Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

"And so I did," answers Esther, gloomily.

"I'm afraid, Esther," says Mrs. Brandon, taking another piece of toast, and shaking her head prophetically, "that you will have to pass through a burning fiery furnace before the stubborn pride of the unregenerate heart is brought low!"

"Perhaps so," answers the young girl, calmly; but to her own heart she says that she defies any earthly furnace to burn hotlier than the one she has already passed through.

CHAPTER XXVII

In another week letters have passed, references been asked and given; Esther proved unimpeachably respectable; the amount of her salary agreed upon; the day of her journey into – shire fixed, and all preliminaries settled previous to her undertaking the agreeable, free, and independent office of companion to John Blessington, Esq., of Blessington Court, in the county of – , aged eighty-nine, and to Harriet Blessington his wife, aged eighty.

Miss Craven has but one good-bye to say, and on the afternoon of the day before her departure she stands in the churchyard ready to say it. It is only to a grave. Huge cloud headlands, great leaden capes and promontories, mournful and heavy with unwept snow-tears, heap and pile themselves up behind the dim mirk hills; it snowed last night, but the snow has nearly all melted; only enough remains to make the old dirty church-tower, from which great patches of whitewash have fallen, look dirtier than ever. Upon the broken headstones, all awry and askew with age and negligence, the lichens flourish dankly. Wet nettles and faded bents overlie, overcross each cold hillock. No one cares to weed in the garden of the dead. Each hillock is the last chapter in some forgotten history.

Oh! why must all stories that are told truly end amongst the worms? Why must death be always at the end of life? Oh! if we could but get it over, like some cruelest operation, in the middle or early part of our little day; so that we might have some half a life, some quarter or twentieth part even of one, to live merrily in, to breathe and laugh and be gay in, without, in our cheerfullest moments, experiencing the chilly fear of feeling the black-cloaked skeleton-headed phantom lay his bony finger on us, saying, "Thou art mine!"

Upon the grey flat tombstone near the church-gate the great grave yew has been dropping her scarlet berries, one by one – berries that shine, like little lights, amid the night of her changeless foliage: there they lie like a forgotten rosary, that some holy man, having prayed amongst the unpraying dead, going, has left behind him. Evening is closing in fast; the air is raw and chill; no one that can avoid it is outside a house's sheltering walls: there is no one to disturb Esther's meeting with her brother. What cares she for the cold, or for the six feet of miry earth that part them. She flings herself upon the sodden mound; stretching herself all along upon it, as the prophet stretched himself on the young dead child – hand to hand, heart to heart, mouth to mouth. She lays her lips upon the soaked soil, and whispers moaningly, "Good-bye, Jack – good-bye! Oh! why won't they let you answer me? Why have they buried you so deep that you cannot hear me?"

Lord God! of what stuff can Mary and Martha have been made, to have overlived the awful ecstasy of seeing their dead come forth in warm supple life out of the four-days-holding grave! Their hearts must have been made of tougher fibre than ours, or, in the agony of that terrible rapture, soul and body must have sundered suddenly, and they fallen down into the arms of that tomb whence their brother had just issued in his ghastly cerements, in dazed, astonished gladness!

As Esther lifts her streaming eyes, they fall upon the inscription on the cross at the grave-head:

"HERE LIETH THE BODYOFJOHN CRAVEN,WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFESEPT. 24TH, 186-. AGED 21 YEARS.""Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!"

She casts her arms about the base of the holy symbol; she presses her panting breast against the stone. "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" she cries too; and surely the live sinner needs mercy as much as the dead one? And as she so lies prostrate, with her forehead leant against the white damp marble, a hideous doubt flashes into her heart – sits there, like a little bitter serpent, gnawing it: "What if there be no Lord! What if I am praying and weeping to and calling upon nothing!

"...... Let me not go mad!Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should beNo God, no heaven, no earth in the void world —The wide, grave, lampless, deep, unpeopled world."

They tell us – don't they? – in our childhood, that wickedness makes people unhappy: I think the converse is full as often true – that unhappiness makes people wicked.

A little icy wind creeps coldly amongst the strong nettles and weak sapless bents, blowing them all one way – creeps, too, through Esther's mourning weeds, and makes a numbness about her shivering breast. For a moment an angry defiant despair masters her.

"What if this great distant being, who, without any foregone sin of ours, has laid upon us the punishment of life– in the hollow of whose hand we lie! – what if He be laughing at us all this while! What if the sight of our writhings, of our unlovely tears and grotesque agonies, be to Him, in His high prosperity, a pleasant diversion!"

So thinking, against her will she involuntarily clasps closer the cross in her straining arms – involuntarily moans a second time, "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" No – no! it cannot be so! it is one of those things that are too horrible to be believed! There is no justice here! none! but it exists somewhere! How else could we ever have conceived the idea of it? It is, then, in some other world: we shall find it on the other side of these drenched, nettly charnels – on the other side of corruption's disgrace and abasement:

".....If this be all,And other life await us not, for oneI say, 'tis a poor cheat, a stupid bungle,A wretched failure! I, for one, protestAgainst it – and I hurl it back with scorn!"

Despair never stays long with any one, unless it is specially invited. Struck with sudden horror at the daring blasphemy of her thoughts, wretched Esther, with clasped hands and a flood of penitential tears, sinks upon her trembling knees. God grant that the thoughts that come to us, we know not whence, that stab us in the dark, that we welcome not, neither cherish at all – yea, rather, drive them away rudely, hatingly – may not be counted to us for crimes in His great Day of Reckoning, any more than the sudden-smiting disease that makes the strong man flag in his noonday is counted to him! With a sudden revulsion of feeling, with a paroxysm of devotion, powerfuller than the former one of doubt had been, the desolate child, prone on the grave of her one treasure, lifts quivering lips and emptied arms to Him who

".....For mankynde's sakeJusted in Jerusalem, a joye to us all!" —

to Him of whom

".....They who loved Him said 'He wept,'None ever said 'He smiled!'"

Perhaps the good Lord, who was sorry for Mary and Martha, may be sorry for her too. Perhaps, after all, her boy is well rid of troublesome breath – well rid of his cares, and his farm, and his useless loving sister! Perhaps she is falsely fond to desire him again – to be so famished for one sight more of his grey laughing eyes, of his smooth stripling face! Beyond her sight, he may be in the fruition of extremest good – in the sweet shade, beneath pleasant-fruited trees, beside great cool rivers. Would she tear him back again thence to toil in the broiling sun, because, so toiling, he would be in her sight?

"If love were kind, why should we doubtThat holy death were kinder?"

The night falls fast; she can scarcely any longer distinguish the clear, new black letters on the cross. Lights are twinkling from the village alehouse; the forge shines like a great dull-red jewel in the surrounding grey; laughing voices of boisterous men are wafted unseemly amongst the graves. Shuddering at the sound, she raises herself up quickly; then, stooping again, kisses yet once more the wet red earth that is now closest neighbour to her brother, and sobbing "Good-bye, my boy, good-bye! – God bless you, Jack!" gathers her dusky cloak about her slight shivering figure, and passes away through the darkness.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It has snowed all day; an immense white monotony is over all the land. The clouds that piled themselves in sulky threatening last night behind the Welsh hills, and many others like them, have to-day fulfilled their threats, and have been, through all the daylight hours, emptying their flaky load on the patient earth. It is as if a huge white bird had been shaking his pinions somewhere, high up in the air – shaking down millions of little down feathers. Rain always seems in earnest, snow in play – with such delicate leisureliness does it saunter down. The rushing train, that bears Esther to her new distant life, is topped like any twelfth-night cake; so are the wayside stations; so are the houses in the smoky towns; so are the men, sparsely walking about on the country roads; so are the engine drivers and stokers; so are the sheep in the fields.

Miss Craven has been sitting all day long in the narrow enceinte of a railway carriage, between the two close-shut, snow-blinded windows – sitting opposite a courteous warrior, who, travelling with all the luxuriousness which his sex think indispensable, is magnanimous enough to share his buffalo-robe and foot-warmer with her. A tête-à-tête of so many consecutive hours with a man would, under any other circumstances than a railway journey, have produced an intimacy that would last a life-time; but now, all the result of it is a couple of bows on the platform at Paddington – a look of interested curiosity after his late companion's retreating figure, as she hurries herself and her small properties into a filthy four-wheeler, on the part of the warrior, and total oblivion on the part of Esther. Since that time she has traversed London in her dilapidated shambling growler, she has had awful misgiving that the "cabby," with the villany that all women ascribe to all "cabbies," is purposely taking her in a wrong direction – is bearing her away to some dark, policeless slum, there to be robbed and murdered. She has reflected, with cold shivers of terror, as to what would be the wisest course to pursue, supposing such to be the case. Should she look silently out of window till she caught sight of the friendly helmet and tight frock-coat of some delivering "Bobby," and then scream? Should she open the door and jump out on the snowy pavement?

While still undecided, her cab stops, and – all mean back-streets and sorry short-cuts being safely passed – deposits her and her box, bag, and umbrella, beneath the Shoreditch lamps and among the Shoreditch porters. Then an hour's waiting in the crowded general waiting-room, where all the chairs are occupied by fat men, none of whom make a movement towards vacating theirs in favour of the slender weary woman, who, with crape veil thrown back from her sad child-face, is holding her little numb hands over the fire, trying vainly to bring them back to life. Then more train; then a three-miles' drive in a fly, up hill and down dale, along snowy country lanes.

And now her journey is ended: the fly has stopped at the door of a great, vague, snow-whitened bulk, that she takes upon trust as Blessington Court. The driver, having rung the bell, now stands banging his arms, each one against the opposite shoulder, in the rough endeavour to restore circulation. The servants are too comfortable – the butler over his mulled port in the housekeeper's room, and the footmen over their mulled beer in the servants' hall – to be in any hurry to attend to the summons. At length, after five minutes' waiting, a sound of withdrawing bolts and turning keys makes itself heard; the heavy door swings inward, and a footman appears in the aperture, blinking disgustedly at the snow, which drives full into his eyes. Esther immediately descends, and enters with the abrupt haste characteristic of extreme nervousness.

"Will you pay him, please?" she says, with a certain flurry of manner, to the servant. "I – I don't know how much I ought to give him – how many miles it is."

While the man complies with her request, she stands in the huge stone-floored hall, lit only by firelight, shivering with cold and fear. She peers up at the ceiling – of which, by-the-bye, there is none, as the hall runs up to the top of the house; at the walls, from which great life-size figures, dimly naked, glimmer uncomfortably cold. Anxious doubts assail her as to whether there are any rules of which she is ignorant for a "companion's" behaviour and deportment; she is not aware that she has ever seen one of those curious animals hitherto in the course of her life. Ought they to make a reverence on entering a room? Ought they to say "Sir" or "Ma'am" to whoever they address? Ought they to laugh at everybody's jokes? – not sit down unless given leave so to do, and not speak unless spoken to? So wondering, she tremblingly follows the footman as he opens the door of an adjoining apartment, and, announcing "Miss Craven," retires joyfully to the society of his compeers and his beer.

The apartment in which Esther is thus left stranded is as large as the hall that she has just quitted. It seems to her oppressively immense – quite a long walk from the door to the inhabited portion. A very big roasting fire burns on the hearth: and right in front of it, in the very glare of its hot red eyes, sits a very old man, doubled together in an armchair – one hand in his breast, and his aged head sunk upon it, apparently fast asleep. An old lady, wrapped up in a shawl, reposes in another easy-chair, with her eyes likewise closed. A lamp with a green shade burns faintly on a centre table, and beyond lamp and table sits a third person, hidden by the lamp-shade from Esther's eyes.

"Are they all asleep?" thinks the poor girl, advancing with gentle, hesitating steps. "They seem to be. How can I wake them? – or would it be disrespectful?"

While she so speculates, the third person rises and comes forward. "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a cold journey, I'm afraid?" says a bland, unforgotten voice.

It is Miss Blessington. In an instant, Esther seems to have jumped back over the past intervening months – to be just entering on her Felton visit. There is the same voice greeting her – the same tones of polite inquiry; the same words almost, except that then it was, "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a hot journey, I'm afraid?" and now it is, "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a cold journey, I'm afraid?" – the same undulating walk; the same effect of lilac evening clouds. Involuntarily she turns her head and glances towards the window, half-expecting to see St. John's legs disappearing through it. Instead, an old woman's voice sounds quavering: "Are you Miss Craven, my dear? Come here!"

Esther does not hear. "It was rather cold," she says, answering Constance, in half bewilderment between past and present, her eyes dazed with the light after her long, dark journey.

"Mrs. Blessington is speaking to you," says Constance, in mild reminder.

Esther turns round quickly. "Oh! I beg your pardon – I did not hear – I hope I was not rude," she cries, forgetting the "Ma'am" she had half-purposed employing.

"Who's there? – who's talking?" asks the old man, lifting up his head, and speaking in a voice tremulous indeed, but with a remnant of the power and fire that "youth gone out had left in ashes."

No one answers.

"Who's there, Mrs. Blessington?" he repeats, with querulous anger.

"Miss Craven, uncle – the young lady that we expected to-day – don't you know?" replies Constance, stooping gracefully over him, and putting her lips as close as possible to his withered ear.

"H'm! Tell her to come and speak to me. I want to see what she is like," he rejoins, much as if she had not been in the room.

"Go to him, my dear," says the old lady.

"And speak as loud as you can; he is as deaf as a post," adds Constance, not in the least lowering her voice at the announcement, in perfect confidence of the truth of her assertion, shrugging her handsome shoulders as she speaks.

Esther goes trembling, and lays her small cold hand in the long bony wreck of muscle, vein, and flesh that is stretched out to her. He gazes at her face with the eager intentness of the purblind.

"What is your name?" he asks abruptly.

"Esther," she answers, faltering.

"Cannot hear a word you say – you mumble so," he says, pettishly.

"Go round to the other side; the other ear is the best," suggests Constance, calmly.

Esther obeys. "Esther," she repeats, speaking unnecessarily loud this time – at the top of her voice, in fact, out of sheer nervousness.

"You need not scream at me, my dear, as if I were stone deaf. Esther or Hester, did you say?"

"Esther."

"And who gave it you, pray?"

"My father and mother, I suppose."

"H'm! Well, you may tell them, with my compliments," he says, with a senile laugh, "that I think they might have found a prettier name to give a young lady, and that the old squire says so. The old squire says so," he repeats, chuckling a little to himself.

"I cannot tell them," answers Esther, half-crying. "They are dead."

"Oh, indeed!"

There his interest in the new comer seems to cease. His white head sinks back on his breast again, and he relapses into slumber.

Esther has had neither luncheon, dinner, nor tea – a fact which none of her companions appear to contemplate as possible. One bun has been her sole support throughout the long bitter day – only one, because all such buns must be bought with Mrs. Brandon's money.

"I daresay you would like to go to bed, dear, you look tired," says Mrs. Blessington, scanning rather curiously Esther's fagged, woebegone little face. "Travelling is so much more fatiguing than it used to be in former days, when one travelled in one's own carriage, whatever they may say. I remember," she continues, with an old woman's garrulity, "Mr. Blessington and I travelling from London to York by easy stages of twenty miles a day, in our own curricle, with outriders. One never sees a curricle nowadays."

"I am rather tired," the girl answers, with a faint smile, "and cravingly hungry," she might have added, but does not.

"Ring the bell for James to light the candles."

Weak from inanition, and with limbs cramped by long remaining in one position, Esther follows Miss Blessington up low flights of uncarpeted stone stairs, through draughty twisting passages, along a broad bare gallery, down more passages, and then into a huge gloomy, mouldy room – frosty, yet cold, despite the fire burning briskly on the old-fashioned-hobbed grate; a vast dark four-poster, hung with ginger-coloured moreen; a couch that looks highly suitable for lying-in-state on; an old-fashioned screen, covered with caricatures of Fox, Burke, the Regent, and Queen Caroline; and on the walls a highly valuable and curious tapestry, which waves pleasantly in the bitter wind that enters freely beneath the ill-fitting old door, giving an air of galvanic motion and false life to the ill-looking Cupids, green with age, that play hide-and-seek amongst vases, broken pillars and wormy blue trees.

"You have plenty of room, you see," says Miss Blessington, with a curve of her suave lips, as she lights the candles on the dressing-table, which, instead of being pink petticoated, white-muslined deal, is bare sturdy oak, with millions of little useless drawers and pigeon-holes in it.

"Plenty," echoes Esther, rather aghast, surveying her premises with some dismay.

"You must not be frightened if you hear odd noises; it's only rats," says her companion, putting one small white-booted foot on the fender.

"I wish that – that stuff would not sway and shake about so," says the young girl, pointing nervously with one timid fore-finger to the tapestry. "Might not some one get behind it very easily and hide, as it does not seem to be fastened down?"

"Possibly," replies Miss Blessington, indifferently. "I never heard of such a thing having happened."

"Am I near any one else – tolerably near, I mean?" asks Esther, her heart sinking.

"Not very."

"Would no one hear me if I screamed?" she inquires, laying her hand unconsciously on the marble round of her companion's firm white arm, while her frightened eyes burn upon Constance's impassive face.

"We will hope that you will not make the experiment," she answers, with a cold smile, and so goes.

CHAPTER XXIX

I think that people's value, or want of value, is seldom their own: it belongs rather to the circumstances that surround them – to attributes foreign to themselves – outside of them. Had Robinson Crusoe, while walking down Bond Street in flowing wig and lace ruffles, first met his man Friday, he might have tossed him sixpence to avoid his importunities; but would hardly have taken him into intimate friendship – would hardly even have admitted him as a man and a brother. Among the blind the one-eyed is king, and among a crowd of total strangers an acquaintance rises into a friend.

Lonely Esther is half-inclined to effect this metamorphosis in the case of Miss Blessington. The mere fact of having eaten, drank, and slept for a considerable period under the same roof with her – the bare fact of having lived with and disliked her during a whole month and more – was enough recommendation in a house not one of whose inmates had she ever beheld before. Almost as a friend has she greeted her this morning. With admiration most unfeigned, though made a little bitter by mental comparison with her own dimmed, grief-blighted beauty, has she regarded the stately woman, the splendid animal, sleek and white as a sacred Egyptian cow; the brilliancy of whose pale, bright hair, and the perfect smoothness of her great satin throat, are heightened by the sober richness of her creaseless black velvet dress. Voluptuous, yet cold, the passions that her splendid physique provoke are chilled to death by the passionless stupor of her soul. I am not at all sure that impassioned ugliness – supposing the ugliness to be moderate, and the passion immoderate – has not more attraction for the generality of men than iced beauty.

Esther's warmth is thrown away; she might as well expect that the "Venus de Medici" would return the pressure of warm clinging fingers with her freezing, sculptured hand.

"I was so glad to find you here last night: it was so pleasant to see a face one knew," Miss Craven says, with the rash credulity of youth unexpectant of snubs.

Miss Blessington looks slightly surprised. "Tha – anks; it is very good of you to say so, I am sure," she answers, rather drawlingly, and with a small, cold smile that would repress demonstrations much more violent than any that Esther had meditated. It is difficult always to remember that one is a "companion."

The Blessington dining-room is, like the other reception-rooms, huge and very nobly proportioned. Did we not know that our seventeenth and eighteenth century ancestors were not giants, we should be prone to imagine that it must have been a race of Anakims that required such great wide spaces to sup, and sip chocolate, and play at ombre in. The furniture is in its dotage; it has, figuratively speaking, like its owners, lost hair and teeth, and all unnecessary etceteras; it is reduced to the bare elements of existence. Three tall windows look out upon a flat lawn, and in the middle of this lawn, exactly opposite Esther's eyes, as she sits at breakfast, is an unique and chaste piece of statuary, entitled "The Rape of the Sabines." The space afforded by the stone pediment is necessarily limited, and consequently Roman and Sabines, gentlemen and lady, are all piled one a-top of another in such inextricable confusion as to demand a good quarter of an hour's close observation to determine which of the muscular writhing legs belong to the Roman ravisher and which to the injured Sabine husband. As the sculptor has given none of his protégées any clothing, the snow has been kind enough to throw a modest white mantle over them all.

"Mr. and Mrs. Blessington do not come down to breakfast?" says Esther, interrogatively, as the two girls seat themselves at table.