Red as a Rose is She. Broughton Rhoda
impatient shake.
"Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed by some one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be good than pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible with the other."
So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into his vigilant dumb observation of her. At the end of a quarter of an hour, as he still shows no signs of moving, finding the present position of affairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heap of huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forced resignation:
"I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same a hundred years hence."
"I am perfectly happy as I am," he answers with provoking good humour, looking up in blissful unconsciousness at her charming cross face, and the plain yet dainty fit of her trim cheap gown.
"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day; please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of; I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."
She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or crooked.
The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another. Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a mist-blue cloak of hyacinths—what could be prettier?—but now it has laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest, fancifullest of all our singers?
"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
That led through this garden along and across—
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees—
"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."
They describe Glan-yr-Afon wood much better than I can. It is a great green cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and where the rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.
"Had we not better walk arm in arm?" asks Esther, sardonically, as they march along in silence. "I believe it is the correct thing on these occasions; at least Gwen and her sweetheart always do on Sunday evenings."
He turns towards her; an expression of surprised delight upspringing into his eyes.
"Do you mean really?"
She is mollified, despite herself, by the simple joy beaming in his poor, good-looking face—face that would be more than good-looking if only some great grief would give it fuller expression; if only a few months of late hours and mundane dissipations would wear off its look of exuberant bucolic healthiness.
"No, no; I was only joking."
"Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seat that stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliaged than its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeam pierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up so pleasantly from below."
Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is too secluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin and Dowsabel might sit fluting and weaving
" … belts of straw and ivy buds,"
and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.
"I don't fancy it," she says, beginning to walk on; "it looks earwiggy."
"Only the other day you said it was quite a lovers' seat!" he exclaims, in surprise.
"Exactly; and for that very reason I prefer waiting till I am more qualified to sit upon it."
By-and-by Miss Craven finds a position that suits her better; one nearer the edge of the wood, in full view of the Naullan road, along which market women, coal carts, stray limping tramps, go passing, and where loverly blandishments are out of the question.
The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rock fragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at the birch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mosses and little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it is such a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the boulders that lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with a coaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrels brought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shells are lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them again in idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through the birch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther's gown and Robert's recumbent figure, as he lies in the repose of warmth, absolute idleness, absolute content at her feet. An hour and a half, two hours to be spent in trying to like Robert! Faugh! She yawns.
"That is the seventh time you have yawned since we have been here," remarks her lover, a little reproachfully.
"I dare say; and if you wait five minutes longer, you will probably be able to tell me that it is the seventy-seventh time."
"You did not yawn while we were indoors."
"I had my work; what is a woman without her work? A dismounted dragoon—a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily, to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted as tedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me the other day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It is putting one's felicity on rather a low level, but I believe it is true."
"In the same way as no man can be good-tempered who is not fond of smoking," says Bob, starting a rival masculine proposition.
"I don't know anything at all about men," replies Esther, exhaustively. "No woman in the world can have a more limited acquaintance with the masculine gender than I have."
"You are young yet," says Brandon, consolingly.
"I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, her thoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is
"Wooed and married and a'"
before her sixteenth birthday.
"You are eight years younger than I am."
"Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly uninteresting to her.
"Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us."
"Why?"
"Because you are the more likely to outlive me."
She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I shall certainly outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a tortoise, to a hundred."
"But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly.
She shrugs her shoulders. "Cela dépend. I shall live here as long as Jack remains unmarried."
"That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "A farmer requires a wife more than most men."
"More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile.
He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makes ineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has he never yet shown even a preference for any one?" he asks,