The Beast Party is over. It has not differed materially from its
predecessors, though it may perhaps glory in the bad pre-eminence of
having left even more ill-feeling and mortification in its wake than did
they.
The little Evanses, indeed, bless its memory, gobbling the bonbons and
strutting about the Vicarage garden in the masks and fools' caps that
they have extracted out of its crackers. And Lady Roupell, too, is
perfectly satisfied with it. Her guests have come, have eaten and drunk,
have gone away again, and she need not trouble her head about them for
another six months. To-day she gets rid of all her friends except the
Harborough children, and is left at liberty to waddle about in her
frieze coat, and with her spud in her hand, in peace--a peace which, at
the worst of times, she never allows to be very seriously infringed. But
there are gradations of age and shabbiness in her frieze coats, and
to-day she may don the oldest.
The peace of the Manor, like its gaieties, is apt to be reflected in the
Cottage: an exodus from the one is virtually an exodus from the other;
and, as such, is apt to be rejoiced over by Margaret as the signal for
Prue to begin to eat her dinner better, sleep sounder, and engage in
some other occupation than running to the end of the garden to see
whether there is a sign of any messenger coming from the Manor. She is
at her post of predilection this morning--the end of the garden that
overhangs the highway--that highway along which all arrivers at and
departers from the Big House must needs travel. She is looking eagerly
down the road.
'Prue!' cries her sister from under the Judas-tree, where she is
sitting, for a wonder, unoccupied.
'Yes,' replies Prue, but without offering to stir from her post of
observation.
'Come here. I want to talk to you.'
'In a minute--directly--by and by.'
A few moments pass.
'Prue?'
'Yes.'
'What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?'
'I am waiting for the Harboroughs to pass. I want to kiss my hand to
Lady Betty as she goes by; she asked me to.'
Margaret makes a gesture of annoyance, and irritably upsets Mink, who
has just curled himself upon her skirt; but she offers no remonstrance,
and it is a quarter of an hour before--the brougham with its
Harboroughs, late as usual, and galloping to catch the train, having
whirled past and been watched till quite out of sight--Prue saunters up
radiant.
'She kissed her hand to me all the way up the hill!' says she, beaming
with pleasure at the recollection. 'I threw her a little bunch of
jessamine just as the carriage went by. She put her head out in a
second, and caught it _in her teeth_!' Was not it clever of her? She
_is_ so clever!'
'Why should she kiss her hand to you? Why should you throw her
jessamine?' asks Peggy gloomily.
'Why should not I?' returns the other warmly. 'I am sure she has been
kind enough to me, if you only knew!'
'You were not so fond of her last week,' says Margaret, lifting a pair
of very troubled eyes to her sister's face. 'Have you already forgotten
the three days running that she robbed you of your ride?'
'I cannot think how I could have been so silly!' returns Prue, with a
rather forced laugh. 'Of course, it was a mere accident. _He_ says he
wonders how I could have been so silly; he was dreadfully hurt about it.
He says he looks upon her quite as an elder sister.'
'An elder sister!' echoes Peggy, breaking into a short angry laugh. 'The
same sort of elder sister, I think, as the nursery-maid is to the Life
Guardsman!'
'I cannot think how you can be so censorious!' retorts Prue, reddening.
'He says it is your one weakness. He admires your character more than
that of any one he knows--he says it is--it is--laid upon such large
lines; but that he has often been hurt by the harshness of your
judgments of other people.'
'Indeed!' says Peggy, with a sort of snort. 'But I daresay that Lady
Betty bandages up his wounds.'
'You must have noticed how kind she was to me last night,' continues
Prue, thinking it wiser to appear not to have heard this last thrust.
'Of course, every one was longing to talk to her, but she quite singled
me out--_me_, of all people! Oh, if you only knew!'
'If I only knew what?' inquires Margaret, struck by the recurrence of
this phrase, to which on its first utterance she had paid little heed,
as being the vague expression of Prue's girlish enthusiasm.
Prue hesitates a moment.
'If--if--you only knew the delightful plan she has made!'
'What plan?' shortly and sternly.
'She--she--I cannot think why she did it; it must have been the purest
kind-heartedness--she asked me to go and stay with her.'
The colour has mounted brave and bright from Margaret's cheeks to her
brow.
'She asked you to stay with her?' repeats she, with slow incisiveness;
'she had the impudence to ask you to stay with her!'
Prue gives a start that is almost a bound.
'_The impudence?_'
'The woman who had the effrontery to sing that song last night,' pursues
Peggy, her voice gathering indignation as it goes along, 'has now the
impudence to invite a respectable girl like you to stay with her! Oh,
Prue!' her tone changing suddenly to one of eager, tender pain, 'just
think what I felt last night when I saw you standing among all those men
in fits of laughter at her stupid indecencies! Oh! how could you laugh?
What was there to laugh at?'
Prue has begun to whimper.
'They all laughed. I--I--laughed be--be--cause they laughed!'
'And now you want to go and stay with her!' says Margaret, touched and
yet annoyed by her sister's easy tears, and letting her long arms fall
to her side with a dispirited gesture, as if life were growing too hard
for her.
'I am sure it would be no great wonder if I did,' says Prue, still
snivelling. 'I, who never go anywhere. She--Lady Betty I mean--could not
believe it when I told her I had only been to London twice in my life;
and He says that the Harboroughs' is the pleasantest house in England!'
'What does He say?' inquires a soft, gay voice, coming up behind them.
'Why, Prue, what is this? Why are the waterworks turned on? It is early
in the day for the fountains to begin playing!' and Freddy Ducane--the
flower-like Freddy--with his charming complexion, his laughing eyes, and
his beautifully-fitting clothes, stands between the agitated girls.
He has taken Prue's hands, both the one that contains the small damp
ball of her pocket-handkerchief and the other. But she snatches them
away and runs off.
'You seem to have been having rather a quick thing,' says the young man,
bringing back his eyes from the flying to the stationary figure.
The latter has risen.
'Did you know of this invitation?' asks she abruptly, without any
attempt at a preliminary salutation.
'I do not much like that dagger-and-bowl way of being asked questions,'
returns Freddy, sinking pleasantly into the chair Margaret has just
quitted. 'What invitation?'
'You know perfectly well what invitation!' retorts she, her breast
beginning to heave and her nostril to quiver, while her pendent right
hand unconsciously clenches itself.
Freddy has thrown back his curly head, and is regarding her luxuriously
from under his tilted hat, and between his half-closed lids.
'I wish you would stay exactly as you are for just two minutes,' he says
rapturously; 'I never saw you look better in my life! What a pose! And
you fell into it so naturally, too! I declare, Peg, though we have our
little differences, there is no one that at heart appreciates you half
as much as I do!'
'I suppose that you suggested it?' says Margaret sternly, passing by
with the most absolute silent contempt her companion's gallantries, and
abandoning in the twinkling of an eye the admired posture which she had
been invited to retain.
'_I suggested it!_' repeats Freddy, lifting his brows. 'Knowing my Peggy
as I do, should I have been likely to call the chimney-pots down about
my own head?'
'But you knew of it? You had heard of it?'
'I daresay I did. I hear a great many things that I do not pay much
attention to.'
'And you think that Lady Betty Harborough would be a desirable friend
for Prue?' says Peggy in bitter interrogation, and unintentionally
falling back into her Medea attitude, a fact of which she becomes aware
only by perceiving Freddy's hand covertly stealing to his pocket in
search of a pencil and notebook to sketch her.
At the sight her exasperation culminates. She snatches the pencil out of
his hand and throws it away.
'Cannot you be serious for one moment?' she asks passionately. 'If you
knew how sick I am of your eternal froth and flummery!'
'Well, then, I _am_ serious,' returns he, putting his hands in his
pockets, and growing grave; 'and if you ask my opinion, I tell you,'
with an air as if taking high moral ground, 'that I do not think we have
any of us any business to say, "Stand by! I am holier than thou!" It has
always been your besetting sin, Peggy, to say, "Stand by! I am holier
than thou!"'
'Has it?' very drily.
'Now it is a sort of thing that I never _can say_' (warming with his
theme). 'I do not take any special credit to myself, but I simply
_cannot_. _I_ say, "Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner!"'
'Indeed!'
'And so I naturally cannot see'--growing rather galled against his will
by the excessive curtness of his companion's rejoinders--'that you have
any right to turn your back upon poor Betty! Poor soul! what chance has
she if we all turn our backs upon her?'
'And so Prue is to stay with Lady Betty to bolster up her decayed
reputation?' cries Peggy, breaking into an ireful laugh. 'I never heard
of a more feasible plan!'
'I think we ought all to stand shoulder to shoulder in the battle of
life!' says Freddy loftily, growing rather red.
'I shall do my best to prevent Lady Betty and my Prue standing shoulder
to shoulder anywhere,' retorts Peggy doggedly.
A pause.
'So that was what Prue was crying about?' says Freddy, with a quiet air
of reflection. 'Poor Prue! if you have been addressing her with the same
air of amenity that you have me, it does not surprise me. I sometimes
wonder,' looking at her with an air of candid and temperate speculation,
'how you, who are so genuinely good at bottom, can have the heart to
make that child cry in the way you do!'
'I did not mean to make her cry,' replies poor Peggy remorsefully. 'I
hate to make her cry!'
'And yet you manage to do it pretty often, dear,' rejoins Freddy
sweetly. 'Now, you know, to me it seems,' with a slight quiver in his
voice, 'as if no handling could be too tender for her!'
Peggy gives an impatient groan. At his words, before her mind's eye
rises the figure of Prue waiting ready dressed in her riding-habit day
after day--watching, listening, running to the garden-end, and crawling
dispiritedly back again; the face of Prue robbed of its roses, clipped
of its roundness, drawn and oldened before its time by Freddy's 'tender
handling.' A bitter speech rises to her lips; but she swallows it back.
Of what use? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his
spots?
Another pause, while Margaret looks blankly across the garden, and
Freddy inhales the smell of the mignonette, and scratches Mink's little
smirking gray head. At length:
'So you do not mean to let her go?' says the young man interrogatively.
'I think not,' replies Peggy witheringly. 'If I want her taught ribald
songs I can send her to the alehouse in the village, and I do not know
any other end that would be served by her going there.'
Freddy winces a little.
'I daresay you are right,' he rejoins blandly. 'I always say that there
is no one whose judgment I would sooner take than yours; and, in point
of fact, I am not very keen about the plan myself; it was only poor
Prue's being so eager about it that made me advocate it. You see,' with
a charming smile, 'I am not like you, Peggy. When persons come to me
brimming over with pleasure in a project, I have not the strength of
mind instantly to empty a jug of cold water all over them! I wish I had!
it would,' sighing pensively, 'make life infinitely less difficult!'
'You are going to Harborough yourself, I suppose?' asks Peggy brusquely,
brushing away like cobwebs her companion's compliments and aspirations.
He shrugs his shoulders.
'How can I tell? Do I ever know where I may drift to? I may wake up
there some fine morning. It is not a bad berth, and,' with a return to
the high moral tone, 'if one can help a person ever so little, I think
that one has no right to turn one's back upon her!'
'Of course not!' ironically.
'And I have always told you,' with an air of candid admission, 'that I
am fond of Betty!'
'I know,' returns Peggy, with a somewhat sarcastic demureness--'I have
heard; you look upon her quite as an elder sister; it is a charming
relationship!'
Freddy reddens, but instantly recovering himself:
'I am not so sure about that! I must consult Prue!' cries he, going off
with a laugh, and with the last word.