THE TERRACES.
Arrived at The Towers, I first slumbered a couple of hours, and then,
the day still early, returned to my mistress’ bedside. She had bidden
me wake her, but I just massaged her with a gentle touch, contemplating
with a smile of pleasure that face whose charms I am soon no more to
behold: and never did she show to me in so angel-like a light as then,
for everything is suddenly changed in me, I find myself inclined to
be kindly-minded to everybody, and then Miss Eve is ever beguiling,
from her very breathing being given forth a breeze fraught with that
fainting fragrance of frangipane, which is as essentially a part of
her self as are her eyes or her smile. When her lids unclosed of their
own action she once more bathed, and it was when I was doing her hands
in making her toilette for the forenoon that she begged me to bear
tea with my own hands to her, if she should happen to be in the small
drawing-room after four that afternoon.
I at once suspected an interview with Monsieur le Comte de Courcy,
and this proved true: for on looking into the small drawing-room in
the afternoon, I saw the two alone at a window, and when I presently
stole in bearing the tray, there they still were, Miss Eve considering
something that had been entreated of her with her head bent, while
Monsieur le Comte, in his grey frock-coat, spoke pressingly at her,
eagerly fingering his imperial. Now, the sight of lovemaking always
profoundly agitates me, causing me a shivering round my right knee; so,
having announced the tea in a mutter, I could not, on stealing out,
tear my ears away, but stood there by the stair-top, hung upon what
was said; and presently could hear the Minister of the Interior say,
“You have permitted me to hope these four months,” then mumble, mumble,
and then the lips of Miss Eve were speaking, saying, “Days have their
weirds and their weathers, if Thursday its drought, perchance Friday
its showers: somehow to-day I am dull, empty of every reply.” “Only
whisper to me the word ‘hope,’” I then heard Monsieur the Minister
implore with much agitation, though what answer was made to this I
could not catch; and he then said, “Soon?” to which she replied, “Soon
necessarily, since you are going.” So he asked her, “To-morrow?” and
the answer given was, “Well, to-morrow, if God will,” at which point I
saw the boy-in-buttons rushing up, so went away.
For the evening Miss Eve had arranged for the party a ball, to which
came a troop of neighbour visitors, though Miss Ruth and Mr. Vickery,
of course, kept themselves from the levity of it. So, after preparing
Miss Eve’s third bath—Miss Ruth, I have heard, considers it to be
“worldly” to bathe her body as frequently as once in a week, as nuns
believe!—after bathing Miss Eve anew, I advised her to put on for the
evening the Chantilly over-skirt and the pearls, for I knew that Miss
Savage in her crimson robe would be making Miss Eve’s pink appear
pale; and having aided nature one wee bit by a touch on her cheeks,
her lashes, and her eye-brows, I turned her out an object _chic_ to
kiss the hand at, proudly certain in myself that she must prove the
finest-costumed of the company; and still I had uttered no word to her
as to my leaving her service immediately, it was so immense a step,
like a ravine from which I shrank.
After dinner, till nearly nine, I was down in the housekeeper’s place,
making a pretence at playing cards, and some moments after nine rose
to rush off to meet him in the east shrubbery, as arranged; but just
then my bell summoned me, and when I went to the shrubbery ten minutes
late, with a rush of terrors I became aware that he was not there. I
ran my hardest now, my heart raised to Heaven in a prayer that nothing
had happened—down the mountain to the cliffs, down their face to his
cave. He was not there, and I wrung my hands together in an anguish
of apprehension, begging the good God not once again to bring me all
the gall of the draught of frustration to drain to the dregs, and the
bitterish bread of drabness to chew for ever: for there he was not,
and where he could have gone to I could not guess. Thinking at last
that I might have missed him in coming, I made my way back up, with
runs and stoppages to take my breath, came back to the shrubbery, but
failed to find him there. However, on looking out across the lake, I
saw in the moonlight that laved the lawn-terraces two forms: one of
them Miss Ruth, pacing there with her gaze poring upon the zodiac,
and her rubric of devotion hung between her fingers; the other, whom
I could just perceive, was lying flat, peeping into the drawing-room
through a window, and I knew that it was he, for a rumour of the music
and dancing came faintly to me there, and I knew that this must have
seduced him to it. I could not but feel pleased to find him, but to
my feet my being was pierced with fear to see him lying there, peeping
carefully in. In a minute, however, he bounded to his feet, hearing,
I presume, the step of Miss Ruth, and he ran some paces, looking back
at her; but when she beckoned to him he waited, and in a minute I
perceived them standing together engaged in speech.
I crept then through the bushes of the lake’s edge, till I came to the
lawn; and there, observing their backs turned toward me, I stalked
still further forward on my hands and knees, till I was in concealment
beneath the stonework of a terrace—little dreaming that I had been
overheard; and thence I heard the voice of Miss Ruth saying to the boy,
“But you must have lived in a strange isolation never to have heard
speak of Jesus Christ?” upon which he, gazing down upon the ground,
said in a low tone that he was altogether ignorant, till two days ago
having never met with anyone save his father and an idiot.
“Poor dear boy!” coos the voice of Miss Ruth, who, being but
twenty-five years of age, has scarcely the right, I think, thus to
soothe a youth of twenty. “And where,” says she, “was this?”
In a tone in his throat he replied, “On an island of the Outer
Hebrides.”
“Why, I am even now from there!” she told him. “But your father, has he
also never known the blessed name of Jesus?”
He answered her that his father possesses the sum of worldly wisdom,
but that he had never at all heard from his father any mention of this
personage.
“Why, this is strange!” she cries in a maze, with her azure eyes of a
child widely agape at him: “to think of such pagans living in Christian
England! Do you not, then, know the words ‘Christian,’ ‘Christianity,’
‘Christendom’?”
To this he answered that he had never heard these words.
“Tell me this, then,” said she: “in what year is it that we are now
living?” to which he made her the amazing answer that we are now in the
year six hundred thousand three hundred and sixty-three.
At this reply Miss Ruth smiled, and during some time appeared wrapped
in silent prayer, until she suddenly asked him, “From what event, then,
do you date this vast sum of years?”
“From the presumed date of the evolution of human life from the
ape-state,” was his reply.
For a few moments Miss Ruth mused upon the young man, then threw up her
hands with drollery in her little human way which just rescues her from
being angelic; and she asked him, “But are not all dates reckoned among
us from the Lord Christ?”
At these words of hers he seemed extremely perplexed, and, after
frowning upon the ground, asked her if the Lord Jesus Christ was a
Greek or a Roman.
“He was a Hebrew!” cries Miss Ruth.
“With an Arianised name,” said he: “lived, then, under the later
Romans.”
“Just so,” said she: “how much you know for one of your station, and
how little!”
“How little,” he said, and on a sudden knelt to her, begging her to
bear with his ignorance, for that she was much more gracious and
merciful to discourse with him than he deserved, as he was not only
strange to the world, but his brain, moreover, was all in a whirl,
inasmuch as he had only just made away from his father’s control, nor
had ever before been intoxicated with strains of harmony such as those
escaping from out of the house, nor beheld such blessed beings as she
and those fabulous beldams moving beautifully to music over the floor
of the drawing-room.... Upon this Miss Ruth raised him up, bid him
wait, and, moving to a window of the drawing-room, peeped in to Miss
Eve, becking her to come, too, to inspect the curiosity. I disliked
her for it, since there was little need for him ever to have seen Miss
Eve near at hand, save for this. At all events, out stepped Miss Eve
now, very tall in the sheen of the moon, Miss Ruth seeming a midget
near her, and even when the three stood face to face, still Miss Eve
appeared the tallest of all. So Miss Ruth recounted now in how odd a
solitude the young man had spent his existence, and then fell anew to
talking of the Lord Christ, he eyeing Miss Eve steadily with the corner
of his wild eye, speaking with a drooped head to Miss Ruth, eyeing
steadily Miss Eve; till now Miss Ruth cried out, “He was man and God,
too!” and only then did the ogler, peering in surprise at her, cease to
eye Miss Eve. Immediately now, too, his meekness appeared to cease, for
looking straight now at Miss Eve, he asked her if she also shared this
belief.
Miss Eve had as yet uttered not a word, but now with her eyes turned
downward, her lips muttered, “Why, yes.”
He smiled, and at the same time looked perfectly perplexed, turning his
stare from one to the other lady, until Miss Ruth remarked to him, “Do
not doubt it, though it is marvellous in all our eyes, so that even the
cherubic natures of the skies deeply brood with admiration upon it,”
and he then very impolitely replied to her that her consciousness of
the size of this earth could not be alert.
To this answered Miss Ruth, “The earth? she is huge in momentousness,
you know: with each tick of the clock a human being ceases to breathe——”
“A human being?” he replied with a cry of surprise: “with each tick of
the clock a million worlds are burned, and are born!”
“Oh, La!” says she, startled a little at him.
Then she said, with that veiling of the eyes with the eyelids that
lends her her air of Madonna saintliness, “That cannot be, I think.”
But the other sister murmured, “Ruth, it must truly be so, if the
universe truly is termless: prove me one world that’s been burned,
millions a minute must burn.”
“Let it be so, then,” said Miss Ruth, “since you say so, and glory be
to God, for the remotest of them, I think, His hand holds, and His
right hand guides it.”
“He is it,” the young man said.
“He is with it, I think,” Miss Ruth replied.
“And _you_ also say this?” he asked of Miss Eve.
“Yes,” she answered curtly, with a touch of pique, as it appeared to me.
Silent he stood now a while, with that smile of his that hides all the
windings of his mind behind his brow, but still giving an impression
of one plunged in bewilderment at the creatures he was speaking with.
Then, glancing upward, he swept his fingers athwart the vault of the
stars, with the remark that all that was a darksome mathematic, a
perfection which was deaf.
But now Miss Eve, going rosy, frowned upon the ground, and in tones
that trembled a little, she observed, “Perfect it _is_, though a Heart,
not a Head, was its Father and Harper; tolling melodious notes, wrung
with emotion it rolls;” and it was now that the young man suddenly
caused my heart to bound into my mouth by coming out with the statement
that, inasmuch as _the fourth_ sharer in the conversation would
undoubtedly be found to contemplate the universe in the same sort of
mood, he could only suppose that all ladies were prone to criticisms of
the same quality.
The two ladies looked round, and “which ‘fourth sharer’ can he mean?”
Miss Ruth wished to know of Miss Eve, while I crouched there beneath
the terrace, trembling lest he should betray my whereabouts; but when
they pressed him to say where I was, to my great gladness, he gave an
evasive reply.
He next requested Miss Ruth to instruct him further in her views of the
universe, upon which she begged him to come the next night that she
might give him a Bible and teach him of the Lord Jesus; and as to his
father, after some hesitation on her part, he gained from her a promise
that, if his father, or his father’s agents, should get upon his scent,
the sisters would not let out to them where he lurked down there in the
river-cave. And next he began to beg Miss Eve for one of the begonias
at her girdle, but at that moment, before he could be answered,
Monsieur le Comte de Courcy stepped out of the house, and, really as
if by magic, the instant he appeared the young man had vanished. By
this time I had somewhat recovered of my fit of affright, my eyes were
anew at the parapet-top, and I could spy the surprise of the ladies,
who seemed unable to believe what their two eyes had seen: for though
the nearest leafage was quite nineteen or twenty metres away, in the
twinkling of an eye, as it seemed, he was within it, and gone like a
ghost at cock-crow.
I, for my part, having crawled back to the lake, rushed through the
shrubbery obliquely, meaning to meet him somewhere in his career
downward: but he was nowhere to be found, until I was on the footpath
above the cliffs, when down there in the moonlight I beheld him walking
furiously to and fro before his cave’s mouth. Down, then, I scrambled,
calling out to him, asking why he had not awaited me; but he is not
very well-bred, went on silently walking, and on marking one of the
swans glide past on the water, he suddenly darted to lie on his face
and gaze at it.
“But why did you fly like that?” I asked him when he returned to me,
“since the gentleman could not have hurt you?” but still he made me no
reply.
“And what did you think of the two ladies?” I next asked him.
Then he: “Who are those ladies?”
I: “They are Miss Ruth and Miss Eve Vickery, the daughters of Mr.
Richard Vickery, who is what is called ‘An Iron King,’ a very rich
and an extremely religious man, who sometimes preaches in a chapel on
Sundays.”
He: “Preaches?”—and I had now to try to explain that “preaching” means
teaching the people how to be devout and grave; but I failed to get him
to comprehend how Mr. Vickery could have attained to greater gravity
than the rest, and he struck his brow in the misery of his failure to
grasp the signification of a single word that I uttered as to this.
“Well, it is so, and that is all,” I said at last; “but as to the
ladies, you have still not told me which of the two you most admire.”
Then he: “Which is the first-born?”
So I: “That auburn-haired one is the elder by three years, being
already twenty-five, and it is she who has the reputation of a saint
in society, though it is Miss Eve who is so much the more queenly; so
which of the sisters do you like, the auburn or the light?”
He: “A saint?”—and I had anew to make an explanation which he little
comprehended, and then anew I wished to know of him which of the two
sisters he the most admired.
And now he, making that stone like an ink-bottle which he keeps inside
his shirt whirl about his forefinger without attachment in a quite
wonderful way, his waist swaying to keep the thing whirling wildly
quick, answered with whistling lips, “I like Miss Ruth.”
Then I: “Oh, you do? You like her better, I see, than you do Miss Eve?”
upon which he, putting his hand behind his back for the stone to whirl
behind there, answered, “Yes.”
Then I: “But leaving Miss Ruth out of the question, since she will
never marry, which of the two do you most admire—Miss Eve or me?”
He: “You.”
I: “Oh, you do?”
He whistled quietly awhile, whirling the thing wildly with a swaying
waist, as it were a wheel wheeling on his hand, and he answered, “Yes”
to me; but I thought that my heart would be breaking with its rankling.
So I to him: “Well, since this is so, that you like me so very vastly
better than Miss Eve and than all, why go to-morrow evening to get
the Bible, since there is no need, really; it is all nonsense and
make-believe, and will merely mean that you will be caught by your
father,” upon which he, suddenly ceasing to wheel the thing, sharply
asked if she had not promised not to betray him.
So I: “She has promised, yes, but she little means it, wait, you will
see, you little know women, they are deceivers all; she will betray you
surely enough, if she but has the chance.”
He glanced sharply at me, then said, “No.”
I: “But I say yes.”
He: “The lapwing says pee-wit.”
What he meant I was not sure, but I was so broken-hearted that night,
that with sobs I threw myself now in a passion to his breast, and on my
knees, kissing my own tears on his hands, implored him like a dear boy
not to leave and despoil me, but to love me for ever, for if he left
me, that would be my death, I said, and his death as well.
He smiled with his fixed little smile upon me, and I could believe that
he meant well by me; so, getting up now, I told him how I had that day
gained all information as to English marriages, and meant on the morrow
to take the first measures; but as I was speaking of this, he, leaning
aside, bent his ear to the ground, hearing God only knows what sound
under the grass, and when I had bidden him good-night, and was going up
the cliff’s brow again, on glancing back I beheld him bent down aside,
eagerly listening with his ear near the ground.