Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

by Rhoda Broughton

Gerard still remains at Blessington—remains, despite the six-o'clock dinners; despite the inarticulate and inharmonious mumblings with which old Blessington takes away the appetites of such as feast with him; despite the utter failure of his endeavours to draw from the mind of his betrothed any ideas but such as Le Follet and Le Journal des Demoiselles had just put into it. Latterly he has abandoned the attempt, has taken to reading the Times, Field, anything in the evening, instead; has even, in his despair—modern works of fiction being, as I have before observed, unknown at Blessington—waded through two chapters and a half of "Pamela," which Esther had inadvertently left on the table. Sometimes, to his own surprise, he catches himself wishing that his wedding-day were over. "When we are married, we need never speak to one another," he reflects. "Thank God, we shall not be so poor as to be obliged to keep together from economy; a dinner of herbs and hatred, or, worse still, indifference therewith, would be hard to digest; she may go her way, and I mine. I will get up a great stock of beads, and looking-glasses, and red calico, and make an expedition to Central Africa; learn some euphonious African tongue, all made up of Ms and Ns; and carefully abstain from engaging in arguments upon the immortality of the soul with intelligent natives."

Now and again conscience's voice thunders at him in the recesses of his soul: "You are paltering with temptation. Arise!—flee!—begone!" But he, strong in the innocence of his acts and words, replies doughtily: "Temptation is there none for me here. The occupations of my life are such as they would be at home; I am struggling to know and like better her with whom my life is to be passed. As to that other woman, I see her rarely, speak to her never, look at her as seldom as it is possible to me."

And, in the meantime, that other woman droops like an unwatered flower, day by day. When the mainspring of a watch is broken, must it not stop? If hope, the mainspring of life, be broken, must not life stop—not all at once, as the watch does, but by gentle yet sure degrees? A slow fire burns in the child's veins; before this man had come, she had peace—a sad stagnant peace, indeed, but still peace. Now she lives in a state of perpetual concealed excitement. True, they meet but rarely, speak to each other never; but the same roof covers them both. From her outlook in the China Gallery, she can watch his going forth in the morning, his coming back at evening. At breakfast and dinner he sits opposite to her; she can study his face, with stealthy care, lest she may be observed, while he drives heavily through slow trite talk with her that fills the place in his life that, for a golden day, from one sundown to another, was Esther's. Sometimes they meet upon the stairs; her black dress lightly touches him, as they pass one another dumbly. At night she lies awake, waiting to catch the sound of his footfall in the gallery past her door; has to wait long hours often; for he, unknowing that any one takes note of his vigils, sits in the smoking-room far into the small hours, puffing out of his well-coloured meerschaum great volumes of smoke—wishing, not seldom, I think, that he could puff away Constance, his beloved, into smoke volumes and thin air.

Fed by no kindly words, nourished only upon neglect and cold looks, Esther's love for Gerard yet strikes out great roots downwards—shoots forth strong branches upwards. A tree of far statelier growth it stands than in the days when the soft gales and gentle streams of answering love fanned and watered it. Who cares for what they can have? Who cries for the moon? It is the intermediate something—the something that lies just a handbreadth beyond the utmost stretch of our most painfully-strained arms, that we eat out our hearts in longing for.

Esther never goes beyond the park palings now, deterred by the fear of being waylaid by Linley. She need not have been alarmed. As long as she came naturally in his way, he was delighted to see her: as we stoop and pick gladly the fruit that drops off the tree at our feet. He had even, on a day when the frost forbade hunting, and when he had got tired of skating, taken the unwonted trouble of riding over to Blessington, to warm himself at the fire of those great black eyes, that have still for him the charm of novelty upon them; but women, many and fair, came too readily to his hand to make him very keen in the chase of any one individual woman. In former generations men used to be the pursuers, women the pursued. In this generation we, who have set right most things, have set right this also. Now, the hares pursue the harriers, the foxes the hounds, and the doves swoop upon the falcons.

During these latter evenings Mr Blessington has been very alert and wakeful—has insisted on being read to from tea to bed-time—a liberal hour. But, however hoarse and voiceless the young reader may be, Gerard never now comes to the rescue, never interferes, though the frequent teasing cough of the "damnable flirt" goes through his heart like a sword. With steady certainty, through frost and thaw, rain and shine, through all the alternations of an English winter, the young girl's health declines. To all but herself is this fact evident, and she, unaccustomed to illness—never having seen the signs of premature decay in others—thinks it is but a little weariness, a little languor, a nothing. It will pass when the swooned world revives into spring and the buttercups come.

Sunday is here again, the initial letter in the week's alphabet:

"The Sundays of man's life,
Threaded together on Time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal glorious King."

Ah me! the languid, yawning Sundays of most of us will make but sorry bracelets for any one, methinks. Sunday—the day on which the Shelford shopboys and shopgirls walk about gloriously apparelled, arm-in-arm, man and maid, filling their lungs with country air,—day on which the gentlefolks, such as are men of them, debarred from horse and hound and cue, smoke a cigar or two more than usual over the instructive pages of Messieurs De Kock, Sue, Balzac, &c.; while such as are women, being for the most part piously disposed, hold Goulburn's "Thoughts on Personal Religion," or Hannay's "Last Day of Our Lord's Passion," open on their velvet laps, and kill a reputation between each paragraph.

On this especial Sunday Esther has risen, feeling feebler, more nerveless than usual. Something in the influence of the weather—soft, sodden, sunless—weighs upon her with untold oppression. She would fain not go to church, remain at home, and lie on her bed; but this cannot be. Foremost in importance, in indispensability, among her duties are these Sunday ones. If the weather be tolerable, Mr. Blessington is always scrupulously punctual in attending Divine worship. Leaning on his valet's arm, he totters up the church, in his old tail-coat, tightly buttoned over his sunken chest, and, arrived at the Blessington pew, is deposited in a little nook thereof, partitioned (in some quirk of his, while he could yet see) from the rest. In this nook there is room for two people—to wit, for Mr. Blessington, and for the happy person who is to guide his devotions. And to conduct Mr. Blessington's prayers and praises is, I assure you, no sinecure. Almost entirely deaf, almost entirely blind, he is yet resolute to take a part in the services by no means less prominent than the clerk's. It is, therefore, his attendant's duty to shout the responses in his ear, in order to give him some clue to the portion of the ritual which has been arrived at and to check him with elbowings and nudgings, when his aberrations from the right path become so flagrantly noticeable as to distract the attention of the other worshippers. But too often, however, the attempts at repression on the part of the acolyte are so much labour lost. In the region of darkness and silence in which his infirmities have placed him, the old man frequently becomes impatient of the slow progress of the service as notified to him by the roars of his companion. Not seldom he proclaims, in a voice distinctly audible throughout the building, the point at which, according to his reckoning, priest and people should have arrived. "And with thy spirit," cries the squire, with unction in his deep, tremulous bass, while the sleek young rector's gentle "The Lord be with you" does not follow till five minutes later. In the Creed there is but one course to pursue: to start him, if possible, fair—happy, indeed, if he does not insist on turning to the altar somewhere towards the close of the second lesson or beginning of the Jubilate,—to start him fair, I say, and then in despair, give him his head. Fervently, loudly, rapidly, he announces his belief in the articles of the Christian faith, while parson, clerk, and congregation toil after him in vain. Occasionally—especially at such portions of the service as refer to our need of forgiveness, our sinfulness, our mortality,—he breaks out into senile tears; too deaf to hear his own penitent sobs, he has no idea of the loudness with which they reverberate through the church. Strangers, hearing, perk their heads up above their pews, and then fling them down again on their pocket-handkerchiefs convulsed with inextinguishable laughter; but the greater part of the assemblage are used to these spasms of grotesque devotion—it is only "t'oud squoire."