Red as a Rose is She: A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
she will leave the talking alone; Miss Blessington because, having contributed her hard, cold beauty to the entertainment, she thinks she has done enough.
The company being rather silent, Esther turns her eyes round the room, and scans the pictures. Two or three Gerards, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, in very full dress; a large copper-coloured woman by Rubens, in no dress at all; "Susanna and the Elders;" "Jupiter and Leda" (twice life-size); a "Venus Sleeping, surprised by Satyrs" (a great gem); and many other like subjects, such as one mostly meets with in the dining-rooms of English nobles and gentles – subjects pleasant and profitable, to employ the eyes and minds of their daughters while engaged in eating their dinners. Esther is staring hard at Susanna's fat, coy face, when her attention is recalled by Mr. Gerard's voice addressing her. She starts and blushes furiously, like a child whose fingers have been found straying among the jam-pots. He looks amused at her confusion.
"I have just been thinking, Miss Craven, how pleasant your first impressions of us must be. What a well-mannered, courteous family you must think us! – I tumbling out of the window at the risk of breaking my neck to avoid you, and my father and mother going to dinner without you."
"If you had been a little quicker in your movements, I should have known nothing about you," responds she, the carmine called forth by her detection dying slowly out of her cheeks, and noticing only the half of his sentence that refers to himself.
"Ah! I am not so young as I was" (with a sigh); "but, to tell the truth, we had just been dragging the pool, like Boodles in 'Happy Thoughts,' and I was such a mass of mud that I had not moral courage to face you."
"We should have met on equal terms. I was as black as a coal, was not I?"
"Railroads do make one wonderfully dusty," replies Miss Blessington, with a polite, evasive platitude.
"I had a worse infliction than any dust to bear," says Esther, stretching her long throat around the bigonia to get a fuller view of her vis-à-vis.
"A baby, of course?" replies he, stretching his neck too for a like purpose.
"An aggravated case of baby – a baby that had something odd the matter with it."
"Not so bad as a man drinking sherry," says he, his grey eyes and a bit of his nose laughing through the leaves; "a woman eating gingerbread is bad enough. I travelled once with a woman who ate gingerbread from London to Holyhead without stopping."
"And did not offer you any?"
"Good heavens, no! What a prodigious suggestion! – that would have been adding insult to injury."
"If I had been travelling with you I should undoubtedly have offered you some. I should have judged you by myself, and I am very fond of gingerbread."
"Indeed!"
"And" (with a mischievous look) "fonder still of peppermint lozenges, particularly in church on hot Sunday afternoons."
They were getting quite voluble, chatting and chirping like a nest of magpies – like children playing and laughing in a garden, unmindful that in a cave in a corner is a great old bear who may pounce out on them at any moment. The Felton bear pounces.
"What the devil do you mean leaving that door open? Morris! John! George! Here, some of you! there's a door open somewhere between here and the kitchen. Don't contradict me, sir! I say there is; if I catch you propping those swing doors open," &c. &c.
The birds have gone to bed, and the slugs come out to walk on the damp garden paths. Now and then a little wind gets up, whispers a word or two to the polished laurel leaves, and lies down again. There is a carpet of thin, smoke-grey clouds over heaven's blue floor. The two girls are strolling up and down the terrace walk. Esther has got a red cloak thrown about her shoulders; she is not in the least afraid of taking cold, and declined the offer of it in the first instance; but on second thoughts, reflecting that the dining-room windows look on the terrace, and that the fairy prince may see and like the combination of black eyes and red cloth (fairy princes being always partial to gay colours), accepted it.
I have called Esther "little," and Miss Blessington "large" but the truth is they are much of a height. The difference between them is, that one is a young, slight sapling that has been so busy shooting up skywards, that it has had no leisure to grow broad, and that the other is a full-grown, spreading, stately forest tree. And yet they are the same age; but some women develop, mind and body, much quicker than others.
From the unshuttered dining-room windows comes a great square of yellow lamplight, and lies smooth upon the gravel. Looking in you see rifled fruit dishes, half-filled wine-glasses, moths flying round and round the lamp globes, trying their best to find an entrance to fiery death.
Sir Thomas, in his red velvet easy chair, with his white duck legs stretched out before him – duck trousers and a blue coat and brass buttons are, I need hardly say, the fine old English gentleman's dinner costume – with his head thrown back, till you can see either up into his brains or down his throat, whichever you choose. St. John, with his elbow resting on the shining oak table, which reflects it as a mirror would, and his head on his hand, in a brown study.
"Do you always walk up and down here, Miss Blessington?" inquires Esther, who is getting rather tired of pacing along, along, along monotonously, with her gown sweeping a little avalanche of pebbles behind her.
"Generally" (with a pretty smile).
Miss Blessington has a very pretty smile – an "angelic smile" – people say who see her only once; but it is only one, and is aired every hour of the day – comes out for Sir Thomas, for Lady Gerard, for servants, for dogs, for callers, for old almswomen, for St. John – so that none can take it personally, can they?
"By yourself?"
"Not generally."
The pretty smile is dashed with a faint complacency.
("H'm! That means with St. John —
"'Walking in a shady grove
With my Juliana.'
"Pleasant look-out for me! A bad third! What a pity that Bob is not here! we should be a partie carrée, and might change partners every now and then; Miss Blessington should have Bob, and I would have St. John!")
Below the terrace spreads a large square of grass, uninvaded by flower-bed or shrub, mowed and rolled, rolled and mowed, into the similitude of a pancake for flatness. There croquet-hoops glance whitely in the soft half-light; mallets lie strewn like dead soldiers after a battle; balls red, blue, and yellow, like great ripe fruit tumbled among the grass.
"Is this your croquet-ground?"
"Yes."
"Nice and level?"
"Yes."
"Like a billiard table, only a prettier green?"
"Yes; would you like a game?"
"Better than doing nothing, isn't it?" answers Esther, cheerily; she being a young woman to whom the words rest and enjoyment are not synonymous, as they mostly grow to be to people in later years.
From the dining-room comes the faint melody of the trombone, played with the skill of much practice by Sir Thomas's nose. Some one comes to the window, looks out, puts a hand on the sill, and jumps down. St. John apparently has an aversion from going out and coming in by the authorised modes of exit and entrance. Now that one can see him without any bigonia interposing, one notices that he has kind, eager eyes – eyes that seem to be looking, looking for something that they have not found yet – and rather a long nose, that the sun has got hold of and browned, as a cook browns mashed potatoes.
"Won't you join us, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington, stooping to reinstate a fallen hoop, and looking calm invitation at him out of her great, fine, passionless, cow eyes.
St. John hesitates, and looks towards Esther to see whether she is not going to second the invitation; but she is balancing herself with her two feet on a croquet-mallet, and does not appear to see him.
"Gooseberry I may be," she thinks, "but, at all events, I won't be instrumental in making myself so."
"Do