frightened because there is an explosion.

"You are deceiving yourself," he says, speaking almost coldly. "You think you like me, because I happened to be the last person that was with the dear fellow that's gone – because you knew that I was grieved about him too: but think of me as you thought of me when you were at the Gerards', and you'll know how much you love me for myself."

"Love!" she repeats, dreamily – "love! love!" saying over and over again the familiar, common word, until by very dint of frequent repetition it grows unfamiliar, odd, void of meaning. "I have used up all I ever had of that: perhaps I never had much, but I think you the very best man that ever lived. Is not that enough to go upon?"

He shakes his head with a slight smile. "Worse and worse! that would be a difficult character to live up to. No!" he says, looking at her, with the nobility of an utter self-abnegation in his sorrowful blue eyes. "I will never marry you, Essie! never! – I swear it! If you were to go down on your knees to me, I would not: I should deserve that God should strike me dead if I could be guilty of such unmanly selfishness!"

"You refuse me then?" she says, with a sigh of half-unconscious relief. "Was ever such a thing heard of? And I have not even the satisfaction of being able to be angry with you."

"I refuse you!" he answers, steadily, taking her two little hands in his. "But – look at me, dear, and believe me – as I said to you before, so I say now, I shall love you to-day, and to-morrow, and always!"

The two young people sit silent; each looking down, as it were with inner eyes, on the wreck of their own destiny – wrecked already! though their ships have so lately left the port. The vapours still curl about the dun hills: the clouds stoop low, as if to mingle with their sister mists. With many a sigh, and with many a shiver, the trees shower down the ruddy rain of their leaves; earth is stripping her fair body for the winter sleep. Then Brandon speaks:

"Promise me one thing, Essie!"

"Anything almost."

"That this – this —talk we have had shall make no difference as to your coming to us!"

"What!" she cries, suddenly springing to her feet, tears of remorse and mortification rushing to her eyes. "After having done you the worst injury a woman can do a man, am I to be indebted to you for daily bread – for food, and clothes, and firing? How much lower do you wish me to fall? Have you no pity on me?"

"You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyes fixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging from its strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to me for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back to Bermuda."

"Gone!" she repeats, blankly. "Are you going too? Is everybody going away from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that it will be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your mother and sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!' to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sell matches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"

He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says, looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face, "you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matches either; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!"

"That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I am pretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" she cries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why – why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born – to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come? – who would?"

"I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a bad place, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though it does do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," he adds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long, and there's a better at the other end of it."

"Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy the world without one, can one?" she continues, following out her own ideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there was, and not long hence there will be, no I; but one cannot realize it!"

"Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy.

"The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly, without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, all with some reference to oneself: one cannot understand their all going on when oneself has stopped!"

Reflections of this character are not much in Bob's way. Pensive musings upon the caducity of the human race are, generally, rather feminine than masculine. A woman dreams over the shortness of life, while a man crowds it with doings that make it, in effect, long. Brandon turns the conversation back into a more practical channel.

"Have you any friends that you have known longer than you have us, Essie?"

"None."

"Any to whom it would be less irksome to you to lie under an obligation, as you call it?"

"None."

"Any that you like better, in short?"

"None," she answers, with a little impatience, as if, in a way, ashamed of her own destitution. "Good or bad, I have no friends, none, and you know it."

He looks at her with a sort of shocked amazement. "Good God! what is to become of you, then?" he asks, bluntly.

"I don't know."

"How are you to live?"

"I don't know."

"Have you never once thought about it?"

"Never. I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiver piteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it, straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "we" lies sleeping – "I thought that we should have lived to be old together: most people live to be old!"

A great yearning pity – purer, nobler, with less of the satyr and more of the god in it, than in any access of human passion between man and woman – seizes him as he looks at her, sitting there so forlorn, with one thin hand lifted to shield her weary purple-lidded eyes, that have grown dim with weeping for "her boy."

"Poor little soul!" he says, compassionately; and he takes, with brotherly intimacy, the other hand, that lies listless in her lap, and lays fond lips upon it.

When one is on the verge of a burst of crying, a harsh word may avert the catastrophe, but a kind one inevitably precipitates it. With how unjust, unreasonable a hatred does one often regard the person who ill-advisedly speaks that kind word! As for Esther, she buries her face on his shoulder and begins to sob hysterically. Her hat falls off, and her bare, defenceless head leans on his breast, while the autumn wind wafts one long lock of her scented hair against his face. She has forgotten that he was her lover, has forgotten that he is a man; she remembers only that he is a friend, which is a sexless thing – that he is the one being who cares about her, in all the great, full, crowded world. Despite the utter abandonment of her attitude, despite the clinging closeness of her soft supple form to his, he feels none of the painful stings of passion that so lately beset him. They are tamed, for the moment, by a nobler emotion: they dare as little assail him now, as they dare assail the holy saints in Paradise. With any other man such abandonment might have been dangerous: with him she is safe. He lays his kind broad hand on her ruffled head, and strokes it, just as Jack used to do, in the pleasant days before he went.

"Come to us, Essie!" he says, with persuasive tenderness; "we'll be good to you; we won't plague you; you would have come to us as my wife, why won't you come as my sister?"

"Because I like buying things better than being given them!" she answers, vehemently, though still incoherent from her tears. "If I had come as your wife, I should have given you something in exchange, —myself, body and soul, my whole life. It would have been of no value really, but you would have thought it something; as your sister, I shall give you absolutely nothing!"

"Child! child! why are you so proud?" he asks, with mournful reproachfulness. "Why are you so bent on standing alone? Which of us can stand alone in this world? We all have to lean upon one another, more or less, and the strongest of us upon God!"

"Yes, I know that! – I know that!" she answers, hastily; "but I would far rather beg, and have to be obliged to any common stranger that I had never seen before, and that most probably I should never see again, than to you. With them I should, at all events, start fair: I should have no old debts to weigh me down; but to you I owe so much already, that I am racking my brain to think how I can pay some part of it, instead of contracting new ones."

"You would contract no new ones," he rejoins, earnestly; "on the contrary. Essie, you told me just now that you would be very glad to be able to make up to me for any pain you may have made me suffer: now is your time! —now is your opportunity!"

"How?" she sobs, lifting up her head, and speaking with a slow, plaintive intonation. "You will be at the other side of the world, thousands of miles away! How will it affect you?"

"I shall be at the other side of the world," he answers, steadily; "better that I should be so! better so! But do you think that my being so far away will make it pleasanter for me to think of the one creature I love above all others on the face of the earth, starving, or worse than starving, at home?"

"Worse than starving!" she repeats, opening her great, wide eyes in astonishment. "What can be worse than starving? Oh! I see what you mean" (a light breaking in upon her, and the colour flushing faintly into her face). "You think I should go to the bad – do something disgraceful, if I had nobody to look after me: I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, but I don't wonder at it," she ends, with resigned depression.

"I have no bad opinion of you!" he answers, eagerly; "but I know the end that women, originally as pure and good as you, have come to before now. I know how hard it is for a beautiful poor girl to live honestly in this world, how frightfully easy to live dishonestly!"

"Well!" she says, recklessly; "and if I did live dishonestly, what matter? Whom have I got to be ashamed of? Whom have I got to disgrace?"

Brandon looks inexpressibly shocked. "Hush!" he says, putting his hand before her mouth; "you don't know what you are saying! For Heaven's sake, talk in that strain to no one but me! Any one that knew you less well than I do might misunderstand you."

She looks up at him, half-frightened. "One does say dreadful things without intending it," she says, apologetically; "but I only meant to express, as forcibly as possible, how little consequence it was what happened to me."

"For God's sake, word it differently then!" he says, almost sternly; "or, better still, don't say it or think it at all! It is morbid, and it is not true. If it is of no consequence to any one else what becomes of you, it is of intense, unspeakable consequence to me: how many times must I tell you that before you mean to believe it?"

"To you! in Bermuda?" she says, with a little doubting sigh.

"Yes, to me, in Bermuda," he answers, firmly. "Perhaps you think that it was only because I looked upon you as my own, my property, that I took so great an interest in you: it was not as mine, it was as yourself, that I cared about you. You are yourself still, though you are not nor ever will be mine."

Then, like Guinevere's, "his voice brake suddenly."

"Then, as a stream, that spouting from a cliffFails in mid-air, but gathering at the base,Remakes itself and flashes down the vale,Went on in passionate utterance."

"Essie! they say that women are more capable of self-sacrifice than men. Prove it to me now! Sacrifice this pride of yours; consent to the one thing that would make me leave England with almost a light, instead of such a heavy heart!"

She is silent for a minute or two, halting between two opinions; hesitating, struggling with herself: then she speaks, rapidly, but not easily —

"I cannot, Bob – I cannot! Ask me anything, not quite so hard, and I'll do it! Just think how young I am, seventeen last birthday, I have probably forty or fifty more years to live; do you wish me to promise to be a pensioner for half a century on your mother's charity?"

He does not answer.

"Don't be angry with me for having a little self-respect!" she cries, passionately, snatching his hand. "I will go and stay with your people till I have found something to do, if they will have me. I will get your mother to help me in looking for work; I will take her advice in everything, do whatever she tells me; I will do anything – anything in life to please you, except – "

"Except the one thing I wish," he answers, sadly and coldly.

"If you speak in that tone I shall have to promise you anything," she says, despairingly; "but it will only be perjury, for I shall infallibly break my promise again. Why should not I work?" she goes on, in a sort of indignation at his silence. "Am I a cripple, or an idiot? Let me wait till I am either the one or the other, before I come upon the parish!" she says, with the bitter pride of poverty; "at all events, let us call things by their right names."

"As you will," he answers, deeply wounded. "If you take it as a great indignity to be offered a home with the oldest friends you have in the world, of course I can say no more; but oh, child! you are wrong – you are wrong!"

CHAPTER XXIV

It is Sunday evening. Miss Craven has been to church for the first time since her bereavement, as people call it. She has displayed her crape in all its crisp funeral newness before the eyes of the Plas Berwyn congregation. Also, she has been made the subject of conversation, over their early dinner, between the imbecile rector and his vinegar-faced, bob-curled wife; the latter remarking how unfortunately unbecoming black was to poor Miss Craven – really impossible to tell where her bonnet ended and her hair began; and how lucky it was for her that people did not wear mourning for as long a time as they used – three months being ample nowadays, ample for a brother! Esther has sat in their pew for the first time alone: she has looked at Jack's prayer-book, at his vacant corner under the dusty cobwebbed window, with eyes dryly stoic; she has walked firmly after service down the church-path, past a grassless hillock, where he who was her brother lies, dumbly submitting to the one terrific, changeless law of decay – the law that not one of us can face, as applying to ourselves, without our brains reeling at the horror of it. Oh! thrifty, harsh Nature! that, without a pang of relenting, unmixes again those cunningest compounds that we call our bodies – making the freed elements that formed them pass into new forms of life – makes us, who erewhile walked upright, godlike, fronting the sun, communing with the high stars – makes us, I say, creep many-legged in the beetle, crawl blind in the worm!

It is evening now, and Esther sits, in her red armchair, beside the drawing-room fire, alone again. The wind comes banging every minute against the shuttered French window, as one that boisterously asks to be let in; the ivy leaves are dashed against the pane, as one that sighingly begs for admittance. Every now and then the young girl looks round timidly over her shoulder, in the chill expectation of seeing a death-pale spirit-face gazing at her from some corner of the room; every now and then she starts nervously, as a hot cinder drops from the grate, or as the small feet of some restless mouse make a hurry-skurrying noise behind the wainscot. As often as she can frame the smallest excuse, she rings the bell, in order to gather a little courage from the live human face, the live human voice, of the servant that answers it.

Around Plas Berwyn also the wind thunders – against Plas Berwyn windows also the ivy-leaves fling themselves plaintively; but there the resemblance ends. The steady light from the lamp outblazes the uncertain, fitful fire-gleams: at Plas Berwyn there are no ghost-faces of the lately dead to haunt the inmates of that cheerful room. They are all sitting round the table on straight-backed chairs – no lolling in armchairs, no stealing of furtive naps on the Sabbath – sitting rather primly, rather Puritanically, reading severely good books. To Bob's palate, the Hedley Vicarsian type of literature is as distasteful as to any other young man of sound head and good digestion, but he succumbs to it meekly, to please his mother; if Sunday came twice a week, I think he would be constrained to rebel. From the kitchen, the servants' voices sound faintly audible above the howling wind, singing psalms. The family are divided between prose and poetry. Miss Brandon is reading a sermon; her sister a hymn. Here it is: —

THE FIRM BANK.[1]"I have a never-failing bank,A more than golden store;No earthly bank is half so rich,How can I then be poor?"'Tis when my stock is spent and gone,And I without a groat,I'm glad to hasten to my bank,And beg a little note."Sometimes my banker, smiling, says,'Why don't you oftener come?And when you draw a little note,Why not a larger sum?"'Why live so niggardly and poor? —Your bank contains a plenty?Why come and take a one-pound noteWhen you might have a twenty?"'Yea, twenty thousand, ten times told,Is but a trifling sumTo what your Father hath laid up,Secure in God his Son.'"Since, then, my banker is so rich,I have no cause to borrow:I'll live upon my cash to-day,And draw again to-morrow."I've been a thousand times before,And never was rejected;Sometimes my banker gives me moreThan asked for or expected."Sometimes I've felt a little proud,I've managed things so clever:But, ah! before the day was doneI've felt as poor as ever!"Sometimes with blushes on my faceJust at the door I stand;I know if Moses kept me back,I surely must be damned."I know my bank will never break —No! it can never fall!The Firm – Three Persons in one God!Jehovah – Lord of All!"

A charming mixture of the jocose and familiar, isn't it?