Red as a Rose is She: A Novel, Page 5

  CHAPTER V.

  This world is divided into poor and rich; into those who do thingsfor themselves, and those who get other people to do them for them.The Cravens belong to the former class. On the afternoon of the daymentioned in my last chapter, Miss Craven is doing for herself what shehad much rather that some one else should do for her. She is sitting ather sewing-machine, with a pile of huckaback cut up into towel-lengthsbeside her. As long as civilization remains at its present ridiculouspitch of elevation, people must have towels, and there is a prejudicein favour of hemmed versus ravelled edges. In the kitchen gardenthe maid-servants are all busy, picking currants and raspberriesfor preserving. Owen, the gardening man, is helping them; they arecombining business with pleasure; fruit-picking with persiflage. Howloudly and shrilly they laugh! and yet loud, shrill laughter expressesmirth and cause for mirth, as well as low and silvery. Esther, graveand alone, catches herself wondering what the joke was that caused suchgeneral merriment two minutes ago. Probably, did she know it, she wouldnot laugh at it, would see no point in it, perhaps, but she would beglad to hear it. The huckaback is thick and heavy; bending down one'shead 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 roseheads, watching the great red poppies straightening out their foldedcreases, pulling the green nightcaps off the escholtzia buds! A shadowdarkens the French window, causing Miss Craven to give one of thosestarts 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, "butnobody came."

  "Oh! it's you, is it?" she says, with a tone not exactly of rapturein her voice; "our servants always manage to be out of the way on therare occasions when any one calls. They are all in the garden, pickingcurrants; one would have been plenty, but they prefer working, likeconvicts 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 herchair, 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 cooland almost as dark as night, and there is always a breeze from thebrook."

  "I am busy!" she says, pettishly, annoyed at his persistence, andtaking 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 wistfullyand 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 invitehim to come in, but he, crossing the threshold diffidently, takes aseat near, but not aggressively near, her. "Don't let me interruptyou!" he says, deprecatingly.

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

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

  "I beg your pardon; this machine makes such a noise that I did notcatch 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 towork again faster than ever, and flushing with annoyance; "she wouldform a most erroneous estimate of me. I dislike particularly to befound by people in one of my rare paroxysms of virtue; they take it formy normal state, and judge and expect of me accordingly."

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

  Esther laughs awkwardly.

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

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

  Esther gives her head a little impatient shake.

  "Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed bysome one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be goodthan pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible withthe other."

  So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into hisvigilant 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 ofaffairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heapof huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forcedresignation:

  "I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same ahundred 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, andthe 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 herappearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passingglance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight orcrooked.

  The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vainwoman, 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 amist-blue cloak of hyacinths--what could be prettier?--but now it haslaid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, fleckedhere and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purpleorchis 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 bells As 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 greatgreen cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and wherethe rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.

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

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

  "Do you mean _really?_"

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

  "No, no; I was only joking."
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  "Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seatthat stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliagedthan its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeampierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up sopleasantly from below."

  Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is toosecluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin andDowsabel might sit fluting and weaving

  ".... belts of straw and ivy buds,"

  and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.

  "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 morequalified to sit upon it."

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

  The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rockfragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at thebirch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mossesand little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it issuch a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the bouldersthat lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with acoaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrelsbrought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shellsare lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them againin idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through thebirch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther'sgown 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 beable 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 dismounteddragoon--a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily,to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted astedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me theother day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It isputting 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 ofsmoking," 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 themasculine gender than I have."

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

  "I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, herthoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is

  "Wooed and married and a'"

  before her sixteenth birthday.

  "You are eight years younger than I am."

  "Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundlyuninteresting 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. "Ishall _certainly_ outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostlyoutlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, saferlives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like atortoise, to a hundred."

  "But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly.

  She shrugs her shoulders. "_Cela depend_. I shall live here as long asJack remains unmarried."

  "That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "Afarmer requires a wife more than most men."

  "More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile.

  He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makesineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has henever yet shown even a _preference_ for any one?" he asks, feeling amore personal interest than he had ever before experienced in Jack'samours and amourettes.

  "Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one,nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal toopoor to be in any demand."

  "I am glad of it."

  "You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one evershowed the slightest inclination to be your rival."

  "So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody elsewants you."

  "Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, Isuppose?"

  A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides byalong the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orangehandkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm.

  Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate,fortunate old woman! she has no lover!

  "I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly,flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at hercompanion.

  "Why should not I? I _am_ happy."

  "But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries,emphatically.

  "I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seempretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining."

  "You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," shesays drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now."

  At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in thisspeech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks downwith a snubbed expression.

  "I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says, humbly,"because I have always been such a lucky fellow; my profession suits medown to the ground; I have never had an ache or a pain in all my life,and I have the best woman in England for my mother."

  A body free from disease, a commission in a marching regiment, amethodistical, _exigeante_ old mother. These would seem but a poor_chetif_ list of subjects of thankfulness to Fortune's curled andperfumed darlings.

  "Your acquaintance amongst old ladies must be extensive to justify youin that last statement," says Esther, with a smile.

  "The best woman I know, then."

  "It is a pity that when you went, like Coelebs, in search of a wife,you did not try to find some one more like her," rejoins Esther, piquedand surprised, despite her utter indifference to his opinion of her, atfinding that, notwithstanding the imbecile pitch of love for herselfat which she believes him to have arrived, he can still set a dowdy,havering, brown old woman on a pedestal, above even that which she,with all the radiant red and white beauty of which she is so calmlyaware, all the triumph of her seventeen sweet summers, occupies in hisheart.

  "You are young and she is old," says Robert, encouragingly; "I don'tsee why you should not be like her when you are her age."

  "I think not; I hope not," says Miss Craven, coolly, strangling hertwenty-fifth yawn. "Without meaning any insult to Mrs. Brandon, Ishould be sorry to think that, at any period of my life, I should be amere reproduction of some one else."

  Another long pause. (Have we been here an hour yet?) The brown bees gohumming, droning, lumbering about, velvet-coated: a high-shoulderedgrasshopper chirps shrilly: the dim air vibrates.

  "Just listen to that cricket!" says Esther, presently, for the sakeof saying something. "How noisy he is! I read in a book the other daythat if a man's voice were as strong in proportion to his size as alocust's, he could be heard from here to St. Petersburg."

  "Could he?" says Bob, absently, not much interested in his betrothed'scurious little piece of entomological information; "how unpleasant!"The
n dragging himself along the grass and the flowers still closer toher feet, he says, "Esther, mother hopes to see a great deal more ofyou now than she has done hitherto."

  "Does she? she is very good, I am sure," answers Esther, formally, witha feeling of compunction at her utter inability to echo the wish.

  "She bid me tell you that she hopes you will come in as often as youcan of an evening. We are all sure to be at home then; the girls readaloud by turns, and mother thought that----"

  "That it might improve my mind, and that it needs improving,"interrupts Esther, smiling drily; "so it does. I quite agree with her;but not even for that object could I leave Jack of an evening; he isout all day long, and the evening is the only time when I have him tomyself."

  "You find plenty to say to _him_ always, I suppose?" says Robert, withan involuntary sigh and slight stress upon the word _him_.

  "Not a word, sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other insociable silence."

  "_How_ fond you are of that fellow!" says Robert, sighing again, andthinking, ruefully, what a long time it would be before any one wouldsay to her, "_How_ fond you are of Bob Brandon!"

  "He is the one thing upon earth that I could not do without!" sheanswers shortly, turning away her head.

  There are some people that we love so intensely that we can hardlyspeak even of our own love for them without tears.

  "I should be afraid to say that of any one," says Bob, bluntly, "forfear of being shown that I _must_ do without them."

  "What have I in all the world but him?" she cries, a passionateearnestness chasing the slow languor from her voice, all her soft faceafire with eager tenderness; "neither kith nor kin; neither friendsnor money. I am as destitute, in fact, though not in seeming, as thatgirl that passed just now, shuffling her bare feet along in the dust,and with three boxes of matches--her whole stock-in-trade--in her dirtyhand. But for Jack," she continues, in a lighter strain, "you might atthe present moment be carrying half a pound of tea or four penn'orth ofsnuff as a present to me in the Naullan almshouses."

  Robert looks attentive, and says "Hem," which is a sort of "Selah" or"Higgaion," and does not express much beyond inarticulate interest.

  "I often think that he is too good for this world," says the younggirl, mournfully, picking an orchis leaf, and looking down absently onthe capricious black splashes that freak its green surface.

  Bob is a little embarrassed between his love of truth and his desire tocoincide in opinion with his beloved.

  Jack is not in the least like the little morbid boys and girls in hissister Bessy's books, who retire into corners in play-hours to readabout hell-fire, to whom marbles and toffee and bull's-eyes are asdung, and who are inextricably entangled in his mind with the idea of"too good for this world." He evades the discussion of the alarmingnature of young Craven's goodness by a judicious silence.

  "I am such an expense to him," continues Esther, lugubriously, thecorners of her mouth drooping like a child's about to cry--"what withclothes, and food, and altogether. Even though one does not eat verymuch every day, it comes to a great deal at the end of the year, doesit not?"

  "If you come to me, you would be no expense at all to him," Robertanswers, stroking his great, broad, yellow beard (beard that will haveto disappear before he rejoins his gallant corps in Bermuda), andlooking very sentimental; yet not that either, for sentimental impliesthe existence of a little feeling, and the affectation of a great dealmore.

  "He would have to provide me with a trousseau and a wedding-cake, evenin that case."

  "I would excuse him both."

  "Would you?" she says, jestingly; "I wouldn't; it has always seemed tome that the best part of holy matrimony is the avalanche of new clothesthat attends being wed."

  "You shall have any amount of new clothes."

  "I should be an expense to you, then," she says, giving him a smilethat is grateful and bright and cold, all in one, like a Januarymorning. Cold as her smile is, it is a smile, and he is encouragedby it to refer to a subject nearer his heart than Jack Craven'sexcellences.

  "If you cannot spare time to come to us of an evening, would you letme--might I--would you mind my joining you and Jack--now and then--forhalf an hour or so--if I should not be in the way?"

  Her countenance falls, more visibly than she is herself perhaps awareof.

  "Of course," she answers, in a constrained voice, "if you wish; weshall always be glad to see you, of course."

  "I would not come often," says the poor young man wistfully; "once aweek perhaps--so that we might get to know one another better; mothersays----"

  "Don't tell me any more of your mother's speeches to-day, or we shallhave none left for to-morrow," interrupts Esther, with a sort ofironical playfulness, flapping about with her pocket-handkerchief at asquadron of young midges, and looking mild exasperation at the unluckysix-foot slave at her feet. Then she stretches out her hand, plucks adandelion, or what was a dandelion a week ago, but is now a sphere ofdelicatest, fragilest, downspikes, and blows it like a child to seewhat o'clock it is. "One, two, three, four, five, six. Time to gohome!" she says, flinging away the hollow stalk and springing up.

  "It seems only five minutes since we came," says Robert, with a greatsigh of good-bye, looking down at the long stretch of bruised grassthat indicates his late resting-place.

  "Do you think so?" exclaims Esther, opening her eyes very wide, and themost violent negative could not have expressed dissent more clearly.

  So they pass home through the loudly vocal wood, and he parts fromher under the porch. He had meant to squeeze her hand at parting;perhaps still bolder forms of adieu flitted before his mind's eye, buta certain expression in her face makes all such plans take to theirheels. He looks as if he would come in if he were asked; but he isnot asked, therefore, courage failing him, he departs. She stands inthe shadow watching him, and thinks, "What bad boots! and is not oneshoulder rather higher than the other?" It is not the least bit higher;no young fir is straighter than he; but when a thing belongs, or maypossibly belong, to oneself, one waxes marvellous critical.