'Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
No daisy makes comparison
(Who sees them is undone);
For streaks of red were mingled there,
Such as are on a Catherine pear,
The side that's next the sun.'
He has not gone above a hundred yards when he hears a small thunder of
feet behind him, and turning, finds Miss Harborough flying at the top of
her speed to overtake him.
'Mammy said I might go with you,' cries she breathlessly.
He stops and hesitates. Is it possible that she has sent this innocent
child to be an unconscious spy upon him?
'Mammy said I might go with you,' repeats Lily, seeing his hesitation,
and beginning to drop her long lashes, and rub her cheek with her
shoulder, according to her most approved methods of fascination.
'But I did not say so,' returns he gravely.
'Oh, but you will,' cries she, flinging herself boisterously into his
arms; 'and I--I'll help you over the stiles.'
Who could resist such a bribe as this? Certainly not Talbot. They walk
off amicably hand-in-hand. After all, he ought to be thankful for
anything that distracts him from his own thoughts, which are certainly
neither pleasant nor profitable enough to be worth thinking. To-day he
is sad, not only on his own account, but on Margaret's. Short as has
been the time of his acquaintance with her, he has got into a habit,
which seems long, of being sorry with her sorrows. He knows that to-day
will be a black day for Prue, and that Peggy will be darkened in
company. Is it not better then, seeing that he cannot stir a finger to
lift the weight from the three hearts he would fain lighten, that he
should have his eight-year-old companion's chatter to be distracted by,
that he should be initiated into the hierarchy of her affections, and
learn the order and degree in which her relations and friends are dear
to her? He is surprised and flattered at the extremely high place
assigned to himself immediately after father, and some way above mammy;
but is less exhilarated on finding out that he shares it with the
odd-man, who has made and presented a whistle to her.
'And Franky? where does Franky come?' asks John, really quite interested
in the subject.
'My dear little brother!' exclaims Lily, with an extravagant affection
of sisterly tenderness. 'I am _so_ fond of him! Poor little brother! he
has _no_ toys!'
John smiles rather grimly. He knows that Miss Lily squabbles frightfully
with her little brother in real life; and how entirely mendacious is her
statement as to his destitution of playthings.
'I have given him most of mine,' pursues Lily, casting one eye subtly up
to watch the effect of her words, 'but he has broken them nearly all,
and now we neither of us have any!'
John receives this broad hint in a silence which Miss Lily feels to be
sceptical; but as her attention is at the same moment diverted by the
sight of Miss Lambton's Red House, and of Mink's face looking through
the bars of the gate, on the anxious watch for passing market-carts to
insult, she does not pursue the subject.
Mink takes them for a market-cart at first, and insults them; but
afterwards apologises, and shows them the way to the garden, jumping up
at Lily's nose, with an affectation of far greater pleasure than he can
really feel.
They find his mistress standing alone in the middle of her domain, a
great gutta-percha snake lying on the ground behind her, and the hose
directed at a thirsty verbena-bed.
As they come up with her, the chiming church clock, having finished its
preliminary stave of 'Home, Sweet Home,' strikes five. Whether the
chimes or her own thoughts have deafened her, she does not hear their
approach.
'Is not that punctuality?' asks Talbot, drawing near. 'Which is better,
to have only one very small virtue, and to have it in absolute
perfection, or to have a smattering of several large ones?'
At his voice she starts, and turns, her eye falling upon him, and also,
of course, upon the child. The latter instantly flings herself into her
arms.
'Mammy and John Talbot said I might come!' cries she effusively.
'You did not give John Talbot much choice in the matter,' returns he
drily.
'But mammy told me to come,' urges Lily in eager self-defence; 'she told
me to run fast that I might be sure to overtake you!'
John feels a dull red rising to his brow; but he will not let his eyes
sink: they meet Peggy's full and straight. She shall see that this time,
at all events, he has been neither ashamed nor afraid to proclaim his
visit to her.
Peggy has gently unclasped the child's arms from about her neck.
'What a dear little doggy!' cries Lily, chattering on, and deceived by
Mink's manner, as all strangers are, into the belief that he has
conceived a peculiar fancy for her. 'What is his name?'
'Mink.'
'And what kind of dog is he?'
'That is what no one--not even himself--has ever been able to make out,'
returns Margaret, with a smile. 'Sometimes he thinks that he is a
Yorkshire terrier, and sometimes he does not. I bought him at the Dogs'
Home, because he was the most miserable little dog there, and because I
was quite certain that if I did not, nobody else would. He has grown so
uppish now that sometimes I have to remind him of his origin--have not
I, Minky?'
'Mammy had a Yorkshire terrier once,' says Miss Harborough
thoughtfully--'John Talbot gave it her--but he died. She had him
stuffed: he looks horrid now!'
Talbot writhes. It seems to him as if he had never before tasted the
full degradation of his position. He makes a clumsy plunge at changing
the conversation by inquiring after Prue.
'She is lying down,' replies Peggy, while he sees a furrow come upon her
white forehead. 'The heat tries her; at least'--her eye meeting his with
a sort of appeal--'she is very easily tired; and she has been waiting
all afternoon with her habit on. She was engaged to go out riding at
three, and now it is five; people ought not to make engagements if they
are not prepared to keep them!'
'I am afraid he had forgotten all about it,' answers Talbot sadly.
Margaret's only answer is a dispirited shrug; and Lily having by this
time scampered off to visit the fox; if possible, with safety, pull his
brush; eat anything that is eatable in the kitchen-garden; and make
friendly advances to the stable-boy--Miss Lambton again takes up the
hose.
'This,' says she, looking at it affectionately, 'is the one solid good I
have ever got from the Big House!'
He does not answer. Though he certainly does not class himself under the
head of a solid good, her words give him a vague chill.
'It sounds ungrateful,' pursues Peggy; 'but I often wish we could move
this acre of ground, with everything that is on it, fifty miles farther
away.'
'Do you?'
'Of course,' pursues she gravely, 'we get a great deal more society here
than we should anywhere else; but I often think that that is a doubtful
good. We grow to know people whose acquaintance we should be far better
without.'
He winces. Does he himself come under this category? But she means no
offence.
'You can have no notion how our lives are cut up,' she continues. 'We
live in a whirl of tiny excitements, that would not be excitements to
anybody but us. We never can settle to any serious occupation; the
moment we take up a book there is a note: "Prue, come out riding;"
"Peggy, come and look over the accounts of the Boot and Shoe Club;"
"Peggy and Prue, come and dine to meet the--the----"'
Harboroughs is the name which rises to her lips, and which she
suppresses out of politeness to him.
He knows, too, that the plural pronoun which she has employed throughout
has been used only as a veil for Prue's weakness; that the picture she
has drawn has no likeness to her own steady soul.
'I sometimes think seriously of moving,' she says presently. 'It would
be a wrench'--looking round wistfully. 'The only two big things that
ever happened to me have happened here: Prue was born here, and mother
died here. Yes, it would be a wrench.'
He listens to her in a respectful silence. It would be impertinent in
him to express overt sympathy in her trouble, the trouble she has never
put into words.
'Sometimes I think that we should do better in London,' she goes on,
looking at him almost as if appealing to him for counsel; 'there would
be more to interest and distract us in London.'
'What, and leave the garden?' says he, lifting his eyebrows.
'She does not care really about the garden,' answers Margaret,
forgetting herself, and using the singular pronoun which she might have
employed all along. 'And as for me'--with a little laugh--'I would grow
mignonette in a box; and buy a load of hay, as I heard of one
country-sick lady doing, and make myself a haycock in the back-yard.'
'I cannot fancy you in a town,' says he, almost under his breath.
It is true. It is impossible to him to picture her except with a
background of waving trees, a floor of blossoming flowers, a spicy wind
to toss her hair, and finches to sing to her. His imagination is not
strong enough to transplant her to the narrow bounds of a little South
Kensington home, lost in the grimy monotony of ten thousand others.
'It is very difficult to know what to decide,' she says, almost
plaintively, 'and I have no one to advise me. Though I am not very
young--twenty-two--I have very little experience of life. There must be
a best; but it is hard to find. Do you never feel it so?'
Her large pure eyes are upon him, asking him, as well as her mouth does,
for an answer to this unanswerable question. For a moment he hesitates,
then:
'Do not you know that there are some people who have arranged their
lives so ingeniously that for them there is no best; that the only
choice left them lies between bad and worse?'
'I do not believe it,' answers she solemnly. 'God gives us all a best,
if we will only look for it; and' (in a lighter key) 'never fear but I
shall find mine before I have done!'
After that they finish their watering almost in silence. When he bids
her good-bye, having recaptured his Miss Harborough, who is restored to
him a good deal smirched by a delirious half-hour in the hayloft with a
litter of kittens, Margaret thanks him simply, yet very heartily, for
his services to her.
'Why are you so grateful to-day particularly?' asks he, alarmed. 'You
make me feel as if the band were playing "God Save the Queen," and
everything was at an end.'
'Jacob comes back to his work to-morrow,' answers she, 'and you know,'
with a smile, 'I cannot afford to keep two gardeners.'
'He must be very weak still.'
'Do not be afraid,' laughing again; 'I will not overwork him.'
'Then I am to consider myself dismissed?'
'With thanks--yes.'
'Out of work? Turned into the street?'
'Yes.'
'And without a character?'
'I daresay you will not miss it,' replies she, a little cynically. 'Many
people do without one.'
He winces. She is not half so nice when she is cynical.
'Come along, Lily,' he says, in a vexed voice; 'we are not wanted here
any longer. We are old shoes, sucked lemons, last year's almanacs. Let
us go.'
'My child!' cries Margaret, her eye falling for the first time on a
gigantic rift in the front of Miss Harborough's frock, 'what have you
done to yourself? What will Nanny say to you?'
'I do not care what she says!' replies Lily swaggeringly. 'She is an old
beast! Oh, Miss Lambton,' with a sudden change of key, 'may not I come
again to-morrow? Alfred wants me to come again to-morrow.' (Alfred is
the stable-boy.) 'May not I come with John Talbot again to-morrow?'
'You see that we are both of one mind,' says John, with a melancholy
whine, walking off with his young lady.