A SNOW GARDEN.
For every shrub, and every blade of grass,
And every pointed thorn seemed wrought in glass;
In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show,
While through the ice the crimson berries glow ...
The spreading oak, the beech, and towering pine,
Glazed over, in the freezing aether shine;
The frighted birds the rattling branches shun,
That wave and glitter in the distant sun.
--Phillips.
Is it that evening or another that they were all assembled in the little
bow-windowed drawing-room in Old Street listening to one of Rhoda's
interminable 'pieces' that she learnt at her French school? And then
came a quartette, but she broke down in the accompaniment, and George
turned her off the music-stool.
The doors were open into John's inner room, from which came a last
western gleam of light through the narrow windows, and beyond the
medlar-tree. It would have been dark in the front room but for those
western windows. In one of them sat Lady Sarah leaning back in John's
old leathern chair, sitting and listening with her hands lying loosely
crossed in her lap; as she listened to the youthful din of music and
voices and the strumming piano and the laughter. She had come by Dolly's
special request. Her presence was considered an honour by Mrs. Morgan,
but an effort at the same time. In her endeavours to entertain her
guest, Mrs. Morgan, bolt upright in another corner, had fallen asleep,
and was nodding her head in this silent inner room. There was noise and
to spare in the front room, people in the street outside stopped to
listen to the music.
When George began to play it seemed another music altogether coming out
of the old cracked yellow piano, smash, bang, crack, he flew at it,
thumping the keys, missing half the notes, sometimes jumbling the
accompaniment, but seizing the tune and spirit of the music with a
genuine feeling that was irresistible.
'Now all together,' cries George, getting excited.
It was an arrangement of one of Mendelssohn's four-part songs. 'As pants
the hart,' sang Rhoda, shrill and sweet, leading the way. 'As pants the
hart,' sang George, with a sort of swing. 'As pants the hart,' sang
Dolly, carefully and restrainedly. She sang with great precision for a
child of her age, quietly, steadily; but even her brother's enthusiasm
did not inspire her. George flung his whole impulse into his music, and
banged a chord at her in indignation at her tameness. John Morgan piped
away with a face of the greatest seriousness, following his pupil's
lead; he had much respect for George's musical capabilities. Cassie and
Zoe sang one part together, and now and then Robert Henley came out with
a deep trumpet-like note, placing it when he saw an opportunity. Dolly
laughed the first time, but Rhoda's dark eyes were raised admiringly. So
they all stood in the twilight, nodding their heads and clearing their
voices, happy and harmlessly absorbed. They might have stood for a choir
of angels; any one of the old Italian masters might have painted them as
they sang, with the addition of lilies and wings, and gold glories, and
the little cherubim who seemed to have flitted quite innocently out of
ancient mythologies into the Legende Doree of our own days;
indifferently holding the music for a St. Cecilia, or the looking-glass
for the Mother of Love.
Dolly, with her flowing locks, stood like a little rigid Raphael maiden,
with eyes steadily fixed upon her scroll. Rhoda blushed, and shrilled
and brightened. How well a golden glory would have become her dark
cloudy hair.
As the room darkened Cassie set some lights, and they held them to read
their music by. George kept them all at work, and gave no respite except
to Rhoda, whose feelings he feared he had hurt. 'Please come and turn
over my music, Rhoda,' he said. 'Dolly's not half quick enough.'
He had found some music in an old box at home the day before, some
old-fashioned glees, with a faded and flourishing dedication to the
Right Honourable the Countess of Church town, and then in faint ink, S.
C. 1799.
It was easy music, and they all got on well enough, picking out the
notes. Lady Sarah could remember her mother playing that same old ballad
of 'Ye gentlemen of England' when she was herself quite a little girl.
One old tune after another came, and mingled with Mrs. Morgan's
sleeping, Lady Sarah's waking dreams of the past that was her own, and
of the future that was to be for others; as the tunes struck upon her
ear, they seemed to her like the new lives all about her repeating the
old notes with fresh voices and feelings. George was in high good
humour, behaving very well until Robert displeased him by taking
somebody else's part; the boy stopped short, and there might have been
some discussion, but Mrs. Morgan's fat maid came in with the tray of
gingerbread nuts, and the madeira and orange wine, that the hospitable
old lady delighted to dispense, and set it down with a jingle in the
back-room where the elder ladies were sitting.
This gingerbread tray was the grand closing scene of the entertainment,
and Robert affably handed the wine-glasses, and John Morgan, seizing the
gingerbread nuts, began scattering them all about the room as he forced
them upon his unwilling guests. He had his sermon to finish for the next
day, and he did not urge them to remain. There was a little chattering
in the hall: Dolly was tied up and kissed and tucked up in her shawl;
Lady Sarah donned a capoche (as I think she called it); they stepped out
into the little starlit street, of which the go-to-bed lights were
already burning in the upper windows. Higher still Orion and his mighty
company looked down upon the humble illumination of the zigzag roofs.
The door of the bow-windowed house opened to let out the voices.
'Good-night,' cried everybody, and then the door closed and all was
silent again, except for the footsteps travelling down the street.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, as I have said, Dolly Vanborough and the
other ladies and gentlemen her contemporaries were not the respectable
middle-aged people they are now, but for the most part foolish young
folks just beginning their lives, looking out upon the world with
respectful eyes, arrogant,--perhaps dogmatic, uncertain,--but with a
larger belief, perhaps a more heroic desire, than exists among them now.
To-day, for a good many of them, expediency seems a great discovery, and
the stone that is to turn everything to gold. Take things as you find
them, do so and so, not because you feel inclined, or because it is
right and generous, but because the neighbours are looking on, it is
expected of you; and then, with our old friend the donkey-man, we
stagger off, carrying the ass upon our shoulders. I suppose it is a law
of nature that the horizon should lower as we climb down the hill of
life, only some people look upwards always, 'And stumble among the
briers and tumble into the well.' This is true enough, as regards my
heroine, who was often in trouble, often disappointed, ashamed, angry,
but who will persist in her star-gazing to the end of her journey.
When Dolly was nearly fifteen, her brother George was eighteen, and had
just gone to college, starting in high spirits, and with visions of all
the letters of the alphabet before him, and many other honourable
distinctions. Dolly, dazzled, helped to pack his portmanteau.
'Oh, I wish I was going too!' Dolly said; 'girls never do anything, or
go anywhere.'
'Mamma wants you to go to India,' said George.
'But the Admiral won't have me,' says Dolly; 'he wrote to Aunt Sarah
about it, and said they were coming home. Are you going to take all
these pipes and French novels?'
'I can never study without a pipe,' said George; 'and I must keep up my
French.'
Dolly and Lady Sarah were disappointed when George, notwithstanding
these appliances for study, returned without any special distinctions.
The first Christmas that he came back, he brought Robert Henley with
him. The old grandmother in the Palace was dead, and the young man had
no longer a lodging in Kensington. The two arrived after dinner, and
found Lady Sarah established by the fire in the oak parlour. They had
come up driving through a fierce Christmas wind from the station, and
were glad of Dolly's welcome and comfortable cups of tea.
When Dolly awoke next morning up in her little room, the whole country
was white with snow. The iron wind was gone, the rigid breath of winter
had sobbed itself away, the soft new-fallen snow lay heaped on the
fields and the hedges, on the fir-trees and laurels. Dolly ran to the
window. George and Robert were out in the garden already. Overhead was a
blue, high heaven; the white snow-country she could see through her
window was sparkling and dazzling white. Sharp against the heavens stood
the delicate branches of the trees, prismatic lights were radiating from
the sloping lawns, a light veil of fallen drift wreathed the distant
coppices; and Dolly, running downstairs soon after, found the
dining-room empty, except for the teapot, and she carried her breakfast
to the window. She had scarcely finished when George and Robert both
came tapping at the pane.
'Come out,' cried George.
'Let her finish her breakfast,' said Robert.
'I've done,' cried Dolly, gaily jumping up and running to fetch her hat
and her coat, and to tie up her long skirts. Dolly possessed a warm fur
cloak, which had been Lady Sarah's once, in the days of her prosperity,
and which became the girl so well that her aunt liked her to wear it.
Henley, standing by a frozen cabbage in the kitchen-garden, watched her
approvingly as she came along the snowy path. All her brown furs were
glistening comfortably; the scarlet feather in her hat had caught the
light and reflected it on her hair.
Dolly's hair was very much the colour of seal-skin, two-coloured, the
hollows of its rippling locks seemed dark while the crests shone like
gold. There was something autumnal in her colours. Dolly's was a
brilliant russet autumn, with grey skies and red berries and warm
lights. She had tied a scarlet kerchief round her neck, but the snow did
not melt for all her bright colours. How pretty it was! leaves lying
crisped and glittering upon the white foaming heaps, tiny tracks here
and there crossing the pathways, and then the bird-steps, like chainlets
lightly laid upon the smooth, white field. Where the sun had melted the
snow in some sheltered corner, some red-breasts were hopping and
bobbing; the snow-sheets glittered, lying heavy on the laurel-leaves on
the low fruit walls.
Robert watched her coming, with her honest smiling face. She stopped at
the end of the walk to clear away a corner of the bed, where a little
colony of snowdrops lay crushed by a tiny avalanche that had fallen upon
their meek heads. It was the work of an instant, but in that instant
Dolly's future fate was decided.
For, as my heroine comes advancing unconscious through this snow and
diamond morning, Henley thinks that is the realization of a dream he has
sometimes dreamt, and that the mistress of his future home stands there
before him, bright and bonnie, handsome and outspoken. Dorothy rules him
with the ascendency of a youthful, indifferent heart, strong in its own
reliance and hope; and yet this maiden is not the person that she thinks
herself, nor is she the person that Henley thinks her. She is strong,
but with an artificial strength not all her own; strong in the love of
those round about her, strong in youth and in ignorance of evil.
They walked together down the garden walks and out into the lanes, and
home again across the stile. 'Dolly,' said Robert, as they were going
in, 'I shall not forget our morning's expedition together--will you,
too, promise me----?' He stopped short. 'What are those?' he said,
sentimentally; 'snowdrops?' and he stooped to pick one or two. Dolly
also turned away. 'Here is something that will remind you----' Robert
began.
'And you,' cries Dolly, flinging a great snow heap suddenly into his
face and running away. It was very babyish and vulgar, but Robert looked
so solemn that she could not resist the impulse. He walked back to the
house greatly offended.