CHAPTER XIII.
Time flew rapidly with both Chandos Winslow and Rose Tracy. They knew not what had thus now plumed the great decayer's pinions for him. Chandos thought that, in his own case, it was, that he had assumed one of those old primeval occupations which in patriarchal days made the minutes run so fast that men lived a thousand years as if they had been but seventy. There was nothing for him like the life of a gardener.
Rose was somewhat more puzzled to account for the cheerful passing of the minutes. When she had been a hundred times more gay, which was, upon a fair calculation, some six weeks before, she had often called the hours lazy-footed loiterers; but now they sped on so fast--so fast--she hardly knew that the year was nearly at the end. She was now as much in the garden as her father, her sister, or her uncle. Whenever they were there, she was with them. When they talked to the head-gardener, she talked to him too; and sometimes a merry smile would come upon her warm little lips, of which her companions did not well see the cause. But Rose was seldom in the garden alone--never indeed but at the two stated times of the day when she went to feed her gold-fishes. That she could not help. It must be deeply impressed upon the reader's mind--ay, and reiterated, that from childhood this had been her task; and it was quite impossible that she could abandon it now--at least, so thought Rose.
Every morning, then, and every evening, she visited the little basin, and hung over her glossy favourites for several minutes. Well was she named--for she was like her name--and very seldom has the eye of man beheld anything more fair than Rose Tracy as she looked down upon the water under the shade of the marble dome above: the soft cheek like the heart of a blush rose, the clustering hair falling like moss over her brow, the bending form, graceful as the stem of a flower.
I know not how fate, fortune, or design had arranged it; but so it was, that the hours when Chandos returned to his cottage, either in the morning to breakfast, or in the evening to rest, were always a few minutes after the periods when Rose visited the basin; and his way at either time was sure to lie near that spot. If Emily was with her, as sometimes happened, the head-gardener doffed his hat and passed on. If Rose was alone, Chandos Winslow paused for a time, resumed his station and himself, and enjoyed a few sweet moments of unreserved intercourse with the only person who knew him as he really was.
The strange situation in which they were placed, their former meeting in a brighter scene, the future prospects and intentions of one, at least, of the parties to those short conversations, furnished a thousand subjects apart from all the rest of the world's things, which had the effect that such mutual stores of thought and feeling always have--they drew heart towards heart; and Chandos soon began to feel that there was something else on earth than he had calculated upon to struggle for against the world's frowns.
Yet love was never mentioned between them. They talked confidingly and happily; they did not know that they met purposely; there was a little timidity in both their bosoms, but it was timidity at their own feelings, not in the slightest degree at the fact of concealment. She called him Mr. Winslow, and he called her Miss Tracy, long after the names of Chandos and Rose came first to the lip.
The quiet course of growing affection, however, was not altogether untroubled--it never is. A gay party came down to Mr. Tracy's, to eat his dinners and to shoot his pheasants. There were battues in the morning, and music and dancing in the evening; and the wind wafted merry sounds to the cottage of the gardener. Chandos was not without discomfort; not that he longed to mix again in the scenes in which he had so often taken part, to laugh with the joyous, to jest with the gay. But he longed to be by the side of Rose Tracy; and when he thought of her surrounded by the bright, the wealthy, and the great; when he remembered that she was beautiful, graceful, captivating, one of the co-heiresses of a man of great wealth; when he recollected that there was no tie between him and her, he began to fear that the bitterest drops of the bitter cup of fortune were yet to be drank.
He knew not all which that cup might still contain.
When they went not out early to shoot, the guests at Northferry House sometimes would roam through the grounds, occasionally with their inviter or his daughters, occasionally alone; and one day, when an expedition to a high moor in the neighbourhood, where there was excellent wild shooting, had been put off till the afternoon, a gay nobleman, who fluttered between Emily and Rose, perfectly confident of captivating either or both if he chose, exclaimed as they all left the breakfast table, "I shall go and talk to your gardener, Tracy. Such a fellow must be a curiosity, as much worth seeing as a bonassus.--A gardener who talks Latin and quotes poetry! Upon my life you are a favoured man! Will you not go and introduce me, Miss Tracy, to this scientific son of Adam, whom your father has told me of."
"Excuse me, my lord," answered Emily, "your lordship will need no introduction. I have a letter to write for post."
"Will not the fair Rose take compassion on me, then?" asked Viscount Overton. "Who but the Rose should introduce one to the gardener?"
"Roses are not found on the stalk in the winter, my good lord," replied General Tracy for his niece, who, he saw, was somewhat annoyed. "But I will be your introducer, if needful, though, according to the phrase of old playwrights and novelists, a gentleman of your figure carries his own introduction with him."
"General, you are too good," replied the other, with an air of mingled self-satisfaction and persiflage. "But really that was an excellent jest of yours--I must remember it--Roses are not found on the stalk in the winter! Capital! Do you make many jests?"
"When I have fair subjects," answered Walter Tracy, with perfect good humour. "But let us go, Viscount, if you are disposed. We shall find Mr. Acton in the garden at this time. It is a pity you are not an Irishman; for he is the best hand at managing a bull I ever saw."
As they went, the story of the adventure with Farmer Thorpe's wild beast was related, much to the delight of Lord Overton, who was a man of a good deal of courage and spirit, though overlaid with an affectation of effeminacy; and by the time it was done, they were by the side of Chandos. General Tracy informed the head-gardener who the noble lord was, and jestingly launched out into an encomium of his taste for and knowledge of gardening.
"I can assure you, Mr. Acton," said Lord Overton, in a tone of far too marked condescension, "that, though the General makes a jest of it, I am exceedingly fond of gardening, and both can and do take a spade or rake in hand as well as any man."
"I am glad to hear it, my lord," replied Chandos, who did not love either his look or his manner; "our nobility must always be the better for some manly employments."
The Viscount was a little piqued, for there certainly was somewhat of a sneer in the tone; and he replied, "But I hear that you, my good friend, occasionally vary your labours with more graceful occupations--studying Latin and Greek, and reading the poets, thinking, I suppose, 'Ingenuas didicisse fideliter, artes, emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.' I dare say you know where the passage is."
"In the Eton Latin Grammar," answered Chandos, drily; and turning to one of the under-gardeners, he gave him some orders respecting the work he was about.
"He does not seem to have had his manners much softened," said Lord Overton in a low voice to Walter Tracy. But the General only replied by a joyous peal of laughter; and, though the peer would not suffer himself to be discomfited, and renewed the conversation with Chandos, he could win no sign of having converted him to a belief, that he was at all honoured by his condescension.
"He's a radical, I suppose," said Lord Overton, when they turned away. "All these self-taught fellows are radicals."
"No, there you are mistaken, my good lord," answered Walter Tracy; "he is a high tory. That is the only bad point about him."
"Ah, General! you always were a terrible whig," said the Viscount, with a shake of the head.
"And always shall be," replied his companion, with a low and somewhat cynical bow; "though the great abilities I see ranged on the other side may make me regret that I am too old and too stiff to change."
"Oh, one is never too old to mend," said Lord Overton; "and one never should be too stiff. That harsh, violent, obstinate adherence to party is the bane of our country."
"Surely your lordship has no occasion to complain of it in our days," observed the General. "If one read the speeches of the present men, delivered twenty, fifteen, ten years ago, and mustered them according to their opinions of that date, where should we find them? But I am no politician. It only strikes me that the difference of the two great parties is this, if I may use some military phraseology: the whigs, pushing on, bayonet in hand, are a little in advance of their first position. Their opponents are scattered all over the field, some fighting, some flying, and more surrendering to the enemy. But, to return, this young man, as I have said, seems to me a very rabid tory--I beg your pardon--but a very honest fellow, notwithstanding."
"The two things are quite compatible, General," said the Viscount, stiffly.
"Oh, perfectly," replied Walter Tracy. "As long as tories remain tories they are very honest people; but when they have turned round two or three times, I do not know what they are."
Lord Overton did not like the conversation, and changed it; and the two gentlemen returned to the house. Not many days after he took his departure for London, not quite able to make up his mind whether Rose or Emily, or either, was qualified by wealth, beauty, and grace to become Viscountess Overton. After three days thought in London, he decided that neither was, upon the consideration of the great moral objection that exists to men of rank marrying Misses, especially where that most horrible denomination is not corrected by the word honourable before it. If Emily had been even a maid of honour, so that her name might have appeared in the newspapers as the Honourable Miss Tracy, he might have consented; but as it was, he judged decidedly it would be a mesalliance, although Mr. Tracy's direct ancestors stood upon the rolls of fame, when his own were herding cattle.
He saved himself a very great mortification; for, to be rejected when a man mistakenly thinks he is condescending, is the bitterest draught with which false pride can be medicined.
Both Emily and Rose Tracy were very glad when the peer was gone, for his fluttering from one to the other (though he annoyed Emily most) had much the same effect as having a bee or large fly in the room; but there was another person in the neighbourhood who rejoiced still more, and that was Horace Fleming. He had dined twice at Mr. Tracy's while the party of visitors were there, and he did not at all approve of Lord Overton's attentions to Emily. Chandos Winslow was not sorry, for although he had not such definite cause for uneasiness as Fleming, yet that little god of love, whom we hear so much of, and so seldom see, is not only a metaphysical god, but a very irritable god too. The sight of Rose Tracy had always been pleasant to him during the whole time he had been in Mr. Tracy's service. Her beautiful little ancle and tiny foot, as she walked along the paths, had to his fancy the power of calling up flowers as it passed. Her smile had seemed to him to give back summer to the wintry day; the light of her eyes to prolong the sunshine, and make the twilight bright. In the morning she was his Aurora, in the evening his Hesperus; and in a word, in the space of six weeks and a day, Chandos Winslow had fallen very much in love. But it must be remarked, that the odd day mentioned, was far detached from the six weeks, dating nearly one year before. It had been an epocha which he had always remembered however--one of the green spots in the past. A lovely and intelligent girl, fresh, and unspoiled by the great corruptor of taste, feeling, and mind--fashionable society--had been cast upon his care and attention for several hours, in a crowd which prevented her from finding her own party at a fête. They had danced together more than was prudent and conventional, because they did not well know what else to do; and the little embarrassment of the moment had only excited for her an additional interest over and above that created by youth, beauty, grace, and innocence. At the end of the evening, she had passed from his sight like a shooting star, as he thought, for ever. But he remembered the bright meteor, and its rays sometimes even had visited him in sleep. Thus that day had as much to do with the love of the case as the far-detached six weeks; though they had served to ripen, and perfect, and mature a passion of which but one solitary seed had been sown before.
Four days after Lord Overton had departed, and three after the rest of the guests had taken flight, Chandos saw Rose through the trees come along towards the marble basin with a quicker step than usual. The little velvet and chinchilla mantle was pressed tight over her full, fine bosom, to keep out the cold wind of the last day of the year; but there was an eager look in her bright eyes which made him think that her rapid pace had other motives than mere exercise; and he, too, hurried his steps, to reach the spot to which her steps tended, at the same time as herself. Just as they both approached it, however, one of the under-gardeners came up to ask a question of his superior officer. He got a quick but kindly answer; but then he asked another; and that was answered too. The devil was certainly in the man; for, having nothing more to say to Chandos, he turned to Rose, and inquired whether she would not like the screens put up to keep the pond from the cold wind; and by the time he had done, General Tracy appeared, and took possession of his niece's ear.
Rose went away with a slower step and less eager look than she came. But Chandos took care to be near the little basin at the time of sunset, marking out some alterations in the surrounding shrubs which he intended to propose against the spring. When Rose appeared, Emily was with her; and Chandos was again disappointed. He showed the two fair girls, however, what he intended to suggest to their father; and, for one single moment, while Emily, taking the basket, scattered some crumbs to her sister's favourites, Rose followed the head-gardener to a spot which he thought might be well opened out, to give a view beyond; and then, she said, in a low, hurried tone, "I am going to do what perhaps is not right; but I must speak to you to-morrow morning, at all risks. I will be here half-an-hour earlier than usual;" and with limbs shaking as if she had committed theft, Rose left him, and hurried back to her sister, ere Emily well perceived that she had left her side.
They were two sisters, however; loving like sisters, trusting like sisters, with barely a year between them; and though they knew that the one was younger, the other elder, they hardy felt it; for Lily was gentle and unpresuming, though firm as she was mild. She took nought upon her; and though she acted as the mistress of her father's house, yet Rose seemed to share her authority, and more than share her power. Emily pretended not to question or to rule her sister; and, had she been suspicious, she would have asked no questions: but she suspected nothing.