"Very few marry for talking,"
and had found its truth in her own experience, for she was a shrewd, observant woman.
Bourhope, it should be understood, was longest subjected to the influence of Chrissy's story-telling power. Indeed, when he did somewhat recover from it, his fancy created fine visions of what it would be to have such a storyteller at Bourhope during the long, dark nights of winter and the endless days of summer. Bourhope was no ignoramus. He had some acquaintance with "Winter's Tales" and summer pastorals, but his reading was bald and tame to this inspiration. He thought to himself it would really be as good as a company of players purely for his own behoof, without any of the disadvantages. He stammered a little in expressing the debt he owed to Chrissy, and she could only eagerly reply by saying, "Not to me, not to me the praise, Mr. Spottiswoode, but to the great unknown. Oh! I would like to know him."
Bourhope was stimulated to do at once what he was sure to do ultimately: he presented his hospitable entertainers with a box at the play. No doubt it was a great delight to Chrissy; for it was in the days when actors were respectable artists and play-going was still universal. Chrissy in her freshness enjoyed the provincials as well as if they had been first-rate—took the good and left the bad, and sat quite entranced.
Bourhope, although he was decidedly intellectual for his calling, watched Chrissy rather than the stage. He read the feeling of the moment reflected in her sagacious yet sensitive face. Once he turned round and tried the same experiment with Corrie. He might as well have expected to borrow a living soul from well-moulded stucco or marble. He now realized in a more lively manner than ever, that geese may look fair and white and soft and shapely as swans till they expose their waddling. He tried in church the process he had learned at the play, and, it must be confessed, not without effect—Chrissy's expression giving a fair notion of the good Priorton minister's earnestness and eloquence.
But at length Chrissy, aware of the liberty Bourhope took in thus making her his study, got restless and troubled in her sound head and warm heart. She was no fool in her simplicity. She knew that Bourhope did not in any sense belong to Mrs. Spottiswoode and Corrie, and she had shrewdly suspected of late that their anticipated arrangements would not be carried out. She could not help occasionally turning over in her mind the circumstance that Cecilia was very plain, but that depressed Mortimer Delville nevertheless bestowed his heart on her, though the gift, like her fortune, was disastrous to Cecilia for many a long day. Chrissy thought that if Bourhope were independent and original enough to like her—to love her—he was his own master; there was nothing between him and his inclination save her inclination and her father and mother's will. And there was little doubt about father and mother's will with respect to a man so worthy, so unexceptionable, and so well endowed as Bourhope.
Nor was there anything like duty to the Spottiswoodes to stand between Bourhope and Chrissy. But still Chrissy's nice sense of honour was disturbed, for had she not a guess that a very different result had been expected? Nay, she had even a half-comical notion that she herself had been expressly selected as a companion to Corrie Hunter during the gaieties of the yeomanry weeks, because she would also prove a sort of harmless foil.
A dream of love was a grand shock to Chrissy's quiet life, making wild yet plaintive music, like all nature's true harmonies, within her, and filling her mind with tremulous light which glorified every object, and was fain even to dazzle herself. It was not unnatural that Bourhope should excite such a dream. But Chrissy was not completely dazzled. It was only a dream as yet, and she would be the mistress of her dream; it should not be the mistress of her. So she resolved, showing herself a reasonable, thoughtful, conscientious woman, as well as a loving, fairly proportioned, and lovely human spirit.
Chrissy retained all her sober senses. She recollected what was due both to the hero and to the others concerned. She was neither a weak victim, nor a headstrong, arrogant, malicious conqueror. Like all genuine women, she struggled against yielding herself without her due—without a certainty that there was no irreversible mistake in the matter. She was not a girl to get love-sick at the first bout, nor one to run even at a worthy lover's beckoning, though she would sacrifice much, and do it proudly, joyously, for true affection, when once it had confessed itself. So she shrank from Bourhope, slipped away from, and managed to avoid him. He was puzzled and vexed, and almost exasperated by doubts as to whether she cared for or wished to accept his notice and regards. Little brown Chrissy taught the bold Yeoman a lesson in her own quiet way. She slowly forced upon him the conviction that any gifts or attainments of his—the prosperous, cultivated farmer laird—were as dross compared with the genius and acquirements of Chrissy Hunter, whom many short-sighted men called insignificant and plain amid the poverty and cares of Blackfaulds. Bourhope was not radically mercenary: he had no certainty that his superiority in worldly estate would secure the strange good upon which he set his heart, and he was at once stimulated and incensed by her indifference to his advances. So he had no communication with Chrissy, apart from a demure interchange of words in general conversation, for three days before the grand review and the ball, except in a single incident of the pipe-claying of his belts.
The gentlemen of the old yeomanry who had not servants to do it for them, did their own pipe-claying, and might generally be seen doing it very indifferently to the accompaniment of private whistling or social bawling to each other over adjacent walls in the back courts and greens of Priorton. Bourhope was one day doing his rather gloomily in the back court, and succeeding very ill, when Chrissy, who saw him from a window, could endure it no longer. Chrissy was not what most intellectual women are described as being—an abstracted, scared being, with two left hands. The exigency of her situation as eldest daughter at Blackfaulds had rendered her as handy as other girls, and only unlike them in being a great deal more fertile in resource. How could such a woman stand and see Bourhope destroying his accoutrements, and in danger of smearing himself from head to foot with pipe-clay? Chrissy came tripping out, and addressed him with some sharpness—"That is not right, Mr. Spottiswoode; you will never whiten your belt in that way, you will only soil the rest of your clothes. I watched the old sergeant doing it next-door for Major Christison. Look here:" and she took the article out of his hands, and proceeded smartly to clean it. Poor Bourhope bowed to her empire, though he would much rather their positions had been reversed: he would rather a thousand times have brushed Chrissy's shoes than that she should clean his belt. She was gone again the moment she had directed him. A portion of his belt was now as white as snow; but nothing would have induced her to stay.