A Red Wallflower

After the meal was over, the colonel lingered only a few minutes, just enough for politeness, and then went off to his room again, with the dry and somewhat uncalled-for remark, that they 'did not want him.'

'That is true!' said Pitt humorously.

'Pitt,' said Esther hurriedly, 'if you don't mind, I want to get my work. There is something I must do, and I can do it just as well while you are talking.'

She went off, and returned with drawing-board and pencils; took her seat, and prepared to go on with a drawing that had been begun.

'What are the claims of this thing to be considered work?' said Pitt, after watching her a minute or two.

'It is a copy, that I shall need Monday morning. Only a little thing. I can attend to you just the same.'

'A copy for whom?'

'One of my scholars,' she said, with a smile at him.

'That copy will never be wanted.'

'Yes, I want it for Monday; and Monday I should have no time to do it; so I thought I would finish it now. It will not take me long, Pitt.'

'Queen Esther,' said he, laying his hand over hers, 'all that is over.'

'Oh no, Pitt! – how should it?' she said, looking at him now, since it was no use to look at her paper.

'I cannot have you doing this sort of work any longer.'

'But!' she said, flushing high, 'yes, I must.'

'That has been long enough, my queen! I cannot let you do it any longer. You may give me lessons; nobody else.'

'But!' – said Esther, catching her breath; then, not willing to open the whole chapter of discussion she saw ahead, she caught at the nearest and smallest item. 'You know, I am under obligations; and I must meet them until other arrangements are made. I am expected, I am depended on; I must not fail. I must give this lesson Monday, and others.'

'Then I will do this part of the work,' said he, taking the pencil from her fingers. 'Give me your place, please.'

Esther gave him her chair and took his. And then she sat down and watched the drawing. Now and then her eyes made a swift passage to his face for a half second, to explore the features so well known and yet so new; but those were a kind of fearful glances, which dreaded to be caught, and for the most part her eyes were down on the drawing and on the hands busied with it. Hands, we know, tell of character; and Esther's eyes rested with secret pleasure on the shapely fingers, which in their manly strength and skilful agility corresponded so well to what she knew of their possessor. The fingers worked on, for a time, silently.

'Pitt, this is oddly like old times!' said Esther at last.

'Things have got into their right grooves again,' said he contentedly.

'But what are you doing? That is beautiful! – but you are making it a great deal too elaborate and difficult for my scholar. She is not far enough advanced for that.'

'I'll take another piece of paper, then, and begin again. What do you want?'

'Just a tree, lightly sketched, and a bit of rock under it; something like that. She is a beginner.'

'A tree and a rock?' said Pitt. 'Well, here you shall have it. But,

Queen Esther, this sort of thing cannot go on, you know?'

'For a while it must.'

'For a very little while! In fact, I do not see how it can go on at all. I will go and see your school madam and tell her you have made another engagement.'

'But every honest person fulfils the obligations he is under, before assuming new ones.'

'That's past praying for!' said Pitt, with a shake of his head. 'You have assumed the new ones. Now the next thing is to get rid of the old. I must go back to my work soon; and, Queen Esther, your majesty will not refuse to go with me?'

He turned and stretched out his hand to her as he spoke. In the action, in the intonation of the last words, in the look which went with them, there was something very difficult for Esther to withstand. It was so far from presuming, it was so delicate in its urgency, there was so much wistfulness in it, and at the same time the whole magnetism of his personal influence. Esther placed her hand within his, she could not help that; the bright colour flamed up in her cheeks; words were not ready.

'What are you thinking about?' said he.

'Papa,' Esther said, half aloud; but she was thinking of a thousand things all at once.

'I'll undertake the colonel,' said he, going back to his drawing, without letting go Esther's hand. 'Colonel Gainsborough is not a man to be persuaded; but I think in this case he will be of my mind.'

He was silent again, and Esther was silent too, with her heart beating, and a quiet feeling of happiness and rest gradually stealing into her heart and filling it; like as the tide at flood comes in upon the empty shore. Whatever her father might think upon the just mooted question, those two hands had found each other, once and for all. Thoughts went roving, aimlessly, meanwhile, as thoughts will, in such a flood-tide of content. Pitt worked on rapidly. Then a word came to Esther's lips.

'Pitt, you have become quite an Englishman, haven't you?'

'No more than you are a Englishwoman.'

'I think, I am rather an American,' said Esther; 'I have lived here nearly all my life.'

'Do you like New York?'

'I was not thinking of New York. Yes, I like it. I think I like any place where my home is.'

'Would you choose your future home rather in Seaforth, or in London?

You know, I am at home in both.'

Esther would not speak the woman's answer that rose to her lips, the immediate response, that where he was would be what she liked best. It flushed in her cheek and it parted her lips, but it came not forth in words. Instead came a cairn question of business.

'What are the arguments on either side?'

'Well,' said Pitt, shaping his 'rock' with bold strokes of the pencil, 'in Seaforth the sun always shines, or that is my recollection of it.'

'Does it not shine in London?'

'No, as a rule.'

Esther thought it did not matter!

'Then, for another consideration, in Seaforth you would never see, I suppose, – almost never, – sights of human distress. There are no poor there.'

'And in London?'

'The distress is before you and all round you; and such distress as I suppose your heart cannot imagine.'

'Then,' said Esther softly, 'as far as that goes, Pitt, it seems to me an argument for living in London.'

He met her eyes with an earnest warm look, of somewhat wistful recognition, intense with his own feeling of the subject, glad in her sympathy, and yet tenderly cognizant of the way the subject would affect her.

'There is one point, among many, on which you and Miss Frere differ,' he said, however, coolly, going back to his drawing.

'She does not like, or would not like, living in London?'

'I beg your pardon! but she would object to your reason for living there.'

Esther was silent; her recollection of Betty quite agreed with this observation.

'You say you have seen her?' Pitt went on presently.

'Yes.'

'And talked with her?'

'Oh yes. And liked her too, in a way.'

'Did she know your name!' he asked suddenly, facing round.

'Why, certainly,' said Esther, smiling. 'We were properly introduced; and we talked for a long while, and very earnestly. She interested me.'

Pitt's brows drew together ominously. Poor Betty! The old Spanish proverb would have held good in her case; 'If you do not want a thing known of you, don't do it.' Pitt's pencil went on furiously fast, and Esther sat by, wondering what he was thinking of. But soon his brow cleared again as his drawing was done, and he flung down the pencil and turned to her.

'Esther,' he said, 'it is dawning on me, like a glory out of the sky, that you and I are not merely to live our earthly life together, and serve together, in London or anywhere, in the work given us to do. That is only the small beginning. Beyond all that stretches an endless life and ages of better service, in which we shall still be together and love and live with each other. In the light of such a distant glory, is it much, if we in this little life on earth give all we have to Him who has bought all that, and all this too, for us?'

'It is not much,' said Esther, with a sudden veil of moisture coming over her eyes, through which they shone like two stars. Pitt took both her hands.

'I mean it literally,' he said.

'So do I.'

'We will be only stewards, using faithfully everything, and doing everything, so as it seems would be most for His honour and best for His work.'

'Yes,' said Esther. But gladness was like to choke her from speaking at all.

'In India there is not the poorest Hindoo but puts by from his every meal of rice so much as a spoonful for his god. That is the utmost he can do. Shall we do less than our utmost?'

'Not with my good-will,' said Esther, from whose bright eyes bright drops fell down, but she was looking steadfastly at Pitt.

'I am not a very rich man, but I have an abundant independence, without asking my father for anything. We can live as we like, Esther; you can keep your carriage if you choose; but for me, I would like nothing so well as to use it all for the Lord Christ.'

'Oh Pitt! oh Pitt! so would I!'

'Then you will watch over me, and I will watch over you,' said he, with a glad sealing of this compact; 'for unless we are strange people we shall both need watching. And now come here and let me tell you about your house. I think you will like that.'

There is no need to add any more. Except only the one fact, that on the day of Esther's marriage Pitt brought her a bunch of red wallflowers, which he made fast himself to her dress. She must wear, he said, no other flower but that on her wedding-day.