The Bazaar day has arrived; so likewise have Constance's chosen
friends, the Misses De Grey; so likewise has their brother, commonly
called Dick De Grey, for no other reason that we wot of but that at his
baptism he received the name of Charles. The large open carriage which
had so impressed Esther on her first arrival at Brainton station, and
St. John's smart T.-cart, with his big, black horse, at whose head, or
rather at some distance below whose nose, a cockaded infant stands trim
and tidy, are at the door.
"How are we to divide?" says Miss Blessington, coming out under the
portico and unfurling her white Honiton parasol. "How many of us are
there? Adeline, Georgina, Miss Craven, and myself, four, and you two
gentlemen six. St. John, will you drive Miss De Grey?"
"I should be delighted," he answers, slowly and tardily, not looking
up from the gardenia which he is fastening on his coat; "but I believe
I am under an old engagement to drive Miss Craven. You have never been
in a T.-cart, have you?" (looking at her imploringly, to back him up in
the ready lie to which, for love of her, he has just given vent.)
"Never!" she answers, smiling coldly. "And now that I see to what a
height one has to climb, and in what close proximity one must be to
that huge quadruped's heels, I am in no hurry to make the experiment.
I release you from your engagement, Mr. Gerard, if it ever existed; if
it is all the same to everybody, I prefer the--I never can recollect
the names of carriages--barouche, sociable, landau, which is it?"
He stares at her for an instant in blank astonishment; then, turning
away quickly to hide the mortification which he knows to be legible
on his face, without a word or a groan helps the oldest, plainest,
languidest of the Misses De Grey into the T.-cart and drives off with
her. And Esther steps into the sociable, and tries to feel triumphant
and dignified, contemplating, for a dozen miles, Miss Georgina De
Grey's gold-dusted hair and featureless face, and submitting meekly
to having the modest proportions of her own toilette covered up and
smothered in the abundance and volume of her _vis-à-vis_' laces and
frillings.
"Since he means to throw me over, it is as well to be beforehand with
him," she says to herself, her eyes fixed pensively on the revolving
black and yellow wheel; "in such cases it is always best to take the
initiative. It would have been very pleasant, so high up out of the
dust; but what have I to do with aristocratic vehicles? A gig, a
wheelbarrow, a pig-tub--such are the only conveyances I am likely to
have experience of in after-life; why then inoculate myself with a
taste for luxuries that are for my betters?"
And meanwhile St. John holds dreary converse with himself, while
a river of sound, on which the words Nilsson, Romeo e Giulietta,
Schneider, drums, Holland House, garden party float, pours into his ear
from the direction of his companion. "She is honest, at all events;
does not relish my society, and does not affect to do so; tolerated me
only as long as I was useful, like a dog, in fetching and carrying. Why
am I so unpopular with women? Is it what I do, what I say, or what I
am, that makes me so? Is it anything mendable or unmendable?"
* * * * *
Precisely seventeen minutes past two of the clock, the Melford
town-hall clock, and visitors are beginning to arrive pretty thickly;
three or four barouches, seven or eight waggonettes, and nine or ten
pony-carriages, are trotting and walking and crawling up the steep
Melford street. Climbing the side of a house is child's play to the
ascent of that most perpendicular of high streets. The doctor's house,
red, and with redder berries thick about its plate-glass windows,
stands on your right as you go up the town. The Doctor and the Doctress
are issuing from the brass-knockered hall door--she in a grey moire
antique, that old Mrs. Evans' quinsy paid for, and gold bracelets that
took their rise from Mr. Watkin's decline and fall.
The town-hall stands in its grey limestone respectability in the
market place, over against the Bell Inn; it has an arched doorway,
and under this arch man, woman, and child go pacing in little, smart
tulle bonnets and black hats, with their purses full of small change,
and their hearts of that most excellent virtue--Christian charity.
Round the hall counters are ranged, and behind these counters stand a
phalanx of young women, prepared to exert their little abilities in
overreaching and circumventing their fathers, lovers, and brothers, to
the utmost.
Miss Blessington's stall is next-door neighbour to poor Mrs. Tomkins',
the Felton curate's fat, childridden wife--as, in some foreign city,
they tell us that you may see marble palaces and mud hovels cheek
by jowl; for, as is a mud hovel to a marble palace, so is poor Mrs.
Tomkins in the Melford table of valuation to Miss Blessington.
Mrs. Tomkins' main hope is in her sister, pretty, second-rate, pert
Miss Smith, who, with a dog-collar round her waist, to demonstrate its
tenuity, and two long, uncurled curls, vulgarly known as "Follow me,
lads!" floating over her fat shoulders, has been kissing strawberries
and rose-buds, and selling them at half-a-crown apiece, to such
attorneys' clerks and doctors' assistants of weak intellect as inhabit
Melford town.
On Miss Blessington's other side the Misses Denzil hold sway--daughters
of a neighbour baronet, whom for twenty years past Sir Thomas has hated
with the hate of hell, because he once beat him in a contest for the
county. Belinda Denzil, an elderly young lady, tall and yellow and
stately; likest to a dandelion among the flowers of the field; and
Priscilla, a beady-eyed, brisk brune, of whom her admirers predicate
that she could talk the hind leg off a mule!
Mr. Gerard and Mr. De Grey are strolling about together arm in arm;
criticising the wares a little and the saleswomen a good deal. They
are not particularly fond of one another; but no more was Alexander
Selkirk, I dare say, of his next-door neighbour, when he lived in
town, if he ever did. All the same, if the said next-door neighbour
had happened to land on that most irreligious of desert islands,
where the benighted valleys and rocks never heard the sound of the
church-going bell, don't you suppose that he would have rushed into
his arms? So in this desert island of Melford, St. John and Dick, the
only two respectable fellows, as they think, among a savage horde of
squireens, march about, hooked on together for mutual defence against
the barbarians.
"You seem to be driving a thriving trade," remarks St. John, who, after
his wanderings, has at length come to anchor at Miss Blessington's
stall, addressing Esther, but addressing her diffidently, as one
that, after the severe and uncalled-for snubbing he had this morning
received, was by no means sure of the reception his civilities might
meet with, while three old women and a parson squeeze in beside
himself and his friend.
"Perhaps you will kindly contribute towards making it more thriving,
by buying something;" replies Miss Craven, coolly and drily. "Let me
recommend this cigar case to your notice; it is rather ugly, and very
dear, but one must not mind trifling drawbacks of that kind on an
occasion like the present."
"Did you make it?"
"Yes; but please don't be so polite as to buy it on that account, as,
upon the same grounds, you would have to buy a large proportion of the
beautiful works of art before you."
So speaking, she turns away from him to another customer, as if glad to
be rid of him.
"May I ask what the price of this is?" asks Mr. De Grey, leaning with
languid familiarity over Miss Smith's counter (everybody is familiar
with Miss Smith; that is one of her great charms), and holding up a
gorgeously-embroidered smoking cap between his finger and thumb.
"One pound eleven and sixpence halfpenny," replies the young lady, with
glib obsequiousness, all a-twitter with excitement at being addressed
by an august being in a cutaway coat who is known throughout the
room to be a visitor at Felton Hall. "But, dear me!" (fussing about
with unnecessary _empressement_) "I have got a much more stylish one
somewhere, if I could but lay my hands on it--one that I made myself,
if that is any recommendation! He! he!" (with a giggle.)
"Can you doubt it?" retorts he, sucking the top of his cane, and
staring at her with lazy impertinence.
Meanwhile the room is getting very crowded and stuffy: it is a very
small town-hall, and all Melford and the southern half of ----shire
are compressed into it--the result being much animal heat, some
ill-humour, and infinite grief over rent garments; which is reversing
the case of the ancients, who rent their garments in sign of grief.
And in and through and about this warm throng, many girls, emissaries
from different stalls, go pushing and elbowing to enlist unwilling
subscribers to raffles. Philanthropy has gone nigh to unsexing them; it
has turned modest, reserved ladies into forward importunate Mænads.
Foremost, most energetic, most unrebuffable of these emissaries is
Miss Priscilla Denzil. She flies about hither and thither, with her
white gown all limp and tumbled, and her rough hair pushing its way
resolutely from under the blue ribbons which make a vain show of
confining it _à la Grecque_. She is not thinking a bit of how she is
looking; her whole soul is intent on doing a good stroke of business,
and none can escape her.
Sir Thomas Gerard has just entered the hall. Having ridden into Melford
on magisterial business, the idea has struck him of how much better
and more cuttingly he will be able to abuse the bazaar at dinner this
evening if he has had the advantage of seeing it. With a dog-whip in
his hand, and an intense desire to lay it about the shoulders of the
company expressed in his cross face, he is pushing his way along when
attacked by the dauntless Priscilla.
"Oh! Sir Thomas, please let me put you down in the raffle for a
fender-stool; _so_ handsome! white arums on a red ground; _do_ let me,
_so_ handsome!"
"A _what_, Miss Priscilla?"
"A fender-stool."
"Humph! the stupidest things that ever were invented," answers the
baronet, snarling. "If they had been made expressly to trip people
up, and pitch them head-foremost into the fire, they could not have
answered the purpose better."
"Did they ever pitch you head-foremost into the fire?" asks Miss
Prissy, insinuatingly ("because [aside], if so, I wonder whoever was
fool enough to pick you out again!")
"No, and they shall never have the chance as long as I can prevent
them," replies the gracious elder, walking off.
For a minute Priscilla stands still, rebuffed; but recovering herself,
speedily rushes off again, charges with her fender-stool an old maid
who has one already, and a poor little whity-brown curate who has no
house to put one in, &c., &c.
"I am afraid I have not done them up very neatly," Esther is saying,
as she gives a parcel into Mr. De Grey's hands--Miss Smith having at
length frightened that gentleman from her side by the rapid strides
to intimacy which she was making with him--"My fingers toil in vain
after the nimbleness with which shopmen whisk a parcel into shape and
compactness before you have time to look round."
Mr. De Grey has spent a small fortune in pincushions, kettle-holders,
dressed dolls, and many other such-like articles which no young man of
fashion should be without.
"What have I done to be so neglected, Miss Craven?" asks Gerard,
elevating his eyebrows plaintively. "Am I expected to put on these
slippers on the spot, that I am given no paper to pack them up in?"
"Oh! I beg your pardon; I thought that Miss De Grey was attending to
you," answers Esther, in the most business-like, shop-woman voice,
without smiling, or lifting her eyes.
"I thought no one ever gave change at a bazaar," he says, trying to
make her look up at him, as she puts a few shillings into his hand.
"I do not approve of such extortion," she answers, demurely; "honesty
is the best policy."
"That proverb must have been invented, as Whately justly observed, by
some one who had tried the other alternative."
She smiles a little against her will. "I wish you two would go now,"
she says, addressing both young men indifferently: "you are only making
me idle. Look! there are three old maids ready to storm the position,
and only deterred by you."
"Rhadamantha, Hebe, and Niobe!" says St. John, laughing.
"Please go; I know you are not thinking of buying anything more."
"Don Ferdinando can do no more than he can do, and at present he is
pretty well cleaned out."
At Miss Blessington's stall trade is certainly very brisk; it is
considered a fitting mark of respect to the family to buy their goods,
and so the honest burgesses of Melford make it a point of honour to buy
Miss Blessington's and Miss De Grey's blotting books and babies' socks
in preference to anyone else's, however superior in fabric and less
exorbitant in price anybody else's might be.
Miss Blessington has just sunk upon a chair, with an affectation of
great fatigue, and is saying languidly, "If ever any one deserved the
martyr's crown, that person is _I;_ within the last ten minutes I have
sold nine cushions and fifteen pairs of muffetees."
"There's plenty of cool tea and warm ices at the other end of the room,
if you think they are likely to restore you," suggests Gerard, who
is still leaning his elbow on the counter, and has not gone away as
commanded.
"It makes one quite hot," pursues Miss Blessington, leaning back and
fanning herself vigorously, "merely to look at Prissy Denzil rushing
about like a Mæenad, worrying every one to put into raffles."
"Providence made a great mistake when it made that girl a lady," says
St. John, following, with a look of half-disgust in his fastidious
eyes, Priscilla's little dishevelled figure; "she would have been much
happier haggling for halfpence at a huckster's stall."
The afternoon draws towards its close; people have come and bought,
and raffled and gone again, carrying manifold ill-tied paper parcels
with them. The farmeresses and yeomen's wives of the Melford district
have departed, carrying with them, in their mind's eye, for imitation
against next Sunday, the cut of Miss Blessington's skirt, and the
profuse curls and _bandeaux_ of Miss De Grey's intricate _coiffure_.
The room is emptying, and the day's duty approaching its end.
"I say, old fellow," remarks Mr. De Grey, touching St. John on the
shoulder as he leans against the wall, gazing somewhat morosely at his
own boots, "don't you think we might as well be saying Ta-ta? I don't
know what you have, but _I_ have had nearly enough of this gay and
festive scene."
"All right," answers the other, shaking off dull care; "I have put into
exactly twenty-five raffles, and only got a christening robe and a
squirt, so I think I may be supposed to have done my duty."
At the door there is a little confusion--carriages driving up,
carriages driving away; a small crowd gathered to see the smart ladies;
two policemen.
The Felton equipage and Mr. Gerard's T.-cart stand at some little
distance down the street. St. John offers Esther his arm, and she,
having no decent excuse for declining, takes it. As they walk along, he
speaks to her hurriedly and not without temper. "If you have no special
ground of quarrel against me--and Heaven knows why you should have--but
feel only that weariness to which most women seem, in my society, to be
more or less subject, be unselfish, and let me drive you home. I will
not speak, neither need you, if you will have it so; there are many
things more unsociable than absolute silence."
"Why cannot you be satisfied with this morning's arrangements?" she
asks, demurring; the recollection of his reported insult rankling in
her mind.
He shrugs his shoulders expressively. "If you had had three fourths
of 'Le Follet' and half the _Morning Post_ poured into your reluctant
ears, as I have, you would not have asked that question."
"If you have heard _half_ the _Morning Post_, is it not a thousand
pities that you should not hear the other half?" she inquires, drily.
They have reached the T.-cart, the big black horse, the baby-tiger; in
the low, red sun the new harness shines brightly.
"I almost wish you could sprain your other ankle," Gerard says,
recovering his good humour. "As long as you were lame, you were much
more amiable."
Ten minutes more, and the Melford steep street and railway bridge are
left behind them, they are trotting with smooth briskness between
the nutty, briary hedgerows. At first the silence which Gerard had
guaranteed threatens to remain unbroken; it is infringed at last by
Esther, out of whose heart the fair late breeze, the happy yellow
stillness, and lastly, the proximity to and solitude with the beloved
one, are smoothing all angry creases. ("If he did speak lightly of me,"
she thinks, sorrowfully, "we shall not have the chance of many more
drives together; whether he think ill or well, highly or meanly, of me,
let me be happy with him while I may!")
"What a pleasant vehicle this would be to make a driving tour in!"
"A tour of all the cathedral towns throughout England, as the Heir of
Redclyffe proposed spending his honeymoon in making!"
She laughs.
"I remember long ago the _Saturday Review_ saying of some
she-novelist's men, that they were like old governesses in trousers: it
was not a bad simile, was it?"
Silence falls on them again; broken this time by Gerard, who, turning
abruptly towards his companion, says, "You are _not_ bored by my
society, Miss Craven? Unless you are cast in a mould different from the
rest of humanity, you _must_ be bored by the society of the Misses De
Grey. Why, then, were you so resolute this morning in rejecting the one
and accepting the other? This is the problem that has been puzzling me
for the last half mile."
She hangs her head like a scolded school-child.
"What _was_ your motive?"
"A prudential one, partly," she answers, rallying her spirits. "I knew
that in after life I should have small experience of T.-carts and such
rich man's luxuries, so I thought it wiser not to run the risk of
contracting a taste for them."
"How do you know what the experience of your after life may be?"
"One may argue from the known to the unknown; I can give a pretty
shrewd guess."
"And was that your sole motive?"
"What does it matter to you whether it was or not?"
"Nothing; except that, to a philosophical mind like mine, woman and her
caprices are an interesting psychological study. Did you ever hear of
an essay of Addison's entitled 'Dissection of a Coquette's Heart?'"
"I am not a coquette," she cries, indignantly, answering the indirect
accusation directly.
"I did not say you were. I hope you are not--I hope to God you are
not!" he answers, with more vehemence than the occasion seems to demand.
"And yet," she says, feeling oppressed by the solemnity of his manner
and trying to speak lightly, "I have heard it said that no woman can be
thoroughly attractive who is not something of a flirt."
"I had rather that she should be thoroughly _un_attractive then," he
answers, shortly and grimly.
"Men always wish to have a monopoly of all pleasant sins," she retorts,
a little cynically.
"If you think that the reason why I wish you not to flirt is that
I want a monopoly of that occupation, you are mistaken," he says,
gravely; "it is an art that I have not either the will or the power to
practise."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Confess that, after that admission, your opinion of me is
considerably lowered."
No answer but a smile.
"Confess that you feel for me as sovereign a contempt as the ladies of
the last century felt for a man that never got drunk."
"I feel," she says, averting her head and speaking under an impulse
that kindles her cheeks and makes her voice falter--"I feel a surprise
that the words you say and the words you are reported to say do _not_
tally better together."
"What am I reported to say?" (a little impatiently.) "A _réchauffé_
of one's own stale speeches is not an appetising dish, but may be
wholesome as an exhortation to consistency."
"A person--I was told--" begins Esther, floundering in confusion
among different forms of speech--"I was told--by a person that ought
to have known--that you had spoken in a slighting, disparaging way
of--of--of--a person."
"Who told you so?" (breathlessly.)
"That can be of no consequence."
"Without your telling me I know," he says, his face growing hot with
the red of indignant anger, not guilt. "God forgive her for such a lie!"
"It was not true, then?" she asks, eagerly, lifting her eyes, brimful
of joyful relief, to his.
"Such an accusation is not worth rebutting," he answers,
contemptuously. "Is a man likely to speak slightingly of----" He
stops abruptly. ("Not yet! not yet! it is impossible that she can
like me yet. Am I an Antinous, to be loved as soon as seen? Let me be
patient--be patient!")