Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

Jack obeys. "There is a person in the drawing-room wanting to speak to you," he says, leaning his arms on the top of the gate, and looking rather malicious.

"What sort of a person?" Esther asks abstractedly, craning her long neck round the corner of the barn, to see whether the drake shows symptoms of returning. "There he is again! Shoo!"

"What was the name of Esther's husband? the man that bullied his first wife so. Oh! I know; his name, oh Queen Esther, is Ahasuerus, which, being interpreted, is Bob."

Esther's apron drops from her fingers and the wheat rolls down in a shower on to the broad backs of the Cochin householders. Fiercely the war of chickens – the pushing, the fluttering, the pecking – rages about her feet. "Already!" she says: and in her voice there is none of love's sweet quiver, nor on her cheeks is there any sign of love's pretty flag being hung out, neither the red nor the white one. She only looks a little blank – a little troubled.

"Yes, already," says Jack, mercilessly; "and not only has he come himself, but he has brought all his household gods with him. He has come with a great company of old women at his back. I fancy they have brought a notary or a scrivener, or what do you call it? with them, and that there is to be a grand betrothal in form."

"Nonsense!" says Esther, and she comes all over to the gate, and clasps two little petitioning hands on his shoulder. "You will come with me, won't you, Jack?"

"Not I!" says Jack, stoutly. "I would not trust myself with those old maids, in their present excited state, if you were to give me my next half-year's rent: they would be employing the notary in my case too before I knew where I was."

"Jack, is my hair pretty tidy?" stroking it down with the improvised brush and comb of her slim fingers.

"Extremely so: it looks as if the chickens had got into it, and been scratching there by mistake."

Meanwhile Master Brandon and his old women, to wit, his mother, Mrs. Brandon, and his sisters, the two Misses Brandon, are posed about the drawing-room, waiting. Waiting is always a painful process, from the modified form of suffering involved in the ten minutes before dinner, when every man's tongue is tied, and his wits congealed by the frost of expectant hunger; upward to the Gehenna of a dentist's antechamber. Robert is all on wires this morning: he cannot sit still; he keeps shuffling and twisting his long, awkward legs about, beating the devil's tattoo on the floor with his nailed boots, and hammering an ugly little tune with a paper knife on an old Book of Beauty on the table. "How you fidget, Bob!" cries his sister Bessy.

Miss Elizabeth Brandon is ten years older and about ten feet shorter than her brother; she is in process of souring, like cowslip wine that has been kept too long, or small beer in thunder. She is not so very sour, after all, poor little virgin! only ten years ago she was, and ten years hence she will be mellower than she is now.

"All right!" says Bob, "I won't;" and he stops, only to commence, two seconds later, a new noise, seven times worse than the first; a very disagreeable sort of scraping with the hind legs of his chair. Is not it one of Miss Yonge's goody heroes, who, when he feels disposed to be impatient, sits down and strums away at the "Harmonious Blacksmith?" Bob could not get through a bar of that soothing melody this morning. Mrs. Brandon is just beginning to say, "Do you think the servant could have told her?" when the door opens, and a little vision comes in with delicate hair ruffling about her sweet, shining eyes; a little vision that ought to be walking on rosy clouds, Bob thinks, with cherubim and seraphim holding up her train, instead of on shabby oil-cloth and faded carpet, dragging her train behind her.

"I – I'm very sorry; I'm afraid I have kept you waiting: I did not" (did not expect you so early is on the tip of her tongue, but she remembers just in time that it would be about the impolitest remark she could make. Never, until the millennium, will the marriage of Truth and Civility be solemnized) – "did not know you were here till Jack came and told me a moment ago," she substitutes so adroitly that none of her auditors perceive the rivet that joins the two halves of her sentence together.

"I don't know what your brother will say to us for taking his house by storm, but you must blame him, my dear, you must blame him!" says Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head towards Bob, and looking as if there was something peculiarly humorous in the idea of Esther being in a condition to blame him for anything he could do or leave undone.

Mrs. Brandon is an old woman, with a smooth, holy face, and a villainous black poke bonnet: she kisses Esther, and the Misses Brandon likewise come forward and inflict a prim sisterly salute with their thin old-maid lips, on the velvet rose-leaf of her cheek. They had never kissed her before, and she felt as if the manacles were being fastened round her wrists, and the gyves about her ankles. She longs to cry out and say, "What are you all about? you are quite mistaken, every one of you; Mrs. Brandon, I am not your daughter; Miss Bessy, I am not your sister; I don't want to be: take back those kisses of yours, if you please, if they mean that!" Had she been alone with Robert, she would probably have said this; have said it without much difficulty, but now the words seemed infinitely, impossibly hard to frame. There is upon her the shyness of a young woman with an old one; the shyness of one against three. She feels, too, that it seems ungracious, churlish, when they are so glad to take her in to themselves, to adopt her as their own, not to be very glad too. When a person says to one, if not in words, yet with looks and gestures, "Our people shall be thy people, and our God thy God," it is not easy for a plastic, gracious nature to say "No, they shall not!" however little they may relish the arrangement. So, in her muteness, Esther accepts the Brandon God and people as hers.

Wordless and demure, she sits down on a little low seat as far removed as may be from Robert. Esther will, no doubt, be an ugly old woman; she makes rather an ugly photograph; but who can deny that she is a delicious bit of colour as she sits there right in the eye of the morning sun, and not at all afraid of his strict scrutiny? So many women, now-a-days, are neutral-tinted, drabbish, greyish, as if the colours that God painted with were not fast, but faded, like Reynolds'. Esther's colouring is as distinct, as decided, as clean and clear as that on a flower's petal or a butterfly's wing. Nobody speaks, except the clock with the short-waisted Minerva on it, and it does not say anything particularly original. Then the old woman bends towards the young one, and says in a kind, low voice, "You see Robert has told us his news, my dear." There is flowing in through the French window a broad river of yellow light from the great fountain in the sky; it is deluging Mrs. Brandon's bonnet and Esther's hair. The bonnet is black, and the hair is black; but there are blacks and blacks. The May grass is green, and a beer bottle is green; but the resemblance between the two is not striking. Esther has not the remotest idea what answer to make; so she chooses one of the shortest words she knows of, and says "Yes!" half-assentingly, half-interrogatively.

"And we could not rest till we came and told you what good news we thought it," pursues the old lady, encouragingly.

Esther says nothing. Her eyelids feel glued down to her cheeks; she is conscious, with inward rage and vexation, of looking blushing, bashful, everything that a young betrothed should look.

"I'm an old woman," concludes Mrs. Brandon, rather moved by her own eloquence, "and I cannot expect a great many more years of life. You know what the Psalmist sweetly says, love; but I trust I may be spared to see God bless both my children, and make them His happy servants for this world and the next."

As she speaks she lays one hand on Esther's head. Bob is happily too far off, or she would lay the other on his, while the two little virgin clerks from the sofa cry "Amen!" in a breath. Esther is half-frightened. What with the serious words, with the three women's solemn faces, she half feels as if she were being married on the spot; her thoughts fly to Jack and the notary; after that "Amen!" she is not quite sure that her name is not Esther Brandon. She shrinks away a little, but not at all rudely.

"You are very kind," she says, in her gentle voice, "and it was so good of you coming all through the wood – such a long walk for you, too; but I think – I'm afraid that there is some mistake about – this – about me; there is nothing settled – nothing at all, I assure you. I told your son so yesterday quite plainly, only I'm afraid he did not understand me," she concludes, looking rather reproachfully over at him.

"I did understand you," protests poor Bob, eagerly, jumping up, upsetting his chair, and never thinking of picking it up again, "I did, indeed. I told mother your very words, only she would have it that they meant – what we all wished they should mean," he ends, looking very downcast and snubbed and disconsolate.

There is another pause, then Mrs. Brandon rises and puts out her hand to Esther – in farewell this time.

"I'm afraid I've been in too great a hurry, my dear," she says, trying not to speak stiffly, and not succeeding quite so well as she deserved. "But you'll forgive me, I'm sure; you see, mothers are apt to be partial people, and I could not imagine any one trying to love my boy, and not succeeding."

But Miss Craven can never let well alone. She would marry Old Nick himself sooner than that his mother or sister should look askance at her, or seem hurt and grieved with her for expressing any want of relish for him, hoofs and tail and horns and all.

"Oh no, you must not go!" she cries, in her quick, eager way, putting up two anxious hands in deprecation; "you must not be vexed with me; I did not mean to be disagreeable. I shall like very much to belong to you, I'm sure. I was only afraid of your expecting more from me than I had to give yet," she ends, with head drooped a little, and cheeks reddened like a peach's that the sun has been kissing all the afternoon.

The stiffness goes away: nobody can be stiff for long with Esther Craven, any more than a snow-ball can remain a snow-ball under the fire's warm gaze.

"We don't want you to belong to us if you don't wish it yourself," the old woman says, very gravely, yet not ill-naturedly.

"I hardly know what I wish," answers the girl, naïvely, in a sort of bewilderment.

Then they go, and Robert walks off with his old mother on his arm. He would walk down Pall Mall with her in that identical poke bonnet, and the two little dowdy vestals pottering behind in the most perfect unconsciousness and simplicity, even if he were to know that his brother officers, to a man, were looking out at him from the "Rag" windows.

"Oh, my cheeks! my cheeks! will they ever get cool again!" cries Esther, flinging herself down on the oak bench in the porch, and laying her face against the cold ivy leaves.

"You look rather as if you had been poking your countenance between the bars of the kitchen grate," responds Jack, with all a brother's candour. Jack has been dodging behind the laurel bushes, after the fashion in which the English gentleman is fond of receiving his friends when they come to call on him.

"Why did not you come to my rescue, you unnatural brother? What chance had I, single-handed, against those three Gorgons? Pah! it makes my head ache to think of mamma's coiffure."

"When a person gets into a scrape themselves, I make it a rule to let them get out of it themselves, as it makes them more careful for the future," replies Jack, with philosophy.

"But I'm not getting out of it; I'm floundering deeper and deeper and deeper in, like a man in an Irish bog," says Esther, ruefully. "Oh, Jack!" she concludes, laughing, yet vexed (laughter is as often the exponent of annoyance as of enjoyment, I think), "if you could have heard the stories I was forced to tell, I'm sure I deserve to be wound up, carried out, and buried, as much as ever Ananias did."

CHAPTER V

This world is divided into poor and rich; into those who do things for themselves, and those who get other people to do them for them. The Cravens belong to the former class. On the afternoon of the day mentioned in my last chapter, Miss Craven is doing for herself what she had much rather that some one else should do for her. She is sitting at her sewing-machine, with a pile of huckaback cut up into towel-lengths beside her. As long as civilization remains at its present ridiculous pitch of elevation, people must have towels, and there is a prejudice in favour of hemmed versus ravelled edges. In the kitchen garden the maid-servants are all busy, picking currants and raspberries for preserving. Owen, the gardening man, is helping them; they are combining business with pleasure; fruit-picking with persiflage. How loudly and shrilly they laugh! and yet loud, shrill laughter expresses mirth and cause for mirth, as well as low and silvery. Esther, grave and alone, catches herself wondering what the joke was that caused such general merriment two minutes ago. Probably, did she know it, she would not laugh at it, would see no point in it, perhaps, but she would be glad to hear it. The huckaback is thick and heavy; bending down one's head over one's work sends all the blood in one's body into it. Phew! How hot! How much pleasanter to be out of doors, tweaking off dead rose heads, watching the great red poppies straightening out their folded creases, pulling the green nightcaps off the escholtzia buds! A shadow darkens the French window, causing Miss Craven to give one of those starts that make one feel as if one literally jumped out of one's skin, and fill one with ungodly wrath against the occasion of them.

"I rang several times," says Robert Brandon, apologetically, "but nobody came."

"Oh! it's you, is it?" she says, with a tone not exactly of rapture in her voice; "our servants always manage to be out of the way on the rare occasions when any one calls. They are all in the garden, picking currants; one would have been plenty, but they prefer working, like convicts or navvies, in gangs."

"I came to see whether you were inclined to take a walk?" he says, hesitatingly, for her manner is not encouraging.

"Too hot!" she answers, lazily, leaning her head on the back of her chair, and closing her eyes, as if his presence disposed her to sleep.

"Not in the wood?" he rejoins, eagerly. "Under our oaks it is as cool and almost as dark as night, and there is always a breeze from the brook."

"I am busy!" she says, pettishly, annoyed at his persistence, and taking in with a dissatisfied eye his tout ensemble– yellow beard, frayed coat-sleeves, vigorous rustic comeliness.

He does not pursue the subject further, but stands leaning wistfully and uncertain against the window.

"Jack is not at home, I'm afraid," she says, stiffly, by-and-by.

"I did not come to see Jack," he answers, bluntly. She does not invite him to come in, but he, crossing the threshold diffidently, takes a seat near, but not aggressively near, her. "Don't let me interrupt you!" he says, deprecatingly.

She takes him at his word, and continues her homely occupation. Up and down, up and down her foot goes, keeping the wheel in motion; prick, prick, prick, the needle travels with its quick, regular stabs. If, as I have said, the process of bending over work on a July afternoon is heating, the consciousness that another person is watching every quiver of your eyelids, counting every breath you draw, and every displaced hair that straggles about brow or cheek, does not conduce to make it less so. The magnetic influence that sooner or later compels the eyes of the looked at to seek those of the looker, obliges Esther, after awhile, to raise hers – reluctant and protesting – to Robert's.

"I wish my mother could see you!" he says, with a smile of placid happiness. Mr. Brandon carries his mother metaphorically upon his back, almost as much as pious Æneas did the old Anchises literally. Esther suspends her employment for a moment.

"I beg your pardon; this machine makes such a noise that I did not catch what you said."

"I was only wishing that mother could see you now."

"It is a pleasure she enjoys pretty frequently. Why now particularly?"

"She would see how thrifty and housewifely you can be."

"I am glad she does not, then," answers the girl, drily, beginning to work again faster than ever, and flushing with annoyance; "she would form a most erroneous estimate of me. I dislike particularly to be found by people in one of my rare paroxysms of virtue; they take it for my normal state, and judge and expect of me accordingly."

"I shall tell her that, at all events, my judgment of you was nearer the truth than hers," says Robert, triumphantly.

Esther laughs awkwardly.

"I don't know whether you are aware of it, but you are conveying to my mind the idea that your mother has been pronouncing a very unfavourable verdict upon me and my character."

"She thinks you are too pretty and lively, and – and – " (frivolous had been the word employed by Mrs. Brandon, but Robert cannot find it in his heart to apply it to his idol) – "too fond of society to care about being useful in tame, humdrum, everyday ways."

Esther gives her head a little impatient shake.

"Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed by some one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be good than pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible with the other."

So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into his vigilant dumb observation of her. At the end of a quarter of an hour, as he still shows no signs of moving, finding the present position of affairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heap of huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forced resignation:

"I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same a hundred years hence."

"I am perfectly happy as I am," he answers with provoking good humour, looking up in blissful unconsciousness at her charming cross face, and the plain yet dainty fit of her trim cheap gown.

"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day; please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of; I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."

She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or crooked.

The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another. Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a mist-blue cloak of hyacinths – what could be prettier? – but now it has laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest, fancifullest of all our singers?

"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,That led through this garden along and across, —Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees, —"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bellsAs fair as the fabulous asphodels,And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."

They describe Glan-yr-Afon wood much better than I can. It is a great green cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and where the rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.

"Had we not better walk arm in arm?" asks Esther, sardonically, as they march along in silence. "I believe it is the correct thing on these occasions; at least Gwen and her sweetheart always do on Sunday evenings."

He turns towards her; an expression of surprised delight upspringing into his eyes.

"Do you mean really?"

She is mollified, despite herself, by the simple joy beaming in his poor, good-looking face – face that would be more than good-looking if only some great grief would give it fuller expression; if only a few months of late hours and mundane dissipations would wear off its look of exuberant bucolic healthiness.

"No, no; I was only joking."

"Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seat that stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliaged than its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeam pierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up so pleasantly from below."

Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is too secluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin and Dowsabel might sit fluting and weaving and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.

"… belts of straw and ivy buds,"

"I don't fancy it," she says, beginning to walk on; "it looks earwiggy."

"Only the other day you said it was quite a lovers' seat!" he exclaims, in surprise.

"Exactly; and for that very reason I prefer waiting till I am more qualified to sit upon it."

By-and-by Miss Craven finds a position that suits her better; one nearer the edge of the wood, in full view of the Naullan road, along which market women, coal carts, stray limping tramps, go passing, and where loverly blandishments are out of the question.

The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rock fragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at the birch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mosses and little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it is such a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the boulders that lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with a coaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrels brought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shells are lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them again in idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through the birch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther's gown and Robert's recumbent figure, as he lies in the repose of warmth, absolute idleness, absolute content at her feet. An hour and a half, two hours to be spent in trying to like Robert! Faugh! She yawns.

"That is the seventh time you have yawned since we have been here," remarks her lover, a little reproachfully.

"I dare say; and if you wait five minutes longer, you will probably be able to tell me that it is the seventy-seventh time."

"You did not yawn while we were indoors."

"I had my work; what is a woman without her work? A dismounted dragoon – a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily, to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted as tedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me the other day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It is putting one's felicity on rather a low level, but I believe it is true."

"In the same way as no man can be good-tempered who is not fond of smoking," says Bob, starting a rival masculine proposition.

"I don't know anything at all about men," replies Esther, exhaustively. "No woman in the world can have a more limited acquaintance with the masculine gender than I have."

"You are young yet," says Brandon, consolingly.

"I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, her thoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is before her sixteenth birthday.

"Wooed and married and a'"

"You are eight years younger than I am."

"Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly uninteresting to her.

"Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us."

"Why?"

"Because you are the more likely to outlive me."

She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I shall certainly outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a tortoise, to a hundred."