Luncheon comes, but no St. John. After luncheon Sir Thomas, Miss
Blessington, and Miss Craven go out riding. Miss Craven's knowledge
of horsemanship is confined to her exploits on a small, shaggy,
down-hearted Welsh pony, concerning whom it would be difficult to
predicate which he was fullest of, years or grass. Miss Blessington has
lent her an old habit; it is much too big in the waist and shoulders
for her, but a well-made garment always manages to adapt itself more or
less to any figure, and she does not look amiss in it. It is a matter
of very little consequence to her at the present moment how she looks;
she is the arrantest coward in Christendom, and her heart sinks down to
the bottom of her boots as she sees three horses that look unnaturally
tall and depressingly cheerful issue through the great folding-doors
that open into the stable-yard.
"Oh, Sir Thomas! it is a chesnut, is it? Don't they say that chesnuts
always have very uncertain tempers? Oh! please--I'm rather frightened.
I think, if you don't mind, I'd almost as soon----"
"Fiddlesticks!" answers Sir Thomas, roughly. "Cannot have my horses
saddled and unsaddled every half-hour because you don't know your own
mind. God bless my soul, child! Don't look as if you were going to be
hanged! Why, you might ride her with a bit of worsted. Here, Simpson,
look sharp, and put Miss Craven up."
After two abortive attempts, in the first of which she springs short,
and glides ignobly to earth again, and in the second takes a bound that
goes near to carrying her clean over her steed, after having given
Simpson a kick in the face, and torn a hole in her borrowed habit, Miss
Craven is at length settled in her seat.
It is a hot afternoon; after all, I think that miladi has the best of
it, sitting in a garden-chair under a tulip tree, eating apricots.
The deer, with dappled sides and heavy-horned heads, are herding
about the rough, knotted feet of the great trees that stand here and
there in solitary kingship about the park. They spread their ancient,
outstretched arms between earth and heaven, and man and beast rejoice
in the shade thereof. The dust lies a hand-breadth thick upon the road;
the nuts in the hedgerow, the half-ripe blackberries, the rag-wort in
the grass--all merge their distinctive colours in one dirty-white mask.
"Is she going to kick, do you think?" asks Esther, in a mysterious
whisper of Miss Blessington, across Sir Thomas. "Does not it mean that
when they put their ears back?"
"I don't think you need be alarmed," answers Constance, with
politely-veiled contempt; "it is only the flies that tease her."
The animal that inspires such alarm in Esther's mind, is a slight,
showy thing, nearly thoroughbred; a capital lady's park hack. It is
quiet enough, only that the quietness of a young, oats-fed mare, and
of an antediluvian Welsh pony blown out with grass, are two different
things. She is sidling along now, half across the road, coquetting with
her own shadow.
"Oh, Sir Thomas!" (in an agonised voice) "why does not she walk
straight? Why does she go like a crab?"
"Pooh!" answers Sir Thomas, in his hard, loud voice; "it's only play!"
"If I'm upset, I don't much care whether it is in play or earnest,"
rejoins Esther, ruefully.
The glare from the road, the dust and the midges, make people keep
their eyes closed as nearly as they can: so that it is not till they
are close upon him that they perceive that the man who is dawdling
along to meet them on a stout, grey cob, with his hat and coat and
whiskers nearly as white as any miller's, is St. John. He looks rather
annoyed at the rencontre.
"I have been over to Melford, Sir Thomas, to see that pointer of
Burleigh's. It will not do at all; it's not half broken."
"You had better turn back with us, St. John," suggests Constance,
graciously.
"No, thanks; much too hot!"
"_Au revoir_, then," nodding her head and her tall hat, and about a
million flies that are promenading on it, gracefully.
Esther's fears vanish.
"Three is no company," she says in a low voice, and making rather a
plaintive little face as he passes her.
Drawn by the magnet that has succeeded in drawing to itself most things
that it wished--viz., a woman's inviting eyes--he turns the cob's head
sharp round.
"But four is," he answers, with an eager smile, putting his horse
alongside of hers.
She was rather compunctious the moment she had said it. It is reversing
the order of things--the woman after the man; "the haystack after the
cow;" as the homely old proverb says.
The road is broad, and for a little while they all four jog on abreast,
as in a Roman chariot-race or a city omnibus--rather a dreary squadron.
"This is very dull," thinks Esther. "Oh! if I could lose my
handkerchief, or my veil, or my gloves! Why cannot I drop my whip?"
No sooner said than done.
"Oh! Mr. Gerard, I am so sorry, I have dropped my whip!"
Mr. Gerard, of course, dismounts and picks it up; Sir Thomas and his
ward pass on.
"What a happy thought that was of yours!" says St. John, wiping the
little delicate switch before giving it back to her.
"_Happy thought!_ What do you mean?" (reddening).
"Oh! it was accident, was it? I quite thought you had dropped it on
purpose, and was lost in admiration of your ingenuity."
He looks at her searchingly as he speaks.
"I _did_ drop it on purpose," she answers, blushing painfully. "Why do
you make me tell the truth, when I did not mean to do so?"
"Don't you always tell truth?" (a little anxiously).
"Does anybody?"
"I hope so. A few men do, I think."
"As I have no pretensions to being a man, you cannot be surprised that
my veracity is not my strongest point."
"You are only joking" (looking at her with uneasy intentness). "Please
reassure me, by saying that you do not tell any greater number of fibs
than every one is compelled to contribute towards the carrying on of
society."
"Perhaps I do, and perhaps I do not."
He looks only half-satisfied with this oracular evasion; but does not
press the point farther.
"It is not often that my papa and I take the air together; we think we
have almost enough of each other's society in-doors."
"He is your father," says Esther, rather snappishly; a little out of
humour with him for having put her out of conceit with herself.
"I never could see what claim to respect that was," answers he,
gravely; "on the contrary I think that one's parents ought to apologise
to one for bringing one, without asking one's leave, into such a
disagreeable place as this world is."
"Disagreeable!" cries Esther, turning her eyes, broad open, in childish
wonder upon him. "Disagreeable to _you!_ Young and----"
"Beautiful, were you going to say?"
"No, certainly not----and with plenty of money to make it pleasant?"
"But I have not plenty of money. I _shall_ have, probably, when I'm too
old to care about it! _he_ is good for thirty years more, you know,"
nodding respectfully at Sir Thomas's broad, blue back.
"It _must_ be tiring, waiting for dead men's shoes," says Esther, a
little sardonically.
"_Tiring!_ I believe you," says St. John, energetically; "it is worse
than tiring--it is degrading. Do you suppose I do not think my own life
quite as contemptible as you can? Take my word for it" (emphasising
every syllable), "there is no class of men in England so much to be
pitied as heirs to properties. We cannot dig; to beg we are ashamed."
"I never was heir to anything, so I cannot tell."
"I should have been a happier fellow, and worth something then,
perhaps, if I had been somebody's tenth son, and had had to earn my
bread quill-driving, or soap-boiling, or sawbones-ing. I think I see
myself pounding away at a pestle and mortar in the surgery" (laughing).
"I should have had a chance, then, of being liked for myself too, even
if I did smell rather of pills and plaister; whereas now, if anybody
looks pleasant at me, or says anything civil to me, I always think it
is for love of Felton, not of me."
"You should go about _incognito_, like the Lord of Burleigh."
"He was but a landscape painter, you know. Do you know that once,
not a very many years ago, I had a ridiculous notion in my head that
one ought to try and do some little good in the world? Thanks to Sir
Thomas's assistance and example, I have very nearly succeeded in
getting rid of that chimera. If I am asked at the Last Day how I have
spent my life, I can say, I have shot a few bears in Norway, and a
good many turkeys and grebe in Albania; I have killed several salmon
in Connemara: I have made a fool of myself once, and a beast of myself
many times."
"How did you make a fool of yourself?" pricking up her ears.
"Oh! never mind; it is a stupid story without any point, and I have not
quite come to the pitch of dotage of telling senile anecdotes about
myself. Here, let us turn in at this gate, and take a cut across the
park: it is cooler, and we can have a nice gallop under the trees,
without coming in for the full legacy of Sir Thomas's and Conny's dust,
as we are doing now."
"But--but--is not it rather _dangerous?_" objects Esther, demurring.
"Don't they sometimes put their feet into rabbit-holes, and tumble down
and break their legs?"
"Frequently, I may almost say _invariably_," answers St. John,
laughing, and opening the gate with the handle of his whip.
The soft, springy, green turf is certainly pleasanter than the hard,
whity-brown turnpike road, and so the horses think as they break into a
brisk canter. The quick air freshens the riders' faces--comes to them
like comfortable words from Heaven to a soul in Purgatory--as they dash
along under the trees, stooping their heads every now and then to avoid
coming into contact with the great, low-spreading boughs.
Laughing, flushed, half-fright, half-enjoyment:
"She looked so lovely as she swayed
The rein with dainty finger-tips;
A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this--
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips."
"Delicious! I'm not a bit afraid now; I bid defiance to the
rabbit-holes," she cries, with little breathless pauses between the
words.
Let no one shout before they are out of the wood. Hardly have the words
left her mouth, when all at once, at their very feet almost, from
among the seven-foot-high fern, where they have been crouching, rise
a score of deer with sudden rustling; and, their slender knees bent,
spring away with speedy grace through the mimic forest. Esther's mare,
frightened at the sudden apparition (many horses are afraid of deer),
swerves violently to the left; then gets her head down, and sets to
kicking as if she would kick herself out of her skin.
"Mind! Take care! Hold tight! Keep her head up!" shouts St. John, in an
agony.
Next moment the chesnut, with head in the air, nostrils extended, and
bridle swinging to and fro against her fore legs, tears riderless past
him. In a second he is off, and at the side of the heap of blue cloth
that is lying motionless among the buttercups.
"I'm not dead," says the heap, raising itself, and smiling rather a
difficult smile up at him, as he leans over it or her, his burnt face
whitened with extremest fear. "Don't look so frightened!"
"Thank God!" he says, hardly above his breath, and more devoutly than
he is in the habit of saying his prayers. "When I saw you there, lying
all shapeless, I half thought--Oh!" (with a shudder) "I don't know what
I thought."
"I must be tied on next time, mustn't I?" says Essie, putting up her
hand to her head with an uncertain movement, as if she were not quite
sure of finding it there. "Oh! Mr. Gerard,"--the colour coming back
faintly to her lips and cheeks--"I _do_ hate riding! it's horribly
dangerous! quite as bad as a battle!"
"Quite!" acquiesces St. John, laughing heartily in his intense relief.
"And you are quite sure you are not hurt?"
"Quite!"
"Really?"
"Really!"
To prove how perfectly intact she is, she jumps up; but, as she does
so, her face grows slightly distorted with a look of pain, and she
sinks back on her buttercup bed.
"Not quite sure, either; I seem to have done something stupid to my
foot--turned it or twisted it."
So saying, she thrusts out from under her habit a small foot. It _is_
a small--a _very_ small--foot; but the boot in which it is cased is
country made, and about three times too big for it; so that it might
rattle in it, like a pea in a drum. Even at this affecting moment St.
John cannot repress a slight feeling of disappointment.
"I'm awfully sorry! Whereabouts does it hurt? There?" putting his
fingers gently on the slender, rounded ankle.
"Yes, a little."
"I'm awfully sorry!" (You see there is not much variety in his
laments.) "What can I do for it? gallop home as hard as I can, and make
them send the carriage?"
"With a doctor, a lawyer, and a parson in it? No, I think not."
"But you cannot sit here all night. Could you _ride_ home, do you
think?"
"On that dreadful beast?" with a horrified intonation.
"But if I lead her all the way?"
"Very well" (reluctantly); "but (brightening a little) I cannot ride
her; she is not here."
"I suppose I must be going to look after her," says St. John, dragging
himself up very unwillingly. "Brute! she is as cunning as Old Nick! And
you are sure you don't mind being left here by yourself for a minute or
two?"
"Not if there are no horses within reach," she answers, with an
innocent smile, which he carries away with him through the sunshine and
the fern and the grass.
Essie spends full half an hour pushing out, pinching in, smoothing and
stroking Miss Blessington's caved-in hat; full a quarter of an hour in
picking every grass and sedge and oxeye that grew within reach of her
destroying arm; and full another quarter in thinking what a pleasant,
manly, straightforward face St. John's is--what a thoroughly terrified
face it looked when she met it within an inch of her own nose after her
disgraceful _bouleversement_--what a much better height five feet ten
is for all practical purposes than six feet four.
At the end of the fourth quarter Mr. Gerard returns, with a fire hardly
inferior to St. Anthony's in his face; with his hair cleaving damply to
his brows, and without the mare.
"Would not let me get within half a mile of her! far too knowing!
Brute! and now she'll be sure to go and knock the saddle to pieces, and
then there'll be the devil to pay!"
"I'm so sorry," says Esther, looking up sympathisingly, with her lap
full of decapitated oxeyes.
"So am I, for your sake: you'll have to ride the cob home."
"I shall have to turn into a man, then," she says, glancing rather
doubtfully at the male saddle.
"No, you won't," (laughing).
He rises, and unfastens the cob from the tree-branch to which he has
been tied. He has been indulging a naturally greedy disposition--biting
off leaves and eating them--until he has made his bit and his mouth as
green as green peas.
"You must let me put you up, I think," says Gerard bending down and
looking into his companion's great, sweet eyes, under the rim of her
battered, intoxicating-looking hat.
"Must I?" (lowering her eyelids shyly.)
"Yes; do you mind much?"
"No--o."
He stoops and lifts her gently. He is not a Samson or a prize-fighter,
and well grown young women of seventeen are not generally
feather-weights; but yet it seems to him that the second occupied in
raising her from the ground and placing her in the saddle was shorter
than other seconds.
A man's arms are not sticks or bits of iron, that they can hold a
beautiful woman without feeling it. St. John's blood is giving little
quick throbs of pleasure. His arms seem to feel the pressure of that
pleasant burden long after they have been emptied of it.
"I think you must let me hold you," he says, gently and very
respectfully passing his arm round her waist.
"No, no!" she cries, hastily, pulling herself away--"no need!--no need
at all! I shall not fall."
She feels an overpowering shrinking from the enforced, unavoidable
familiarity. It does not arise from any distaste for St. John
certainly, nor yet from any quixotic loyalty to Bob; it springs from a
new, unknown, uncomprehended shyness.
"Very well," he answers, quietly, releasing her instantly, and taking
the bridle in his hand. "But I'm afraid you will find that you are
mistaken."
They set forward across the park, at a foot's pace and in silence.
Esther twists her hands in the cob's mane, and tries to persuade
herself that pommelless pigskin does not make a slippery seat. Every
two paces she slides down an inch or so, and then recovers herself with
an awkward jerk. The sun is hot. Now and then, as the cob puts his foot
on a mole-hill, or some other slight inequality in the ground, her
ankle bumps against the saddle-flap. She feels turning giddy and sick
with the heat and the pain.
"Mr. Gerard! Mr. Gerard! I'm falling!" she calls out loud, stretching
out her arms to him, and clutching hold of his shoulder with a violence
and tenacity that she herself is not in the least aware of.
He is magnanimous. He does not exult over her; he does not say, "I
knew how it would be; I told you so!" He only says, in a kind, anxious
voice, and plainlier still with kind, anxious eyes, "I'm afraid you are
in great pain?" and replaces the rejected arm in its former obnoxious
position.
As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward
advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great
favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever
speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."
"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly;
"even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."
"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks,
explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance.
"Broken the mare's knees, I suppose?" cries Sir Thomas, loudly, taking
no notice whatever of Miss Craven's casualties. "Some fool's play, of
course; larking over the palings, I dare say. Well, sir, what have you
done with her? where have you left her? out with it!" (lashing himself
up into an irrational turkeycock fury.)
"Damn the mare!" answered St. John in a rage, growing rather white, and
forgetting his manners.
St. John's rages, when he does get into them, which is not very often,
are far worse ones than his papa's, and so the latter knows, and is
cowed by the first symptoms of the approach of one.
Miss Blessington looks up shocked. This _jeune personne bien élevée_
always is shocked at whatever people ought to be shocked at--Colenso,
Swinburne, skittles, &c.
"You are not much hurt, _really_, I hope?" she says, suavely, walking
along beside Esther, while Sir Thomas and his heir wrangle in the
background. "Which way did you come, and what _has_ become of your
horse?"
"We came through the park," answers Esther, holding on by her eyelids
to the cob's slippery back; "so I suppose the horse is there still. Mr.
Gerard tried to catch it, and could not."
"Through the park!" repeats Miss Blessington, with a slight smile of
superior intelligence. "Oh! I see; a short cut home! Poor St. John has
such a horror of taking a ride for riding's sake, that he always tries
to shorten his penance as much as possible!"