"Yes, my horse and my dog are my companions generally. My aunt never walks, and Sir Thomas never rides. Were you going into the park again, Mr. Ward?"
By this time Cæsar had run out into the road, and was in a state of impatient perplexity, and evidently much inconvenienced by the basket, which he was too well trained to drop, but shook disconsolately as he glanced reproachfully at Clare, wondering how much longer she meant to keep him waiting.
"No, Miss Carruthers, I was merely walking past the Sycamores, and recalling yesterday's pleasure--half gladly, half sadly, as I fancy we recall all pleasures."
"I--I told my uncle of your visit yesterday, and he said he was sorry to have missed you, and hoped you would see as much of the park as you liked. Did--did you finish your sketch, Mr. Ward? Oh, that horrid Cæsar, he will have the handle off my basket. Just see how he is knocking it against the stile."
She came hurriedly through the open gateway into the road, George following her.
"May I take it from him?" he said.
"Oh, pray do; there now, he is over the stile, and running through the field."
George rushed away in pursuit of Cæsar, triumphant at his success in thus terminating a period of inaction for which he saw no reasonable excuse. Miss Carruthers mounted the stile in a more leisurely fashion, turned into the footpath which led through the field, and in a few moments met George returning, her basket in his hand, and Cæsar slouching along beside him, sulky and discontented.
She thanked George, told him she was going nearly as far as Amherst by the "short cut," which lay through her uncle's land, and the two young people in another minute found themselves walking side by side, as if such an arrangement were quite a matter of course, to which Mrs. Grundy could not possibly make any objection. Of course it was highly imprudent, not to say improper, and one of the two was perfectly conscious alike of the imprudence and the impropriety; perfectly conscious, also, that both were increased by the fact that he was George Dallas, and the young lady was Clare Carruthers, the niece of his stepfather, the girl, on whose account mainly he had been shut out from the house called by courtesy his mother's. As for Clare Carruthers, she knew little or nothing of life and the world of observances and rules of behaviour. Sheltered from the touch, from the breath, from the very knowledge of ill, the girl had always been free with a frank innocent freedom, happy with a guileless happiness, and as unsophisticated as any girl could well be in this wide-awake realistic nineteenth century. She was highly imaginative, emphatically of the romantic temperament, and, in short, a Lydia Languish without the caricature. Her notions of literary men, artists, and the like, were derived from their works; and as the little glimpse which she had as yet had of society (she had only "come out" at the ball at Poynings in February) had not enabled her to correct her ideas by comparison with reality, she cherished her illusions with ardour proportioned to their fallaciousness. The young men of her acquaintance were of either of two species: sons of country gentlemen, with means and inclination to devote themselves to the kind of life their fathers led, or military magnificoes, of whom Clare, contrary to the fashion of young ladies in general, entertained a mean and contemptuous opinion. When Captain Marsh and Captain Clitheroe were home "on leave," they found it convenient and agreeable to pass a good deal of their leisure at Poynings; and as they happened to be ninnies of the first magnitude, whose insignificance in every sense worth mention was only equalled by their conceit, Miss Carruthers had conceived a prejudice against military men in general, founded upon her dislike of the two specimens with whom she was most familiar. Clergymen are not uncommonly heroes in the imagination of young girls, but the most determined curate-worshipper could not have invested the clergymen who cured the souls in and about Amherst with heroic qualities. They were three in number. One was fat, bald, and devoted to antiquarianism and port wine. Another was thin, pock-marked, ill-tempered, deaf, and a flute-player. The third was a magistrate, a fox-hunter, and a despiser of womankind. In conclusion, all three were married, and Miss Carruthers was so unsophisticated, that, if they had been all three as handsome and irresistible as Adonis, she would never have thought of them in the way of mundane admiration, such being the case. So Clare's imagination had no home pasture in which to feed, and roamed far afield.
It had taken its hue from her tastes, which were strongly pronounced, in the direction of literature. Clare had received a "good education;" that is to say, she had been placed by a fashionable mother under the care of a fashionable governess, who had superintended fashionable masters while they imparted a knowledge of music, drawing, dancing, and a couple of modern languages to her pretty, docile, intelligent pupil. The more solid branches of instruction Clare had climbed under Miss Pettigrew's personal care, and had "done credit" to her instructress, as the phrase goes. But the upshot of it all was, that she had very little sound knowledge, and that the real educational process had commenced for her with the termination of Miss Pettigrew's reign, and had received considerable impetus when Clare had been transferred--on the not particularly lamented decease of the fashionable mother, who was Sir Thomas Boldero's sister, and remarkably unlike that hearty and unworldly country gentleman--to Poynings and the guardianship of Mr. Carruthers. Then the girl began to read after her own fancy indeed, unguided and uncontrolled, but in an omnivorous fashion; and as she was full of feeling, fancy, and enthusiasm, her reading ran a good deal in the poetical, romantic, and imaginative line. Novels she devoured, and she was of course a devotee of Tennyson and Longfellow, saying of the latter, as her highest idea of praise, that she could hardly believe him to be an American, or a dweller in that odious vulgar country, and wondering why Mrs. Carruthers seemed a little annoyed by the observation. She read history, too, provided it was picturesquely written, and books of travel, exploration, and adventure she delighted in. Periodical literature she was specially addicted to, and it was rather a pleasant little vanity of Clare to "keep up with" all the serial stories--not confusing the characters or the incidents, no matter how numerous they were, and to know the tables of contents of all the magazines and reviews thoroughly. She had so much access to books that, as far as a lady's possible requirements could go, it might be said, without exaggeration, to be unlimited. Not only did the Sycamores boast a fine library, kept up with the utmost care and attention by Sir Thomas Boldero, and of which she had the freedom, but Poynings was also very creditably endowed in a similar respect, and Mrs. Carruthers, as persistent a reader as Clare, if less discursive, subscribed largely to Mudie's. Croquet had not yet assumed its sovereign sway over English young-persondom, and none but ponderous and formal hospitalities prevailed at Poynings, so that Clare had ample leisure to bestow upon her books, her pets, and her flowers. She was so surrounded with luxury and comfort, that it was not wonderful she should invest opposite conditions of existence with irresistible charms; and her habitual associates were so commonplace, so prosperous and conventional, that her aspirations for opportunities of hero-worship naturally directed themselves towards oppressed worth, unappreciated genius, and fiery hearts struggling manfully with adverse fate. "The red planet Mars" was a great favourite with her, and to suffer and be strong a much finer idea to her mind than not to suffer and to have no particular occasion for strength. She knew little of the realities of life, having never had a deeper grief than that caused by the death of her mother, and she was in the habit of reproaching herself very bitterly with the superficiality and the insufficiency of the sorrow she had experienced on that occasion, and therefore mild and merciful judges would have pitied and excused her errors of judgment, her impulsive departure from conventional rules. Mild and merciful judges are not plentiful commodities, however, and Mrs. Grundy would doubtless have had a great deal to say, and a very fair pretext for saying it, had she seen Miss Carruthers strolling through the fields which lay between the Sycamores and Amherst, in deep and undisguisedly delighted conversation with a strange young man, who was apparently absorbed in the pleasure of talking to and listening to her, while Cæsar trotted now by the side of the one, anon of the other, with serene and friendly complacency. Mrs. Grundy was, however, not destined to know anything about the "very suspicious" circumstance for the present. And George Dallas and Clare Carruthers, with the unscrupulous yielding to the impulse of the moment, which affords youth such splendid opportunities for getting into scrapes, from which the utmost efforts of their elders are powerless to extricate them, walked and talked and improved the shining hours into a familiar acquaintance, which the girl would have called friendship, but which the young man felt, only too surely, was love at first sight. He had mocked at such an idea, had denied its existence, had derided it with tongue and pen, but here it was, facing him now, delivering to him a silent challenge to deny, dispute, or mock at it any more.