Chapter XVII

The sweetness of September is that of the last few days spent with a friend that goeth on a very long journey; and we know not whether, when he returneth, we shall go to meet him with outstretched arms, or shall smile up at him only through the eyes of the daisies that flower upon our straight green graves.

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,"

and our sweetest seasons are, to my thinking, those in which the ecstasies of possession are mixed with the soft pain of expected parting. A September sun--such a one as warmly kissed the quiet faces of our young dead heroes, as they lay thick together on Alma's hill-side--is shining down with even mildness upon the just and the unjust, upon Constance Blessington's grass-green gown as she sits at breakfast, and on the hair crown of yellow gold with which Providence has seen fit to circle her dull fair brows.

"I think that you must have regretted being in such a hurry to run away from the garden and us," she is saying, with a gentle smile of lady-like malice, to Esther, _à propos_ of her yesterday's misadventure.

"Sitting in the shade eating nectarines is certainly pleasanter occupation than grovelling on your hands and knees on a mud-bank," replies Esther, demurely.

"St. John is so terribly energetic!" says Miss Blessington, rather lackadaisically; "he would have walked me off the face of the earth long ago if I had let him."

Remembering the Chinese invitation, Esther cannot repress an involuntary smile.

"What about St. John?" says the young man, entering; having caught his own name, with that wonderful acuteness of hearing with which every one is endowed when themselves are in question.

"Much better have stuck to your parish church," says Sir Thomas, brandishing a large red and yellow bandanna, which is part of the old English costume, "than gone scrambling heigh-go-mad over hedges and ditches after new-fangled Puseyite mummeries!"

Gerard and his betrothed exchange a glance of intelligence. Gerard is looking slightly sentimental; his head is a little on one side; but on his discovering that he is an object of attention to Constance, it returns rather suddenly to the perpendicular.

Esther's eyes are brillianter than their wont; her cheeks are flushed with a deeper hue than the crimson lips of a foreign shell, but it is not the flush of a newly-departed sleep. The angel of slumber has passed by the portals of her brain, as the destroying angel passed by the blood-painted lintels of Israel. Thoughts sweeter than virgin honey, thoughts bitterer than gall, have kept her wakeful. Ere she went to bed, she spent three hours in writing letters of dismissal to Brandon, and at the end left him undismissed. "I _cannot_ write it to him!" she cries, sitting up in bed in the dark, and flinging out blind arms into the black nothingness around her; "anything written sounds so harsh, so abrupt, so hard. I must tell him myself very gradually and gently, and tell him how sorry I am, and beg him to forgive me, and cry--go down on my knees, perhaps. No; I should look such a fool if I did that! After all, no one cries long over spilt milk--least of all any one so sensible and utterly unimaginative as poor dear Bob." And with that, thinking in a disparaging, hold-cheap way of him and his love, she turns the pillow over to try and find a cooler place on the under side for her burning face to rest on.

* * * * *

"Two dissyllabic names now passing many mouths by three dissyllabic names are here expressed," reads Miss Blessington, with distinct gravity, after breakfast that morning, out of an acrostic book that lies on the work-table before her, while Esther sits opposite with pencil and paper, ready to write down the products of the joint wisdom of their two minds. But the top of the pencil is being bitten by the young scribe's short white teeth, and her eyes are straying away absently--away through the open window and out to the sunshiny sward, where two of St. John's dogs, forbidden by Sir Thomas on pain of death, to set paw within the house, are rolling over one another, making abortive bites at each other's hind legs, and waggishly, with much growling and mumbling, taking each other's heads into their mouths.

"That is the whole," continues Constance. "These are the proofs; a woman, a wise man, a king, a poet, a beauty!"

Silence.

"A woman!" says Miss Blessington, cogitatively, resting her smooth chin on her hand, and looking vaguely round at the cabinets and busts for inspiration.

Esther makes no suggestion.

"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, raising her voice a little.

Esther comes back to consciousness with a little jump. "Oh! I beg your pardon; I don't think I was attending. A----what did you say?"

"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, for the third and last time.

"A woman!" echoes Esther, vacantly; "that is rather vague, is it not? There have been a good many women, one way or another."

"Let us try the next, then," says Constance, obligingly: "A wise man."

"Solomon!" answers Esther, glibly.

"I said a _dis_syllable name," remarks Constance, with gentle asperity.

The door opens, and St. John enters.

"Tell us a wise man's name?" "Who was a wise man?" cry they both in a breath.

"Solomon!" replies St. John, brilliantly.

"So I said," says Esther, smiling; "but, unluckily, it must be a _two_-syllabled wise man. I'm afraid that it would be disrespectful to abbreviate him into _Solmon_, wouldn't it?"

"One ought to be provided with a Bible, a Lemprière, and an encyclopædia before one attempts to grapple with these devices of Satan," says Gerard, sitting down on the arm of the sofa beside Constance and looking over her shoulder.

"A woman! Who is the woman?"

"We have not found out yet."

"A king! Who is the king?"

"We have not found out yet."

"You seem to be on the highroad to success," says he, laughing, and throwing himself back lazily.

"We have only just begun," says Miss Blessington, a little reproachfully. "You and Miss Craven are always so impatient."

"There are a great many two-syllabled kings' names," says Esther, with a prodigious effort to look intelligent and interested: "Edward, Henry, Louis, Ahab, Alfred, Joash!"

"I daresay it is one of those Jewish kings," says Constance, reflectively; "they are always fond of introducing Bible names into acrostics. Is there a Bible anywhere about, St. John?"

St. John walks slowly round the well-laden tables; looks over photograph books, Doré's "Elaine," Flaxman's "Dante;" but in vain. He comes back, and shakes his head.

"I will go and fetch one," says Constance, rising with noiseless grace, and rustling softly away among the console tables.

"May she long be occupied in searching the Scriptures for a dissyllabic king!" cries Gerard, drawing a long breath, and yawning as the door closes behind her.

"I am glad she is gone," says Esther, looking rather embarrassed, "as I have something to say to you."

"Say on."

"I must go home to-morrow," she continues, drawing hideous faces and wooden-legged cows on her bit of paper.

"Are you beginning to try experiments on me already?" he asks, incredulously, leaning his folded arms on the little table which forms a barrier between them.

"No; but I have received a letter from Jack this morning, which----"

"Which you are going to read to me?"

"Oh, no--no!" she answers, hastily, putting her hand in involuntary protection over her pocket; "it--it--wouldn't interest you." (It would have interested him rather too much.) "He seems to be missing me a good deal."

"Be honest," says St. John, stretching out his hand and taking hers captive, pencil and all. "Does he miss you as much as I shall?"

"More, a good deal, I should say," she replies, looking up with an arch smile; "I don't make your tea, and order your dinner, and darn your socks. One, two, three, four weeks," continues she, marking each number with her slender fingers on the table. "I have actually been here nearly a month, and" (with a half-absent sigh), "do you know, the very day I left home I told them----"

"Who's them?"

She blushes furiously. "Them--did I say them? Oh! I meant _him_, of course--Jack."

"Does he always speak of himself in the plural, like a king, or a reviewer?"

"Nonsense!" cries Esther, pulling away her hand rather impatiently. "Do you never make slips of the tongue?"

"Frequently. Well, you must write and tell _them_" (with a laughing emphasis on the _them_) "that they must get some one else to darn their socks, for that you have found something better to do."

"I could not have anything better," she answers, reddening with indignation. "You don't understand about Jack, or you would not make jokes!"

"It is a fault I'm not often guilty of; being funny never was my besetting sin," he answers, drily. "Essie, whenever you do go home, I have a great mind to go with you--if you will invite me."

"Oh, no, don't!" she cries, with involuntary eagerness, the pencil dropping from between her fingers.

"I believe you are ashamed of me," he says, angrily, walking off to the window to hide the flush of vexation which is invading his weather-worn cheeks.

"Ashamed of myself more likely," she cries, jumping up suddenly and following him.

"Why?"

"You fine gentlemen do not understand the

"'short and simple annals of the poor,'"

she answers, with a forced laugh. "You would probably be in the position of Mother Hubbard's singularly ill-used dog;

"When you came there,
The cupboard was bare.'"

"You think that gluttony, like gout, must be hereditary," says Gerard, laughing again, and yet looking very tender withal--not with the puling, milk-and-water tenderness of a green love-sick boy, but with the condensed, strong passion of a world-worn, world-tainted, half world-weary-grown man.

"There are other reasons too," says Essie, drooping her eyelids, over which the small blue veins--

"wandering, leave a tender stain--"

with a maiden's shyness, under the new-known fire of a lover's gaze.

"What other reasons?"

"I have never mentioned anything about you to Jack!" she answers, twisting her one paltry ring round her finger. "I don't suppose he is aware of your existence, unless he has bought a new 'Baronetage' since I left home--a piece of extravagance that I do not think he is likely to have been guilty of: and he would think it so odd if I were to appear suddenly on the scene, dragging you in tow."

"That would be easily explained," replies St. John, gravely, drawing himself up, and looking rather too conscious of the eight centuries of Norman blood in his strong veins. "I suppose that a man may be allowed to travel for a few hours in company with his future wife without any one being straightlaced enough or behind the world enough to call it _odd!_"

"Your future wife!" she repeats, with a dreamy, mournful smile. "Am I that? I think not. I shall _never_ be your wife," she says, a look of melancholy inspiration crossing and darkening, as a travelling cloud crosses and darkens the blue eyes of a June brook, the sweet red and sweeter white of her little piquante face.

"Do you know any just cause or impediment why you should not be?" he asks, gaily.

"None," she answers, shuddering a little, as she has got into the habit of doing lately--"except" (throwing herself impulsively into his glad arms) "that it would make me so intolerably happy!"

There is a pause--a little brief pause--in which that shyest, fleetest-winged of earth's visitants--Happiness--folds her pinions and settles down for a little minute on two beating, trembling human hearts.

"Do you know," continues Essie, after awhile--raising herself, and looking up, with tears glistening, like dew on the autumn grass, upon her long swart lashes--"Do you know that in a book I was reading the other day I met this sentence: 'Le bonheur sur terre est un crime puni de mort comme le génie, comme la divinité'? It has haunted me ever since yesterday."

"As far as that goes," he answers, thoughtfully, "there is nothing in this world that is not punished with death, except Death himself. Well" (smiling fondly, and stroking her ruffled, scented love-locks), "may I come? may I be Mother Hubbard's dog?"

"Why do you want to come _now_, particularly?" she asks, in rather a troubled voice.

"Because I am a coward," he answers, laughing--"because I like a quiet life, and I imagine that there will be squally weather here when I announce my intention of taking you as a helpmeet for me."

"I _am_ a _mésalliance_, I suppose?" she answers, rather sadly. "What will Sir Thomas say? Anything very bad?"

"Oh, nothing out of the way," answers Gerard, with a careless shrug. "He will call me an ass, and tell me that I always was, from a boy, the biggest fool he ever came across; and that, for his part, he'll wash his hands of me: and he'll probably conclude with a threat of cutting me off with a shilling."

"And will he?" asks Esther, quickly, looking up eager-eyed, parted-lipped.

"Why do you ask?" said the young man, sharply.

"Do you think that I want to marry a _beggar?_" inquires she, playfully, not detecting his suspicion.

"You need not be alarmed," he replies, coldly, and his arms slacken their fond hold a little. "He will not, for the very excellent reason that he cannot."

The door handle, turning, rattles. With one spring, Esther returns to her seat--to her deserted cows and impossible profiles. St. John looks out of the window. No transformation scene at Drury Lane could be more complete.

"Ahab--Jehu--Zimri--Omri--Joash!" recites Miss Blessington, entering, with an open Bible in her hand.