"Never, never!" she cries, bringing together emphatically her two gleaming, wet hands. "You have witnessed my first and last equestrian feat; with my own free-will I will mount never a horse again, unless it is the rocking-horse at the end of the north gallery: it is frisky, yet safe; gallops and plunges, yet stands still: that is the horse for me."
He laughs, and then they are silent.
A star falls, hurling itself mysteriously down the sky, and into the dark; two bats glide past, dusky, noiseless. Bats always seem to me like the ghosts of dead birds, that haunt the green gardens and copses they used to love.
St. John speaks presently. "One forms mistaken estimates of people's characters; I should not have imagined you a coward."
"But I am one, physically and morally," she answers, sighing.
As the ladies retire to bed, Miss Blessington enters Esther's room – a familiarity which somewhat surprises that virgin, as it is the first time that it has been accorded to her.
"I have come to congratulate you!" Constance says, civilly; "you have made a wonderful recovery."
"Yes, wonderful!"
"You can walk perfectly well without assistance, cannot you?"
"Perfectly" (turning away her head, in the guilty consciousness of having, despite her soundness of limb, not walked without assistance).
"St. John is very useful as a walking-stick, isn't he?" (playfully.)
"He thought it would tire me less," replies the other, flushing; "he has been most kind!"
"He always is," answers Miss Blessington, quickly: "it is his nature; old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, dirty children in the gutter – it is all one to him."
"Really!"
"That universal geniality amounts almost to a weakness, though an amiable one; it has often been the cause of exciting hopes that, of course, he had neither the wish nor the power to gratify."
"What! in old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, and dirty children in the gutter?" says Esther, smiling merrily, yet with scorn.
"If I did not take an interest in you," continued Constance, leaning in a graceful artistic pose against the mantelpiece, "I should, of course, not take the trouble to mention the subject; but, as I do, I thought it the kindest thing I could do to you to set you on your guard against attentions to which you, who do not know him, might, without vanity, attribute some importance, but which I, who know him so thoroughly, know to mean absolutely nothing, beyond a sort of general bonhomie towards the whole of the human race."
"I am deeply grateful," answers the young girl, with sarcastic emphasis; "but in my part of the world, girls are not in the habit of cherishing vague hopes because a man has the civility to offer them his arm when they are disabled by an accident from walking by themselves."
"Well, forewarned is forearmed, you know" (nodding and smiling); "and from some careless, slighting remarks that St. John let fall the other day, I thought I should not be acting the part of a friend by you if I did not warn you against a snare into which I have seen others older, and knowing more of the world than you do, fall. Good night!"
"Stay!" cries Esther, springing up, and catching hold of her companion's gauzy dress in detention. "It is unfair to tell a person half, and not the whole. What were the slighting remarks that Mr. Gerard made à propos of me?"
"Really, I – I – don't remember exactly," replies Constance, with reluctance, half-feigned, half-real; "I did not pay much attention at the time; it was an admission that slipped out without my intending it."
"But now that it has slipped out," cries the other, authoritatively, "you must explain it fully, please."
"Well, really – please don't look so tragic, it can be of so very little consequence to you what he said or did not say about you – "
"Infinitesimally little! but still I mean to hear it."
"Well" (with rather an awkward laugh), "the situation is hardly worth such Mrs. Siddons' airs: it was only that, when I was remonstrating with him the other day on his manner to you, he said, in his off-hand, abrupt way, something to the effect that when he threw you over – never for a moment denying that sooner or later he would do so – you would get over it soon, or something of that description. I cannot recall the exact phrase. Good night."
But beautiful Esther, standing there stricken, credulous, with eager, angry eyes, forgets to make the answering greeting.
CHAPTER XIII
The Bazaar day has arrived; so likewise have Constance's chosen friends, the Misses De Grey; so likewise has their brother, commonly called Dick De Grey, for no other reason that we wot of but that at his baptism he received the name of Charles. The large open carriage which had so impressed Esther on her first arrival at Brainton station, and St. John's smart T. – cart, with his big, black horse, at whose head, or rather at some distance below whose nose, a cockaded infant stands trim and tidy, are at the door.
"How are we to divide?" says Miss Blessington, coming out under the portico and unfurling her white Honiton parasol. "How many of us are there? Adeline, Georgina, Miss Craven, and myself, four, and you two gentlemen six. St. John, will you drive Miss De Grey?"
"I should be delighted," he answers, slowly and tardily, not looking up from the gardenia which he is fastening on his coat; "but I believe I am under an old engagement to drive Miss Craven. You have never been in a T. – cart, have you?" (looking at her imploringly, to back him up in the ready lie to which, for love of her, he has just given vent.)
"Never!" she answers, smiling coldly. "And now that I see to what a height one has to climb, and in what close proximity one must be to that huge quadruped's heels, I am in no hurry to make the experiment. I release you from your engagement, Mr. Gerard, if it ever existed; if it is all the same to everybody, I prefer the – I never can recollect the names of carriages – barouche, sociable, landau, which is it?"
He stares at her for an instant in blank astonishment; then, turning away quickly to hide the mortification which he knows to be legible on his face, without a word or a groan helps the oldest, plainest, languidest of the Misses De Grey into the T. – cart and drives off with her. And Esther steps into the sociable, and tries to feel triumphant and dignified, contemplating, for a dozen miles, Miss Georgina De Grey's gold-dusted hair and featureless face, and submitting meekly to having the modest proportions of her own toilette covered up and smothered in the abundance and volume of her vis-à-vis' laces and frillings.
"Since he means to throw me over, it is as well to be beforehand with him," she says to herself, her eyes fixed pensively on the revolving black and yellow wheel; "in such cases it is always best to take the initiative. It would have been very pleasant, so high up out of the dust; but what have I to do with aristocratic vehicles? A gig, a wheelbarrow, a pig-tub – such are the only conveyances I am likely to have experience of in after-life; why then inoculate myself with a taste for luxuries that are for my betters?"
And meanwhile St. John holds dreary converse with himself, while a river of sound, on which the words Nilsson, Romeo e Giulietta, Schneider, drums, Holland House, garden party float, pours into his ear from the direction of his companion. "She is honest, at all events; does not relish my society, and does not affect to do so; tolerated me only as long as I was useful, like a dog, in fetching and carrying. Why am I so unpopular with women? Is it what I do, what I say, or what I am, that makes me so? Is it anything mendable or unmendable?"
Precisely seventeen minutes past two of the clock, the Melford town-hall clock, and visitors are beginning to arrive pretty thickly; three or four barouches, seven or eight waggonettes, and nine or ten pony-carriages, are trotting and walking and crawling up the steep Melford street. Climbing the side of a house is child's play to the ascent of that most perpendicular of high streets. The doctor's house, red, and with redder berries thick about its plate-glass windows, stands on your right as you go up the town. The Doctor and the Doctress are issuing from the brass-knockered hall door – she in a grey moire antique, that old Mrs. Evans' quinsy paid for, and gold bracelets that took their rise from Mr. Watkin's decline and fall.
The town-hall stands in its grey limestone respectability in the market place, over against the Bell Inn; it has an arched doorway, and under this arch man, woman, and child go pacing in little, smart tulle bonnets and black hats, with their purses full of small change, and their hearts of that most excellent virtue – Christian charity. Round the hall counters are ranged, and behind these counters stand a phalanx of young women, prepared to exert their little abilities in overreaching and circumventing their fathers, lovers, and brothers, to the utmost.
Miss Blessington's stall is next-door neighbour to poor Mrs. Tomkins', the Felton curate's fat, childridden wife – as, in some foreign city, they tell us that you may see marble palaces and mud hovels cheek by jowl; for, as is a mud hovel to a marble palace, so is poor Mrs. Tomkins in the Melford table of valuation to Miss Blessington.
Mrs. Tomkins' main hope is in her sister, pretty, second-rate, pert Miss Smith, who, with a dog-collar round her waist, to demonstrate its tenuity, and two long, uncurled curls, vulgarly known as "Follow me, lads!" floating over her fat shoulders, has been kissing strawberries and rose-buds, and selling them at half-a-crown apiece, to such attorneys' clerks and doctors' assistants of weak intellect as inhabit Melford town.
On Miss Blessington's other side the Misses Denzil hold sway – daughters of a neighbour baronet, whom for twenty years past Sir Thomas has hated with the hate of hell, because he once beat him in a contest for the county. Belinda Denzil, an elderly young lady, tall and yellow and stately; likest to a dandelion among the flowers of the field; and Priscilla, a beady-eyed, brisk brune, of whom her admirers predicate that she could talk the hind leg off a mule!
Mr. Gerard and Mr. De Grey are strolling about together arm in arm; criticising the wares a little and the saleswomen a good deal. They are not particularly fond of one another; but no more was Alexander Selkirk, I dare say, of his next-door neighbour, when he lived in town, if he ever did. All the same, if the said next-door neighbour had happened to land on that most irreligious of desert islands, where the benighted valleys and rocks never heard the sound of the church-going bell, don't you suppose that he would have rushed into his arms? So in this desert island of Melford, St. John and Dick, the only two respectable fellows, as they think, among a savage horde of squireens, march about, hooked on together for mutual defence against the barbarians.
"You seem to be driving a thriving trade," remarks St. John, who, after his wanderings, has at length come to anchor at Miss Blessington's stall, addressing Esther, but addressing her diffidently, as one that, after the severe and uncalled-for snubbing he had this morning received, was by no means sure of the reception his civilities might meet with, while three old women and a parson squeeze in beside himself and his friend.
"Perhaps you will kindly contribute towards making it more thriving, by buying something;" replies Miss Craven, coolly and drily. "Let me recommend this cigar case to your notice; it is rather ugly, and very dear, but one must not mind trifling drawbacks of that kind on an occasion like the present."
"Did you make it?"
"Yes; but please don't be so polite as to buy it on that account, as, upon the same grounds, you would have to buy a large proportion of the beautiful works of art before you."
So speaking, she turns away from him to another customer, as if glad to be rid of him.
"May I ask what the price of this is?" asks Mr. De Grey, leaning with languid familiarity over Miss Smith's counter (everybody is familiar with Miss Smith; that is one of her great charms), and holding up a gorgeously-embroidered smoking cap between his finger and thumb.
"One pound eleven and sixpence halfpenny," replies the young lady, with glib obsequiousness, all a-twitter with excitement at being addressed by an august being in a cutaway coat who is known throughout the room to be a visitor at Felton Hall. "But, dear me!" (fussing about with unnecessary empressement) "I have got a much more stylish one somewhere, if I could but lay my hands on it – one that I made myself, if that is any recommendation! He! he!" (with a giggle.)
"Can you doubt it?" retorts he, sucking the top of his cane, and staring at her with lazy impertinence.
Meanwhile the room is getting very crowded and stuffy: it is a very small town-hall, and all Melford and the southern half of – shire are compressed into it – the result being much animal heat, some ill-humour, and infinite grief over rent garments; which is reversing the case of the ancients, who rent their garments in sign of grief. And in and through and about this warm throng, many girls, emissaries from different stalls, go pushing and elbowing to enlist unwilling subscribers to raffles. Philanthropy has gone nigh to unsexing them; it has turned modest, reserved ladies into forward importunate Mænads.
Foremost, most energetic, most unrebuffable of these emissaries is Miss Priscilla Denzil. She flies about hither and thither, with her white gown all limp and tumbled, and her rough hair pushing its way resolutely from under the blue ribbons which make a vain show of confining it à la Grecque. She is not thinking a bit of how she is looking; her whole soul is intent on doing a good stroke of business, and none can escape her.
Sir Thomas Gerard has just entered the hall. Having ridden into Melford on magisterial business, the idea has struck him of how much better and more cuttingly he will be able to abuse the bazaar at dinner this evening if he has had the advantage of seeing it. With a dog-whip in his hand, and an intense desire to lay it about the shoulders of the company expressed in his cross face, he is pushing his way along when attacked by the dauntless Priscilla.
"Oh! Sir Thomas, please let me put you down in the raffle for a fender-stool; so handsome! white arums on a red ground; do let me, so handsome!"
"A what, Miss Priscilla?"
"A fender-stool."
"Humph! the stupidest things that ever were invented," answers the baronet, snarling. "If they had been made expressly to trip people up, and pitch them head-foremost into the fire, they could not have answered the purpose better."
"Did they ever pitch you head-foremost into the fire?" asks Miss Prissy, insinuatingly ("because [aside], if so, I wonder whoever was fool enough to pick you out again!")
"No, and they shall never have the chance as long as I can prevent them," replies the gracious elder, walking off.
For a minute Priscilla stands still, rebuffed; but recovering herself, speedily rushes off again, charges with her fender-stool an old maid who has one already, and a poor little whity-brown curate who has no house to put one in, &c., &c.
"I am afraid I have not done them up very neatly," Esther is saying, as she gives a parcel into Mr. De Grey's hands – Miss Smith having at length frightened that gentleman from her side by the rapid strides to intimacy which she was making with him – "My fingers toil in vain after the nimbleness with which shopmen whisk a parcel into shape and compactness before you have time to look round."
Mr. De Grey has spent a small fortune in pincushions, kettle-holders, dressed dolls, and many other such-like articles which no young man of fashion should be without.
"What have I done to be so neglected, Miss Craven?" asks Gerard, elevating his eyebrows plaintively. "Am I expected to put on these slippers on the spot, that I am given no paper to pack them up in?"
"Oh! I beg your pardon; I thought that Miss De Grey was attending to you," answers Esther, in the most business-like, shop-woman voice, without smiling, or lifting her eyes.
"I thought no one ever gave change at a bazaar," he says, trying to make her look up at him, as she puts a few shillings into his hand.
"I do not approve of such extortion," she answers, demurely; "honesty is the best policy."
"That proverb must have been invented, as Whately justly observed, by some one who had tried the other alternative."
She smiles a little against her will. "I wish you two would go now," she says, addressing both young men indifferently: "you are only making me idle. Look! there are three old maids ready to storm the position, and only deterred by you."
"Rhadamantha, Hebe, and Niobe!" says St. John, laughing.
"Please go; I know you are not thinking of buying anything more."
"Don Ferdinando can do no more than he can do, and at present he is pretty well cleaned out."
At Miss Blessington's stall trade is certainly very brisk; it is considered a fitting mark of respect to the family to buy their goods, and so the honest burgesses of Melford make it a point of honour to buy Miss Blessington's and Miss De Grey's blotting books and babies' socks in preference to anyone else's, however superior in fabric and less exorbitant in price anybody else's might be.
Miss Blessington has just sunk upon a chair, with an affectation of great fatigue, and is saying languidly, "If ever any one deserved the martyr's crown, that person is I; within the last ten minutes I have sold nine cushions and fifteen pairs of muffetees."
"There's plenty of cool tea and warm ices at the other end of the room, if you think they are likely to restore you," suggests Gerard, who is still leaning his elbow on the counter, and has not gone away as commanded.
"It makes one quite hot," pursues Miss Blessington, leaning back and fanning herself vigorously, "merely to look at Prissy Denzil rushing about like a Mæenad, worrying every one to put into raffles."
"Providence made a great mistake when it made that girl a lady," says St. John, following, with a look of half-disgust in his fastidious eyes, Priscilla's little dishevelled figure; "she would have been much happier haggling for halfpence at a huckster's stall."
The afternoon draws towards its close; people have come and bought, and raffled and gone again, carrying manifold ill-tied paper parcels with them. The farmeresses and yeomen's wives of the Melford district have departed, carrying with them, in their mind's eye, for imitation against next Sunday, the cut of Miss Blessington's skirt, and the profuse curls and bandeaux of Miss De Grey's intricate coiffure. The room is emptying, and the day's duty approaching its end.
"I say, old fellow," remarks Mr. De Grey, touching St. John on the shoulder as he leans against the wall, gazing somewhat morosely at his own boots, "don't you think we might as well be saying Ta-ta? I don't know what you have, but I have had nearly enough of this gay and festive scene."
"All right," answers the other, shaking off dull care; "I have put into exactly twenty-five raffles, and only got a christening robe and a squirt, so I think I may be supposed to have done my duty."
At the door there is a little confusion – carriages driving up, carriages driving away; a small crowd gathered to see the smart ladies; two policemen.
The Felton equipage and Mr. Gerard's T. – cart stand at some little distance down the street. St. John offers Esther his arm, and she, having no decent excuse for declining, takes it. As they walk along, he speaks to her hurriedly and not without temper. "If you have no special ground of quarrel against me – and Heaven knows why you should have – but feel only that weariness to which most women seem, in my society, to be more or less subject, be unselfish, and let me drive you home. I will not speak, neither need you, if you will have it so; there are many things more unsociable than absolute silence."
"Why cannot you be satisfied with this morning's arrangements?" she asks, demurring; the recollection of his reported insult rankling in her mind.
He shrugs his shoulders expressively. "If you had had three fourths of 'Le Follet' and half the Morning Post poured into your reluctant ears, as I have, you would not have asked that question."
"If you have heard half the Morning Post, is it not a thousand pities that you should not hear the other half?" she inquires, drily.
They have reached the T. – cart, the big black horse, the baby-tiger; in the low, red sun the new harness shines brightly.
"I almost wish you could sprain your other ankle," Gerard says, recovering his good humour. "As long as you were lame, you were much more amiable."
Ten minutes more, and the Melford steep street and railway bridge are left behind them, they are trotting with smooth briskness between the nutty, briary hedgerows. At first the silence which Gerard had guaranteed threatens to remain unbroken; it is infringed at last by Esther, out of whose heart the fair late breeze, the happy yellow stillness, and lastly, the proximity to and solitude with the beloved one, are smoothing all angry creases. ("If he did speak lightly of me," she thinks, sorrowfully, "we shall not have the chance of many more drives together; whether he think ill or well, highly or meanly, of me, let me be happy with him while I may!")
"What a pleasant vehicle this would be to make a driving tour in!"
"A tour of all the cathedral towns throughout England, as the Heir of Redclyffe proposed spending his honeymoon in making!"
She laughs.
"I remember long ago the Saturday Review saying of some she-novelist's men, that they were like old governesses in trousers: it was not a bad simile, was it?"
Silence falls on them again; broken this time by Gerard, who, turning abruptly towards his companion, says, "You are not bored by my society, Miss Craven? Unless you are cast in a mould different from the rest of humanity, you must be bored by the society of the Misses De Grey. Why, then, were you so resolute this morning in rejecting the one and accepting the other? This is the problem that has been puzzling me for the last half mile."
She hangs her head like a scolded school-child.
"What was your motive?"
"A prudential one, partly," she answers, rallying her spirits. "I knew that in after life I should have small experience of T. – carts and such rich man's luxuries, so I thought it wiser not to run the risk of contracting a taste for them."
"How do you know what the experience of your after life may be?"
"One may argue from the known to the unknown; I can give a pretty shrewd guess."
"And was that your sole motive?"
"What does it matter to you whether it was or not?"
"Nothing; except that, to a philosophical mind like mine, woman and her caprices are an interesting psychological study. Did you ever hear of an essay of Addison's entitled 'Dissection of a Coquette's Heart?'"
"I am not a coquette," she cries, indignantly, answering the indirect accusation directly.
"I did not say you were. I hope you are not – I hope to God you are not!" he answers, with more vehemence than the occasion seems to demand.
"And yet," she says, feeling oppressed by the solemnity of his manner and trying to speak lightly, "I have heard it said that no woman can be thoroughly attractive who is not something of a flirt."
"I had rather that she should be thoroughly unattractive then," he answers, shortly and grimly.
"Men always wish to have a monopoly of all pleasant sins," she retorts, a little cynically.
"If you think that the reason why I wish you not to flirt is that I want a monopoly of that occupation, you are mistaken," he says, gravely; "it is an art that I have not either the will or the power to practise."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Confess that, after that admission, your opinion of me is considerably lowered."
No answer but a smile.
"Confess that you feel for me as sovereign a contempt as the ladies of the last century felt for a man that never got drunk."
"I feel," she says, averting her head and speaking under an impulse that kindles her cheeks and makes her voice falter – "I feel a surprise that the words you say and the words you are reported to say do not tally better together."
"What am I reported to say?" (a little impatiently.) "A réchauffé of one's own stale speeches is not an appetising dish, but may be wholesome as an exhortation to consistency."
"A person – I was told – " begins Esther, floundering in confusion among different forms of speech – "I was told – by a person that ought to have known – that you had spoken in a slighting, disparaging way of – of – of – a person."
"Who told you so?" (breathlessly.)
"That can be of no consequence."
"Without your telling me I know," he says, his face growing hot with the red of indignant anger, not guilt. "God forgive her for such a lie!"
"It was not true, then?" she asks, eagerly, lifting her eyes, brimful of joyful relief, to his.
"Such an accusation is not worth rebutting," he answers, contemptuously. "Is a man likely to speak slightingly of – " He stops abruptly. ("Not yet! not yet! it is impossible that she can like me yet. Am I an Antinous, to be loved as soon as seen? Let me be patient – be patient!")