Red as a Rose is She: A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
are two different things. She is sidling along now, half across the road, coquetting with her own shadow.
"Oh, Sir Thomas!" (in an agonised voice) "why does not she walk straight? Why does she go like a crab?"
"Pooh!" answers Sir Thomas, in his hard, loud voice; "it's only play!"
"If I'm upset, I don't much care whether it is in play or earnest," rejoins Esther, ruefully.
The glare from the road, the dust and the midges, make people keep their eyes closed as nearly as they can: so that it is not till they are close upon him that they perceive that the man who is dawdling along to meet them on a stout, grey cob, with his hat and coat and whiskers nearly as white as any miller's, is St. John. He looks rather annoyed at the rencontre.
"I have been over to Melford, Sir Thomas, to see that pointer of Burleigh's. It will not do at all; it's not half broken."
"You had better turn back with us, St. John," suggests Constance, graciously.
"No, thanks; much too hot!"
"Au revoir, then," nodding her head and her tall hat, and about a million flies that are promenading on it, gracefully.
Esther's fears vanish.
"Three is no company," she says in a low voice, and making rather a plaintive little face as he passes her.
Drawn by the magnet that has succeeded in drawing to itself most things that it wished – viz., a woman's inviting eyes – he turns the cob's head sharp round.
"But four is," he answers, with an eager smile, putting his horse alongside of hers.
She was rather compunctious the moment she had said it. It is reversing the order of things – the woman after the man; "the haystack after the cow;" as the homely old proverb says.
The road is broad, and for a little while they all four jog on abreast, as in a Roman chariot-race or a city omnibus – rather a dreary squadron.
"This is very dull," thinks Esther. "Oh! if I could lose my handkerchief, or my veil, or my gloves! Why cannot I drop my whip?"
No sooner said than done.
"Oh! Mr. Gerard, I am so sorry, I have dropped my whip!"
Mr. Gerard, of course, dismounts and picks it up; Sir Thomas and his ward pass on.
"What a happy thought that was of yours!" says St. John, wiping the little delicate switch before giving it back to her.
"Happy thought! What do you mean?" (reddening).
"Oh! it was accident, was it? I quite thought you had dropped it on purpose, and was lost in admiration of your ingenuity."
He looks at her searchingly as he speaks.
"I did drop it on purpose," she answers, blushing painfully. "Why do you make me tell the truth, when I did not mean to do so?"
"Don't you always tell truth?" (a little anxiously).
"Does anybody?"
"I hope so. A few men do, I think."
"As I have no pretensions to being a man, you cannot be surprised that my veracity is not my strongest point."
"You are only joking" (looking at her with uneasy intentness). "Please reassure me, by saying that you do not tell any greater number of fibs than every one is compelled to contribute towards the carrying on of society."
"Perhaps I do, and perhaps I do not."
He looks only half-satisfied with this oracular evasion; but does not press the point farther.
"It is not often that my papa and I take the air together; we think we have almost enough of each other's society in-doors."
"He is your father," says Esther, rather snappishly; a little out of humour with him for having put her out of conceit with herself.
"I never could see what claim to respect that was," answers he, gravely; "on the contrary I think that one's parents ought to apologise to one for bringing one, without asking one's leave, into such a disagreeable place as this world is."
"Disagreeable!" cries Esther, turning her eyes, broad open, in childish wonder upon him. "Disagreeable to you! Young and – "
"Beautiful, were you going to say?"
"No, certainly not – and with plenty of money to make it pleasant?"
"But I have not plenty of money. I shall have, probably, when I'm too old to care about it! he is good for thirty years more, you know," nodding respectfully at Sir Thomas's broad, blue back.
"It must be tiring, waiting for dead men's shoes," says Esther, a little sardonically.
"Tiring! I believe you," says St. John, energetically; "it is worse than tiring – it is degrading. Do you suppose I do not think my own life quite as contemptible as you can? Take my word for it" (emphasising every syllable), "there is no class of men in England so much to be pitied as heirs to properties. We cannot dig; to beg we are ashamed."
"I never was heir to anything, so I cannot tell."
"I should have been a happier fellow, and worth something then, perhaps, if I had been somebody's tenth son, and had had to earn my bread quill-driving, or soap-boiling, or sawbones-ing. I think I see myself pounding away at a pestle and mortar in the surgery" (laughing). "I should have had a chance, then, of being liked for myself too, even if I did smell rather of pills and plaister; whereas now, if anybody looks pleasant at me, or says anything civil to me, I always think it is for love of Felton, not of me."
"You should go about incognito, like the Lord of Burleigh."
"He was but a landscape painter, you know. Do you know that once, not a very many years ago, I had a ridiculous notion in my head that one ought to try and do some little good in the world? Thanks to Sir Thomas's assistance and example, I have very nearly succeeded in getting rid of that chimera. If I am asked at the Last Day how I have spent my life, I can say, I have shot a few bears in Norway, and a good many turkeys and grebe in Albania; I have killed several salmon in Connemara: I have made a fool of myself once, and a beast of myself many times."
"How did you make a fool of yourself?" pricking up her ears.
"Oh! never mind; it is a stupid story without any point, and I have not quite come to the pitch of dotage of telling senile anecdotes about myself. Here, let us turn in at this gate, and take a cut across the park: it is cooler, and we can have a nice gallop under the trees, without coming in for the full legacy of Sir Thomas's and Conny's dust, as we are doing now."
"But – but – is not it rather dangerous?" objects Esther, demurring. "Don't they sometimes put their feet into rabbit-holes, and tumble down and break their legs?"
"Frequently, I may almost say invariably," answers St. John, laughing, and opening the gate with the handle of his whip.
The soft, springy, green turf is certainly pleasanter than the hard, whity-brown turnpike road, and so the horses think as they break into a brisk canter. The quick air freshens the riders' faces – comes to them like comfortable words from Heaven to a soul in Purgatory – as they dash along under the trees, stooping their heads every now and then to avoid coming into contact with the great, low-spreading boughs.
Laughing, flushed, half-fright, half-enjoyment:
"She looked so lovely as she swayed
The rein with dainty finger-tips;
A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this —
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips."
"Delicious! I'm not a bit afraid now; I bid defiance to the rabbit-holes," she cries, with little breathless pauses between the words.
Let no one shout before they are out of the wood. Hardly have the words left her mouth, when all at once, at their very feet almost, from among the seven-foot-high fern, where they have been crouching, rise a score of deer with