Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

by Rhoda Broughton

"Is there no vehicle I can have?" she asks in impatient agony—"no cart?—no anything? I'd give all I have in the world to any one who would take me. Oh God! how many minutes I am wasting."

The housemaid puts down her flat candlestick on the table, and rubs her forehead with her rough fore-finger to aid her thinking powers. "There's the dog-cart that the under-servants goes to church in," she says, presently, with an uncertain suggestion: "if we could knock the men up, you might have it, perhaps."

"Knock them up this instant, then!" cries Esther, with passionate urgency—"now, this minute! Go, for God's sake!"

So saying, she almost pushes the woman out of the room, and herself follows her. Through long passages and corridors, full of emptiness and darkness—darkness utter and complete, save where through the gallery's high-stained east window the chilly, chilly dawn comes peeping, with a grey glimmer, about the black frames, never closing eyes, and stiff, prim simpers of the family portraits—down to the lower regions, where the huge kitchen-grate yawns, black as Erebus—up steep back-stairs along other passages. In one of these passages Esther stands, her frame trembling and teeth chattering with cold and nervous excitement, while her companion raps with broad, hard knuckles on a door, and loudly calls on Simpson to awake. But hard workers are hard sleepers, and it is some time before the coachman can be induced to leave the country of slumber. When at length he is aroused, and has come out to them, in all the yawning sulkiness of disturbed sleep, it is a still longer time before he can be induced to admit the possibility of any vehicle whatever being put at Esther's disposal: with so righteous a fear of his wrath has Sir Thomas succeeded in inspiring his subordinates.

It is not without the aid of all her remaining money, with the exception of what is needed for the purchase of her railway ticket—not without the aid of all that is left of poor Jack's hardly-spared five-pound note—that she is able at length to induce him to consent to the getting ready of the dog-cart "in which the under-servants goes to church." Fully three-quarters of an hour more elapse before one of the helpers can be knocked up, can dress himself, can harness the oldest and screwiest horse in the stables, and put him, with many a muttered grumble, into the cart. Wretched Esther follows the man and his lanthorn to the stable-yard, with the vain idea that her presence may hurry his movements. During most of the three-quarters of an hour she walks quickly up and down over the hard, round stones with which the yard is paved, or stands watching, with greedy eyes, every step in the harnessing process; while her hands clench themselves, as his are clenched who is dead by some very cruel, violent death, and a pain like a red-hot, two-bladed knife keeps running through her heart. Before the horse is well between the shafts, she has climbed into the cart and taken her seat.

"The luggage is not in yet, 'm," suggests the groom, respectfully.

"Oh! never mind the luggage," cries Esther, feverishly; "I don't want it! I don't want anything! I'm ready! Get in, please, and set off this minute!"

Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of the rose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as the glorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been a positive, actual frost in the night—not frost enough to congeal the wayside pools or to kill the dahlias—but the air has, for all that, a frosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The trees and hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadruple their real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; the meadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up to the shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgotten to take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dress and jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shake and shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it—she could not have told you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold.

At the turnpike gate a sleepy old man comes hobbling out (men at toll-gates are mostly one-legged), in his hand a candle, to which the white morning is beginning to give a very sickly, yellow look: it seems to Esther that he will never have done fumbling in his breeches-pocket for the sixpence of change that eludes his search.

"Why do you stop? Cannot you go a little quicker?" asks Esther, hoarsely, her teeth chattering with cold and misery, as the groom allows his horse to walk up a long, gentle incline.