"Esther," said Mr. Tremain a few hours later, as they sat together in the library, just before the time for the tea-tray and the return of the other visitors, who, at Dick Darling's suggestion and under her guidance, had gone en masse to deal out tobacco and small sums of money to the old salts at Snug Harbour, "Esther, did you know Patricia was to be here, when you asked me to come?" His voice was more stern than reproachful, and Mrs. Newbold, glancing up at him furtively, thought how cold and impassive was his face. She paused a moment before answering him, and the flames from the pine-logs on the wide hearth, leaping high, revealed a half-anxious, half-hesitating expression in her blue eyes and about her delicately-cut mouth. She held a screen of scarlet Ibis feathers, as she sat in a low chair, to shield her from the heat, and her hand trembled just enough to set the scarlet feathers moving, like so many vivid fire-tongues. She answered somewhat evasively: "And if I did, Philip, what then? Is the old wound so deep it cannot be healed, and do you, a Hercules among men, shrink from the light touch of a woman's fingers?" "We are but courageous," he made answer, "according to time and opportunity, and the weakness or strength of the temptation. A woman's hand has been the cause of a man's undoing ever since the world began, Esther. I have no desire to become another sacrifice on the altar of a woman's vanity." "What do you fear, Philip?" she asked, presently, turning the feather fan round and round in her fingers, and watching him intently as she spoke. "What do I fear? Everything and nothing. You, who know the whole miserable old story, must also know the bitterness of its ending. What do I fear? I fear Patricia; I fear the light coming and going in her eyes; I fear the grace and beauty of her motions; I fear the subtle witchery of her voice; I fear the sweetness of her smile, the studied trick of her down-drooped mouth, the soft lingering pressure of her hand; I fear—but there, why fight against shadows? I have the remedy in my own hands—I can leave you, Esther. Even you cannot compel me to see her." He had risen as he spoke, and moved about restlessly, stopping half-unconsciously at a table that stood in his path, and fingered absently the several articles of bric-À-brac upon it. Esther followed his movements with her eyes, a look of pity and yet triumph on her face. As his voice grew passionate, she dropped the feather-screen, and clasping her hands across her knee, drew a quick long breath; but when he came towards her again, she sank back into her former listless attitude. He stood up tall and straight before her, resting one arm upon the chimney-shelf, and looked down at her with dark excited eyes, which the slight smile upon his lips failed to counterbalance. "Did you ask her here with some deep-laid plan of reconciliation? Esther, was that your motive? Did you think, knowing me since your girlhood—not so many years ago, Esther—and finding me fairly good-natured and forgiving, as men go, that you would take the spindle of fate into your own hands, and like Atropos of old, cut the tangled skein of my life, in the vain hope of reuniting it with hers? It was kindly meant, Esther, but—it cannot be." Mrs. Newbold stopped him with an upward gesture of her hand. "Philip," she said, slowly, and looking at him steadily, "does it not strike you—do you not think—you are taking her acquiescence rather too much as a matter of course? Has Patricia no right to repudiate you, before even you endeavour to reclaim her?" He paused before he answered, and the lines about his mouth and eyes grew sterner and more defined. When he spoke he took his arm from the chimney-shelf, on which he had been resting, as though disdaining that slight support, and his voice sounded harsh and uncompromising. "Has she that right, Esther? Has she not rather by her own actions cut herself adrift from the usual consideration granted to women? Did she consider me, when she cast me off so lightly? And for what, forsooth? Because I was a too eager and too rustic a lover; because my outward appearance offended her hypercritical eyes; because she was but a butterfly of the hour, as vain and frivolous as the frailest cigale of a summer's hour; and because her world, before which she shone as a bright particular star—and oh, what a little, trifling world it was!—and over which she reigned as a queen, repudiated me. I was not of their mode; I was not a super-chic; I could not speak their argot, or join in their light impertinent persiflage. I was too honest, Esther, for her world—too honest and too brutally straightforward, and so—she threw me over." "She was young, Philip," pleaded Mrs. Newbold, "young and flattered and spoilt. Cannot you now make allowance for her surroundings then, and understand how terrible and impossible poverty, imperious poverty, seemed to her? You, who so well appreciate the luxuries of life now, cannot you put yourself in Patricia's place, and judge from her standpoint, and see with her eyes, what it meant, when you asked her to fling her old life behind her, and start on a new and untried one, with you alone, and you only as recompense and compensation?" "If she had loved me," broke in Mr. Tremain, "she would not have considered, she would not have hesitated; my love and my devotion would have weighed heavier with her than all the baubles and gewgaws of her fashionable life." For all answer to this Mrs. Newbold laughed, throwing back her pretty head, and throwing out her pretty hands dramatically. "Ah," she cried, "for wholesale, downright vanity commend me to a man! It's no use looking savage, Philip; I cannot help it, I must have my laugh out; your cool assumption of the be-all and end-all of Patricia's existence is too irresistibly funny. It's very man-like, and very characteristic. You never take into consideration, you lords of creation, the up-bringing, education and surroundings of a girl of the world. You forget that the very trifles you stigmatise as frivolities are the daily small necessities of her life: she knows nothing different. It is as natural to her to have pretty clothes, artistic surroundings, and dainty employments, as it is for you to go to a crack tailor and smoke an irreproachable cigar. She cannot understand another sort of world where these elements are not: she accepts them as a matter of course, and could not fashion her day without them. Then comes some untoward fate, in the shape of a lover from that unfamiliar world, whose habits, manner of life, occupations, are all opposed to hers—as opposite as the luxurious civilisation of Europe is to that of the heart of Africa. What she deems necessities, he calls luxuries; her natural pastimes become frivolities; her occupations, idleness; her unconscious acceptation of all that money brings, worldliness; and her hesitation, when her lover and her love demand the sacrifice of all this, pusillanimity and calculativeness. And what does the man offer in exchange?—for luxurious comfort, straitened means; for dainty clothes, the resuscitated dresses of last year; for society—a tired harassed husband; and for recreation—perhaps a cheap place at some theatre, two or three times a year." "You are painfully frank, Esther," said Mr. Tremain, stiffly. "Yes, and I mean to be," continued Mrs. Newbold, "because it is a subject I have very much at heart, and because it is the fashion of the day to cry down the worldly maiden, and cry up the poor, but self-sacrificing lover. Had you anything better to offer Patricia, than what my words picture? Was there any brighter prospect for her? Did you not make the sacrifice as great a one as possible, and could you honourably and reasonably have expected the change in your fortunes, when you urged Patricia's choice, and left her no alternative between poverty with you, and her accustomed luxury without you? Do you not understand her position somewhat better, Philip, since you have become a man of luxury and wealth?" "You should qualify as a special pleader, Esther," was Mr. Tremain's reply; "but you are in a manner right, a woman's motives are always beyond a man's fathoming;" and then with half a sigh she heard him add, under his breath, "poor Patty, poor pretty wilful Patty!" and she smiled at the inconsequent words, and nodded her pretty head at the dancing flames, while the lurking look of triumph in her eyes shone out defiantly, and drove away the droop of apprehension from her lips. Then came Long, and the tea-tray, and little Marianne, and Mrs. Esther was very gracious and sweet, and full of petits soins for Mr. Tremain's comfort, and withal so winsome and so subduedly elated, that Dick Darling—who returned presently with all her volunteers in outrageous spirits—declared she was "the daisyest thing out, and quite too superlatively lovely!" "And how did you find the old salts, Dick?" asked Esther, when every one had been served with tea, and little Marianne was particularly happy, forcing some scalding milk down the luckless throat of "Trim," her fidus Achates in terrier-dog form. "Oh, as fresh as paint, and as delightfully greedy and selfish as it behoves all old men to be. They minutely inspected the 'baccy,' and one of them told me, ''tweren't his sort, but shiver his timbers if he could expect a young leddy ter know the difference atween "old virginny," and "honey dew";' and another one spat rather unpleasantly upon the new silver dollar I gave him, and expressed his rather blasphemous opinion, as to its being a 'Blaine dollar,' and only worth ninety cents! Oh, my dear, they are a most edifying old crew, and their simplicity and naturalness is only worthy of that respectable old party, and his residence, known familiarly as 'Davy Jones's locker.'" "Dick, you are incorrigible!" laughed Mrs. Newbold, and that young lady, on whom the afternoon's expedition seemed to have acted as champagne, began again. "There was one most particularly refreshing old hero; he said he had been all through the civil war, and got his promotion, and his leg bowled off, at Gettysburgh——" "Oh, but I say, Miss Dick," here broke in Freddy Slade, "he couldn't do it, you know, not there, because Gettysburgh was a land battle, and how could your old man-o'-war's man be there?" "He said Gettysburgh, I am perfectly sure he did," answered Dick, "because I quite well remember how he winked at me when he said it, and—yes, I did, I couldn't help it, it must have been capillary attraction, Esther—I winked back at him, and then he spun a tremendous yarn, all about his gory wounds, and bloody hurts; mixed up, you know, with reefing topsails, and belaying mizzen-masts, and setting fore and aft sheets, and rolling in the scuppers, and weltering in his own gore, and piping up the dog-watch, and losing his leg, and fighting for his country, and scoffing at its rewards; and I am sure, yes, very sure, he said it was at Gettysburgh it all happened. But really now, when you come to think of it, things were a little mixed, and I am not responsible for the geography of this country." At this there was another laugh, in which Dick joined, and then in the silence that followed, Marianne's shrill treble made itself heard: "I do quite think with Perkins, mumsey, Miss Dick's the gal for my money!" At which astounding revelation Esther gasped, and the rest of the company fell into renewed shouts of laughter. "Come here, Mimi," said Mr. Slade at last, putting out his hand, and catching hold of the child and the dog, and drawing them towards him, he lifted Marianne on to his knee, causing Trim to stand in perilous fashion on his back legs, since his little mistress refused to release him. "Now, Mimi," Mr. Slade continued in the hush of a breathless silence, "you are a most interesting little girl, and what you have just told us has made Miss Dick very happy, only we should like to know a little more. Can you remember anything else said by the ingenuous Mr. Perkins?" "He isn't Mister Perkins, 'cept to Sarah," said Marianne, very proud of her position, and rather consequential in consequence; "he's her young man, and he comes under her window sometimes, and sings 'Sally in our Alley,' real beautiful, and that's her, and I heard her tell Jane, and she's my very own nursery-maid, that he said 'that there wasn't no one could hold a candle to Miss Dick, and she was the gal for his money; he wouldn't mind putting a fiver on her, 'cause she'd run straight; but he wouldn't go much on that there pal of hers, Miss James, 'cause she was a shifty one.'" "Oh, Marianne, Marianne!" cried out Esther, trying vainly to cover the confusion caused by Miss Newbold's parrot-like revelations, "come here to me." Then as Mimi struggled down from Mr. Slade's detaining arms, and danced over to her mother, she said, reprovingly: "What were you doing, to hear all that senseless gossip? Where was Mdlle. Lamien?" "Poor Lammy had a 'cruciation' headache," lisped the little girl, standing first on one foot and then on the other; "so I was just put off on to Jane, 'cause nursey was out, and so she and Sarah did their work together and I helped 'em, and they were having 'a crack' over the company. Is you sorry, mumsey?" the little thing asked suddenly, noticing the look of annoyance on her mother's face. "Was I naughty?" "Yes, I am very sorry," answered Mrs. Newbold, emphatically; "my little daughter, you must not listen to such nonsense. You must get your dolly next time, or come to me, when Mdlle. Lamien has a headache." "Poor Lammy!" echoed the child, "she was cross, too, and said Sarah was very wrong, every one wasn't made with Miss Dick's bright face and sweet temper; but I could make myself like her if I tried to always say a kind thing and not a horrid one, though the horrid one might be cleverer." There was a moment's unbearable awkwardness as Mimi's sage remarks fell upon the burning ears of her audience; then Esther made a move, quickly followed by the other ladies, and the party broke up, each glad to escape the embarrassment of the moment. Esther alone noticed Miss James's face, flushed with passion and mortification, and sighed involuntarily. She had reason afterwards to remember that look, and her sigh. |