Читать книгу Red as a Rose is She: A Novel - Broughton Rhoda - Страница 3

As saith that most delicious of love poems that makes us all feel immoral as we read it. It is the hour when chanticleer retires to his perch in the henhouse, lowers his proud tail, sinks his neck into his breast, and goes to sleep between his two fattest wives. It is the hour when animal life and wild humanity retire to bed; the hour when tamed humanity sits down to dinner. The more we advance in civilisation the farther back we push the boundaries of sleep and forgetfulness. When we reach our highest point of culture, I suppose we shall hustle the blessed, the divine Nepenthe, off the face of the earth altogether.

The dining-room at Glan-yr-Afon is, like the rest of the house, rather small and rather pleasant. It will not dine more than twelve comfortably; it is seldom asked to dine more than two; and these two, being young and void of gluttony, do not spend much of their time in it. In youth the dining-room is not our temple, our sanctuary, our holy of holies, as it often is in riper years. In youth our souls are great, and our bodies slender; in old age our bodies are often great and our souls slender. The one wide open window looks on the gay little garden – the window, all around and about which the climbing convolvulus is blowing great white trumpets. There are two or three pictures on the walls; good ones, though dim and dusty. Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, very dark and haughty and saturnine, in blue grey armour, scowling at whosoever looks at him, as he might have scowled at Pym and Hollis. Erasmus, astute and lean, in a black skull cap: and Mary, Queen of Scots, very pale and peaky and indistinct, for time has washed and scrubbed all the carmine out of the cheeks and lips that sent Europe mad three centuries ago. An old sheep-dog is lying on the hearth-rug, with his wise old eyes fixed on his master, licking his chops every now and then when he sees some morsel more tempting than ordinary conveyed to another mouth than his.

This evening Lord Strafford is scowling, Mary Stuart simpering, down upon two people dining together, and on a third person whisking about in a clean cap and an aggressively well-starched print dress in attendance upon them. There is a great pot, full and brimming over with roses – a beanpot our forefathers would have called it – in the middle of the table. They were plucked but half an hour ago, and their faces were still wet with the dew-tears that they wept at being torn away from their brothers and sisters on the old gnarled rose trees up the kitchen-garden walk.

But the freshest, the sweetest, the largest of the roses is not in the beanpot with the others; it is on a chair by itself; there are no dew-tears on its cheeks, it has no prickles, and its name is Esther.

"Have some roast chips, Essie? I cannot offer you any roast mutton, because there isn't any; I dare say there was an hour ago, but there certainly isn't now."

This speech is made by Jack. Jack is a young person with not a single good feature in his face; with a baby moustache, which, like the daguerreotypes of fifteen or sixteen years ago, is only visible at rare intervals in one particular light; and with cheeks and nose and chin and throat all as brown as any berry that ever ripened under the mellow autumn sun.

"It's a fault on the right side, dear boy; it's better than quivering and being purple," says Esther, with a pout which a lover would have thought entrancing, but which a prosaic brother, if he perceived it at all, considered rather a distortion than otherwise.

"I wish that people would remember that there is a time to call and a time to dine, and that the two times are not the same," he grumbles, a little crossly.

A man may bear the untimely cutting off of his firstborn, the disposition evinced by the wife of his bosom to love his neighbour as himself, the sinking of his little all in the Agra Bank, with resignation and fortitude truly Christian; but what hero, what sage, what archbishop, can stand the over-roasting or under-boiling of his mutton, the burning of his soup, or the wateriness of his potatoes, and bear an æquam mentem?

Esther looks rather conscious, purses up her pink mouth into the shape of a noiseless "Hush!" and says "Pas avant," which idiomatic phrase is intended to convey to her brother the indiscreetness of making comments in Sarah's presence on Mr. Brandon's enormities.

From long familiarity with the sound, Sarah has become entirely acquainted with Esther's specimen of Parisian French, and always pricks up her ears when it appears on the scene.

Then they are silent for a little space. One is not apt to say very brilliant things in one's family circle; it requires the friction of mind with mind before bright sayings spring into being, as the flint and the steel must be married before the spark leaps into life.

"How long the days are now!" Jack says presently, as he looks out on the evening light lying like a great bright cloak all over the land.

The earth is so very fair, all pranked with "smalle flowres" and green leaves, that the sun is grievously loth to leave her. Fair-weather friend as he is, he cannot be in too great a hurry to desert her, when she lies poor and bare and faded in the dull November days.

"One always says that this time of year," Esther says, smiling. "It would be much more worthy remark if they didn't get longer; if one kept a journal of one's remarks for a year, what an awful tautology there would be in them! What a pity that one cannot say a thing once for all, and have done with it!"

"If you resolved never to say anything that anybody had said before, you would make mighty few observations, I take it," Jack answers, a little drily. "Most remarks have been pretty well aired in the course of the last six thousand years, I fancy."

So, with a little flagging talk, the dinner passes, and the modest dessert appears: scarlet pyramids of strawberries, great bag-shaped British Queens, and little racy, queer-tasted hautbois.

Sarah retires, and the embargo is taken off Esther's speech.

"Is she gone – finally gone?" she cries, very eagerly. "Heaven be praised for that! I thought she would never have done clattering those spoons. Oh, Jack, what a heavy weight a piece of news is to carry! How I sympathise with the woman who had to whisper to the rushes about Midas' ears! I have been dying all through dinner for some rushes to whisper to."

"To whisper what to?" asks the boy, his eyes opening very wide and round.

"Jack, do I look taller than usual to-night?"

"No."

"Broader?"

"Not that I perceive."

"More consequential?"

"Much as usual. You never are a woman with 'a presence.'"

"Is it possible that there's no difference at all in me?"

"None whatever; except that, now I look at you, your cheeks are, if possible, redder than usual. Why should there be any?"

"Because" (drawing herself up) "I have to-day passed a turning-point in my history. I have had – a proposal."

"Who from? – one of the haymakers?"

"No. That would not have surprised me much more, though. Let me get it out as quick as I can, now that the string of my tongue is loosed. Robert Brandon was here to-day."

"As I know to my cost," says Jack, with rather a rueful face at the recollection of his unpalatable dinner.

"And – and – how shall I word it prettiest? – asked me to be his."

"The devil he did!" exclaims Jack, surprised into strong, language.

"Yes, the devil he did! as you epigrammatically remark."

"And you, what answer did you give?" asks the boy, quickly, his mouth emulating the example of his eyes, and opening wide, too.

"I said I was much obliged, but that, for the present, I preferred being my own."

"You said 'No,' of course?"

"Yes, I did; ever so many 'Noes.' I did not count them, but I'm sure their name was Legion."

Jack gives a sigh of relief, and throws a biscuit to the ceaselessly attent sheep-dog. "Poor beggar!" he says. "Here, Luath, old man. You old muff! why did you not catch it? He is as good a fellow as ever I came across, and now, I suppose, it will be all different and disagreeable. Hang it! what a plague women are!"

"But, Jack – "

"Well, Essie, not done yet? Any more unlucky fellows sent off with their tails between their legs?"

"No, no; but, Jack" (looking down, and staining her fingers with the henna of the strawberries), "I – I'm not quite sure that, after all those 'Noes,' I did not say something that was not quite 'No.'"

"That was 'Yes?'"

"No, not 'Yes' either; not positive, actual 'Yes;' something betwixt and between; a sort of possible, hypothetical 'Yes.'"

"More fool you!" said Jack, briefly.

"Don't scold me, you bad boy!" she cries, running over to him and putting her gentle arms about his neck in the caressing way which sisters affect so much, and which brothers, in general, disrelish so highly, "or I vow I'll cry, and you know you hate that."

"I hate your making a fool of yourself worse," growls Jack, mollified, but struggling. "I say, you need not strangle a fellow."

"Wait till I do make a fool of myself," she says, very gaily. "I'm only talking about it as yet, and there's a good wide ditch between saying and doing."

"More shame for you to say what you don't mean."

"Jack, dear boy, don't you know that I hate saying things that vex a person? I never had a faculty for telling people home-truths; I'd far sooner tell them any amount of stories; and I got so tired of saying 'No,' and he seemed to take it so much to heart, that I said 'Yes,' just for a change – just for peace. In fact, 'anything for a quiet life' is my motto."

"And may I ask what you intend to live upon?" asks Jack (the romantic side of whose mind lies at present fallow and uncultivated, and whose thoughts, Briton-like, speedily turn from "love's young dream" to the pound, shilling, and pence aspect of the matter).

"On love, to be sure. On – what is it? – 6s. 6d. a day; and perhaps I may take in soldiers' washing," Esther says, bursting out into a violent fit of laughing.

"Uncommonly funny, no doubt!" Jack says, laughing too, but sorely against his will. "And do you mean to tell me that you like Brandon all of a sudden enough to be such an abject pauper with him for the rest of your days? Why it was only yesterday that you were laughing at him, saying he danced like a pair of tongs."

Esther has slidden down to the floor, and sits there tailor-fashion.

"I don't mean to tell you anything of the kind," she answers, gravely. "Poor dear fellow! – it is very odious of me – but between you and me I think I should survive it if I were to know that I should never see him again; only, please don't tell him I said so."

she repeats softly, musing to herself; "that is a very lovely line, but it is horribly untrue."

"What do you mean to do then, if it is not an impertinent question?" asks Jack, throwing back his young head, and looking in an inquisitorial manner at the penitent at his feet from under his eyelids. "Marry a man that you don't like, and who has not a farthing to keep you on, merely because he is the first person that asked you?"

"Nothing is farther from my intentions," says Esther, getting rather red. "And how unkind of you to twit me with my dearth of admirers. I mean you to interpose your parental authority and forbid the banns; I intend to shift the odium of the transaction on to your shoulders," she says, relapsing into levity, – "poor, dear shoulders!" (patting them very fondly) "they are not very wide, but they are broader than mine, at all events; to them I transfer my difficulties."

"That you shan't!" cries Jack, with animation, shaking off her hand, and looking very indignant and honest. "You are to do shabby things, and I am to have the credit of them! Thanks, very much, but I don't admire that division of labour. I don't think I ever heard a meaner proposition."

Esther's little head, rich in a soft plenitude of dusky love-locks, sinks low down towards her lap; she is very easily snubbed, especially by Jack.

"A nice name you'll make for yourself, Miss Essie," pursues the young Solomon, severely, still brandishing the metaphorical birch-rod over his sister. "I expect you'll make the country too hot to hold us in a short time."

Esther lifts up two sudden, tearful eyes, that look like great jewels seen through running water, and says, piteously, "But, Jack, you know, as you said just now, it was the first time; one never does things well the first time one tries; one is always clumsy at them; I shall know better next time."

"I don't see what 'next time' you are likely to have," says Jack, inexorable in his young severity. "It will be rather late in the day for people to propose to you when you are Bob Brandon's half-starved or whole-starved wife."

"But I'm not, Jack," cries Esther, very eagerly.

She looks grave enough now; rather alarmed at the little gay sketch her brother has drawn of her future destiny.

"I'm not going to marry him or any one else, ever. Do you think I'd leave you to marry the Angel Gabriel, if he came down from heaven on purpose to ask me?"

"Why did you tell Brandon that you would then?" asks the young fellow, not a bit disarmed by her sweet flattery.

"I did not tell him so; I said I would try; but even if I do try, I need not succeed; and even if I do manage to get up a sort of liking for him, I need not marry him. You are in such a hurry to jump at conclusions; there's the beauty of his being so poor, don't you see? He cannot expect me to marry him, when he has no bread and butter to put into my mouth."

"Then why be engaged to him at all, my good girl?" asks honest Jack, rather bewildered by these new lights – these subtleties on the subject of betrothal.

"Why do people give babies gin? – it is not good for them, but it keeps them quiet; that is precisely my principle. Being engaged to me may not be good for Robert, but it is gin to him; it keeps him quiet," answers Esther, on the battle-field of whose small face smiles and tears are fighting.

Her brother does not seem to see the beauty of this ingenious mode of reasoning in a very strong light.

"I won't have you playing fast and loose with him," he says, very decisively, shaking a stern young head – stern, despite its curliness and its total dearth of those care-lines that are supposed to be Wisdom's harsh footprints. "He is much too good a fellow to be played tricks with; mind that, Miss Esther!"

"I have not the slightest desire in life to play tricks with him; if I ever do play tricks, I hope it will be with some one more amusing," answers Essie, very pettishly, looking excessively mutine and ill-humoured. "I don't care if I never hear his ugly name again; he has spoilt the dinner and made you as cross as two sticks; and – and – I wish he was dead, that I do!" concludes happy Mr. Brandon's fiancée weeping.