Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

And St. John hears of Linley's visit, and does not hear of Esther's little self-abnegation; and, too proud to ask any questions about the matter, pictures to himself soft oeillades, challenging smiles, hand-pressures, under the purblind eyes of the old lady, and, so picturing, eats his heart out with a dumb gnawing jealousy.

One evening, in one of her late lonely saunters (Miss Blessington never accompanies her on her walks), Esther has strayed outside the park paling into the road, lured by the splendour of a great holly-bush, all afire with thousand clustered berries, amid the dark glister of varnished leaves. Now, although having well understood (as

"Johnny and his sister Jane,While walking down a shady lane,"

unfortunately for themselves, did not) that

"Fruit in lanes is seldom good,"

Esther has coveted those berries. Fond of bright colours as a child or a savage, she has been wrestling obstinately with the stout tough stems, and has come off ultimately victor, with only one very considerable scratch, and several lesser ones on each bare hand. This spoil, robbed from niggard winter, will make the old rat palace at home so bravely, warmly gay. As she strolls slowly along, considering her treasures, the sound of a trotting horse on the road behind her reaches her ears. She turns, and sees a glimmer of scarlet flashing through the misty light. Is it St. John coming back from hunting? If St. John have a figure light and spare as a jockey's, have a large red moustache, and a small questioning retroussé face, this is he; if he have not, this is not he.

"How de-do, Miss Craven?" says Linley, throwing himself off his horse, and coming towards her with ready right hand heartily outstretched. "Could not imagine who you were. I thought, perhaps, you were the spirit of a departed Blessington, and as I am rather nervous, and frightened out of my wits at ghosts, I had half a mind to turn and flee."

"Only curiosity got the better of fear," she says, smiling up at him, or rather down on him, through the steaming January evening; "you thought I might prove human, after all?"

"Why did not you come and see me the other day when I came to call upon you?" he asks, walking along beside her; "I believe you were at home all the time." In his heart he does not in the least believe it.

She does not answer; but, without thinking of what she is doing, picks off the berries, the procuring of which had cost her so many wounds, and strews them along the road.

"Were you really at home?" he repeats, a misgiving as to such having been the case crossing his mind, and giving his vanity a slight prick.

"Yes, I was."

"And knew I was there all the time?"

"Yes."

"A prey to Mrs. Blessington – ?"

"Yes."

"And never came to my rescue?"

"Did you expect the butler and housekeeper to come and entertain you?" she asks, a little bitterly. "Have you forgotten what I told you the other day – that I am Mrs. Blessington's valet? I have as little concern with her visitors as the kitchen-maids have."

"But I was not her visitor," objects the young fellow, stoutly – "at least" (laughing) "I was, but Heaven knows I did not mean to be! However, 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' and I obtained a great deal of information gratis upon a subject on which I really never had reflected as seriously as, it appears, I ought to have done – "

"Draughts and sandbags! I know what you are going to say," interrupts Esther, breaking into a childish lighthearted laugh. "We do hear a great deal about them; but I don't mind now; I'm used to it. I fall into a sort of waking trance when the subject is first broached, and say 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'H'm' and 'Oh,' at stated intervals; it does just as well as listening all through."

Linley laughs too. He is always glad of an excuse for laughing. Life has been to him as yet only laughable or smileable.

"Not a bad plan," ha says, commendingly; "but, really now, I flattered myself I struck out one or two very original thoughts on the subject of sash-windows; I said several rather brilliant things, only she did not seem to see them. I hoped she would have found my conversation so improving that she would have asked me to come again; but she did not do anything of the kind."

"They never ask anybody to Blessington," says Esther, feeling the string of her tongue loosed, and experiencing, despite herself, great enjoyment in having some one to chatter to, at whom it is not necessary to bawl, and who does not answer her monosyllabically with fade chilly smiles. "They are too old to care for society; like Barzillai the Gileadite, they cannot hear any more 'the voice of singing men and singing women.' They have the clergyman and his wife to dine on Christmas Day, and there their gaiety for the year begins and ends."

"And yours too?"

"And mine too. But I don't wish for gaiety," she answers, gravely, with an involuntary glance at her crape, which has grown very brown, and rusty, and shabby genteel.

"It must be an awful fate being shut up with those two old mummies," says Linley, compassionately, his pity for Miss Craven made vivid by his personal recollections of Mrs. Blessington's conversational power. "I had rather live in a lighthouse, or sweep a crossing, by long odds."

"So would I," she answers, drily, "if any one would set on foot a subscription to buy me a broom."

"You have Miss Blessington now as a companion, at all events," rejoins he, glad to fix on any bright spot in his poor new acquaintance's mud-coloured life.

"Yes; she is pleasant to look at."

"And to talk to."

"She never talks."

"And Gerard? He is not particularly pleasant to look at, certainly – "

"Not particularly," she assents; feeling a hot glow steal all over her, as at an insult to herself.

"But when he is not in one of his sulks, as he was the other day – do you remember? – he is not a bad fellow, as fellows go."

"Isn't he?"

He looks at her with surprise. "Why, surely, living in the same house with him, you ought to know him, at least as well as I do?"

"I never speak to him, and he never speaks to me," she answers, shortly.

Linley bursts out laughing. "Good heavens! what a horrible picture you draw! You remind one of Mr. Watts's pretty little hymn —

"'Where'er I take my walks abroadHow many poor I see!And as I never speaks to themThey never speak to me.'"

Esther laughs; but anyone listening might have heard a melancholy ring in her merriment.

"Does nobody speak to anybody then at Blessington?" asks the young man, aghast at the state of things as revealed by his companion's answers.

"Mr. Blessington roars at Mrs. Blessington, and Mrs. Blessington roars at Mr. Blessington, and I roar at them both."

"And the other two – do not they speak?"

"We are, none of us, much addicted to conversation," she answers, grimly; "but, en revanche, what we do say we say very loud."

"Are you all deaf, then?"

"No; but when one lives with deaf people, one gets into the habit of thinking that the whole world is hard of hearing; one bawls at everyone."

"What an exhausting process!" he says, with a shrug; "takes a great deal out of you, doesn't it?"

"A good deal; lately, I have generally ended the day without any voice at all. I don't mind making short remarks at the top of my voice, but shouting out six columns of the Times, as is daily my pleasing task, is rather fatiguing."

"How inhuman of them to allow you!" he cries, indignantly, looking at the slender, fragile figure, at the childish face – so appealing, so touching in its utter paleness, now that he sees it without the temporary rose-flush of excitement.

"Not at all," she answers, simply; "they pay me for it."

"It would require very high pay to indemnify any one for the sacrifice of the best years of their lives to those two old fossils; I thought I was entitled to something considerable for standing the old woman for three-quarters of an hour the other day without uttering a groan," answers the young man, more seriously than he generally takes the trouble of saying anything.

"My pay is fifty pounds a year," she answers, frankly, "if you call that high."

Fifty pounds! It would not find him in cigars. He has thrown away five times that sum, before now, at lansquenet at one sitting.

Involuntarily his thoughts glance back over his own life – the luxurious sybarite life in which, hitherto, the heaviest misfortunes have been a too-prolonged frost, a disease among the grouse, the coming in second at a steeplechase, or the pressure of a heavy helmet on his forehead when on duty on a hot summer afternoon. Involuntarily, he compares this life of his with the existence of the slight frail child beside him: but the comparison is disagreeable, and so he stifles it, as he always stifles, on principle, every painful thought, as a sin against his religion of ease.

"Fifty pounds! – what a pittance!" he ejaculates.

"Do you think so?" she answers, surprised. "I think it is a good deal. Considering that they find me in food and lodging, and that I do for them only what any charity-school boy could do nearly as well, it is surely enough."

Her companion differs widely in opinion from her, but

"When ignorance is bliss'Tis folly to be wise;"

and reflecting that it is fortunate that she is satisfied, on whatever insufficient grounds her satisfaction rests, he drops the subject, and continues his catechism on a different head.

"Have you no amusement of any kind– none?"

"Oh dear, yes! We drive into Shelford every day in a close carriage, with all the windows up."

"Terrific! And what do you do when you get there?"

"We come back again."

"And have you no visitors? Does no one ever come to call?"

"Yes; you came the other day."

"And am I a solitary instance of would-be sociability?"

"Not quite. Mr. Blessington gets into a panic about himself, sometimes, and thinks that he is drawing near his latter end; and he bids us all good-bye; and he cries, and we cry, and then Mr. Brand, the doctor, comes and reassures us."

"I had no idea that there was anything the matter with the old gentleman."

"No more there is. He has no more idea of dying really than you have; less, probably. You may break your neck out hunting, and he cannot well break his out of his armchair. When a person has got into such a confirmed habit of living as he has," she concludes, drily, "they find it extremely difficult to break themselves of it."

He smiles.

"After all," she continues, thoughtfully, "since it is wear-and-tear of mind, brain and heart-work, that drives people to the churchyard, I don't see any reason why mere sleeping and eating machines should not go on for ever."

It would be impossible to imagine a more innocent dialogue than the foregoing, would not it? But the interlocutors have involuntarily fallen into a very gentle saunter, as two people that, finding each other's society agreeable, are in no haste to part. With his horse's bridle carelessly thrown over his arm, a small muddy scarlet gentleman strolls along with his face turned with interest towards his companion, who is chattering away to him freely and readily – not as having any particular partiality for him, but as being something young, friendly, compassionate.

This is the picture – invested by twilight with an air of mystery that it would not have worn in daylight – that salutes the eyes of a second and larger scarlet gentleman, splashing home through the puddles on a tired horse. As he passes them, Gerard (for it is he) pulls up his horse into a walk, for he would not have the incivility to cover any woman with dirt, even though the woman in question be a vile greedy coquette, to whose insatiable vanity all men are meat. Then, raising his hat stiffly, he rides on without speaking. As he trots homeward through the dusk, the thought flashes into his writhing heart: "It was an assignation! She arranged it with him on the day he came to call. Damnable flirt! Is not she satisfied with two ruined lives? Is she fool enough to think that Linley will marry her? A nice time of night for a respectable young woman to be out walking with a man she has only seen twice in her life! And I heard her tell Mrs. Blessington the other day that she never went outside the park-gates! Liar! What man was ever deep enough to be up to a woman's tricks? She'll go to the dogs, as sure as fate, if she is left to herself! Pshaw! I daresay she knows the way there already. She is so young; shall I warn her? Shall I speak to her? Not I. Thank God, it is no business of mine!"

"Gerard!" says Linley, as, having passed them, he strikes into a brisk trot – looking as if he were going to his own funeral, and just about to join the cortège. "Certainly being in love don't improve him; he is not half the fellow he was last season."

But Esther, in the moment of his passing them, had caught a glimpse of the eager white anger of his face, and she hardly hears. "I'm afraid Mr. Gerard thought it odd my being out so late," she says, trembling with recollected fear of those altered, wrathful eyes.

"Well, and if he did?" cries Linley, impatiently.

"It is very late," she says, looking round into the dusk; "it must be, by the light. I never noticed how dark it has grown since you overtook me."

"It is no darker than it was before Gerard passed us," he answers, rather nettled.

"No, but – "

"Why, how scared you look!" he interrupts her. "You don't mean to say you are afraid of him?" (incredulously.) "If I were you, I don't think I should pay much deference to the opinion of a person who, as you say, never has the civility even to speak to you."

She is silent.

"It is the authority of his eye that awes you, I suppose?" says the young man, vexed and sneering: —

"'An eye like Mars', to threaten and command.'

"Threaten! Yes – I can testify to that!"

Hearing his words, Esther recovers her self-possession, and speaks with some dignity: "You are quite wrong. Mr. Gerard's opinion has no influence whatever on my sayings or doings; it would be very ridiculous if it had. It was merely that his look of surprise reminded me of what I ought to have recollected without reminding, that I should have been home an hour ago."

"Wanted again, I suppose?" says the young man, with the air of an aggrieved person. "I wish you were not in quite such request; you are always being wanted."

"There is a stile close here," says Esther, evidently in a hurry to be off; "if I cross it, and make a short-cut across the park, I shall be home twenty minutes sooner than if I went by the road. Good-bye."

"Good-bye," he says, reluctantly. "I'm not a bloodthirsty fellow generally, but I wish that Gerard had broken his neck over that bullfinch that he came to grief over to-day, before he had come poking his ugly nose here, where nobody wanted him; at least I did not, and, to judge by your face, neither did you. Well! when are we to meet again, I wonder?"

"Never! – some time or other – soon!" answers Esther, hastily and contradictorily, running up the gamut of adverbs in search of the one most likely to obtain her release. Having gained that object, she jumps over the stile, and disappears into a sea of mist.

Meanwhile St. John, having arrived at Blessington, and given up his horse to a groom, enters the house; but the confinement of roof and walls is insupportable to him. So he goes out again, and, walking up the avenue, stations himself at the gate. There, resting his arms on the topmost bar, he stands, straining his eyes down the road by which he expects to see Esther and her companion make their appearance.

"They will defer their parting to the last moment – that is of course," he says to himself, in his lonely pain. "Well," taking out his watch and minuting them, in order to drink the cup of his jealous misery to the dregs, "it is not more than a mile and a half from here to the place where I passed them; let us see how long a time they will manage to be in doing the distance."

He has not long to wait. Before five minutes are over he hears the sound of a horse's feet. "Linley must not see him watching them," he thinks, with a sort of shame at himself, and so steps back into the shade of a great tree.

Linley rides by alone. His face is turned towards the house, in whose great black façade the lighted windows make oblong-shaped red glories; his eyes are trying to fix upon Esther's casement. Of course he hits upon the wrong one, and directs his sentimental gaze towards the apartment where, with wig off and teeth out, Mrs. Blessington, aided by her maid, is slowly moving through the stages of her dinner toilette.

"She must have taken the short-cut across the park," thinks Gerard, with a sense of unwilling relief. "Afraid of my telling tales of her escapade, I suppose."

He retraces his steps down the avenue, and, following a back road that skirts the kitchen-garden, reaches another gate that leads into the park, and there stands and waits again.

The short-cut has proved rather a long one. Part of the park has been fenced off, to keep the deer and the Scotch cattle separate; a gate which she had reckoned upon finding open, she discovers to be padlocked, and has to make a long circuit round to another gate.

As she toils weary-footed through the wet grass, vague alarms assail him that watches for her. Can any evil have come to her in the darkness? Most improbably in that still, safe park. After a while, and when his reasonless fears are beginning to gather more strongly about his heart, he hears the sound as of some one running pantingly. Esther is not so good at running as she was in the old Glan-yr-Afon days. She has been flying along in hot haste, with a mixed fear of Scotch bulls and goblins in pursuit. As she approaches the gate, Gerard opens it for her. Seeing it swing open without any apparent cause, she gives a great nervous start; then, discovering the motive cause of the phenomenon, drops into a walk.

"It is rather late, Mr. Gerard, I'm afraid, isn't it so?" she asks, with some hesitation at this disobedience to his command of silence. And yet, surely, if he had meant not to speak to her, he would not have come thither.

Two speech-gifted human beings could hardly be expected to meet with less civility than two pigs, who would at least exchange a grunt.

He looks at his watch again. "It is ten minutes to six," he replies with punctilious politeness.

"Is it really? I had no idea how the time went," she says, apologetically, "until your look of – of —surprise reminded me."

The line of defence she has hit upon is unlucky.

"Really!" he answers, stiffly.

"I had not noticed how the light had gone, nor anything about the matter," she continues, innocently, floundering at every word into deeper disgrace.

"I daresay not," he replies, freezingly.

She had addressed him, penitent and humble, willing to take a scolding in all submissiveness, but the chill brevity of his answers turns her meekness to gall.

"When one is in pleasant company," she remarks, with a rather hysterical laugh, "one forgets the flight of time."

"Undoubtedly," replies Gerard, endeavouring to conceal his anger under an appearance of calmness, and unable to manage more than one word at a time.

"If one has not taken a vow of perpetual silence, it is a great relief to have a little conversation with a person who is neither deaf nor dumb," she says, emboldened by exasperation.

"An immense relief, no doubt," he answers, in deep displeasure. "And yet, if you will allow me," he continues, unable to resist the temptation to lecture her – "who am so much older than you, and can have no interest in the matter but your own advantage – to give an opinion, I should recommend your choosing a fitter time of day for your meetings, even with so desirable and congenial a companion as Mr. Linley."

"Beggars must not be choosers," she answers, sulkily. "You seem to forget how very small a portion of the day I have at my own disposal."

He draws himself up to his full height, and a stern expression makes his lip thin. "I was right," he says internally; "it was no accident!" Then aloud: "I apologise, Miss Craven, for interfering in your affairs, in which, God knows, I have small concern. I only thought that, as you are so young, you might not be aware that nocturnal walks with a man of Linley's character are not advantageous to any woman's reputation."

"I know nothing about his character," retorts she, defiantly; "I daresay it is as good as other people's. All I know is, that he is very kind and civil to me, which is what nobody else is nowadays."

Then, to avoid the disgrace of seeming to court his compassion by tears, she darts from his side, and rushes to that harbour of refuge – her great, bare sleeping-chamber.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Time goes by. Since Joshua, God-bidden, commanded sun and moon to stand still, who has been able to stop it?

Gerard still remains at Blessington – remains, despite the six-o'clock dinners; despite the inarticulate and inharmonious mumblings with which old Blessington takes away the appetites of such as feast with him; despite the utter failure of his endeavours to draw from the mind of his betrothed any ideas but such as Le Follet and Le Journal des Demoiselles had just put into it. Latterly he has abandoned the attempt, has taken to reading the Times, Field, anything in the evening, instead; has even, in his despair – modern works of fiction being, as I have before observed, unknown at Blessington – waded through two chapters and a half of "Pamela," which Esther had inadvertently left on the table. Sometimes, to his own surprise, he catches himself wishing that his wedding-day were over. "When we are married, we need never speak to one another," he reflects. "Thank God, we shall not be so poor as to be obliged to keep together from economy; a dinner of herbs and hatred, or, worse still, indifference therewith, would be hard to digest; she may go her way, and I mine. I will get up a great stock of beads, and looking-glasses, and red calico, and make an expedition to Central Africa; learn some euphonious African tongue, all made up of Ms and Ns; and carefully abstain from engaging in arguments upon the immortality of the soul with intelligent natives."

Now and again conscience's voice thunders at him in the recesses of his soul: "You are paltering with temptation. Arise! – flee! – begone!" But he, strong in the innocence of his acts and words, replies doughtily: "Temptation is there none for me here. The occupations of my life are such as they would be at home; I am struggling to know and like better her with whom my life is to be passed. As to that other woman, I see her rarely, speak to her never, look at her as seldom as it is possible to me."

And, in the meantime, that other woman droops like an unwatered flower, day by day. When the mainspring of a watch is broken, must it not stop? If hope, the mainspring of life, be broken, must not life stop – not all at once, as the watch does, but by gentle yet sure degrees? A slow fire burns in the child's veins; before this man had come, she had peace – a sad stagnant peace, indeed, but still peace. Now she lives in a state of perpetual concealed excitement. True, they meet but rarely, speak to each other never; but the same roof covers them both. From her outlook in the China Gallery, she can watch his going forth in the morning, his coming back at evening. At breakfast and dinner he sits opposite to her; she can study his face, with stealthy care, lest she may be observed, while he drives heavily through slow trite talk with her that fills the place in his life that, for a golden day, from one sundown to another, was Esther's. Sometimes they meet upon the stairs; her black dress lightly touches him, as they pass one another dumbly. At night she lies awake, waiting to catch the sound of his footfall in the gallery past her door; has to wait long hours often; for he, unknowing that any one takes note of his vigils, sits in the smoking-room far into the small hours, puffing out of his well-coloured meerschaum great volumes of smoke – wishing, not seldom, I think, that he could puff away Constance, his beloved, into smoke volumes and thin air.