Red as a Rose is She: A Novel

CHAPTER I

Have you ever been to Wales? I do not ask this question of any one in particular; I merely address it to the universal British public, or, rather, to such member or members of the same as shall be wise enough to sit down and read the ensuing true and moving love story – true as the loves of wicked Abelard and Heloise, moving as those of good Paul and Virginia. Probably those wise ones will be very few; numerable by tens, or even units: they will, I may very safely aver, not form the bulk of the nation. However high may be my estimate of my own powers of narration, however amply Providence may have gifted me with self-appreciation, I may be sure of that, seeing that the only books I know of which enjoy so wide a circulation are the Prayer-book and Bradshaw. I am not going to instruct any one in religion or trains, so I may as well make up my mind to a more limited audience, while I pipe my simple lay (rather squeakily and out of tune, perhaps), and may think myself very lucky if that same kind, limited audience do not hiss me down before I have got through half a dozen staves of the dull old ditty.

Have you ever been to Wales? If you have ever visited the pretty, dirty, green spot where Pat and his brogue, where potatoes and absenteeism and head-centres flourish, alias Ireland, you have no doubt passed through a part of it, rushing by, most likely, in the Irish mail; but in that case your eyes and nose and ears were all so very full of dust and cinders – you were so fully employed in blinking and coughing and enjoying the poetry of motion – as to be totally incapable of seeing, hearing, or smelling any of the beauties, agreeable noises, or good smells, which in happier circumstances might have offered themselves to your notice. Perhaps you are in the habit, every midsummer, of taking your half-dozen male and female olive shoots to have the roses restored to their twelve fat cheeks by blowy scrambles about the great frowning Orme's Head, or by excavations in the Rhyl Sands. Perhaps you have gone wedding-touring to Llanberis on the top of a heavy-laden coach, swinging unsafely round sharp corners, and nearly flinging your Angelina from your side on to the hard Welsh road below. Perhaps you have wept with Angelina at the spurious grave of the martyred Gelert, or eaten pink trout voraciously at Capel Curig, and found out what a startlingly good appetite Angelina had. But have you ever lived in the land of the Cymri? Have you ever seen how drunk the masculine Cymri can be on market days, or what grievous old hags the feminine Cymri become towards their thirtieth year? Have you ever, by bitter experience, discovered the truth of that couplet —

I have lived in Wales, so I speak with authority; and for my part I don't think that Taffy is much more given to the breaking of the eighth commandment than the canaille of any other country. He is not a bright fellow, is not Taffy; happiest, I think, when rather tipsy, or when yelling psalms in his conventicle or schism-shop – for Taffy is addicted to schism; he will tell you plenty of lies, too, and will not season them with the salt of a racy, devil-me-care wit, as Pat would. But he is very civil-spoken, and rather harmless; seldomer, I think, than his cleverer neighbour over the border does he hanker feloniously after his neighbour's spoons, or hammer his wife's head with the domestic poker.

But why am I drivelling on, like a sort of Murray and water, on the manners and character of this, to my thinking, not very interesting nation? I will waste no more "prave 'ords" upon them, as the few men and women whom I am going to tell you about, and whom I shall want you to like a little, or dislike a little, as the case may be, are not Taffies, only they happen to have stuck up their tent-poles in Taffy-land when they first make their low bow to you. These men and women were nothing out of the way for goodness, or beauty, or talent; they did a hundred thousand naughty things, each one of them. Some of them did them with impunity, as far as this world goes; some of them, capricious Megæra and Tisyphone lashed with scorpions for their derelictions. This is going to be neither a "Life of Saints," nor a "History of Devils;" these are memoirs neither of a "Hedley Vicars," nor of a "Dame aux Camellias;" so, whoso expects and relishes either of those styles of composition may forthwith close this volume, and pitch it (if it be his own, and not the battered property of a circulating library) into the fire. Those who love a violent moral, or violent judgment for sins and follies – a man struck dead for saying "damn," or a woman for going to a ball, as the Record would charitably have us believe is the way of Providence – equally with those who enjoy the flavour of violent immorality, will be disappointed if they look this way for the gratification of their peculiar idiosyncracies. Of my friends presently to be made known to you, and criticised by you, "the more part remain unto this present, but some have fallen asleep."

Once upon a time – I like that old, time-honoured opening; it makes one so nobly free, gives one so much room to stretch one's wings in, ties one down to no king's reign, no hampering, clogging century – once upon a time there was a valley in Taffy-land; there is still, unless some very recent convulsion has upheaved it to the top of a mountain, or submerged it beneath the big Atlantic waves; a valley lovelier than that one in "Ida," where "beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris," pastured his sheep and his jet-black goats, and inaugurated his rakish course; a valley where there are no dangerous, good-looking Parises, only one or two red-headed Welsh squires, who have each married, or will in the fulness of time each marry, one lawful wife – red-headed, too, very likely; and have never made, will never make, love to any Enones or other ill-conducted young shepherdesses. In fact, in that Arcadia there are no such shepherdesses; the daughters of the Cymri do not "ply the homely shepherd's trade," nor would they shed much romance over it if they did; for with sorrow be it spoken, blowsy are they mostly, hard-featured, toothless; and, moreover, the little nimble, lean sheep that go scrambling and jumping and skurrying about the rough crags and steep hill-sides do not need any crook'd and melodious Dowsabellas or Neæras to look after them and guide them in the way they should go.

In that valley there are plenty of houses, squires' houses and peasants' houses, where the propagation of the Cambrian is conducted with much success; houses big and little, red-faced and white-faced and dirty-faced, old and new. But we have at present to do with only one of those houses, and it comes under the head of the littles and the olds. Halfway up a hill-side it stands, looking across the valley to other higher hills that swell out softly against the sky, and go sloping gently down to the sea twenty miles away. They always remind me – I don't know why – of the distant hills in Martin's picture of the "Plains of Heaven;" so mistily do they rise in their hazy blueness. It is a snug, unpretending little house enough, with its black and white cross-beamed front and unwalled kitchen-garden straggling steeply up the slope at the back. Many and many a day has it stood there, seeing generations and fashions come in and go out; has stood there since the far-away days when men wore curly wigs half-way down their backs, and sky-blue coats, and fought and died for prerogative and King Charles, or fought and lived for England and liberty: when most houses were black and white, like its little elderly self, before plate glass or stucco, or commodious villa residences, five minutes' walk from a station, were dreamed of. The name of the little house is Glan-yr-Afon.

CHAPTER II

"Jack and I got in our last hayload to-day, without a drop of rain; the first bit of good luck that has come to us, I don't know when. If we had any land, I should imagine that we must have a bit of consecrated ground among it, to account for our ill-fortune; but as we have not of our own enough to pasture a goose upon, that cannot be it. Such an odd thing happened to-day – Robert Brandon proposed to me: it is the first offer I ever had, though I was seventeen last month. If it is never a more pleasant process than it was to-day, I hope sincerely it may be the last. I said 'Yes,' too; at least, a species of Yes after half-a-dozen Noes; I cannot imagine why, for I certainly did not feel Yes. I suppose I must have been pleased at any one wishing for my company during the term of his natural life."

The name on the fly-leaf of this journal-book is Esther Craven, Glan-yr-Afon, and the date July 10, 186-. July is very often a rather wet month – not so this year; all through its one-and-thirty days the sky was like brass, as it looked to Elijah (the Seer's) eyes on the top of Carmel, when, by his faith, he brought up the tarrying rain from the sea's chambers. London is pouring out her noble army of haberdashers and greengrocers into Ramsgate and Margate, and Scarborough and Llandudno. The John Gilpins of to-day are not satisfied with a modest outing to the "Bell" at Edmonton, "all in a chaise and pair."

Armies of schoolboys are devouring arid sandwiches and prime old buns in railway refreshment rooms – schoolboys emptied out of every school and seminary and college all over the country. Highly paid instructors of youth are stretching their cramped legs up the steep sides of Helvellyn and Mont Blanc, and surveying the "frozen hurricane" of the glaciers through their academic spectacles. And young Craven's (of Glan-yr-Afon) last hayload is safely stacked, as you heard from his sister's diary. This morning the highest lying of the upland fields was hilly with haycocks: to-night it is as flat as Salisbury Plain. All day long the waggons have gone grinding and crunching up and down the rocky mountain road between field and rick-yard. All day long Evan and Hugh and Roppert (sic) with their waistcoats open and their brown arms bared, aided and abetted by various Cambrian matrons, with bonnets standing upright on their heads, and pitchforks in their lily hands, have been tossing the scented bundles – sweeter in death than in life, like a good man's fame – into the carts; loading them till of the shaft horse nought but ears and nose and forelegs appeared, save to the eye of faith. All day long Esther has been sitting under a haycock, as one might fancy Solomon's wise woman doing, "looking well to the ways of her household." The hay moulds itself pliably into a soft arm-chair for her young, slight figure, and the big hay-spiders walk up her back at their leisure, and explore the virgin forests of her thick dusk hair. She has had her luncheon brought out to her there – bread and milk in a white bowl. It is unsocial, surly work, eating alone; one feels reduced to the level of a dog, cracking bones, and lapping up gravy out of his trencher, all by himself, with tail well down, like a pump handle, and a growl and a snap for any brother dog who may approach to share his feast.

The haymakers were much cheerier – "couched at ease" under the nutty hedgerow; bringing slices of unnaturally fat bacon out of blue and white spotted pocket-handkerchiefs, gabbling to one another in the Welsh tongue, which, to one who occupies the room of the unlearned, has always a querulous, quarrelsome, interrogative sound; and digging their clasp knives into the ground to clean them, when their services were no longer required. Jack is out for the day, and the place feels stupid without him. There is not much melody in "I paddle my own canoe," but one misses it when one is accustomed to hear it echoing gaily over the crofts and through the farm-yard and orchard. It would be impossible to talk more dog-Welsh than Jack does to his workmen; but even the mellifluous tongue of the Cymri, with its three or four consonants standing together, undissevered by any vowel, is made harmonious, enunciated by a young, clear voice, that sounds as if it had never been the vehicle for sorrowful words.

and Esther, though she has entered upon her eighteenth year (an age which a century ago would have been rather overripe – Chloe and Cynthia and Phyllis being considered in their prime at fifteen, and toasted accordingly), has as yet no Lubin but her brother. Now and again, Gwen the cook, and Sarah the housemaid, came panting up the hill in lilac cotton gowns and trim white aprons, bearing beer in every jug and mug and tin pipkin that Glan-yr-Afon affords, as Evangeline brought the nut-brown ale to the reapers of the village of Grand Pré. And the haymakers drink insatiably, and wipe the thirsty mouth upon the convenient sleeve as artless Nature bids. By-and-by artless Nature makes them rather unsteady on their legs. As they lead the heavy-laden cart to the last remaining haycock, the one on which their mistress sits enthroned, I am not at all sure that they do not see two haycocks, two wide-leaved white hats, two Esthers. Perceiving their condition, though too old an inhabitant of Wales to be in any degree surprised at what is, after all, the normal condition of the Welsh, Miss Craven rises precipitately. Driven from her fortress, she picks up her needles and threads, and Jack's shirt, from which, as usual, the frequent button is missing, and runs lightly down the mountain path in her strong country boots, which bid defiance to the sharp stones that crop out at every step through the limestone soil. At the hall door – a little arched door like a church's, with a trellised porch and benches, such as one sees Dutch boors sitting on with their beer and schnapps, in Teniers' pictures – Sarah meets her. Sarah is an Englishwoman.

"Mr. Brandon is in the parlour, 'm."

"Parlour! My good Sarah, how many times shall I adjure you, by all you hold most sacred, to say drawing-room?"

"He has been there best part of half-an-hour, 'm."

"Poor man! how lively for him! why on earth didn't you come and call me?"

"He said as he wasn't in no partikler hurry, and he'd as lieve as not wait till you come in. Stop a bit, Miss Esther, you have got some hay on your frock behind."

"People of seventeen wear gowns, not frocks, Sarah. Oh! there, that will do. If I had a haystack disposed about my person, he would never be a bit the wiser."

Half-an-hour passes, and Mr. Brandon is still in the "parlour." It is seven o'clock, and dinner-time. Would you like to know what it is that Mr. Brandon takes so long in saying, and whether it is anything likely to reconcile Miss Craven to the loss of her dinner? A little room that looks towards the sun-setting; a little room full of evening sunshine and the smell of tea-roses; a light paper, with small, bright flower-bunches on the walls; white muslin curtains; a general air of crisp freshness, as of a room that there are no climbing, crawling, sticky-fingered children to crumple and rumple. A young woman, rather red in the face, standing in one corner. She has been driven thither apparently by a young man, who is standing before her, and who is still redder. At a rough calculation, you would say that the young man was seven feet high; but put him with his back against the wall, with his heels together, and his chin in, and you will find that he is exactly six feet four; that is, four inches taller than any man who wishes to do work in the world, and find horses to carry him, ought to be. His clothes are rather shabby, and he looks poor; but, from the crown of his close-clipped head to the sole of his big feet, a gentleman, every inch of him, though he has no "gude braid claith" to help to make him so. His features may be Apollo's or Apollyon's, for all you can see of them, so thickly are they planted out with a forest of yellow hair; but tears do not seem to be at any immense distance from eyes blue as the sky between storm clouds, fearless as a three-years' child's.

"Don't you think that we do very well as we are?" says the young woman, suggestively.

"I don't know about you, I'm sure. I know I've lost a stone and a half within the last year," replies the young man, very ruefully.

Esther laughs. "There is some little of you left still," she says, with rather a mischievous glance up at the two yards and a half of enamoured manhood before her.

This is what has been over-roasting the mutton. He has been asking her to take his heart, his large hand, and the half of one hundred and twenty pounds a year (the exorbitant pay of a lieutenant in Her Majesty's infantry), of an old hunting watch, and a curly retriever dog; and she has been declining these tempting offers, one and all. The minute hand of the gilt clock, on which Minerva sits in a helmet and a very tight gown, with her legs dangling down, has travelled from 6.30 to 7.5, and within these five-and-thirty minutes Miss Craven has refused three proposals, all made by the same person: the first, very stoutly and mercilessly, from Jack's arm-chair, where she had originally taken up her position; the second, decisively still, but with less cruelty, from the music-stool, to which she had next retired; and the third, in a hasty and wavering manner, from the corner, in which she has taken final refuge, in a strong, fortified entrenchment behind the writing-table.

"But – but – " says Esther, her rebellious mouth giving little twitches every now and then as at some lurking thought of the ridiculous – "it's – it's such a very odd idea! I don't think I ever was more surprised in my life. When Sarah told me that you were here, I thought that, of course, you had come to say something about that bone-dust. Why, you never said anything at all tending this way before."

"Didn't I?" answers the young giant, with a crestfallen look. "I tried several times, but I don't think that you could have understood what I meant, for you always began to laugh."

"I always do laugh at civil speeches," answers the girl simply. "I don't know how else to take them: I suppose it is because I have had so few addressed to me; they always sound to me so niais."

"I'm not a bit surprised at your not liking me," he says, with humility. "I don't see how any one could at first. I know that I'm ugly and awkward, and don't understand things quick – "

"I don't dis-like you," interrupts Esther, with magnanimity, quite affected by her lover's description of his own undesirability. "Why should I? There is nothing in you to dislike; you are very good-natured, I'm sure," damning with faint praise, in the laudable effort not to be unqualifiedly uncomplimentary.

"I know what an unequal exchange it is that I am offering," says Brandon, too humble to resent, and yet with a dim sense of mortification at the quantity and quality of praise bestowed upon him. "I know of how much more value you are than I!"

She does not contradict him; her own heart echoes his words. "I am of more value than he; I shall find it out practically some day."

"That was why I was in such a hurry to speak," he says eagerly. "I felt sure that if I did not, you would be snapped up directly by some one else."

She laughs rather grimly. "You might have laid aside your alarms on that head, I think. I don't know who there is about here to snap me up."

Silence for a few minutes: Esther takes up a penwiper, fashioned into a remote resemblance to a chimney sweep, and studies its anatomy attentively. "Shall I upset the writing-table and make a rush past him? No, the ink would spoil the carpet, and he would only come again to-morrow, and hunt me into the other corner. Poor fellow! I hope he is not going to cry, or go down on his knees!"

Whether mindful or not of the fate of Gibbon the historian, who, having thrown himself on his knees before his lady-love, was unable, through extreme fat, to get up again, Brandon does not indulge in either of the demonstrations that Esther apprehended. He stands quiet, cramming half a yard of yellow beard into his mouth, and says presently:

"Well, I suppose I must not worry you any more; it is not good manners, is it? A man ought to be satisfied with one No; I have given you the trouble of saying three."

"It's very disagreeable, I'm sure," says Esther, wrinkling up her forehead in an embarrassed fashion, "and I hate saying No to any one: I don't mean in this way, because nobody ever asked me before, but about anything; but what can I do?"

"Try me!" he says very eagerly, stretching out his hand across the narrow table (all but upsetting the standish en route). "I don't want to threaten you, saying that I should go to the dogs if you threw me over, for I should not; that always seemed to me a cowardly sort of thing to do; and, besides, I should have my mother left to live for if the worst came to the worst; but you must see that it is everything in the world to a fellow to have one great hope in it to keep him straight."

Soft music in the distance; some one whistling "I paddle my own canoe" somewhere about the house; Esther, in an agony between the fear of subversing the table, and the hundredfold worse fear of being discovered by Jack in an unequivocally sentimental position, of which she would never hear the last. "Very well, very well, I'll – I'll think about it; could you be so very kind as to loose my hand?"

He complies reluctantly, and she, that there may be no further discussion about it, hides it discreetly away in her jacket pocket. "I paddle my own canoe" dies away in the distance; apparently it was on its way to dress for dinner. Esther draws a sigh of relief. "I thought that some one was coming."

"And if they had?"

"Why, I did not relish the idea of being found driven into a corner, like a child at a dame's school, and you, like the dame, standing over me," answers she, abandoning the struggle with the corners of her mouth, and bubbling over with the facile laughter of seventeen. Utterly unable to join in her merriment, he stands leaning in awkward misery against the wall; all other griefs are at least respectable; love-sorrows, alone, are only ludicrous.

"It really is so silly," says Esther, presently, compassionate but impatient. "Do try and get the better of it!"

"Easier said than done," he answers ruefully. "I might as well advise you to get the better of your affection for Jack."

"I don't see the parallel," rejoined she, coldly, feeling as if there was sacrilege in the comparison. "My love for Jack is a natural instinct, built too upon the foundation of lifelong obligations, endless benefits, countless kindnesses. What kindness have I ever shown you? I sewed a button on your glove once, and once I pinned a rose on your coat."

"I have the rose still."

She says "Pshaw!" pettishly, and turns away her head.

"Perhaps you are afraid of marrying on small means?" suggests Brandon, diffidently, after a while.

The gentle clatter and click of dishes carried into the dining-room enters faintly through the shut door. Esther's heart sinks within her. Is he going to begin all over again? – round and round, like a thunderstorm among hills?

"I am afraid of marrying on any means," she says, comprehensively. "I particularly dislike the idea; marriage seems to me the end of everything, and I am at the beginning."

"But I don't want you to marry me now," cries Robert, stammering.

"Don't you? You told me just now that you did."

"For pity's sake, Esther, don't laugh! it may be play to you, but it is death to me."

"I'm not laughing."

"Perhaps some day you will feel what I am feeling now."

"Perhaps" (doubtfully).

"And you will find then that it is no laughing matter."

"Perhaps" (still more doubtfully).

The clamour of a fresh cohort of plates shaking noisily upon a tray warns Brandon that his time is short.

"Esther!" with a sort of despair in his voice, clashing the ridiculous with the pathetic – they are always twin sisters – "I could live upon such a little hope."

"What would you have me say?" she cries, standing with fluttering colour, tapping feet, and irritated eyes. "I have told you the plain truth, and it does not please you; must I dress up some pretty falsehood, and tell you that I fell in love with you at first sight, or that after all I find that you are the only man in the world that can make me really happy?"