Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St.
George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who,
perceiving that Éloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was
satisfactory; and Éloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of
her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
with the result of bad government; their association with the
Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was
light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull
them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and
even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would
not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there
was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect
order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was,
moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in
Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the
candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred
matters about which he knew nothing at all,--and always given, in spite
of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of
taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it
for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt
under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such
superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every
one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George
in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand
friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength
to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of
all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a
master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to
follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and
of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to
have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's
masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and
was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.
In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they
did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut
their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being
yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or
twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.
A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and Éloise, weary of
confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place,
as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's
people but adored her.
"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at
the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not
deigning a second address for a second rebuff,--"It will be quite
impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into
rivers."
Éloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way,
strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr.
St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching
tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to
read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she
had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the
pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But
she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page,
and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it
was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and
only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she
perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water
had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light
forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess
the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by,
there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was
seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a
seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which
she had stood.
"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her
ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices
our still life so well!"
"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried Éloise, freeing herself.
"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare
not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught
and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little
witch!"
"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"
"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."
"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."
"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all
safe,--it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising
his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour
ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find
you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."
Éloise was a little sobered.
"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.
"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you
again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely
impassable."
And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a
brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St.
George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set
her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St.
George expected, Éloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then,
looking up, said,--
"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."
Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her
from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and
immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.
"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing
out Éloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two
mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him
swear! He galloped off at last like mad."
And as Éloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for
her in the glass, the familiar girl added,--
"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,--oh, no, indeed!--but at all of
us, to think we'd let you go alone."
"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken
to your master about buying Vane?"
"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise
excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,--we
minded ole Massa for lub,--but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St.
George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean
to,--as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested
Hazel.
"Mr. St. George," said Éloise, "is very good to his people; they ought
to wish to obey him."
"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business _here_."
"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Éloise, facing the
suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."
But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length
glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny
cheek, she added, in a low voice,--
"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"
"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."
Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before
Éloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather
courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She
was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past
conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered
slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order
still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well
have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.
It was one afternoon that Éloise sat at the drawing-room window, having
recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a
place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect,
just then,--her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along
the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid
down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her
appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.
"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.
Éloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek.
Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her
heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she
recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent
portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved
Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other,
"I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George
had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a
hesitating voice came sliding towards him,--
"Mr. St. George"----
"I beg your pardon,--did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.
"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Éloise.
She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort,
then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.
"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid,
who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger,
and I became attached to her"----
And before Éloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's
riding-whip,--that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the
appropriation of everything about her.
"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."
"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only
seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,--just, you know, as I might
have been"----
Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Éloise added, throwing back
her head again,--
"Just as I _am_, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for
several----Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her.
I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her
initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with,
when I was a little girl,--and she wouldn't let me have it, of course.
Pretty initials!"
"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.
Éloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and,
unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George
laughed.
"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked
Éloise then, mischievously.