TUCKERS.

Barbara sat in the little oak parlour, a pretty room that opened out of the hall; indeed it had originally been a portion of the hall, which was constructed like a letter L. The hall extended to the roof, but the branch at right angles was not half the height. It was ceiled about ten feet from the floor, and instead of being, like the hall, paved with slate, had oak boards. The window looked into the garden. Mr. Jordan’s father had knocked away the granite mullions, and put in a sash-window, out of keeping with the room and house, but agreeable to the taste of the period, and admitting more light. A panelled division cut the room off from the hall. Barbara and Eve could not agree about the adornment of this apartment. On the walls were a couple of oil paintings, and Barbara supplemented them with framed and glazed mezzotints. She could not be made by her sister to see the incongruity of engravings and oil paintings hanging side by side on dark oak panels. On the chimney-piece was a French ormolu clock, which was Eve’s detestation. It was badly designed and unsuitable for the room. So was the banner-screen of a poodle resting on a red cushion; so were the bugle mats on the table; so were the antimacassars on all the arm-chairs and over the back of the sofa; so were some drawing-room chairs purchased by Barbara, with curved legs, and rails that were falling out periodically. Barbara thought these chairs handsome, Eve detestable. The chimney-piece ornaments, the vases of pale green glass illuminated with flowers, were also objects of aversion to one sister and admiration to the other. Eve at one time refused to make posies for the vases in the parlour, and was always protesting against some new introduction by her sister, which violated the principles of taste.

‘I don’t like to live in a dingy old hall like this,’ Eve would say; ‘but I like a place to be fitted up in keeping with its character.’

Barbara was now seated in this debatable ground. Eve was out somewhere, and she was alone and engaged with her needle. Her father, in the next room, was dozing. Then to the open window came Jasper, leaned his arms on the sill—the sash was up—and looked in at Barbara.

‘Hard at work as usual?’ he said.

She smiled and nodded, and looked at him, holding her needle up, with a long white thread in it.

‘On what engaged I dare not ask,’ said Jasper.

‘You may know,’ she said, laughing. ‘Sewing in tuckers. I always sew tuckers on Saturdays, both for myself and for Eve.’

‘And, pray, what are tuckers?’

‘Tuckers’—she hesitated to find a suitable description, ‘tuckers are—well, tuckers.’ She took a neck of a dress which she had finished and put it round her throat. ‘Now you see. Now you understand. Tuckers are the garnishing, like parsley to a dish.’

‘And compliments to speech. So you do Eve’s as well as your own.’

‘O dear, yes; Eve cannot be trusted. She would forget all about them and wear dirty tuckers.’

‘But she worked hard enough burnishing the brass necklace.’

‘O yes, that shone! tuckers are simply—clean.’

‘My Lady Eve should have a lady’s-maid.’

‘Not whilst I am with her. I do all that is needful for her. When she marries she must have one, as she is helpless.’

‘You think Eve will marry?’

‘O yes! It is all settled. She has consented.’

He was a little surprised. This had come about very suddenly, and Eve was young.

‘I am glad you are here,’ said Barbara, ‘only you have taken an unfair advantage of me.’

‘I—Barbara?’

‘Yes, Jasper, you.’ She looked up into his face with a heightened colour. He had never called her by her plain Christian name before, nor had she thus addressed him, but their hearts understood each other, and a formal title would have been an affectation on either side.

‘I will tell you why,’ said the girl; ‘so do not put on such a puzzled expression. I want to speak to you seriously about a matter that—that—well, Jasper, that makes me wish you had your face in the light and mine in the shade. Where you stand the glare of the sky is behind you, and you can see every change in my face, and that unnerves me. Either you shall come in here, take my place at the tuckers, and let me talk to you through the window, or else I shall move my chair close to the window, and sit with my back to it, and we can talk without watching each other’s face.’

‘Do that, Barbara. I cannot venture on the tuckers.’

So, laughing nervously, and with her colour changing in her checks, and her lips twitching, she drew her chair close to the window, and seated herself, not exactly with her back to it, but sideways, and turned her face from it.

The ground outside was higher than the floor of the parlour, so that Jasper stood above her, and looked down somewhat, not much, on her head, her dark hair so neat and glossy, and smoothly parted. He stooped to the mignonette bed and gathered some of the fragrant delicate little trusses of colourless flowers, and with a slight apology thrust two or three among her dark hair.

‘Putting in tuckers,’ he said. ‘Garnishing the sweetest of heads with the plant that to my mind best symbolises Barbara.’

‘Don’t,’ she exclaimed, shaking her head, but not shaking the sprigs out of her hair. ‘You are taking unwarrantable liberties, Mr. Jasper.’

‘I will take no more.’ He folded his arms on the sill. She did not see, but she felt, the flood of love that poured over her bowed head from his eyes. She worked very hard fastening off a thread at the end of a tucker.

‘I also,’ said Jasper, ‘have been desirous of a word with you, Barbara.’

She turned, looked up in his face, then bent her head again over her work. The flies, among them a great bluebottle, were humming in the window; the latter bounced against the glass, and was too stupid to come down and go out at the open sash.

‘We understand each other,’ said Jasper, in a low voice, as pleasant and soft as the murmur of the flies. ‘There are songs without words, and there is speech without voice: what I have thought and felt you know, though I have not told you anything, and I think I know also what you think and feel. Now, however, it is as well that we should come to plain words.’

‘Yes, Jasper, I think so as well, that is why I have come over here with my tuckers.’

‘We know each other’s heart,’ he said, stooping in over her head and the garnishing of mignonette, and speaking as low as a whisper, not really in a whisper but in his natural warm, rich voice. ‘There is this, dear Barbara, about me. My name, my family, are dishonoured by the thoughtless, wrongful act of my poor brother. I dare not ask you to share that name with me, not only on this ground, but also because I am absolutely penniless. A great wrong has been done to your father and sister by us, and it does not become me to ask the greatest and richest of gifts from your family. Hereafter I may inherit my father’s mill at Buckfastleigh. When I do I will, as I have undertaken, fully repay the debt to your sister, but till I can do that I may not ask for more. You are, and must be, to me a far-off, unapproachable star, to whom I look up, whom I shall ever love and stretch my hands towards.’

‘I am not a star at all,’ said Barbara, ‘and as for being far off and unapproachable, you are talking nonsense, and you do not mean it or you would not have stuck bits of mignonette in my hair. I do not understand rhodomontade.’

Jasper laughed. He liked her downright, plain way. ‘I am quoting a thought from “Preciosa,”’ he said.

‘I know nothing of “Preciosa,” save that it is something Eve strums.’

‘Well—divest what I have said of all exaggeration of simile, you understand what I mean.’

‘And I want you to understand my position exactly, Jasper,’ she said. ‘I also am penniless. The money my aunt left me I have made over to Eve because she could not marry Mr. Coyshe without something present, as well as a prospect of something to come.’

‘What! sewn your poor little legacy in as a tucker to her wedding gown?’

‘Mr. Coyshe wants to go to London, he is lost here; and Eve would be happy in a great city, she mopes in the country. So I have consented to this arrangement. I do not want the money as I live here with my father, and it is a real necessity for Eve and Mr. Coyshe. You see—I could not do other.’

‘And when your father dies, Morwell also passes to Eve. What is left for you?’

‘Oh, I shall do very well. Mr. Coyshe and Eve would never endure to live here. By the time dear papa is called away Mr. Coyshe will have made himself a name, be a physician, and rolling in money. Perhaps he and Eve may like to run here for their short holiday and breathe our pure air, but otherwise they will not occupy the place, and I thought I might live on here and manage for them. Then’—she turned her cheek and Jasper saw a glitter on the long dark lash, but at the same time the dimple of a smile on her cheek—’then, dear friend’—she put up her hand on the sill, and he caught it—’then, dear friend, perhaps you will not mind helping me. Then probably your little trouble will be over.’ She was silent, thinking, and he saw the dimple go out of her smooth cheek, and the sparkling drop fall from the lash on that cheek. ‘All is in God’s hand,’ she said. ‘We do wrong to look forward; I shall be happy to leave it so, and wait and trust.’

Then he put the other hand which did not clasp hers under her chin, and tried to raise her face, but he could only reach her brow with his lips and kiss it. He said not one word.

‘You do not answer,’ she said.

‘I cannot,’ he replied.

Then the door was thrown open and Eve entered, flushed, and holding up her finger.

‘Look, Bab!—look, dear! I have my ring again. Now I can shake off that doctor.’

‘O Eve!’ gasped Barbara; ‘the ring! where did you get it?’ She turned sharply to Jasper. ‘She has seen him—your brother Martin—again.’

Eve was, for a moment, confused, but only for a moment. She recovered herself and said merrily, ‘Why, Barbie dear, however did you get that crown of mignonette in your hair? You never stuck it there yourself. You would not dream of such a thing; besides, your arm is not long enough to reach the flower-bed. Jasper! confess you have been doing this.’ She clasped her hands and danced. ‘O what fun!’ she exclaimed: ‘but really it is a shame of me interfering when Barbara is so busy with the tuckers, and Jasper in garnishing Barbara’s head.’ Then she bounded out of the room, leaving her sister in confusion.