The 2.25 train from Brainton is due at Felton at 5.30. It is drawing
near Hither now, escorted by a vanguard, bodyguard, and rearguard of
dust-clouds; it rushes along, with the sun beating down on the roofs
of the carriages, making them like little compartments of Hades. If
the devil took a hint from the Coldbath Fields cells for "improving
the prisons of Hell," he certainly might take a hint from the Brainton
train for improving the travelling conveyances of the same locality.
In one of the first-class carriages there is a baby: it has got a cold,
and seems rather inclined to be sick; so both the nurse, on whose lap
it lies gaping and blowing bubbles, and the idolising mother, who sits
over against it, insist on keeping its window tight up. There is a
rusty old divine, in gilt-rimmed spectacles and a jowl, reading the
_Guardian;_ a commercial traveller, with his hat off, his legs up, and
a gaudy cap on his head, fast asleep; and, lastly, a little young lady,
sitting facing the engine, with the dusty blast driving hot and full
in her face, blinking, coughing, choking, with the utmost patience. On
her lap lies a huge bunch of red and yellow roses and heavy-scented
double-stocks, all limp and drooping and soiled. Bob gave them to her
when he came down to the station to see her off--and very kind of him
too, and very nice they are; but all the same, as she has already a
bag, a box, and a parasol to carry, she thinks (though she barely owns
it to herself) that she would almost as soon have been without them.
The dusty blast blows gentler, moderates to a dusty zephyr; the
train is slackening speed. "Fel--ton!" "Fel--ton!" cry a row of
green-fustianed porters, as the long bulk draws up at the platform.
"Please 'm, are you Miss Craven?" inquires a tall footman in powder and
a cockade, touching his hat to Esther, as she stands all by herself,
trying to take several beams out of her own eye.
"Yes."
"The carriage is here for you, 'm. Would you please to show me which is
your maid and luggage?"
"I have no maid, and there's my luggage," responds Esther, pointing
with one grimy kid finger to a small trunk standing on its head, and
looking half inclined to burst asunder in the midst. She is ashamed of
her destitute condition, and ashamed of herself for being ashamed of it.
"Will it change into a pumpkin?" thinks Miss Craven, as she steps into
a large yellow barouche, with two fidgety, showy greys, that is waiting
for her at the station gate. After the yammering of the baby, the dull
rumble-rumble of the train, how delicious! "If it were only my own,"
she says to herself, throwing herself back with a consequential feeling
on the soft cushions, as some country people pass and pull their
forelocks to the well-known liveries.
"Well, odder things have happened! _But_ for Bob! The Prince fell in
love with Cinderella at first sight; why should not Prince Gerard with
me? I dare say I'm quite as good-looking as Cinderella was!"
As they pass Lady Gerard's model school, twenty little charity girls
come trooping out in the uniformity of their cotton frock and straw
bonnet livery, and drop twenty bob courtesies to Esther, who feels as
the man in the "Arabian Nights" did who woke and found himself Sultan.
Labouring men go stumping heavily home, with their tools over their
shoulders and their heads bent earthwards, as is always the case with
the tillers of the soil, who must--oh, hard necessity!--be ever looking
down.
Park palings, through which the strong brake fern is thrusting itself,
slide past; then a red lodge, picked out with blue bricks, where an
obsequious old woman rushes out from the washtub, with hands all
soapsuds, to open the gates; then a grassy, knolly park; then a great
red house, likewise picked out with blue bricks; then stones clattering
under an echoing portico; then the pumpkin stops, and Cinderella
descends.
"Miss Craven!" announces the butler, opening a tall door; and Miss
Craven, plucking up heart, marches into a high, dark library, lined
with high, dark books--marches in, looking very much like a chimney
sweep. Dust lies in ridges on her once white bonnet; dust, instead of
belladonna, in streaks under her eyes; dust on the parting of her hair,
on her eyelashes, up her nose (on which there is also, though, happily
for her, she does not know it, a large smut), and a double portion of
dust on the great, faded, yellow roses, to which she cleaves with as
much pertinacity as the idiot in "Excelsior" clave to that senseless
banner which he was so determined to run up hill with.
As she enters, a goddess rises like an exhalation (as Pandemonium did),
and comes floating on lilac clouds towards her. This is as things
seem to her; in reality, a large, fair, young woman comes forward in
a long-tailed mauve muslin. Simultaneously a man's two legs are seen
disappearing over the window-sill.
"How do you do?" says the goddess, sweetly. "I think the train must
have been rather late; we expected you half an hour ago."
"Yes."
A little pause, each taking stock.
"Won't you have some tea?"
"Thanks."
The tea is poured out; it has been standing on the table an hour, and
is perfectly cold. The goddess and the little female collier examine
each other stealthily.
"Rather alarming," thinks the latter: "talks in such a low voice, and
has such a difficulty in pronouncing her _r_'s. So that is the correct
thing, is it? Well, I'll always call Robert _Wobert_ for the future."
"Might be pretty, if she were not so filthy," thinks the other.
"Same age as I am, indeed! She looks five years older."
"I think, if you don't mind, we had perhaps better be going to dress.
Sir Thomas is so very particular as to punctuality."
"Is he? was that Sir Thomas that got out of the window just as I came
in?"
"Oh no! that was St. John."
("St. John! What a pretty name! How much prettier than Bob!")
* * * * *
Sir Thomas Gerard is walking up and down the library, with his watch
in his hand, prepared the instant the clock strikes to ring the bell
violently, and inquire what is the meaning of dinner being so late.
Sir Thomas is a big man, who affects the country squire, the good,
old English gentleman--plain Sir Thomas, without any nonsense about
him; dresses to the character, and succeeds in looking not unlike the
Frenchman's idea of an English _milord_, as depicted in _Punch_ some
years ago, where he is represented in low-crowned hat and breeches,
with the face of a truculent butcher, cracking a whip, and exclaiming,
with equal coherency and elegance, "Rosbif! I send my wife to Smiffel!
God dam!"
Sir Thomas does not use such strong language when speaking of Lady
Gerard, but in other respects the portrait is not unfaithful. Lady
Gerard is lying in an arm-chair. She is fat to make you shudder; she
has a short, turn-up nose, short legs, a red skin, and next to no
hair--all very good points in a pig, but hardly so good in a lady. The
clock strikes, and at the same instant the butler opens the door, and
announces "Dinner!"
"Come along, Conny!" says Sir Thomas, sticking out his elbow to his
ward.
"Are not you going to wait for Miss Craven? And St. John is not down,
either," suggests Lady Gerard, who is hoisting herself slowly up out of
her chair.
"Wait for 'em? Not I," responds Sir Roger de Coverley. "If people don't
choose to conform to the rules of my house, they may go without their
dinner for all I care, and serve 'em right, too. Come along, Conny!"
The soup is nearly ended when two people, who have come together by a
fortuitous concourse of atoms at the door, make a simultaneous entry
into the dining-room.
"Companions in iniquity!" says St. John, with a sarcastic look at his
father, bowing to Esther, as he seats himself beside Miss Blessington.
"How do?" says Sir Thomas, putting out his left hand (his right is
still grasping his spoon). "Never wait for anybody here; would not let
the soup get cold for the Queen nor the Lord Chancellor either."
"Miss Craven mistook you for Sir Thomas before dinner," says Miss
Blessington, in her sweet, smooth way to her neighbour.
"Did she? Unintentional compliments are always the most flattering,"
replies Mr. Gerard, quietly.
Then he looks across through the partition wall of great bigonias in
silver pots, and sees a little face peeping at him under and over the
broad crimson leaves.
No one would ever call Esther's a Madonna face. No artist would ever
ask her to sit for St. Catherine, or St. Cecilia, or St. Anybody else;
hers is essentially _beauté du diable_--one of those little, sparkling,
provoking, petulant faces that have a fresh dress of smiles or tears,
or dimples or blushes, for every trivial, passing question; one of
those little faces that have been at the bottom of half the mischiefs
the world has seen.
"I only saw a pair of legs," replies the face, exculpating itself; "how
could I tell whether they were young or old legs?"
Miss Blessington looks rather shocked, as if she thought that Esther's
modes of expression were somewhat _libre;_ and indeed at the rate of
purity at which we are advancing, _legs_ will soon walk off into the
limbo of silence and unmentionableness; _arms_ will probably follow
them, and then perhaps noses.
Although Miss Blessington looks shocked, St. John only laughs. He looks
pleasant when he laughs; he did not look pleasant just now, when he was
turning up his nose at his cold soup. When he is in an ill-humour he
has a decided look of his father, though it puts him into an awful rage
to tell him so. He is not handsome, certainly; not a straight-nosed,
pink-cheeked, flaxen-curled, fairy prince at all; neither is he very
young--not a boy, that is to say--five-and-thirty, or thereabouts;
his face has a weather-beaten look, as of one that has felt many an
icy wind and many a tropic sun beat against it. No lily-handed, curled
woman's darling.
"What do you mean?" cries Sir Thomas, raising his voice, and turning
round in a fury (with his stiff grey hair standing upright, and the
veins in his forehead swelling) upon an unlucky footman, who has had
the _maladresse_ to drop three spoons that he was carrying upon a tray.
"You stupid hound, mind what you are about, or else keep out of the
room, one or the other!"
Esther's mouth opens; she feels a sensation of shamefaced aghastness;
but the rest of the company sit with the composure induced by long
familiarity with the good old English gentleman's courtesies. Only one
little flash of indignant contempt shoots from St. John's grey eyes.
"How I hate my father!" would be his reading of the great statesman's
dying ejaculation, "How I love my country!"
Nobody ever speaks much at dinner at Felton. St. John because he knows,
if he trusted himself to speak at all, it would be to contradict his
father flat _whatever_ he said, for the mere pleasure of contradicting
him; Lady Gerard because she has heard that it is impossible to do two
things well at the same time, and as she is quite resolved upon doing
the eating part well, she thinks she will leave the talking alone; Miss
Blessington because, having contributed her hard, cold beauty to the
entertainment, she thinks she has done enough.
The company being rather silent, Esther turns her eyes round the room,
and scans the pictures. Two or three Gerards, by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
in very full dress; a large copper-coloured woman by Rubens, in no
dress at all; "Susanna and the Elders;" "Jupiter and Leda" (twice
life-size); a "Venus Sleeping, surprised by Satyrs" (a great gem);
and many other like subjects, such as one mostly meets with in the
dining-rooms of English nobles and gentles--subjects pleasant and
profitable, to employ the eyes and minds of their daughters while
engaged in eating their dinners. Esther is staring hard at Susanna's
fat, coy face, when her attention is recalled by Mr. Gerard's voice
addressing her. She starts and blushes furiously, like a child whose
fingers have been found straying among the jam-pots. He looks amused at
her confusion.
"I have just been thinking, Miss Craven, how pleasant your first
impressions of us must be. What a well-mannered, courteous family you
must think us!--I tumbling out of the window at the risk of breaking
my neck to avoid you, and my father and mother going to dinner without
you."
"If you had been a little quicker in your movements, I should have
known nothing about you," responds she, the carmine called forth by her
detection dying slowly out of her cheeks, and noticing only the half of
his sentence that refers to himself.
"Ah! I am not so young as I was" (with a sigh); "but, to tell the
truth, we had just been dragging the pool, like Boodles in 'Happy
Thoughts,' and I was such a mass of mud that I had not moral courage to
face you."
"We should have met on equal terms. I was as black as a coal, was not
I?"
"Railroads do make one wonderfully dusty," replies Miss Blessington,
with a polite, evasive platitude.
"I had a worse infliction than any dust to bear," says Esther,
stretching her long throat around the bigonia to get a fuller view of
her _vis-à-vis_.
"A baby, of course?" replies he, stretching his neck too for a like
purpose.
"An aggravated case of baby--a baby that had something odd the matter
with it."
"Not so bad as a man drinking sherry," says he, his grey eyes and a bit
of his nose laughing through the leaves; "a woman eating gingerbread
is bad enough. I travelled once with a woman who ate gingerbread from
London to Holyhead without stopping."
"And did not offer you any?"
"Good heavens, no! What a prodigious suggestion!--that would have been
adding insult to injury."
"If I had been travelling with you I should undoubtedly have offered
you some. I should have judged you by myself, and I am very fond of
gingerbread."
"Indeed!"
"And" (with a mischievous look) "fonder still of peppermint lozenges,
particularly in church on hot Sunday afternoons."
They were getting quite voluble, chatting and chirping like a nest of
magpies--like children playing and laughing in a garden, unmindful that
in a cave in a corner is a great old bear who may pounce out on them at
any moment. The Felton bear pounces.
"What the devil do you mean leaving that door open? Morris! John!
George! Here, some of you! there's a door open somewhere between here
and the kitchen. Don't contradict me, sir! I say there is; if I catch
you propping those swing doors open," &c. &c.
* * * * *
The birds have gone to bed, and the slugs come out to walk on the damp
garden paths. Now and then a little wind gets up, whispers a word or
two to the polished laurel leaves, and lies down again. There is a
carpet of thin, smoke-grey clouds over heaven's blue floor. The two
girls are strolling up and down the terrace walk. Esther has got a red
cloak thrown about her shoulders; she is not in the least afraid of
taking cold, and declined the offer of it in the first instance; but on
second thoughts, reflecting that the dining-room windows look on the
terrace, and that the fairy prince may see and like the combination of
black eyes and red cloth (fairy princes being always partial to gay
colours), accepted it.
I have called Esther "little," and Miss Blessington "large" but the
truth is they are much of a height. The difference between them is,
that one is a young, slight sapling that has been so busy shooting up
skywards, that it has had no leisure to grow broad, and that the other
is a full-grown, spreading, stately forest tree. And yet they are the
same age; but some women develop, mind and body, much quicker than
others.
From the unshuttered dining-room windows comes a great square of yellow
lamplight, and lies smooth upon the gravel. Looking in you see rifled
fruit dishes, half-filled wine-glasses, moths flying round and round
the lamp globes, trying their best to find an entrance to fiery death.
Sir Thomas, in his red velvet easy chair, with his white duck legs
stretched out before him--duck trousers and a blue coat and brass
buttons are, I need hardly say, the fine old English gentleman's dinner
costume--with his head thrown back, till you can see either up into his
brains or down his throat, whichever you choose. St. John, with his
elbow resting on the shining oak table, which reflects it as a mirror
would, and his head on his hand, in a brown study.
"Do you always walk up and down here, Miss Blessington?" inquires
Esther, who is getting rather tired of pacing along, along, along
monotonously, with her gown sweeping a little avalanche of pebbles
behind her.
"Generally" (with a pretty smile).
Miss Blessington has a very pretty smile--an "angelic smile"--people
say who see her only once; but it is only one, and is aired every hour
of the day--comes out for Sir Thomas, for Lady Gerard, for servants,
for dogs, for callers, for old almswomen, for St. John--so that none
can take it personally, can they?
"By yourself?"
"Not generally."
The pretty smile is dashed with a faint complacency.
("H'm! That means with St. John--
"'Walking in a shady grove
With my Juliana.'
"Pleasant look-out for me! A bad third! What a pity that Bob is not
here! we should be a _partie carrée_, and might change partners every
now and then; Miss Blessington should have Bob, and I would have St.
John!")
Below the terrace spreads a large square of grass, uninvaded by
flower-bed or shrub, mowed and rolled, rolled and mowed, into the
similitude of a pancake for flatness. There croquet-hoops glance
whitely in the soft half-light; mallets lie strewn like dead soldiers
after a battle; balls red, blue, and yellow, like great ripe fruit
tumbled among the grass.
"Is this your croquet-ground?"
"Yes."
"Nice and level?"
"Yes."
"Like a billiard table, only a prettier green?"
"Yes; would you like a game?"
"Better than doing nothing, isn't it?" answers Esther, cheerily; she
being a young woman to whom the words _rest_ and _enjoyment_ are not
synonymous, as they mostly grow to be to people in later years.
From the dining-room comes the faint melody of the trombone, played
with the skill of much practice by Sir Thomas's nose. Some one comes
to the window, looks out, puts a hand on the sill, and jumps down. St.
John apparently has an aversion from going out and coming in by the
authorised modes of exit and entrance. Now that one can see him without
any bigonia interposing, one notices that he has kind, eager eyes--eyes
that seem to be looking, looking for something that they have not found
yet--and rather a long nose, that the sun has got hold of and browned,
as a cook browns mashed potatoes.
"Won't you join us, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington, stooping to
reinstate a fallen hoop, and looking calm invitation at him out of her
great, fine, passionless, cow eyes.
St. John hesitates, and looks towards Esther to see whether she is not
going to second the invitation; but she is balancing herself with her
two feet on a croquet-mallet, and does not appear to see him.
"Gooseberry I may be," she thinks, "but, at all events, I won't be
instrumental in making myself so."
"Do I ever play?" asks he, with petulance, walking off in a huff.
"He did not accept your invitation with the exultant gratitude one
would have expected, did he?" says Miss Craven, maliciously.
"He hates the game," replies Miss Blessington, rather sharplier than is
her wont--"particularly playing with odd numbers."
"Oh!"
The match begins; it is about as fair as a foot race between Deerfoot
and a lame baby. Esther has played about six times in the course of her
life; Miss Blessington about six thousand. Miss Blessington makes the
round of the hoops in triumphant solitude, while poor Essie struggles
feebly, ignorantly, unscientifically, to ring a bell that refuses to
emit the faintest tinkle.
"Hare and tortoise!" cries she, laughing at her own discomfiture;
"you'll go to sleep presently, and I shall crawl in and win."
"Since you wish me, I don't mind taking a mallet," says St. John,
appearing suddenly round a big Wellingtonia, and looking confusedly
conscious of being seen descending very awkwardly from his high horse.
"How do you know we wish you to take one?--we never said so," says
Essie, flashing at him with her wicked, laughing, half-lowered eyes.
("Since I am another's and he is another's, I don't see why we should
not try to amuse each other," she says to herself.)
"It is your turn to play, Miss Craven," interposes Constance, coldly.
"Come to my rescue, won't you?" says Esther, making her seventy-second
careless, abortive attempt at the bell, and throwing twice as much
_empressement_ into her voice from the amiable motive that she thinks
such _empressement_ is displeasing to Miss Blessington.
"You snubbed me so just now that I don't think I will. I'll leave you
to perish miserably," answers he, looking at her as he speaks with an
intentness only excusable by the dim light, and the indistinctness of
all objects in it.
"Constance, if you don't mind I'll take one of Miss Craven's balls."
"If you remember, I asked you to join us half an hour ago," replies
Constance, in her measured way.
"I make one stipulation before we start," cries Esther, gaily, "and
that is, that you make no remarks upon my play except such as are of a
laudatory nature."
"I'll make no stipulation of the kind," answers he, gaily too; "if I
see anything reprehensible I shall testify."
Fate does not smile upon the union of St. John and Esther. Disgrace and
disaster attend their arms; in ignorance, unskilfulness, and general
incapacity, St. John is no whit inferior to his partner.
"Why, you play worse than I do," cries she, delighted at the discovery.
"I know I do," he answers, not too amiably; "I should be ashamed of
myself if I did not; it is the vilest, stupidest game ever any idiot
invented; no play in it whatever. All luck! all chance! Look there!"
pointing with a sort of ill-tempered resignation to Constance, who,
with dress delicately lifted with one hand, and foot gracefully
poised, is inflicting heavy chastisement, with a calm, satisfied
vindictiveness, on his ball.
"Take that, you fool you!" (this is addressed to the ball, not to Miss
Blessington) hurling his mallet at it as it scuds swiftly over the
sward and lodges in the pink and purple breast of an aster bed. The
head and handle of the mallet fly asunder from the violence of their
passage through the air, and Mr. Gerard is reduced to the ignominy of
picking up the _disjecta membra_ and hammering them together again.
"You must make a sensation when you go to a croquet party," remarks
Esther, sarcastically.
"Do you think so badly of me as to suppose I ever do? is thy servant
a curate that he should do this thing?" he answers, coming over and
standing close to her.
"Please attend to the game, St. John! It is you to play!" exclaims
Constance, with suppressed, lady-like irritation, from the other end of
the ground, where she stands in majestic solitude.
It is the penalty of greatness to be lonely. A few more egregious
blunders on the part of the firm of Gerard and Craven, a few more
masterstrokes by Miss Blessington, and the game draws to a conclusion.
"It is ridiculous playing against such luck as yours, Constance," cries
St. John, flinging down his weapon in an unjust, unreasonable fury.
"It is always the same; it does not matter what--whist, billiards,
anything--always the same story. Take my advice" (turning to Essie,
and speaking eagerly), "never play at anything, or do anything, or
be anything with me, or you'll be sure to be a loser. I am the most
unlucky devil under the sun." Then he feels that he is making a fool of
himself, and walks off in a rage.
"Why, he is _really_ cross," says Esther, opening her great eyes and
looking a little blankly after him.
"He is rather odd-tempered," answers Miss Blessington, composedly; "and
the most singular thing is, that it is always the people he is fondest
of with whom he is most easily irritated."
"How fond he must be of you!" says Esther, internally.