Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Summer/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more."
We are feeding the gold and silver fish in the pool before the drawing-room windows, Paul Vasher and I. He is providing for the silver ones. I for the gold, or at least am trying to, for the former, if they have duller backs, have far brighter wits than their orange-coloured brethren, and get the crumbs oftenest. "Do you know," I say, as I drop my last bit deftly into the greedy maw for which it was intended, "that we are going to have something most charming and delightful?"
"And what is that?” he asks, as we pace along the terrace side by side.
"A ball!" I say, clapping my hands; "a real one, no make-believes this time! Will you ever forget that party at Charteris?"
As the words leave my lips, he looks across at Silvia, who is, for a wonder, sitting alone hard by, seemingly watching us with a listless indifference.
"I shall never forget that party," he says quietly; "and so you like the prospects of this ball?"
"Yes, indeed. Will you believe that I have never had a real partner in my life but once, and that was when I danced with you?"
"Have you not? Then for the sake of that old dance, you will give me the first, will you not ?"
"Yes, but you must not be angry if I bungle dreadfully; I never could dance well!"
"Then why are you pleased at the prospect of this party?"
"I shall like the music, and the fun, and my partners, and all that."
"And I suppose you are full of delight at having to choose a new gown and wreath!"
"Full of delight!" I stare at him blankly for a moment, then look away. He little knows what a gnashing of teeth business, having a new gown in our family is. "It is not much of a pleasure," I say, with an odd smile; "it is far more of a misfortune."
"You are afraid of its not being becoming?" says Paul, looking puzzled. "Have you decided on what it is to be?"
"I have not thought much about it yet: anything."
"Wear white," he says, with a man's fixed belief in the perfectibility of that colourless colour. Black or white, or black and white—every man believes a woman to be well dressed when she is arrayed from top to toe in either, or both. Men have no notion of the innumerable little details that go to make up a perfectly appointed toilet. They will say that a woman looks well or ill, but they can't pick her to pieces, and tell you in what part of her dress the fault lies. They will pronounce one of Worth's choicest confections to be "hideous," and a simply but gracefully attired girl to be "charming;" having no feminine admiration—the barbarians!—for the costly lace and exquisite trimmings that mark the former, while the charming creature, poor soul! wears only ordinary muslin and ordinary silk.
"There are so many whites," I say, considering; "white silk, white satin, white brocade, white muslin—the materials are endless."
"And what had you on that day I met you among the rye?"
"A white cambric," I answer; adding mentally, "or a 'clean boiled rag,' as Jack calls it, and which the washerwoman knows as well as her own face!"
"If I tell you what to wear," says Mr. Vasher, "will you promise to have it?"
"So long as you do not put me in pink or yellow."
"Then you shall wear white of some glistening light fabric; and on one side you must have great bunches of gold wheat and scarlet poppies, with a little bunch of the same against your left shoulder, and with a wreath in your hair."
"Not in my hair, please, Mr. Vasher! It is not so very long ago that it was almost red, and———"
"I don't think you need be afraid of the poppies," he says, looking at my untidy ruffled locks; "they looked well enough the other day."
"I only wore that wreath across the field out of sheer bravado," I say laughing, "because I had been told not to."
"Who told you not to?" he asks quickly; "who had the right to?"
"No one!" I say, turning my head away; at least, no one in particular."
We walk in silence up the little steep path that leads towards the upper terraces. In front of us are Mrs. Fleming and Mr. Silvestre; following behind, Alice and Lord St. John: the men have returned from shooting early to-day. I am wondering what my dress will cost, and whether boughten poppies are expensive, also whether they are as handsome as their living sisters. After all I think I shall take Milly's advice. Papa could not possibly storm more over a big bill than he would over a little one, and let the cost be what it may, I am resolved that on the 17th I will for once in my life be not merely clothed but dressed.
"I have made up my mind," I say, briskly, "my gown shall be made of white gauze. It ought to be beautiful, ought it not?"
"Very."
He is not looking at me but straight before him, and there is a thwarted, glum look on his face.
"Are you cross?" I ask. "Are you thinking how frivolous and senseless I am to be thinking so much about my first ball?"
"No, child! I was wondering if it were possible for one to meet with a girl who had never———"
"Never what?"
"Nothing."
A silence falls between us as we pace along the gravel walks, the coolness of the late afternoon all about us, the greenness of the earth at our feet, God's azure carpet hanging royally over our head; only the faint pure smell of an occasional wild flower comes to us on the air, for we are high up on the cliff now, and the gay garden flowers are too proud or too lazy to climb so high.
"And how soon will you be going back to Silverbridge?" asks Paul, his voice disturbing me in the midst of an agonizing calculation of how many yards of stuff an orthodox ample ball dress requires.
"Not until the end of the month." (Thirty, I should think. I wonder what gauze is a yard?)
"I suppose you are in a great hurry to get back?"
"Not at all! why should I be? Jack is in town, Dolly at school; it is very dull at home just now. And I have not been here ten days yet."
"But you have other friends in Silverbridge; there are some residents, are there not?"
"One or two." (I must have a pair of white satin shoes from Marshall's, and long gloves with a great many buttons—I shall not stick at a button or two.)
"Tell me their names, for they will be my neighbours too very shortly."
"We have neighbours, but do not visit them nor they us. Papa does not like them. We know only one family, and their name is—Tempest," I say, turning aside to pluck a modest spray of euphrasy, and looking down on its purple-streaked petals.
"A large family?"
"No ; only a father and son."
Whether it is that I have really forgotten all about my absent lover, or that the thought of my new gown absorbs my faculties to such an extent that I am unable to entertain any other ideas, I do not, I am proud to say, blush in the very least, and am able to meet Paul's searching eyes without a ray of embarrassment or self-consciousness.
"And I suppose that it was because you have seen so few people that you recognised me when we met in the field of rye?"
"Perhaps. I had never known but two men in all my life—young men I mean—until I came here, so I could not very well forget, could I?"
"And I am very glad of it !" he says heartily.
"Are you? I am not! I do not think one is able to judge of whether a man is admirable or the reverse until one has seen a great many."
"Women ought not to see too many men," he says decidedly; "it is bad for them." Paul Vasher is like the rest of his sex, who value their privileges too highly to permit women to encroach the merest jot upon them, and would build so prickly a wall of propriety around us, that we shall not even be able to climb up and see what is going on on the other side.
"That is very hard upon us," I say. "Is it not the author of 'Guy Livingstone' who says, 'that a man must see and admire many roses before he plucks the fairest of them all, his Provence rose, to lay in his breast? You are free to walk about, looking at this flower and that, critically surveying all, able to make your choice after mature deliberation, while we may not look around us or seek to judge for ourselves; on the contrary, we must accept the first flower that is offered to us, think it adorable, perfect, fall down before it in worship, and look at it contentedly to the end of our days!" Here I stop. somewhat out of breath and laughing.
"Is she always bound to take the first?" he asks, looking at me very keenly.
"Almost always," I say, with a heavy sigh. "Must it not be hard when some day, and all too late, a woman who has given away her life like that, ignorantly, meets with some other who would have suited her? Ah ! what ugly words those are, ' too late!' They always make me think of Balzac and the dream that ran through his toiling, barren life of the tender woman's hands that should one day smooth the hair back from his weary brow, and say, 'Poor soul, thou hast suffered!' They came to him at last, too late."
"Do you know," says Paul, "that you have the saddest face sometimes, child, that I ever saw?"
"Do I look like a girl who is going to have a miserable story!' I ask, stopping short; "do I look like a girl who is going to die young?"
He takes my two hands in his, and looks down with infinite gentleness on my pale, scared face.
"God forbid!" he says gently.
"Do not think me a very great coward: do not despise me," I say, shivering; "but I so fear death. I have such a bodily horror and shrinking away from it, not for what it brings, but because I so dread to go away, to be caught out of this warm, beautiful earth that I know, and away from all the people and things I love. I enjoy my life so keenly that I could not bear to let it go. Do you think I shall be punished? Is it impious to feel like this?"
"You sweet little soul!" he says, in his strong, tender voice, "you be punished for aught in your fair young life? I wonder what God would reserve for sinners such as I, then?"
"You are not a sinner," I say stoutly, looking into his noble face—a face that gives so much more promise of grand things than he has ever worked in his life yet. "You are good."
I loose my hands from his, and we walk on again side by side.
"Do you know," I say laughing (Why does laughter often follow so quickly on the heels of sighs?), "that if I know you long I shall become the most egotistical, maundering little person in Christendom? You listen to my complainings, at home no one ever does! Who was it said that there were two people in the world one should never trust one's self to talk about—one's self and one's enemy?"
"A foolish man whoever he was," says Paul, "who knew nothing of human nature, for are not those two naturally the most interesting people under the sun?"
"I do not think I have an enemy?" I say, considering: "have you?"
"No particular one that I know of, though there are plenty of people who dislike me, no doubt. When you are back at Silverbridge, Nell, I shall see you very often, shall I not?"
"If papa does not take a dislike to you."
"I shall be glad to be back there," he says, with a hearty content in his voice. "After a bit, I suppose, I shall settle down and grow fat!"
"I don't think so," I say, glancing at his clean length of limb. "A man need never do that unless he pleases; he has so many active exercises by which he can ward off stoutness. Now, a woman has only got to sit down, and be free from worry of body or soul, to grow fat directly!"
"Then some day I may expect to see you of very comely proportions?"
"No, lean and haggard and ill-favoured very likely, but stout never. I bother myself too much over everything for that."
"Your husband will take better care of you," he says; then, bending his head to look into my eyes with those splendid dark ones, that send so sharp and quick a pain through my heart, "has it never occurred to you, child, that some day you will marry?"
"Everybody does at some time or another, do they not? It is a solid heavy pudding of which all taste in turn!"
"Except the old maids."
"I had forgotten them, but they have probably had lovers in their time; and after all, the courting must be so much pleasanter than the hard and fast wedlock!"
"I think your experience of married people cannot have been very fortunate," says Paul, looking amused. "Why should not people love each other after they are married as well as before?".
"They ought, but very often they do not! They begin very hot and end very cold; and I was wondering only yesterday whether, if one married somebody one did not care about, one would gradually get warmer towards him?”
"It would be rather a dangerous experiment," says Paul; "were you thinking of trying it?"
I do not answer, and as at this moment we fall in with Fane and Milly, he has no opportunity of repeating his question.