CHAPTER XI.
It is the 1st of September, and the seal of impending destruction isset upon many a little plump brown bird; but ignorance is bliss, andthe little brown birds do not know it, and are walking about the turnipridges and amongst the stubble fields as confidently as if there wereno 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 byluncheon time, and returns to his orchid-house, and to the goadingthe bricklayers, as King Agamemnon did his fellow-chiefs, with bitterwords. Esther spends the day in her bedroom, lying in state on a sofawith her ankle bandaged up. It hurts her acutely if she attempts towalk on it; but if she keeps quiet, she is hardly aware of there beinganything wrong with it. It is very annoying having to play the invalidfor an ailment that is purely local when you feel in riotous health andspirits--to have your dinner sent up to you on a tray when you are sohungry that you could eat double your allotted portion, if it were notthat, being an invalid, you are ashamed to say so. One has a sense ofshamming, malingering.
Poor Miss Craven passes a very dull day; the red rose on one sidethe 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 manyother flowers have been calling to her with our voiceless voices tocome out into the breeze and shine?" A bee comes in sometimes, andgoes buzz--buzzing about, telling himself how busy he is, and thathe has no time to waste now that his honey-harvest is drawing sonear to its sweet close. The room is so still that, but for feelingintensely alive, and not having her chin tied up, Esther might almostimagine herself laid out previous to her interment. Now and againMiss Blessington enters noiselessly, says "I hope you are feeling alittle easier," in her soft monotone, and then rustles gently awayagain. 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 isone written with a purpose; a dull one-sided tilt against Ritualism.Esther never found out an acrostic in her life, and has seldom been socompletely vacant of employment as to try. She is, therefore, reducedto spending half the day in writing to Bob--half the day! and yet whenthe letter is finished it only covers three sides of a sheet. She haswritten, rewritten, and re-rewritten it. All around and about her liehalf-covered, quarter-covered, whole-covered sheets, all stamped withthe seal of condemnation. Gerard is the stumbling block; his nameeither will not come in at all, which looks unnatural, or else insistson thrusting itself in every second line. This is the form in whichMiss 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 herhand--jessamine, heliotrope, everything that smells sweetly and notheavily--unlike Bob's well meaning but annihilating double stocks.
"I hope you are in less pain now" (the usual formula, that comes asregularly 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 verykind of him!"
"He always is so good-natured," answers Constance, with a coldgenerality.
"It is so particularly kind of him, when he has such an overpoweringaversion for strangers," continues Essie, with a malicious twinkle inher eyes.
Constance sweeps to the window, slightly discomfited.
"He told me to ask you whether you would like him to come and carry youdownstairs for an hour or two?" she says, in a somewhat constrainedvoice; "but I daresay you would rather be left in peace up here; and Ishould think that the quieter you kept your foot the better for it."
"On the contrary, I should like it of all things," cries Essie, withperverse alacrity. "In your cheerful company downstairs, I shall bemore likely to forget my sufferings, such as they are, than all by mydull self up here; to tell the truth, I was meditating asking your maidto come and talk to me about haberdashery."
Outside Miss Craven's door St. John pauses, as one that is devouthesitates on the threshold of a sanctuary. Chintz curtains rose-lined,white-dressed toilet-table, simple valueless ornaments lying about, twolittle slippers, that look as if they had been just kicked off--his eyetakes in all the details. He feels like Faust in Marguerite's chamber.And Marguerite herself, lying careless, restful on her couch, her twoarms flung lazily upwards and backwards, to make a resting-place forher 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--inthe 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 atGlan-yr-Afon? From old Mrs. Brandon? From Miss Bessie? From--"Stop theLeak?" Deponent sayeth not whence.
"_How_ good of you!" she says, with emphasis, stretching out her handto him, as he stands beside her sofa, looking rather fagged with hisday's work. "I had just been calculating how many hours there wouldbe before I could have a decent pretext for going to bed; one gets sotired of oneself."
"Not so tired as one does of one's family," answers St. John, ratherruefully.
"I have no family," she rejoins, simply.
"We Gerards have a particularly happy knack of rubbing each other thewrong way," he says, rather irritably. "I am sometimes tempted to thinkthat 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 thanany one else's."
"Has Miss Craven changed her mind, St. John?" asks Miss Blessingtonfrom the doorway.
St. John starts. "Not that I know of."
He stoops, and lifts her carefully, as a thing most precious; as hedoes so, a little foolish trembling passes over her, as a baby-breezepasses over some still pool's breast, hardly troubling the sky and thetrees that lie far down in the blue mirror. Down the grand staircase hebears her, and Constance follows to see that there is no loitering bythe way.
The morning-room at Felton (so called because the family always sitthere in the evenings) is very lofty. You have to crane your neck upto see the stucco stalactites, faintly imitative of Staffa and Iona,pendant from the ceiling. There are statuettes in plenty standing aboutin niches and on pedestals. Venuses and Minervas and Clyties, all withtheir 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 isSt. John's; the _Cornhill_, that is everybody's. Sir Thomas and miladiare playing backgammon; miladi is compelled to do so every night as apenance for her sins--four rubbers, and if _he_ wins, as she prays andendeavours 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 Chambery gauze, and by Nature inher usual panoply of beautiful stupidity, which she wears sleeping andwaking, at home and abroad, living and dying, is at work at a littletable, a nude Dian, with cold, chaste smile and crinkly hair, on a redvelvet shrine just above her head.
"Do they play every evening?" asks Esther, from the recess where shehas been deposited by St. John, whose eyes she encounters, consideringher attentively over the top of the _Saturday_. Shams, Flunkeyism,Woman's Rights, Dr. Cumming, the Girl of the Period--they have all beenpassing 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 mustbe stupid, and that all pleasant women must be bad. Esther is notstupid. Is she bad, then? Those glances of hers, they give a man oddsensations about the midriff; they inspire in him a greedy, covetousdesire for more of them; but are they such as Una would have given herRed Cross Knight? Are they such as a man would like to see his wifebestow on his men friends? The wilder a man is or has been himself, themore scrupulously fastidious he is about the almost prudish nicety ofthe women that belong to him. He likes to see the sheep and the goatsas plainly, widely separated as they are in the parable; it moves himto deep wrath when he sees a good woman faintly, poorly imitating a badone. 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 bezique 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 comesand 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 forgetting fond of anything that I live and eat and breathe with--like thefellow in the Bastille, don't you know, that got so fond of a spider. Inever should have grown fond of a spider, though; they have got such amonstrous 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 sureabout 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 soa 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 shemight 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 thingsin life he hates so much as playing backgammon with his father, buthe hates seeing his mother bullied even more. If a man is cursed witha necessity for loving something, the chances are that he will lovehis mother, even if she bear more resemblance to a porpoise than to aChristian lady.
"I'll have a rubber with you, Sir Thomas; my mother is tired."
"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she beendoing to tire herself?--fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking offhalf 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 latteryields.