Red as a Rose is She: A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
slender knees bent, spring away with speedy grace through the mimic forest. Esther's mare, frightened at the sudden apparition (many horses are afraid of deer), swerves violently to the left; then gets her head down, and sets to kicking as if she would kick herself out of her skin.
"Mind! Take care! Hold tight! Keep her head up!" shouts St. John, in an agony.
Next moment the chesnut, with head in the air, nostrils extended, and bridle swinging to and fro against her fore legs, tears riderless past him. In a second he is off, and at the side of the heap of blue cloth that is lying motionless among the buttercups.
"I'm not dead," says the heap, raising itself, and smiling rather a difficult smile up at him, as he leans over it or her, his burnt face whitened with extremest fear. "Don't look so frightened!"
"Thank God!" he says, hardly above his breath, and more devoutly than he is in the habit of saying his prayers. "When I saw you there, lying all shapeless, I half thought – Oh!" (with a shudder) "I don't know what I thought."
"I must be tied on next time, mustn't I?" says Essie, putting up her hand to her head with an uncertain movement, as if she were not quite sure of finding it there. "Oh! Mr. Gerard," – the colour coming back faintly to her lips and cheeks – "I do hate riding! it's horribly dangerous! quite as bad as a battle!"
"Quite!" acquiesces St. John, laughing heartily in his intense relief. "And you are quite sure you are not hurt?"
"Quite!"
"Really?"
"Really!"
To prove how perfectly intact she is, she jumps up; but, as she does so, her face grows slightly distorted with a look of pain, and she sinks back on her buttercup bed.
"Not quite sure, either; I seem to have done something stupid to my foot – turned it or twisted it."
So saying, she thrusts out from under her habit a small foot. It is a small – a very small – foot; but the boot in which it is cased is country made, and about three times too big for it; so that it might rattle in it, like a pea in a drum. Even at this affecting moment St. John cannot repress a slight feeling of disappointment.
"I'm awfully sorry! Whereabouts does it hurt? There?" putting his fingers gently on the slender, rounded ankle.
"Yes, a little."
"I'm awfully sorry!" (You see there is not much variety in his laments.) "What can I do for it? gallop home as hard as I can, and make them send the carriage?"
"With a doctor, a lawyer, and a parson in it? No, I think not."
"But you cannot sit here all night. Could you ride home, do you think?"
"On that dreadful beast?" with a horrified intonation.
"But if I lead her all the way?"
"Very well" (reluctantly); "but (brightening a little) I cannot ride her; she is not here."
"I suppose I must be going to look after her," says St. John, dragging himself up very unwillingly. "Brute! she is as cunning as Old Nick! And you are sure you don't mind being left here by yourself for a minute or two?"
"Not if there are no horses within reach," she answers, with an innocent smile, which he carries away with him through the sunshine and the fern and the grass.
Essie spends full half an hour pushing out, pinching in, smoothing and stroking Miss Blessington's caved-in hat; full a quarter of an hour in picking every grass and sedge and oxeye that grew within reach of her destroying arm; and full another quarter in thinking what a pleasant, manly, straightforward face St. John's is – what a thoroughly terrified face it looked when she met it within an inch of her own nose after her disgraceful bouleversement– what a much better height five feet ten is for all practical purposes than six feet four.
At the end of the fourth quarter Mr. Gerard returns, with a fire hardly inferior to St. Anthony's in his face; with his hair cleaving damply to his brows, and without the mare.
"Would not let me get within half a mile of her! far too knowing! Brute! and now she'll be sure to go and knock the saddle to pieces, and then there'll be the devil to pay!"
"I'm so sorry," says Esther, looking up sympathisingly, with her lap full of decapitated oxeyes.
"So am I, for your sake: you'll have to ride the cob home."
"I shall have to turn into a man, then," she says, glancing rather doubtfully at the male saddle.
"No, you won't," (laughing).
He rises, and unfastens the cob from the tree-branch to which he has been tied. He has been indulging a naturally greedy disposition – biting off leaves and eating them – until he has made his bit and his mouth as green as green peas.
"You must let me put you up, I think," says Gerard bending down and looking into his companion's great, sweet eyes, under the rim of her battered, intoxicating-looking hat.
"Must I?" (lowering her eyelids shyly.)
"Yes; do you mind much?"
"No – o."
He stoops and lifts her gently. He is not a Samson or a prize-fighter, and well grown young women of seventeen are not generally feather-weights; but yet it seems to him that the second occupied in raising her from the ground and placing her in the saddle was shorter than other seconds.
A man's arms are not sticks or bits of iron, that they can hold a beautiful woman without feeling it. St. John's blood is giving little quick throbs of pleasure. His arms seem to feel the pressure of that pleasant burden long after they have been emptied of it.
"I think you must let me hold you," he says, gently and very respectfully passing his arm round her waist.
"No, no!" she cries, hastily, pulling herself away – "no need! – no need at all! I shall not fall."
She feels an overpowering shrinking from the enforced, unavoidable familiarity. It does not arise from any distaste for St. John certainly, nor yet from any quixotic loyalty to Bob; it springs from a new, unknown, uncomprehended shyness.
"Very well," he answers, quietly, releasing her instantly, and taking the bridle in his hand. "But I'm afraid you will find that you are mistaken."
They set forward across the park, at a foot's pace and in silence. Esther twists her hands in the cob's mane, and tries to persuade herself that pommelless pigskin does not make a slippery seat. Every two paces she slides down an inch or so, and then recovers herself with an awkward jerk. The sun is hot. Now and then, as the cob puts his foot on a mole-hill, or some other slight inequality in the ground, her ankle bumps against the saddle-flap. She feels turning giddy and sick with the heat and the pain.
"Mr. Gerard! Mr. Gerard! I'm falling!" she calls out loud, stretching out her arms to him, and clutching hold of his shoulder with a violence and tenacity that she herself is not in the least aware of.
He is magnanimous. He does not exult over her; he does not say, "I knew how it would be; I told you so!" He only says, in a kind, anxious voice, and plainlier still with kind, anxious eyes, "I'm afraid you are in great pain?" and replaces the rejected arm in its former obnoxious position.
As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."
"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly; "even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."
"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks, explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance.
"Broken the mare's knees, I suppose?" cries Sir Thomas, loudly, taking no notice whatever of Miss Craven's casualties. "Some fool's play, of course; larking over the palings, I dare say. Well, sir, what have you done with her? where have you left her? out with it!" (lashing himself up into an irrational turkeycock fury.)
"Damn the mare!" answered St. John in a rage, growing rather white, and forgetting his manners.
St.