A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended.
Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's
lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of
the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents
of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful
nostrils--entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington
had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being
made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with.
Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude
for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing
solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of
mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house,
although not particularly young, and in general not particularly
gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull,
Devil; Pull, Baker!--Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by
St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain
their point.
"Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning,
addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together
after breakfast.
"I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?"
"Well!"
"If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her
usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well----"
"I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he
answers, picking up the _Pall Mall_.
"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.
"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon
than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can
'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for
imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"
"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you,
with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make
of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."
"I _am_ wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly
to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the _Pall Mall_. "There
is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is
there?"
She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of
being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.
"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished,
like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to
get well'--what then?"
"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think
that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs
than by being continually moved from place to place; _that_ is what I
was going to say."
"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs
with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her
limbs."
Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.
"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually
carrying her about the house."
"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."
"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in
your arms."
"What a horribly immoral picture--vice stalking rampant through the
Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that
cannot carry herself!"
"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her
former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her--to be haled about like
a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her
brother, I grant you, it would be different."
"If I were her brother it _would_ be different," assents Gerard,
blandly.
The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation,
it is made exactly to contradict itself.
"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure
that it is not mistaken kindness."
"That _what_ is not mistaken kindness?"
"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."
"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening
to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities,
and explain; I am all attention."
"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts,
with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her
original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken
up and dropped again----"
"Like a hot chesnut!"
"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."
"Hardly."
"And when you drop her----"
"Literally or metaphorically?--on the stone floor, or out of the light
of my favour?"
"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)----
"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his
face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her--"To be
dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex
has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive
voice of the verb to drop."
"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that _is_ the pride that apes
humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely
to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no
attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when
you drop her----"
"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and
of the repetition of the phrase--"she will be no worse off than she was
before that misfortune happened to her."
So Esther lies all day long in lazy contentment upon the sofa, looking
out at the garden, and at the fountain where four bronze dolphins
spout continual showers of spray in the autumn sunlight; dips into
Owen Meredith's last poems; peeps between the crisp uncut leaves of
new magazine or novel; and looks forward towards the ante-dinner hour,
when St. John will come in from the day's amusement or occupation, and
passive content will be exchanged for active enjoyment.
Esther has, as you know, made but light of her accident in her letters
to her lover; fearing lest, in his eager anxiety on her account, he
might get into the train, and give her the unexpected pleasure of
seeing him arrive at Felton--seeing him arrive in his threadbare
shooting jacket, through whose sleeves he always appears to have thrust
his long arms too far, and his patched, creaking, Naullan boots.
Imagine St. John introduced to those boots! A cold shiver runs down her
spine at the bare idea. St. John is no dandy, it is true, but coats
from Poole's are as much a matter of course to him as a knife and fork
to eat his dinner with, or a bed to lie upon.
On the afternoon of the day on which the above-reported short dialogue
took place, St. John and his father, converging from different points
of the compass to one centre, enter almost at the same moment the
library. Two canary-coloured Colossi have just deposited tea on a small
table. St. John has neither neckerchief nor collar; his brown throat is
bared in a _négligé_ as becoming to most men as the _à quatre épingles_
exactitude of their park get-up is unbecoming.
A man in the loose carelessness of his every-day country clothes is a
man: in the prim tightness of his Pall Mall toilette he is a little,
stiff, jointless figure out of Noah's ark.
"Slops again!" says Paterfamilias, very gruffly. "I never come into
this room at any hour of the day or night without finding you women
drinking tea! Why on earth, if you are thirsty, cannot you drink beer
or water, instead of ruining your insides with all that wash?"
At this courteous speech a silence falls on the company. Sir Thomas
mostly brings silence with him; he is half-conscious that at his entry
voices are choked and laughter quenched, and it serves to exasperate
him the more.
"You sit with your knees into the fire in air-tight rooms all day
long," pursues he, in his loud, hectoring voice, "and destroy your
digestions with gallons of hot tea, and then you are surprised at
having tallow in your cheeks, instead of lilies and roses, as your
grandmothers had!"
"Perhaps," says St. John, drily, "the ladies deny the justice of your
conclusions; Sir Thomas; perhaps they do not own the soft impeachment
of tallowy cheeks which you so gallantly ascribe to them."
As he speaks, his eyes involuntarily rest on the clear, rose brilliance
of the young stranger's happy, beautiful child-face.
"I don't mind being called 'tallow face,'" says Esther, with a low
laugh--"Juliet was; her father said to her, 'Out, you baggage! you
tallow face!'"
"He must have been an ancestor of Sir Thomas's in direct male line,
must not he?" says the young man, gaily stooping over her and
whispering.
Seeing them so familiarly and joyously whisper together, Constance
looks up with an air of astonished displeasure, which Gerard
perceiving, instantly turns towards her.
"What are you making, Conny?"
"Braces."
"For me, no doubt? With your usual thoughtfulness, you recollected
that my birthday falls next week, and you were preparing a little
surprise for me. Well, never mind; though I have made the discovery
rather prematurely, I'll be as much surprised as ever when the day of
presentation arrives."
"They are not for you, St. John; they are for the bazaar."
"The bazaar!" he repeats, a little testily. "For the last month all
your thoughts have tended bazaarwards; you neither eat, nor sleep, nor
speak, nor hear, nor smell, without some reference to the bazaar."
"Bazaar! Humbug!" growls Sir Thomas, rising and walking towards the
door. "A parcel of idle women getting together to sell trash and make
asses of themselves!"
Then he goes out, and bangs the door.
"I would not for worlds have given him the satisfaction of agreeing
with him while he was in the room," says St. John, insensibly speaking
in a louder key now that the autocrat before whom all voices sink
has removed himself; "but, for once in my life, I must confess to
coinciding in opinion with aged P.: to be pestered with unfeminine,
unladylike importunity to buy things that one would far rather be
without--to be lavishly generous, and get no credit for it--to be
swindled without any hope of legal redress; this is the essence of a
charitable bazaar!"
"Dear me!" says Esther, with a crestfallen sigh. "And I had been
looking forward to it so much!"
He sits down on a low chair beside her sofa. "Looking forward to a
bazaar!" he echoes, with a half-incredulous smile. "My dear Miss
Craven, what a revelation as to your past history that one sentence
is! Why, I should as soon think of looking forward to a visit to the
dentist, or to my mother's funeral!"
"No one expects to _enjoy_ it; it is a necessary evil," says Miss
Blessington, with resignation.
"Like dancing with married men, or going to church?"
"Conny! Conny!" shouts Sir Thomas from somewhere in the unseen distance.
Conny rises, though reluctantly, and leaves the other two _tête-à-tête_.
"Miss Blessington is going to have a stall," says Esther, presently,
for the sake of saying something, catching a little nervously at the
first remark that occurred to her.
"Yes."
"And I am to help her."
"Yes."
"But I will promise not to pester you with unfeminine, unladylike
importunity to buy my wares."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"Miss Blessington has two friends coming to stay with her for it."
"Yes."
"Are you glad or sorry?"
"Glad is a weak word to express my feelings; I am in ecstasies!"
"They are beautiful, I suppose--refined, witty, as I always picture the
women of your world?" she says, a little enviously.
"On the contrary, it would be impossible to find two more faded,
negative specimens of Belgravian womanhood: they have not a single
angle in either of their characters."
"Do you think _that_ a recommendation?"
"I did not say so."
"But you implied it, by expressing such exaggerated joy at their
coming."
"So I did--so I do: and if they were to rise in number from two to
fifty, like Falstaff's highwaymen, I should express greater joy still."
"And why?" raising herself from her cushions to get a straighter, truer
look into his bright, grave eyes.
"Because," he says, lowering his voice a little, and leaning closelier
over her, "the larger the party the better chance there is of
undisturbed _tête-à-têtes_ between congenial spirits. Do you see?"
And Esther _does_ see, and thinking on Robert Brandon, is uneasily
joyful.
* * * * *
Ere the arrival of the looked-for bazaar, Miss Craven's cure is
complete. On the day preceding the one appointed for that philanthropic
festivity, she has been walking in the late evening about the
moon-coloured garden, free from any remaining lameness, leaning on
St. John's arm. She does not need the slight stay, but it pleases him
to give and her to receive it. It does not please Miss Blessington,
however, watching them from an upper chamber--watching Esther dabble
her small hands in the opal water in the great bronze water-lily leaf
that makes the basin of the fountain--watching St. John, rapt and
absorbed in her pretty foolish chatter. And yet their talk, if she
could but hear it, holds nothing obnoxiously fond or _flirtatious;_ it
might be proclaimed by the bellman in the streets.
"How nice it is to be no longer a devil upon two sticks!" the young
girl is saying, joyfully; and the man makes answer, "You will be up to
another gallop across the park to-morrow?"
"Never, _never!_" she cries, bringing together emphatically her two
gleaming, wet hands. "You have witnessed my first and last equestrian
feat; with my own free-will I will mount never a horse again, unless it
is the rocking-horse at the end of the north gallery: it is frisky, yet
safe; gallops and plunges, yet stands still: that is the horse for me."
He laughs, and then they are silent.
A star falls, hurling itself mysteriously down the sky, and into the
dark; two bats glide past, dusky, noiseless. Bats always seem to me
like the ghosts of dead birds, that haunt the green gardens and copses
they used to love.
St. John speaks presently. "One forms mistaken estimates of people's
characters; I should not have imagined you a coward."
"But I am one, physically and morally," she answers, sighing.
As the ladies retire to bed, Miss Blessington enters Esther's room--a
familiarity which somewhat surprises that virgin, as it is the first
time that it has been accorded to her.
"I have come to congratulate you!" Constance says, civilly; "you have
made a wonderful recovery."
"Yes, wonderful!"
"You can walk perfectly well without assistance, cannot you?"
"Perfectly" (turning away her head, in the guilty consciousness of
having, despite her soundness of limb, not walked without assistance).
"St. John is very useful as a walking-stick, isn't he?" (playfully.)
"He thought it would tire me less," replies the other, flushing; "he
has been most kind!"
"He always is," answers Miss Blessington, quickly: "it is his nature;
old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, dirty children in the gutter--it is all
one to him."
"Really!"
"That universal geniality amounts almost to a weakness, though an
amiable one; it has often been the cause of exciting hopes that, of
course, he had neither the wish nor the power to gratify."
"What! in old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, and dirty children in the
gutter?" says Esther, smiling merrily, yet with scorn.
"If I did not take an interest in you," continued Constance, leaning in
a graceful artistic pose against the mantelpiece, "I should, of course,
not take the trouble to mention the subject; but, as I do, I thought it
the kindest thing I could do to you to set you on your guard against
attentions to which you, who do not know him, might, without vanity,
attribute some importance, but which I, who know him so thoroughly,
know to mean absolutely nothing, beyond a sort of general _bonhomie_
towards the whole of the human race."
"I am deeply grateful," answers the young girl, with sarcastic
emphasis; "but in my part of the world, girls are not in the habit of
cherishing vague hopes because a man has the civility to offer them his
arm when they are disabled by an accident from walking by themselves."
"Well, forewarned is forearmed, you know" (nodding and smiling); "and
from some careless, slighting remarks that St. John let fall the other
day, I thought I should not be acting the part of a friend by you if I
did not warn you against a snare into which I have seen others older,
and knowing more of the world than you do, fall. Good night!"
"Stay!" cries Esther, springing up, and catching hold of her
companion's gauzy dress in detention. "It is unfair to tell a person
half, and not the whole. What were the slighting remarks that Mr.
Gerard made _à propos_ of me?"
"Really, I--I--don't remember exactly," replies Constance, with
reluctance, half-feigned, half-real; "I did not pay much attention at
the time; it was an admission that slipped out without my intending it."
"But now that it has slipped out," cries the other, authoritatively,
"you must explain it fully, please."
"Well, really--please don't look so tragic, it can be of so very little
consequence to you what he said or did not say about you----"
"Infinitesimally little! but still I mean to hear it."
"Well" (with rather an awkward laugh), "the situation is hardly worth
such Mrs. Siddons' airs: it was only that, when I was remonstrating
with him the other day on his manner to you, he said, in his off-hand,
abrupt way, something to the effect that _when_ he threw you
over--never for a moment denying that sooner or later he would do
so--you would get over it soon, or something of that description. I
cannot recall the exact phrase. Good night."
But beautiful Esther, standing there stricken, credulous, with eager,
angry eyes, forgets to make the answering greeting.