_AT HOME_.
Upon reaching home Esther sought to place her bloodroot in safety,
giving it a soft and well-dug corner in her little plot of garden
ground. She planted it with all care in the shadow of a rose-bush; and
then went in to put her other flowers in water.
The sitting-room, whither she went, was a large, low, pleasant place;
very simply furnished, yet having a cheerful, cosy look, as places do
where people live who know how to live. The room, and the house, no
doubt, owed its character to the rule and influence of Mrs.
Gainsborough, who was there no longer, and to a family life that had
passed away. The traces abode still. The chintz hangings and the carpet
were of soft colours and in good harmony; chairs and lounges were
comfortable; a great many books lined the walls, so many indeed that
the room might have been styled the library. A portfolio with
engravings was in one place; Mrs. Gainsborough's work-table in another;
some excellent bronzes on the bookcases; one or two family portraits,
by good hands; and an embroidery frame. A fine English mastiff was
sleeping on the rug before the fire; for the weather was still cold
enough within doors to make a fire pleasant, and Colonel Gainsborough
was a chilly man.
He lay on the couch when Esther came in with her flowers; a book in his
hand, but not held before his eyes. He was a handsome man, of a severe,
grave type; though less well-looking at this time because of the
spiritless, weary, depressed air which had become his habit; there was
a want of spring and life and hope in the features and in the manner
also of the occupant of the sofa. He looked at Esther languidly, as she
came in and busied herself with arranging her maple blossoms, her
Hepatica and one or two delicate stems of the bloodroot in a little
vase. Her father looked at the flowers and at her, in silence.
'Papa, aren't those _beautiful?_' she asked with emphasis, bringing the
vase, when she had finished, to his side.
'What have you got there, Esther?'
'Just some anemones, and liverleaf, and bloodroot, and maple blossoms,
papa; but Christopher calls them all sorts of big names.'
'They are very fragile blossoms,' the colonel remarked.
'Are they? They won't do in the garden, Christopher says, but they grow
nicely out there in the wood. Papa, what is the difference between a
weed and a flower?'
'I should think you were old enough to know.'
'I know them by sight--sometimes. But what is the _difference?_'
'Your eyes tell you, do they not?'
'No, papa. They tell me, sometimes, which is which; but I mean, why
isn't a flower a weed? I asked Christopher, but he couldn't tell me.'
'I do not understand the question. It seems to me you are talking
nonsense.'
The colonel raised his book again, and Esther took the hint, and went
back to the table with her flowers. She sat down and looked at them.
Fair they were, and fresh, and pure; and they bore spring's messages,
to all that could hear the message. If Esther could, it was in a
half-unconscious way, that somehow awakened by degrees almost as much
pain as pleasure. Or else, it was simply that the glow and stir of her
walk was fading away, and allowing the old wonted train of thought to
come in again. The bright expression passed from her face; the features
settled into a melancholy dulness, most unfit for a child and painful
to see; there was a droop of the corners of the mouth, and a lax fall
of the eyelids, and a settled gloom in the face, that covered it and
changed it like a mask. The very features seemed to grow heavy, in the
utter heaviness of the spirit.
She sat so for a while, musing, no longer busy with such pleasant
things as flowers and weeds; then roused herself. The weariness of
inaction was becoming intolerable. She went to a corner of the room,
where a large mahogany box was half-concealed beneath a table covered
with a cloth; with a good deal of effort she lugged the box forth. It
was locked, and she went to the sofa.
'Papa, may I look at the casts?'
'Yes.'
'You have got the key, papa.'
The key was fished out of the colonel's waistcoat pocket, and Esther
sat down on the floor and unlocked the box. It was filled with casts in
plaster of Paris, of old medals and bas-reliefs; and it had long been a
great amusement of Esther's to take them all out and look at them, and
then carefully pack them all away again between their layers of soft
paper and cotton batting. In the nature of the case, this was an
amusement that would pall if too often repeated; so it rarely happened
that Esther got them out more than three or four times a year. This
time she had hardly begun to take them out and place them carefully on
the table, when Mrs. Barker came in to lay the cloth for dinner. Esther
must put the casts back, and defer her amusement till another time in
the day.
Meals were served now for the colonel and his daughter in this same
room, which served for sitting-room and library. The dining-room was
disused. Things had come by degrees to this irregularity, Mrs. Barker
finding that it made her less work, and the colonel in his sorrowful
abstraction hardly knowing and not at all caring where he took his
dinner. The dinner was carefully served, however, and delicately
prepared; for there Barker's pride came in to her help; and besides,
little as Colonel Gainsborough attended now to the food he ate, it is
quite possible that he would have rebelled against any disorder in that
department of the household economy.
The meal times were sorrowful occasions to both the solitary personages
who now sat down to the table. Neither of them had become accustomed
yet to the empty place at the board. The colonel ate little and talked
none at all; and only Esther's honest childish appetite saved these
times from being seasons of intolerable gloom. Even so, she was always
glad when dinner was done.
By the time that it was over to-day, and the table cleared, Esther's
mood had changed; and she no longer found the box of casts attractive.
She had seen what was in it so often before, and she knew just what she
should find. At the same time she was in desperate want of something to
amuse her, or at least to pass away the time, which went so slowly if
unaided. She bethought her of trying another box, or series of boxes,
over which she had seen her father and mother spend hours together; but
the contents hitherto had not seemed to her interesting. The key was on
the same chain with the key of the casts; Esther sat down on the floor
by one of the windows, having shoved one of the boxes into that
neighbourhood, turned the key, and opened the cover. Her father was
lying on the couch again and gave her no attention, and Esther made no
call upon him for help.
An hour or two had passed. Esther had not changed her place, and the
box, which contained a quantity of coins, was still open; but the
child's hands lay idly in her lap, and her eyes were gazing into
vacancy. Looking back, perhaps, at the images of former days; smiling
images of light and love, in scenes where her mother's figure filled
all the foreground. Colonel Gainsborough did not see how the child sat
there, nor what an expression of dull, hopeless sorrow lay upon her
features. All the life and variety of which her face was abundantly
capable had disappeared; the corners of the mouth drawn down, the brow
rigid, the eyes rayless, she sat an image of childish desolation. She
looked even stupid, if that were possible to Esther's features and
character.
What the father did not see was revealed to another person, who came in
noiselessly at the open door. This new-comer was a young man, hardly
yet arrived at the dignity of young manhood; he might have been
eighteen, but he was really older than his years. His figure was well
developed, with broad shoulders and slim hips, showing great muscular
power and the symmetry of beauty as well. The face matched the figure;
it was strong and fine, full of intelligence and life, and bearing no
trace of boyish wilfulness. If wilfulness was there, which I think, it
was rather the considered and consistent wilfulness of a man. As he
came in at the open door, Esther's position and look struck him; he
paused half a minute. Then he came forward, came to the colonel's sofa,
and standing there bowed respectfully.
The colonel's book went down. 'Ah, William,' said he, in a tone of
indifferent recognition.
'How do you do, sir, to-day?'
'Not very well! my strength seems to be giving way, I think, by
degrees.'
'We shall have warm weather for you soon again, sir; that will do you
good.'
'I don't know,' said the colonel. 'I doubt it; I doubt it. Unless it
could give me the power of eating, which it cannot.
'You have no appetite?'
'That does not express it.'
There was an almost imperceptible flash in the eyes that were looking
down at him, the features, however, retaining their composed gravity.
'Perhaps shad will tempt you. We shall have them very soon now. Can't
you eat shad?'
'Shad,' repeated the colonel. 'That's your New England piscatory
dainty? I have never found out why it is so reckoned.'
'You cannot have eaten them, sir; that's all. That is, not cooked
properly. Take one broiled over a fire of corn cobs.'
'A fire of corn cobs!'
'Yes, sir; over the coals of such a fire, of course, I mean.'
'Ah! What's the supposed advantage?'
'Flavour, sir; gusto; a spicy delicacy, which from being the spirit of
the fire comes to be the spirit of the fish. It is difficult to put
anything so ethereal into words.' This was spoken with the utmost
seriousness.
'Ah!' said the colonel. 'Possibly. Barker manages those things.'
'You do not feel well enough to read to-day, sir?'
'Yes,' said the colonel, 'yes. One must do something. As long as one
lives, one must try to do something. Bring your book here, William, if
you please. I can listen, lying here.'
The hour that followed was an hour of steady work. The colonel liked
his young neighbour, who belonged to a family also of English
extraction, though not quite so recently moved over as the colonel's
own. Still, to all intents and purposes, the Dallases were English; had
English connections and English sympathies; and had not so long mingled
their blood with American that the colour of it was materially altered.
It was natural that the two families should have drawn near together in
social and friendly relations; which relations, however, would have
been closer if in church matters there had not been a diverging power,
which kept them from any extravagance of neighbourliness. This young
fellow, however, whom the colonel called 'William,' showed a
carelessness as to church matters which gave him some of the advantages
of a neutral ground; and latterly, since his wife's death, Colonel
Gainsborough had taken earnestly to the fine, spirited young man;
welcomed his presence when he came; and at last, partly out of
sympathy, partly out of sheer loneliness and emptiness of life, he had
offered to read the classics with him, in preparation for college. And
this for several months now they had been doing; so that William was a
daily visitor in the colonel's house.