The world's life is shorter by a fortnight than it was on that last
day I told you of, and during that fortnight the ordinary amount of
things have happened. The usual number of people have had their bodies
knocked to atoms and their souls into eternity by express trains; the
usual number of men and maids have come together in the _Times_ column
in holy matrimony; and the usual number of unwelcome babies have been
consigned to the canals. A great many players have laid down their
cards, risen up, and gone away from the game of life; but whether
winners or losers, they tell us not, neither shall we know awhile; and
other players have taken their places, and have sat down with the zest
of ignorance.
"Nature takes no notice of those that are coming or going."
She is briskly occupied at her old business--the business that seems to
us so purposeless, progressless, bootless--the making only to unmake;
the beautifying only to make hideous; the magnifying only to debase. Oh
life! life! Oh clueless labyrinth! Oh answerless riddle!
September is waning mellowly into death, like a holy man to whom an
easy passage has been vouchsafed; the land has been noisy with guns,
and many partridges have been turned into small bundles of ruffled
feathers--little round, brown corpses. Bob Brandon walks stoutly up
the furzy hill sides and along the stony levels after the shy, scarce
birds; he is out and about all day, but you do not hear him whistling
or humming so often as you used to do. "He goeth heavily, as one that
mourneth." The fortnight is past, and yet another week, and still
Esther holds no speech of returning; her letters have waxed fewer,
shorter, colder. Since that first one, mention of Gerard's name is
there in them none. Bob is not of a suspicious nature, but he can add
two and two together. He has been doing that little dreary sum all
the last ten days, till his head aches. But though he can do this sum
himself, he will not suffer any one else to do it--at least in his
presence.
One day at dinner, when Bessy was beginning a little sour adaptation
of the text, "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye," &c., to
Esther, he interrupted her with downright outspoken anger and rebuke;
and, though he apologised to her afterwards, and begged her pardon for
having spoken rudely to her, yet she felt that that theme must not be
dealt with again. He had promised to love her always in all loyalty,
and whether she were loyal or disloyal to him made no difference. He
will let no man, woman, or child speak evil of her in his hearing:
".........love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."
Jack Craven, too, is beginning to wonder a little when Esther is going
to return to the old farmhouse--beginning to feel rather lonely as he
sits by himself on the window-ledge of an evening, smoking his pipe,
with no one to take it out of his mouth now, and thinking on his unpaid
for steam ploughs and sterile mountain-fields, with no one to speak
comfortably to him, or console him with sweet illogical logic.
"All is not gold that glitters." Care gets up behind the man, however
fine a horse he may be riding. Care is sitting _en croupe_ behind Miss
Craven, and she cannot unseat him. It strikes her sometimes with a
shock of fear that she is succeeding _too_ well; that the admiration
and liking and love she had hankered so greedily after, had striven
unfairly for, had made wicked lightnings from her eyes to obtain, was
ready to be poured out lavishly, eagerly, honestly at her feet, and she
dare not put out a finger to take them up. She had been walking miles
and miles of nights, up and down her bedroom, from door to window, from
window to door, when all the rest of the house are abed and asleep.
"What _shall_ I do?--what _shall_ I do?" she cries out to her own
heart, while her hands clasp one another hotly, and the candles, so
tall at dressing time, burn short and low. "Oh! if I had some one to
advise me!--not that I would take their advice, if it were to give up
St. John! Give him up! How can I give up what I have not got? Oh Bob,
Bob, if you only knew how I hate you!--Only less than I hate myself!
Oh! why was not my tongue cut out before that unlucky day when I said I
would _try_ to like you? Try, indeed! If there is need for trying, one
may know how the trial will end. Shall I tell St. John? What! volunteer
an unasked confession? Warn him off Robert's territory when he is not
thinking of trespassing? And if I were to tell him--oh Heaven! I had
sooner put my hand into a lion's mouth--what _would_ he think of me?
He, with his fastidious, strict ideas of what a woman should be and do
and look? Shall I write and ask Bob to let me off? It would not break
his heart; he is too good; only bad people ever break their hearts, as
I shall do some day, I dare say. Oh! poor Bob, how badly I am treating
you! Poor Bob! and his yellow roses that St. John made such fun of!
How I wish that the thoughts of your long legs and your little sour
Puritan sisters did not make me feel so sick! Oh! if you would but be
good enough to jilt me! What _shall_ I do?--what _shall_ I do? Wait,
wait, go on waiting for what will never come, probably, and when I have
degraded myself by waiting till hope is quite dead, go back whence I
came, and jig-jog through life alongside of Bob in a poke bonnet like
his mamma's. Ah Jack, Jack! why did I ever leave you? How I wish that
all Bobs and St. Johns and other worries were at the bottom of the Red
Sea, and you and I king and queen of some desert island, where there
was nothing nearer humanity than monkeys and macaws, and where there
was no rent nor workmen's wages nor lovers to torment us!"
One must go to bed at some time or other, however puzzled and pondering
one may be; and in furtherance of this end, Esther, having reached
this turn in her reflections, begins to undress. In so doing she
misses a locket containing Jack's picture, which she always wears
round her neck. She must have dropped it downstairs, where perhaps
some housemaid's clumsy foot may tread upon it, and mar the dear, ugly
young face within. She must go and look for it, though the clock is
striking one. She takes up her candle, and runs lightly downstairs.
The gas is out. Great shadows from behind come up alongside, and then
stretch ahead of her; the statues glimmer ghostly chill from their
dark pedestals. With a shock of frightened surprise she sees a stream
of light issuing through the half-open door of the morning-room. Is
it burglars, or are the flowers giving a ball, as in Andersen's fair,
fanciful tale? She creeps gently up, and peeps in. The lamp still burns
on the centre table, and pacing up and down, up and down, as she has
been doing overhead, is a man buried in deepest thought. Fear gives
place to a great, pleasant shyness. "I--I--I have lost my locket," she
stammers.
He gives a tremendous start. "You up still!" he says, in astonishment.
"Lost your locket, have you? Oh! by-the-by, I found it just now; here
it is. Do you know (with a smile) I could not resist the temptation of
looking to see who you had got inside it. Are you very angry?"
"Very!" she answers, drooping her eyes under his. She could sit and
stare into Bob's eyes by the hour together, if she liked, only that it
would be rather a dull amusement; with St. John it is different.
"Don't go; stay and talk a minute. It is so pleasant to think that we
are the only conscious, sentient beings in the house--all the others
sleeping like so many pigs," he says, coming over to her with an
excited look on his face, such as calm, slow-pulsed English gentlemen
are not wont to wear.
"No, no, I cannot--I must not."
She has taken the bracelets off her arms, and the rose from her hair:
there she stands in her ripe, fresh beauty, with only the night and St.
John to look at her.
"Five minutes," he says, with pleading humility, but putting his back
against the door as he speaks.
"If you _prevent_ my going, of course I cannot help myself," she
answers, putting on a little air of offended dignity to hide her
tremulous embarrassment.
"Don't be offended! Do you know" (leaving his post of defence to follow
her)--"do you know what I have been doing ever since you went--_not_ to
bed apparently?"
"Drinking brandy and soda-water, probably" (looking rather surly, and
affecting to yawn).
"That would have been hardly worth mentioning. I have been wondering
whether my luck is on the turn. I have been da----I mean very unlucky
all my life. I never put any money on a horse that he was not sure to
be nowhere. Luck does turn, sometimes, doesn't it? Do you think mine is
turning?"
"How can I tell?"
"You don't ask in what way I have been so unlucky. Why don't you? Have
you no curiosity?"
"I never like to seem inquisitive," answers Esther, coldly, hoping
that he does not notice how the white hands that lie on her lap are
trembling.
"Do you recollect my telling you that I had made a great fool of myself
once?"
"Yes."
"Do you care to hear about it, or do you not?" pulling at his drooping
moustache, in some irritation at her feigned indifference.
"Yes, I care," she answers, lighting up an eager, mobile face--fear,
shyness, and the sense of the impropriety of the situation all ceding
to strong curiosity.
"Well, it was about a woman, of course. _Cela va sans dire;_ a man
never can get into a scrape without a woman to help him, any more than
he can be born, or learn his A B C."
"Was she handsome?" looking up, and speaking quickly.
That is always the first question a woman asks about a rival. I do
not know why, I am sure, as many of the greatest mischiefs that have
been done on earth have been done by ugly women. Rousseau's Madame
d'Houdetot squinted ferociously.
"Pretty well. She had a thundering good figure, and knew how to use
her eyes. By-the-by" (with an anxious discontent in his tone), "so do
you. I often wish you did not; I hate being able to trace one point of
resemblance between you and her."
"Did she refuse you?" asks Esther, hastily, too anxious for the sequel
of the story to think of resenting the accusation made against her eyes.
"Not she! I should not have been the one to blame her if she had; one
cannot quarrel with people for their tastes. She swore she liked me
better than any one else in the world; that she would go down to Erebus
with me, be flayed alive for me--all the protestations usual in such
cases, in fact, I suppose," he ends bitterly.
"And threw you over?" says Essie, leaning forward with lips half apart,
and her breast rising and falling in short, quick undulations.
"Exactly; had meant nothing else all along. I filled only the pleasant
and honourable situation of decoy duck to lure on shyer game, and when
the bird was limed--such a bird, too! a great, heavy, haw-haw brute
in the Carabineers, with a face like a horse--she pitched me away as
coolly as you would pitch an old shoe--or as you would pitch _me_, I
dare say, if you had the chance."
"And what did you do?" asks Essie, breathlessly, her great eyes, black
as death, fastened on his face.
St. John smiles--a smile half fierce, half amused.
"Run him through the body, do you suppose?--spitted him like a lark or
a woodcock?--cut out his heart and made her eat it, as the man did to
his wife in that fine old Norman story? No; I could have done any of
them with pleasure if I had had the chance; with all our veneering and
French polish, I think the tiger is only half dead in any of us; but I
did not; I did none of them: I--prepare for bathos, please--I went out
hunting; it was in winter, and, as misfortunes never come singly, I
staked one of the best horses I ever was outside of: that diverted the
current of my grief a little, I think."
He speaks in a jeering, bantering tone, scourging himself with the rod
of his own ridicule, as men are apt to do when they are conscious of
having made signal asses of themselves in order to be beforehand with
the world.
"And she told you she was fond of you?" ejaculates Essie, raising her
sweet face, sympathetic, indignant, glowing, towards him.
"Scores of times--swore it. I suppose it is no harder to tell a lie a
hundred times than once; _ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte_. Tell
me," he says, vehemently, leaning over her, and taking hold of her
hand, as if hardly conscious of what he was doing--"you are a woman,
you must know--tell me, is there no difference between truth and lies?
have they both _exactly_ the same face? How is a man to tell them
apart?"
They are both speaking in a low key, almost under their breath, for
fear of drawing down upon themselves the apparition of Sir Thomas in
_déshabille_ and a blunderbuss. Their faces are close together; she can
see the lines that climate and grief and passion have drawn about his
eyes and mouth--can see the wild, honest anxiety looking through his
soul's clear windows.
"I--I--don't know," she answers, stammering, and shivering a little,
half with fear at his vehemence, half with the strong contagion of his
passion.
"Do you ever tell untruths?" he asks, hurriedly, scanning her face with
anxious eyes, that try to look through the mask of fair, white flesh,
and see the heart underneath. "Don't be angry with me, but I sometimes
fancy that you might."
"_I!_ what do you mean?" snatching away her hand, and the angry blood
rushing headlong to her cheeks.
"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Hazael was only
the first of a long string who have asked that virtuously irate
question.
His countenance clears a little. "You must forgive me," he says,
repentantly. "I suppose it is my own unlucky experience that has made
me so suspicious; because my own day has been cloudy, I have wisely
concluded upon the non-existence of the sun. But, come" (smiling a
little), "one good turn deserves another: have you nothing to tell me
in return for the long list of successes I have been confiding to you?"
He watches her changing, flushing, paling face, with a keen solicitude
which surprises himself. What can this downy, baby-faced rustic have to
confess? Now for Bob! Now is the time--now or never! Sing, oh goddess,
the destructive wrath of St. John, the son of Thomas! What time, place,
situation, can be suitabler for such a tale? It is an hour and a half
past midnight; they love one another madly, and they are alone.
Are they alone, though? Is this one of the statues stepped down from
its pedestal in the hall that is coming in at the door, severely,
chilly, fair, with a candle in its hand?
"Miss Craven!" ejaculates Constance (for it is she), stopping suddenly
short, while a look of surprised displeasure ripples over her calm,
smooth face.
Silence for a second on the part of everybody.
"It is a pity, St. John," says Miss Blessington, drawing herself up,
and looking an impersonation of rigid, aggressive, pitiless virtue,
"that you and Miss Craven should choose such a very unseasonable time
for your interviews; it is not a very good example for the servants, if
any of them should happen to find you here."
"The servants have something better to do than to come prying and
eavesdropping upon their betters," retorts St. John, flushing angry-red
to the roots of his hair, and not taking the most conciliatory line of
defence.
"You are mistaken if you think I have been eavesdropping," says
Constance, with dignified composure, her grave face looking out
chastely cold from the down-fallen veil of her yellow hair. "I could
not sleep, and came down to look for a book. Pray don't let me disturb
your _tête-à-tête!_" making a movement towards going.
"Don't be a fool, Conny!" cries St. John, hastily, in bitter fear of
having compromised Esther by his ill-advised detention of her: "it is
the purest accident your having found Miss Craven and me together here!"
"I am well aware of that," she answers, with a little smiling sneer.
"You know what I mean, perfectly well: it is the purest accident our
_being_ here. Miss Craven lost her locket, and----"
"And" (smiling still)--"and you have been helping her to look for it.
Yes, I see. Well, I--hope you will find it. Good-night!" going out and
closing the door behind her.
"What did she say?--what does she mean?" cries Essie, panting, and with
a face hardly less white than her dress.
"What does it matter what she means? She's a fool!" answers St. John,
wrathfully. "Go to bed, and don't think about her; who cares?"
But he looks as if he did care a good deal.