It is the 1st of September, and the seal of impending destruction is
set upon many a little plump brown bird; but ignorance is bliss, and
the little brown birds do not know it, and are walking about the turnip
ridges and amongst the stubble fields as confidently as if there were
no such man as Purdey, and no such infernal machine as a gun. St.
John and his papa go out shooting together. Sir Thomas knocks up by
luncheon time, and returns to his orchid-house, and to the goading
the bricklayers, as King Agamemnon did his fellow-chiefs, with bitter
words. Esther spends the day in her bedroom, lying in state on a sofa
with her ankle bandaged up. It hurts her acutely if she attempts to
walk on it; but if she keeps quiet, she is hardly aware of there being
anything wrong with it. It is very annoying having to play the invalid
for an ailment that is purely local when you feel in riotous health and
spirits--to have your dinner sent up to you on a tray when you are so
hungry that you could eat double your allotted portion, if it were not
that, being an invalid, you are ashamed to say so. One has a sense of
shamming, malingering.
Poor Miss Craven passes a very dull day; the red rose on one side
the window, and the travellers' joy on the other, look in and say,
"Why is this lazy child lying all day on a couch, when we and so many
other flowers have been calling to her with our voiceless voices to
come out into the breeze and shine?" A bee comes in sometimes, and
goes buzz--buzzing about, telling himself how busy he is, and that
he has no time to waste now that his honey-harvest is drawing so
near to its sweet close. The room is so still that, but for feeling
intensely alive, and not having her chin tied up, Esther might almost
imagine herself laid out previous to her interment. Now and again
Miss Blessington enters noiselessly, says "I hope you are feeling a
little easier," in her soft monotone, and then rustles gently away
again. She has provided Esther with a novel and a book of acrostics,
and thinks she has done her duty by her neighbour amply. The novel is
one written with a purpose; a dull one-sided tilt against Ritualism.
Esther never found out an acrostic in her life, and has seldom been so
completely vacant of employment as to try. She is, therefore, reduced
to spending half the day in writing to Bob--half the day! and yet when
the letter is finished it only covers three sides of a sheet. She has
written, rewritten, and re-rewritten it. All around and about her lie
half-covered, quarter-covered, whole-covered sheets, all stamped with
the seal of condemnation. Gerard is the stumbling block; his name
either will not come in at all, which looks unnatural, or else insists
on thrusting itself in every second line. This is the form in which
Miss Craven's billetdoux finally presents itself at Plas Berwyn:
"Dear Bob,--Thanks very much for your letter; please
put a few stops next time. I had a very disagreeable
journey here--bushels of dust and a sick baby. This
is a very handsome place, and they are all very kind
to me. (H'm! are they? I don't know about that; _one_
of them is.) Yesterday I went out riding with Sir
Thomas and his ward (so I did; I set out with them),
and I stupidly fell from my horse, a sort of thing
that nobody but I would have done, and hurt my foot
a little; but nothing to speak of. Miss Blessington,
the ward, is remarkably handsome, but looks a great
deal older than I do. My love to your mother, and
thanks for her kind messages; the same to the girls.
Tell Bessy that it is hardly worth while sending me
'The Sinfulness of Little Sins,' as I shall have more
time for reading when I get home again.
"Yours affectionately,
"E. C.
"P. S.--Mr. Gerard is not at all good-looking; he
seems very fond of shooting; he has been out all
to-day."
"The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs."
Dinner is over; nothing to look forward to but bed-time. Yah! How dull!
A knock comes at the door. Miss Blessington enters with flowers in her
hand--jessamine, heliotrope, everything that smells sweetly and not
heavily--unlike Bob's well meaning but annihilating double stocks.
"I hope you are in less pain now" (the usual formula, that comes as
regularly and frequently as the doxology in church).
"Oh yes! thanks; I'm very well" (yawning and looking woefully bored.)
"What lovely flowers!"
"St. John sent them to you" (rather shortly).
"Mr. Gerard?" (with animation, the bored look vanishing.) "How very
kind of him!"
"He always is so good-natured," answers Constance, with a cold
generality.
"It is so particularly kind of him, when he has such an overpowering
aversion for strangers," continues Essie, with a malicious twinkle in
her eyes.
Constance sweeps to the window, slightly discomfited.
"He told me to ask you whether you would like him to come and carry you
downstairs for an hour or two?" she says, in a somewhat constrained
voice; "but I daresay you would rather be left in peace up here; and I
should think that the quieter you kept your foot the better for it."
"On the contrary, I should like it of all things," cries Essie, with
perverse alacrity. "In your cheerful company downstairs, I shall be
more likely to forget my sufferings, such as they are, than all by my
dull self up here; to tell the truth, I was meditating asking your maid
to come and talk to me about haberdashery."
Outside Miss Craven's door St. John pauses, as one that is devout
hesitates on the threshold of a sanctuary. Chintz curtains rose-lined,
white-dressed toilet-table, simple valueless ornaments lying about, two
little slippers, that look as if they had been just kicked off--his eye
takes in all the details. He feels like Faust in Marguerite's chamber.
And Marguerite herself, lying careless, restful on her couch, her two
arms flung lazily upwards and backwards, to make a resting-place for
her head; the smooth elbows and shoulders gleaming warm, cream-white,
through the colder blue-white of her dress; and the up-looking face,
childish in its roundness, and blooming down--but oh! most womanish--in
the shafts of quick fire that greet him from the laughing, sleepy eyes.
Where did she learn that art of shooting? From the pigs and cabbages at
Glan-yr-Afon? From old Mrs. Brandon? From Miss Bessie? From--"Stop the
Leak?" Deponent sayeth not whence.
"_How_ good of you!" she says, with emphasis, stretching out her hand
to him, as he stands beside her sofa, looking rather fagged with his
day's work. "I had just been calculating how many hours there would
be before I could have a decent pretext for going to bed; one gets so
tired of oneself."
"Not so tired as one does of one's family," answers St. John, rather
ruefully.
"I have no family," she rejoins, simply.
"We Gerards have a particularly happy knack of rubbing each other the
wrong way," he says, rather irritably. "I am sometimes tempted to think
that we are the most unamiable family God ever put breath into."
"People always think that of their own family," answers Essie,
laughing; "they know their own little crookednesses much better than
any one else's."
"Has Miss Craven changed her mind, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington
from the doorway.
St. John starts. "Not that I know of."
He stoops, and lifts her carefully, as a thing most precious; as he
does so, a little foolish trembling passes over her, as a baby-breeze
passes over some still pool's breast, hardly troubling the sky and the
trees that lie far down in the blue mirror. Down the grand staircase he
bears her, and Constance follows to see that there is no loitering by
the way.
The morning-room at Felton (so called because the family always sit
there in the evenings) is very lofty. You have to crane your neck up
to see the stucco stalactites, faintly imitative of Staffa and Iona,
pendant from the ceiling. There are statuettes in plenty standing about
in niches and on pedestals. Venuses and Minervas and Clyties, all with
their hair very elaborately dressed, and not a stitch of clothes on.
There is a great litter of papers and magazines on the round table:
the _Justice of the Peace_, that is Sir Thomas's; the _Field_, that is
St. John's; the _Cornhill_, that is everybody's. Sir Thomas and miladi
are playing backgammon; miladi is compelled to do so every night as a
penance for her sins--four rubbers, and if _he_ wins, as she prays and
endeavours that he may, five.
"Don't take the dice up in such a hurry, miladi," he says, snappishly;
"how the deuce can I see what your throw is?"
"Seizes, Sir Thomas," responds miladi, meekly.
"Seizes! don't believe a word of it! much more like seize ace!"
Miss Blessington, dressed by Elise in Chambéry gauze, and by Nature in
her usual panoply of beautiful stupidity, which she wears sleeping and
waking, at home and abroad, living and dying, is at work at a little
table, a nude Dian, with cold, chaste smile and crinkly hair, on a red
velvet shrine just above her head.
"Do they play every evening?" asks Esther, from the recess where she
has been deposited by St. John, whose eyes she encounters, considering
her attentively over the top of the _Saturday_. Shams, Flunkeyism,
Woman's Rights, Dr. Cumming, the Girl of the Period--they have all been
passing through his eye into his brain, and, mixed with Esther Craven,
make a fine jumble there.
St. John has been rather unlucky in his experiences of women hitherto.
He has got rather into the habit of thinking that all good women must
be stupid, and that all pleasant women must be bad. Esther is not
stupid. Is she bad, then? Those glances of hers, they give a man odd
sensations about the midriff; they inspire in him a greedy, covetous
desire for more of them; but are they such as Una would have given her
Red Cross Knight? Are they such as a man would like to see his wife
bestow on his men friends? The wilder a man is or has been himself, the
more scrupulously fastidious he is about the almost prudish nicety of
the women that belong to him. He likes to see the sheep and the goats
as plainly, widely separated as they are in the parable; it moves him
to deep wrath when he sees a good woman faintly, poorly imitating a bad
one. I do not think that good women believe this half generally enough;
or, if they do, they do not act upon it.
"Do they play every evening?"
"Every evening, and Sir Thomas always accuses my mother of cheating."
"And you, what do you do?"
"Read, go to sleep, play cribbage or bézique with Conny."
"Does she live here always?"
"Always."
"You and she are inseparable, I suppose?"
"We get on very well in a quiet way; she is a very good girl, and comes
and sits in my smoking-room by the hour with me."
"Wrong, but pleasant, as the monkey said when he kissed the cat,"
remarks Esther, flippantly. "You are very fond of her, I suppose?"
"H'm!" shrugging his shoulders. "I have a cat-like propensity for
getting fond of anything that I live and eat and breathe with--like the
fellow in the Bastille, don't you know, that got so fond of a spider. I
never should have grown fond of a spider, though; they have got such a
monstrous lot of long legs; but the principle is the same."
"Why are not you fond of Sir Thomas then?"
"So I am, I suppose, _in a way;_ if he were to tumble into the pool,
I suppose I should hop in and fish him out again; I'm not quite sure
about that, either."
"We'll have another rubber, miladi?" shouts Sir Thomas's stentor voice,
elate with victory; "that is the ninth game I have beat you to-night;
you'll never win as long as you leave so many blots--I have told you so
a score of times."
Poor miladi, strangling a gigantic yawn, begins to set her men again;
she had hoped that her punishment was ended for the night, and that she
might be dismissed to the _otium cum dignitate_ of her armchair and nap.
St. John jumps up and walks over to the players; there are few things
in life he hates so much as playing backgammon with his father, but
he hates seeing his mother bullied even more. If a man is cursed with
a necessity for loving something, the chances are that he will love
his mother, even if she bear more resemblance to a porpoise than to a
Christian lady.
"I'll have a rubber with you, Sir Thomas; my mother is tired."
"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she been
doing to tire herself?--fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off
half a dozen dead roses. Very good thing for her if she is."
But the man's will is stronger than the turkey-cock's, and the latter
yields.