"Just try—there's a good girl," urges he, coaxingly; "you can stop in a minute if you find that it hurts you."
A mulish expression comes into her face; small good would persuasion, cajolery, threats, or promises do now!
"I am very sorry I cannot oblige you; but as I am to dine out on Thursday, and one is always expected to sing, I really must nurse my voice."
[CHAPTER XXXV.]
"When the days begin to lengthen,
Then the cold begins to strengthen."
This ancient distich proves true in the year I am speaking of. Not later than Christmas does the moist mild weather last. With January the frost comes hurrying back; hanging great icicles on the house-eaves, throwing men out of work, and pressing with its iron finger the thin faint life out of half-a-dozen old almsmen and almswomen. The foxes have a little breathing-time—a little space in which to steal and eat three or four more fat capons and stubble-fed geese—before that evil day when their dappled foes shall tear their poor little red bodies limb from limb. Hunting is stopped, and men are hurrying up from the shires to London. St. James's Street and its hundred clubs are crowded. At Blessington everybody is pirouetting on the ice. St. John, passionately fond of all out-of-door sports, spends the whole day on the mere. One afternoon a large party comes over from Lord Linley's place, five miles away. Not in all Lord Linley's grounds is there such a stretch of smooth ice as the Blessington pool affords; and so they are all come to show their prowess on its hard flat face.
Esther keeps well out of their way. From her post of observation—the deep window-seat in the China gallery—she has watched their arrival, heard their gay voices in the hall, and then, unnoticed, unmissed, she has stolen out upon one of her long, dawdling, cold-giving strolls in the park: over the frost-crisped grass, under the branchy trees, whose staglike crowns cut the pale sky—up little knolls and down into dips where, in summer time, the fern stands neck high. At last she comes in sight of the mere; and, impelled by curiosity, trusting in her own insignificance to escape notice, sits down on a bank that slopes gently down towards the sheet of water, and looks upon the unwonted brilliance of the scene. Girls in velvet short costumes; bright petticoats, furs, hats with humming birds on them, curls, fair chignons, glancing in the cheerful winter sun. Fashion in all its folly and extravagance, but picturesque withal; it is as if a company of Dresden shepherdesses had stepped off the mantelshelf, and come tripping, dainty-footed, over the frozen water. Her eyes follow the shepherdess figures with eager interest—so seldom in her simple country-bred life has she been brought into contact with any of Fashion's bright daughters. The men have less attraction for her. Under no most prosperous conjunction of circumstances could she ever have been a man; but under happier auspices she might have been one of these fluttering butterflies—a prettier butterfly than any there, her heart tells her. Shylock's words recur to her: "Am not I 'fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer?' Why, then, are they frisking about in purple and fine linen upon the ice, with half-a-dozen young patricians (in trousers of surprising tightness and coats of unequalled brevity) in their train, while I am perched here upon the all-alone stone, among these stiff cold sedges, with only the Canada geese, with their long necks craned out, screeching above my head?"