Chapter XII

A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended. Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful nostrils--entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with. Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house, although not particularly young, and in general not particularly gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull, Devil; Pull, Baker!--Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain their point.

"Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning, addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together after breakfast.

"I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?"

"Well!"

"If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well----"

"I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he answers, picking up the _Pall Mall_.

"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.

"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can 'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"

"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you, with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."

"I _am_ wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the _Pall Mall_. "There is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is there?"

She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.

"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished, like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well'--what then?"

"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs than by being continually moved from place to place; _that_ is what I was going to say."

"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her limbs."

Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.

"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually carrying her about the house."

"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."

"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in your arms."

"What a horribly immoral picture--vice stalking rampant through the Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that cannot carry herself!"

"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her--to be haled about like a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her brother, I grant you, it would be different."

"If I were her brother it _would_ be different," assents Gerard, blandly.

The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation, it is made exactly to contradict itself.

"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure that it is not mistaken kindness."

"That _what_ is not mistaken kindness?"

"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."

"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities, and explain; I am all attention."

"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts, with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken up and dropped again----"

"Like a hot chesnut!"

"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."

"Hardly."

"And when you drop her----"

"Literally or metaphorically?--on the stone floor, or out of the light of my favour?"

"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)----

"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her--"To be dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive voice of the verb to drop."

"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that _is_ the pride that apes humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when you drop her----"

"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and of the repetition of the phrase--"she will be no worse off than she was before that misfortune happened to her."

So Esther lies all day long in lazy contentment upon the sofa, looking out at the garden, and at the fountain where four bronze dolphins spout continual showers of spray in the autumn sunlight; dips into Owen Meredith's last poems; peeps between the crisp uncut leaves of new magazine or novel; and looks forward towards the ante-dinner hour, when St. John will come in from the day's amusement or occupation, and passive content will be exchanged for active enjoyment.

Esther has, as you know, made but light of her accident in her letters to her lover; fearing lest, in his eager anxiety on her account, he might get into the train, and give her the unexpected pleasure of seeing him arrive at Felton--seeing him arrive in his threadbare shooting jacket, through whose sleeves he always appears to have thrust his long arms too far, and his patched, creaking, Naullan boots. Imagine St. John introduced to those boots! A cold shiver runs down her spine at the bare idea. St. John is no dandy, it is true, but coats from Poole's are as much a matter of course to him as a knife and fork to eat his dinner with, or a bed to lie upon.

On the afternoon of the day on which the above-reported short dialogue took place, St. John and his father, converging from different points of the compass to one centre, enter almost at the same moment the library. Two canary-coloured Colossi have just deposited tea on a small table. St. John has neither neckerchief nor collar; his brown throat is bared in a _négligé_ as becoming to most men as the _à quatre épingles_ exactitude of their park get-up is unbecoming.

A man in the loose carelessness of his every-day country clothes is a man: in the prim tightness of his Pall Mall toilette he is a little, stiff, jointless figure out of Noah's ark.

"Slops again!" says Paterfamilias, very gruffly. "I never come into this room at any hour of the day or night without finding you women drinking tea! Why on earth, if you are thirsty, cannot you drink beer or water, instead of ruining your insides with all that wash?"

At this courteous speech a silence falls on the company. Sir Thomas mostly brings silence with him; he is half-conscious that at his entry voices are choked and laughter quenched, and it serves to exasperate him the more.

"You sit with your knees into the fire in air-tight rooms all day long," pursues he, in his loud, hectoring voice, "and destroy your digestions with gallons of hot tea, and then you are surprised at having tallow in your cheeks, instead of lilies and roses, as your grandmothers had!"

"Perhaps," says St. John, drily, "the ladies deny the justice of your conclusions; Sir Thomas; perhaps they do not own the soft impeachment of tallowy cheeks which you so gallantly ascribe to them."

As he speaks, his eyes involuntarily rest on the clear, rose brilliance of the young stranger's happy, beautiful child-face.

"I don't mind being called 'tallow face,'" says Esther, with a low laugh--"Juliet was; her father said to her, 'Out, you baggage! you tallow face!'"

"He must have been an ancestor of Sir Thomas's in direct male line, must not he?" says the young man, gaily stooping over her and whispering.

Seeing them so familiarly and joyously whisper together, Constance looks up with an air of astonished displeasure, which Gerard perceiving, instantly turns towards her.

"What are you making, Conny?"

"Braces."

"For me, no doubt? With your usual thoughtfulness, you recollected that my birthday falls next week, and you were preparing a little surprise for me. Well, never mind; though I have made the discovery rather prematurely, I'll be as much surprised as ever when the day of presentation arrives."

"They are not for you, St. John; they are for the bazaar."

"The bazaar!" he repeats, a little testily. "For the last month all your thoughts have tended bazaarwards; you neither eat, nor sleep, nor speak, nor hear, nor smell, without some reference to the bazaar."

"Bazaar! Humbug!" growls Sir Thomas, rising and walking towards the door. "A parcel of idle women getting together to sell trash and make asses of themselves!"

Then he goes out, and bangs the door.

"I would not for worlds have given him the satisfaction of agreeing with him while he was in the room," says St. John, insensibly speaking in a louder key now that the autocrat before whom all voices sink has removed himself; "but, for once in my life, I must confess to coinciding in opinion with aged P.: to be pestered with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy things that one would far rather be without--to be lavishly generous, and get no credit for it--to be swindled without any hope of legal redress; this is the essence of a charitable bazaar!"

"Dear me!" says Esther, with a crestfallen sigh. "And I had been looking forward to it so much!"

He sits down on a low chair beside her sofa. "Looking forward to a bazaar!" he echoes, with a half-incredulous smile. "My dear Miss Craven, what a revelation as to your past history that one sentence is! Why, I should as soon think of looking forward to a visit to the dentist, or to my mother's funeral!"

"No one expects to _enjoy_ it; it is a necessary evil," says Miss Blessington, with resignation.

"Like dancing with married men, or going to church?"

"Conny! Conny!" shouts Sir Thomas from somewhere in the unseen distance.

Conny rises, though reluctantly, and leaves the other two _tête-à-tête_.

"Miss Blessington is going to have a stall," says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something, catching a little nervously at the first remark that occurred to her.

"Yes."

"And I am to help her."

"Yes."

"But I will promise not to pester you with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy my wares."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"Miss Blessington has two friends coming to stay with her for it."

"Yes."

"Are you glad or sorry?"

"Glad is a weak word to express my feelings; I am in ecstasies!"

"They are beautiful, I suppose--refined, witty, as I always picture the women of your world?" she says, a little enviously.

"On the contrary, it would be impossible to find two more faded, negative specimens of Belgravian womanhood: they have not a single angle in either of their characters."

"Do you think _that_ a recommendation?"

"I did not say so."

"But you implied it, by expressing such exaggerated joy at their coming."

"So I did--so I do: and if they were to rise in number from two to fifty, like Falstaff's highwaymen, I should express greater joy still."

"And why?" raising herself from her cushions to get a straighter, truer look into his bright, grave eyes.

"Because," he says, lowering his voice a little, and leaning closelier over her, "the larger the party the better chance there is of undisturbed _tête-à-têtes_ between congenial spirits. Do you see?"

And Esther _does_ see, and thinking on Robert Brandon, is uneasily joyful.

* * * * *

Ere the arrival of the looked-for bazaar, Miss Craven's cure is complete. On the day preceding the one appointed for that philanthropic festivity, she has been walking in the late evening about the moon-coloured garden, free from any remaining lameness, leaning on St. John's arm. She does not need the slight stay, but it pleases him to give and her to receive it. It does not please Miss Blessington, however, watching them from an upper chamber--watching Esther dabble her small hands in the opal water in the great bronze water-lily leaf that makes the basin of the fountain--watching St. John, rapt and absorbed in her pretty foolish chatter. And yet their talk, if she could but hear it, holds nothing obnoxiously fond or _flirtatious;_ it might be proclaimed by the bellman in the streets.

"How nice it is to be no longer a devil upon two sticks!" the young girl is saying, joyfully; and the man makes answer, "You will be up to another gallop across the park to-morrow?"

"Never, _never!_" she cries, bringing together emphatically her two gleaming, wet hands. "You have witnessed my first and last equestrian feat; with my own free-will I will mount never a horse again, unless it is the rocking-horse at the end of the north gallery: it is frisky, yet safe; gallops and plunges, yet stands still: that is the horse for me."

He laughs, and then they are silent.

A star falls, hurling itself mysteriously down the sky, and into the dark; two bats glide past, dusky, noiseless. Bats always seem to me like the ghosts of dead birds, that haunt the green gardens and copses they used to love.

St. John speaks presently. "One forms mistaken estimates of people's characters; I should not have imagined you a coward."

"But I am one, physically and morally," she answers, sighing.

As the ladies retire to bed, Miss Blessington enters Esther's room--a familiarity which somewhat surprises that virgin, as it is the first time that it has been accorded to her.

"I have come to congratulate you!" Constance says, civilly; "you have made a wonderful recovery."

"Yes, wonderful!"

"You can walk perfectly well without assistance, cannot you?"

"Perfectly" (turning away her head, in the guilty consciousness of having, despite her soundness of limb, not walked without assistance).

"St. John is very useful as a walking-stick, isn't he?" (playfully.)

"He thought it would tire me less," replies the other, flushing; "he has been most kind!"

"He always is," answers Miss Blessington, quickly: "it is his nature; old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, dirty children in the gutter--it is all one to him."

"Really!"

"That universal geniality amounts almost to a weakness, though an amiable one; it has often been the cause of exciting hopes that, of course, he had neither the wish nor the power to gratify."

"What! in old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, and dirty children in the gutter?" says Esther, smiling merrily, yet with scorn.

"If I did not take an interest in you," continued Constance, leaning in a graceful artistic pose against the mantelpiece, "I should, of course, not take the trouble to mention the subject; but, as I do, I thought it the kindest thing I could do to you to set you on your guard against attentions to which you, who do not know him, might, without vanity, attribute some importance, but which I, who know him so thoroughly, know to mean absolutely nothing, beyond a sort of general _bonhomie_ towards the whole of the human race."

"I am deeply grateful," answers the young girl, with sarcastic emphasis; "but in my part of the world, girls are not in the habit of cherishing vague hopes because a man has the civility to offer them his arm when they are disabled by an accident from walking by themselves."

"Well, forewarned is forearmed, you know" (nodding and smiling); "and from some careless, slighting remarks that St. John let fall the other day, I thought I should not be acting the part of a friend by you if I did not warn you against a snare into which I have seen others older, and knowing more of the world than you do, fall. Good night!"

"Stay!" cries Esther, springing up, and catching hold of her companion's gauzy dress in detention. "It is unfair to tell a person half, and not the whole. What were the slighting remarks that Mr. Gerard made _à propos_ of me?"

"Really, I--I--don't remember exactly," replies Constance, with reluctance, half-feigned, half-real; "I did not pay much attention at the time; it was an admission that slipped out without my intending it."

"But now that it has slipped out," cries the other, authoritatively, "you must explain it fully, please."

"Well, really--please don't look so tragic, it can be of so very little consequence to you what he said or did not say about you----"

"Infinitesimally little! but still I mean to hear it."

"Well" (with rather an awkward laugh), "the situation is hardly worth such Mrs. Siddons' airs: it was only that, when I was remonstrating with him the other day on his manner to you, he said, in his off-hand, abrupt way, something to the effect that _when_ he threw you over--never for a moment denying that sooner or later he would do so--you would get over it soon, or something of that description. I cannot recall the exact phrase. Good night."

But beautiful Esther, standing there stricken, credulous, with eager, angry eyes, forgets to make the answering greeting.