Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

"You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyes fixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging from its strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to me for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back to Bermuda."

"Gone!" she repeats, blankly. "Are you going too? Is everybody going away from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that it will be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your mother and sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!' to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sell matches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"

He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says, looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face, "you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matches either; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!"

"That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I am pretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" she cries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why – why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born – to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come? – who would?"

"I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a bad place, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though it does do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," he adds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long, and there's a better at the other end of it."

"Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy the world without one, can one?" she continues, following out her own ideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there was, and not long hence there will be, no I; but one cannot realize it!"

"Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy.

"The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly, without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, all with some reference to oneself: one cannot understand their all going on when oneself has stopped!"

Reflections of this character are not much in Bob's way. Pensive musings upon the caducity of the human race are, generally, rather feminine than masculine. A woman dreams over the shortness of life, while a man crowds it with doings that make it, in effect, long. Brandon turns the conversation back into a more practical channel.

"Have you any friends that you have known longer than you have us, Essie?"

"None."

"Any to whom it would be less irksome to you to lie under an obligation, as you call it?"

"None."

"Any that you like better, in short?"

"None," she answers, with a little impatience, as if, in a way, ashamed of her own destitution. "Good or bad, I have no friends, none, and you know it."

He looks at her with a sort of shocked amazement. "Good God! what is to become of you, then?" he asks, bluntly.

"I don't know."

"How are you to live?"

"I don't know."

"Have you never once thought about it?"

"Never. I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiver piteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it, straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "we" lies sleeping – "I thought that we should have lived to be old together: most people live to be old!"

A great yearning pity – purer, nobler, with less of the satyr and more of the god in it, than in any access of human passion between man and woman – seizes him as he looks at her, sitting there so forlorn, with one thin hand lifted to shield her weary purple-lidded eyes, that have grown dim with weeping for "her boy."

"Poor little soul!" he says, compassionately; and he takes, with brotherly intimacy, the other hand, that lies listless in her lap, and lays fond lips upon it.

When one is on the verge of a burst of crying, a harsh word may avert the catastrophe, but a kind one inevitably precipitates it. With how unjust, unreasonable a hatred does one often regard the person who ill-advisedly speaks that kind word! As for Esther, she buries her face on his shoulder and begins to sob hysterically. Her hat falls off, and her bare, defenceless head leans on his breast, while the autumn wind wafts one long lock of her scented hair against his face. She has forgotten that he was her lover, has forgotten that he is a man; she remembers only that he is a friend, which is a sexless thing – that he is the one being who cares about her, in all the great, full, crowded world. Despite the utter abandonment of her attitude, despite the clinging closeness of her soft supple form to his, he feels none of the painful stings of passion that so lately beset him. They are tamed, for the moment, by a nobler emotion: they dare as little assail him now, as they dare assail the holy saints in Paradise. With any other man such abandonment might have been dangerous: with him she is safe. He lays his kind broad hand on her ruffled head, and strokes it, just as Jack used to do, in the pleasant days before he went.

"Come to us, Essie!" he says, with persuasive tenderness; "we'll be good to you; we won't plague you; you would have come to us as my wife, why won't you come as my sister?"

"Because I like buying things better than being given them!" she answers, vehemently, though still incoherent from her tears. "If I had come as your wife, I should have given you something in exchange, —myself, body and soul, my whole life. It would have been of no value really, but you would have thought it something; as your sister, I shall give you absolutely nothing!"

"Child! child! why are you so proud?" he asks, with mournful reproachfulness. "Why are you so bent on standing alone? Which of us can stand alone in this world? We all have to lean upon one another, more or less, and the strongest of us upon God!"

"Yes, I know that! – I know that!" she answers, hastily; "but I would far rather beg, and have to be obliged to any common stranger that I had never seen before, and that most probably I should never see again, than to you. With them I should, at all events, start fair: I should have no old debts to weigh me down; but to you I owe so much already, that I am racking my brain to think how I can pay some part of it, instead of contracting new ones."

"You would contract no new ones," he rejoins, earnestly; "on the contrary. Essie, you told me just now that you would be very glad to be able to make up to me for any pain you may have made me suffer: now is your time! —now is your opportunity!"

"How?" she sobs, lifting up her head, and speaking with a slow, plaintive intonation. "You will be at the other side of the world, thousands of miles away! How will it affect you?"

"I shall be at the other side of the world," he answers, steadily; "better that I should be so! better so! But do you think that my being so far away will make it pleasanter for me to think of the one creature I love above all others on the face of the earth, starving, or worse than starving, at home?"

"Worse than starving!" she repeats, opening her great, wide eyes in astonishment. "What can be worse than starving? Oh! I see what you mean" (a light breaking in upon her, and the colour flushing faintly into her face). "You think I should go to the bad – do something disgraceful, if I had nobody to look after me: I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, but I don't wonder at it," she ends, with resigned depression.

"I have no bad opinion of you!" he answers, eagerly; "but I know the end that women, originally as pure and good as you, have come to before now. I know how hard it is for a beautiful poor girl to live honestly in this world, how frightfully easy to live dishonestly!"

"Well!" she says, recklessly; "and if I did live dishonestly, what matter? Whom have I got to be ashamed of? Whom have I got to disgrace?"

Brandon looks inexpressibly shocked. "Hush!" he says, putting his hand before her mouth; "you don't know what you are saying! For Heaven's sake, talk in that strain to no one but me! Any one that knew you less well than I do might misunderstand you."

She looks up at him, half-frightened. "One does say dreadful things without intending it," she says, apologetically; "but I only meant to express, as forcibly as possible, how little consequence it was what happened to me."

"For God's sake, word it differently then!" he says, almost sternly; "or, better still, don't say it or think it at all! It is morbid, and it is not true. If it is of no consequence to any one else what becomes of you, it is of intense, unspeakable consequence to me: how many times must I tell you that before you mean to believe it?"

"To you! in Bermuda?" she says, with a little doubting sigh.

"Yes, to me, in Bermuda," he answers, firmly. "Perhaps you think that it was only because I looked upon you as my own, my property, that I took so great an interest in you: it was not as mine, it was as yourself, that I cared about you. You are yourself still, though you are not nor ever will be mine."

Then, like Guinevere's, "his voice brake suddenly."

 
"Then, as a stream, that spouting from a cliff
Fails in mid-air, but gathering at the base,
Remakes itself and flashes down the vale,
Went on in passionate utterance."
 

"Essie! they say that women are more capable of self-sacrifice than men. Prove it to me now! Sacrifice this pride of yours; consent to the one thing that would make me leave England with almost a light, instead of such a heavy heart!"

She is silent for a minute or two, halting between two opinions; hesitating, struggling with herself: then she speaks, rapidly, but not easily —

"I cannot, Bob – I cannot! Ask me anything, not quite so hard, and I'll do it! Just think how young I am, seventeen last birthday, I have probably forty or fifty more years to live; do you wish me to promise to be a pensioner for half a century on your mother's charity?"

He does not answer.

"Don't be angry with me for having a little self-respect!" she cries, passionately, snatching his hand. "I will go and stay with your people till I have found something to do, if they will have me. I will get your mother to help me in looking for work; I will take her advice in everything, do whatever she tells me; I will do anything – anything in life to please you, except – "

"Except the one thing I wish," he answers, sadly and coldly.

"If you speak in that tone I shall have to promise you anything," she says, despairingly; "but it will only be perjury, for I shall infallibly break my promise again. Why should not I work?" she goes on, in a sort of indignation at his silence. "Am I a cripple, or an idiot? Let me wait till I am either the one or the other, before I come upon the parish!" she says, with the bitter pride of poverty; "at all events, let us call things by their right names."

"As you will," he answers, deeply wounded. "If you take it as a great indignity to be offered a home with the oldest friends you have in the world, of course I can say no more; but oh, child! you are wrong – you are wrong!"

CHAPTER XXIV

It is Sunday evening. Miss Craven has been to church for the first time since her bereavement, as people call it. She has displayed her crape in all its crisp funeral newness before the eyes of the Plas Berwyn congregation. Also, she has been made the subject of conversation, over their early dinner, between the imbecile rector and his vinegar-faced, bob-curled wife; the latter remarking how unfortunately unbecoming black was to poor Miss Craven – really impossible to tell where her bonnet ended and her hair began; and how lucky it was for her that people did not wear mourning for as long a time as they used – three months being ample nowadays, ample for a brother! Esther has sat in their pew for the first time alone: she has looked at Jack's prayer-book, at his vacant corner under the dusty cobwebbed window, with eyes dryly stoic; she has walked firmly after service down the church-path, past a grassless hillock, where he who was her brother lies, dumbly submitting to the one terrific, changeless law of decay – the law that not one of us can face, as applying to ourselves, without our brains reeling at the horror of it. Oh! thrifty, harsh Nature! that, without a pang of relenting, unmixes again those cunningest compounds that we call our bodies – making the freed elements that formed them pass into new forms of life – makes us, who erewhile walked upright, godlike, fronting the sun, communing with the high stars – makes us, I say, creep many-legged in the beetle, crawl blind in the worm!

It is evening now, and Esther sits, in her red armchair, beside the drawing-room fire, alone again. The wind comes banging every minute against the shuttered French window, as one that boisterously asks to be let in; the ivy leaves are dashed against the pane, as one that sighingly begs for admittance. Every now and then the young girl looks round timidly over her shoulder, in the chill expectation of seeing a death-pale spirit-face gazing at her from some corner of the room; every now and then she starts nervously, as a hot cinder drops from the grate, or as the small feet of some restless mouse make a hurry-skurrying noise behind the wainscot. As often as she can frame the smallest excuse, she rings the bell, in order to gather a little courage from the live human face, the live human voice, of the servant that answers it.

Around Plas Berwyn also the wind thunders – against Plas Berwyn windows also the ivy-leaves fling themselves plaintively; but there the resemblance ends. The steady light from the lamp outblazes the uncertain, fitful fire-gleams: at Plas Berwyn there are no ghost-faces of the lately dead to haunt the inmates of that cheerful room. They are all sitting round the table on straight-backed chairs – no lolling in armchairs, no stealing of furtive naps on the Sabbath – sitting rather primly, rather Puritanically, reading severely good books. To Bob's palate, the Hedley Vicarsian type of literature is as distasteful as to any other young man of sound head and good digestion, but he succumbs to it meekly, to please his mother; if Sunday came twice a week, I think he would be constrained to rebel. From the kitchen, the servants' voices sound faintly audible above the howling wind, singing psalms. The family are divided between prose and poetry. Miss Brandon is reading a sermon; her sister a hymn. Here it is: —

THE FIRM BANK.^[1]

 
"I have a never-failing bank,
A more than golden store;
No earthly bank is half so rich,
How can I then be poor?
 
 
"'Tis when my stock is spent and gone,
And I without a groat,
I'm glad to hasten to my bank,
And beg a little note.
 
 
"Sometimes my banker, smiling, says,
'Why don't you oftener come?
And when you draw a little note,
Why not a larger sum?
 
 
"'Why live so niggardly and poor? —
Your bank contains a plenty?
Why come and take a one-pound note
When you might have a twenty?
 
 
"'Yea, twenty thousand, ten times told,
Is but a trifling sum
To what your Father hath laid up,
Secure in God his Son.'
 
 
"Since, then, my banker is so rich,
I have no cause to borrow:
I'll live upon my cash to-day,
And draw again to-morrow.
 
 
"I've been a thousand times before,
And never was rejected;
Sometimes my banker gives me more
Than asked for or expected.
 
 
"Sometimes I've felt a little proud,
I've managed things so clever:
But, ah! before the day was done
I've felt as poor as ever!
 
 
"Sometimes with blushes on my face
Just at the door I stand;
I know if Moses kept me back,
I surely must be damned.
 
 
"I know my bank will never break —
No! it can never fall!
The Firm – Three Persons in one God!
Jehovah – Lord of All!"
 

A charming mixture of the jocose and familiar, isn't it?

"Mother," says Bob, rather abruptly, looking up from a civil-spoken, pleasant little work, entitled "Thou Fool!" which he is perusing (it is generally an understood thing that conversation is not to be included among the Sabbath evening diversions at Plas Berwyn) – "Mother, do you know I don't think I shall try for extension, after all?"

The gold-rimmed spectacles make a hasty descent from their elevation upon Mrs. Brandon's high thin nose.

"Dear Bob! why not?"

"Because I don't see why I should," he answers, frankly. "I'm perfectly well: why should I shirk work any more than any other fellow? I might say that I prefer a cool climate to a hot vapour-bath, English winds to oily calms, but I don't suppose that I am singular in that!"

"My dear boy!" says the old woman, tremulously, stretching out her withered hand across the table to him, – "why did you ever go into that dreadful profession? Why did not you enter the ministry, like your dear father, as I so much wished you to do?"

"I'm very glad I didn't, mother!" replies the young man, bluntly; "I should have been a fish sadly out of water, and, after all, I hope that Heaven will not be quite so full of black coats that there will not be room for one or two of our colour."

"Have you told Essie?" inquires his eldest sister, joining in the conversation.

"Yes, she knows."

"Will she be ready to go with you on such short notice?"

"No."

"You'll leave her behind, then?"

"Yes."

"I thought you always had such a horror of long engagements?"

"So I have, but – but" (involuntarily lowering his voice, and lifting "Thou Fool!" to be a partial shade for his face) – "there is no engagement between us now!"

Six startled eyes fix themselves upon his face. "What!" cry three simultaneously shrill female voices. "No engagement! Has she thrown you over?"

"No."

"Have you thrown her over?" (with an astonished emphasis on the pronouns).

"No."

"Have you quarrelled, then?" "No, we haven't," answers Bob, wincing. "Poor little child! one would hardly choose such a time as this to quarrel with her. Cannot you understand two people coming to the conclusion that they are better apart; better as friends than as – as anything else?"

His three comforters stare at one another in bewilderment; then his parent speaks, shaking her head oracularly:

"I'm afraid I see how it is, Bob; you have found out that this unfortunate girl is, in some way, unworthy of you, and you are too generous to confess it, even to us."

Bob dashes down "Thou Fool!" in a fury, and his blue eyes shine with quick fire.

"Mother, do you call that the 'charity that thinketh no evil?' I tell you, Essie is willing to marry me to-morrow, but I – "

"But you are not willing!" interrupts the domestic pack, bursting again into full cry.

"Tell us something a little more probable, Bob, and we'll try and believe it," subjoins Bessy, with a small curling smile.

"It is a matter of perfect indifference to me whether you believe me or not," replies the young man, sternly; keeping under, with great difficulty, an unmanly longing to box Miss Bessy's ears. "I only tell you, upon my honour, that Essie is willing to marry me, and that I – solely for her own sake, solely because I know that an inferior being cannot make a superior one happy – am not willing."

"And a very good thing too," cries Bessy, viciously. "I always thought you were singularly ill-suited to one another; I always said so to mamma and Jane. Didn't I, mamma? – didn't I, Jane? 'Can two walk together except they be agreed?' you know."

"Girls," says poor Bob, harried almost beyond endurance, and addressing his sisters by the conveniently broad appelative which covers everything virgin between the ages of six and a hundred – "Girls, would you mind going into the dining-room for a few minutes? I want to speak to mother alone."

The "girls" look rebellious, but their rebellion does not break into open mutiny. Rising, they comply with his request.

"Of course, what most nearly concerns our only brother cannot be supposed to have any interest for us," says Bessy, leaving her sting behind, like a wasp, and shutting the door with as near an approach to a bang as her conscience will admit.

As soon as they are well out of the room, Bob comes and sits at his mother's feet, and lays his head on her lap, as he used to do when he was a very little boy. She passes her fingers fondly through his curly hair.

"This is a severe trial, my dear boy," she says, a little tritely; "but take an old woman's word for it; look for comfort in the right direction, and you'll surely, surely find it!"

"I don't want comfort," answers Bob, pluckily; he having by no means exiled his sisters in order to pule and whimper over his own woes. "I do very well."

"I thought you had come to your old mother for consolation," answers his parent, a little aggrievedly: naturally somewhat disappointed at being balked of the office of Paraclete, so dear to every woman's heart; "if not, what was it that you wanted to talk to me about that you did not wish your sisters to hear?"

"About her!" he answers, emphatically, lifting up his head, and reading her face earnestly. "I didn't wish her to be the mark for any more of Bessy's sneers. I wonder," he says, a little bitterly, "that she who is always talking about 'our Great Exemplar' does not recollect that He never sneered at any one."

"Did you say that it was Esther Craven that you wished to speak to me about?" inquires Mrs. Brandon, rather coldly.

"Mother," he says, passionately, "she has not a farthing in the world! What is to become of her?"

"Any one that my dear son takes an interest in will always be welcome to a home with me, for as long as they like to avail themselves of it," says the old lady, primly.

He shakes his head.

"She would not come," he says, despondently; "she is too proud: she hates to be beholden to any one: she is bent on working for her own living."

"And a very proper resolution, too," replies his mother, stoutly, her heart being steeled against Esther by a latent conviction that that fair false maid has dealt unhandsomely by her son. "Providence is always more willing to help those that help themselves."

"How can she help herself?" cries Esther's champion, indignantly. "What sort of work are those little weak hands, that little inexperienced head, fitted for?"

"Women with hands as weak and heads as inexperienced have toiled for their daily bread before now, I suppose," rejoins Mrs. Brandon, with a certain hardness, foreign to her nature, and arising from that spirit of contradiction, innate in us all, which makes us look coldly upon any object that some one else is making a fuss over.

Bob springs to his feet in great wrath, and speaks low and quick: "Mother! I'm sorry I ever broached this subject to you; one takes a long time, I see, to get acquainted with one's nearest relatives' characters. If you can see the child of one of your oldest friends working her poor little fingers to the bone for the bare necessaries of life without stretching out a finger to help her, I cannot!"

Speaking thus disrespectfully, he walks towards the door.

 
"A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat 'em, the better they be."
 

says the rude old saw. Every woman, from a mother to a mistress, enjoys, rather than otherwise, being bullied.

The old woman half rises, and stretching out her hand to her son, says, "My boy! come back! let us talk rationally: don't quarrel with your old mother about a person that will never be so good a friend to you as she is."

He turns, half hesitating: anger's red ensign still aflame on his honest face.

"Shall I tell you, Bob, why I cannot feel common compassion for – for this girl?"

"Why?"

"Because," says the old lady, with emotion, Mr. Brandon's image heaving up and down rather quicklier than usual upon her ample breast, – "because some instinct tells me that she has not had common compassion upon you."

"'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;' in fact," answers Bob, with a sarcasm unusual to him, "you are forgetting, mother, how often you have impressed upon me that we are no longer under the Mosaic dispensation! But why should she have compassion on me, may I ask? In what way do I stand in need for it? I'm not a woman, thank God!"

She looks at him, intently, with a steadiness that disconcerts him. "Bob, can you look me in the face and tell me that you have not been unhappier since you knew Esther Craven than ever you were before in all your life?"

"I have," he answers, simply, "and happier too; so that makes it square."

Foiled in this direction, she varies her point of attack a little: "Can you look me in the face, and tell me that since your engagement she has behaved to you as a modest, honourable woman should behave to the man she has promised to marry?"

He casts his eyes down troubled, and begins to fidget with a dilapidated little Chelsea Cupid on the mantelshelf, too truthful to say "Yes," too generous to say "No."

"She is ready to fulfil her promise," he answers, evasively. "She is willing to marry me whenever I like, as I told you before – to-morrow! to-night! this instant, if I wish!"

"For a home, of course; one can understand that, in her situation," says his mother, in a tone of slighting pity.

Bob perceives, and is stung by it.

"No, not for a home!" he answers, indignantly. "Poor soul! she may have that without paying such a heavy toll for it."

"To what motive, then, do you ascribe her willingness?"

"She told me that she liked me better than any one else in the world," he answers, with the reluctance of one who is making a statement that he believes will not be credited by the auditor to whom it is addressed.

"My poor simple boy! and you believed her?" (with a sort of compassionate scorn).

He hesitates. "I believe that she meant what she said at the moment," he replies, doubtfully.

"If there was such perfect harmony of opinion between you, why was the engagement broken, may I ask?" she inquires, a little sharply.

No answer, except quickened breathing, and a frown slightly contracting his climate-bronzed forehead.

"Was it – oh, my dear boy! if it was so, no one can respect your scruples more than I do – was it because you were not quite sure that she was one of the Lord's people?"

"Oh, dear, no," answers the young man, quickly, with scarcely repressed impatience in his tone – "nothing of the kind. God forbid my being so presumptuously uncharitable! How am I to know who is, or who is not? All I know is that if she is not, neither am I; and I trust, mother, that you will find, by-and-bye, that they are not quite such, a scanty nation as you seem to imagine."

"A higher authority than I am has expressly designated them 'a little flock,'" says the old woman, sententiously, pursing up her mouth; "but far be it from me to wish to judge, whatever you may imply. But I am still waiting to hear what your motive was for breaking your engagement, a motive which you seem to have such an unaccountable difficulty in telling me."

He looks down, for an instant or two, biting his lips, then speaks petulantly:

"Why should I tell you, mother? – why should I tell any one? A man's motives are his own concern, whatever his actions may be; if mine are strong enough to satisfy myself and her, surely that is enough."

"Oh, of course," answers his mother, rather nettled at what she considers a want of confidence; "only that, unless I am put in possession of the circumstances of the case, I really don't see how I can be expected to give advice – "

"I don't want advice," interrupts the young man, eagerly. "I want a much better thing – assistance."

"Assistance in what?"

"Why, in hindering that poor girl," he says, with warmth, "from being thrown upon the world penniless, helpless, and without a friend, as she will be after the sale at Glan-yr-Afon."

"Not without a friend, as long as you are alive, Bob; one can answer for that!" rejoins his mother, rather tartly.

"I count for nothing," says Bob, quietly. "A man's friendship can be of no service to a woman, unless he is in some authorised position of relationship or connection with her; otherwise he does her more harm than good. What she needs, and what I hoped she would have found in you, mother, is a woman-friend."

"If," replies his mother, drawing herself up and looking very stiff – "If she is, as you say, too proud to avail herself of the home that I am, for your sake, willing to offer her, she is likely to be too proud to consent to be befriended in any other way."

Brandon looks at her for a moment with something akin to indignant scorn in his face, dutiful son as he usually is; then, repenting, throws himself on his knees beside her, and clasping his arms about her withered neck, says, entreatingly: "Mother, why are you so hard upon her? – what has she done to you? Just think, how would you have liked Jane or Bessy, when they were her age, to have been driven out into the world to make their own way, without a single soul to say a kind word to them, or give them a helping hand; and," he continues, musingly, "they never could have been exposed to the temptations she will be – they never were beautiful, like her!"

He had never spoken truer words in all his life, but the truth is not always the best to be spoken.

"At all events," says the old lady, with emphasis, freeing herself from his arms, and getting rather red in the face – "At all events, Bob, however disparagingly you may speak of them, they were and are good, modest, pious girls, that would not trifle with an honest man's affection for their own amusement, as handsomer ones have done before now."

"I never heard of any honest man having given them the chance," retorts Bob, sarcastically, quitting his caressing posture, with a revulsion of feeling as sudden as it was complete.

"The servants are assembled," says the youngest, best, modestest, piousest of the girls, opening the door, and putting in her little drab face. "Must I tell them to go back to the kitchen for a quarter of an hour, or has Bob nearly finished his private communication?"