"If you cannot spare time to come to us of an evening, would you let me—might I—would you mind my joining you and Jack—now and then—for half an hour or so—if I should not be in the way?"
Her countenance falls, more visibly than she is herself perhaps aware of.
"Of course," she answers, in a constrained voice, "if you wish; we shall always be glad to see you, of course."
"I would not come often," says the poor young man wistfully; "once a week perhaps—so that we might get to know one another better; mother says——"
"Don't tell me any more of your mother's speeches to-day, or we shall have none left for to-morrow," interrupts Esther, with a sort of ironical playfulness, flapping about with her pocket-handkerchief at a squadron of young midges, and looking mild exasperation at the unlucky six-foot slave at her feet. Then she stretches out her hand, plucks a dandelion, or what was a dandelion a week ago, but is now a sphere of delicatest, fragilest, downspikes, and blows it like a child to see what o'clock it is. "One, two, three, four, five, six. Time to go home!" she says, flinging away the hollow stalk and springing up.
"It seems only five minutes since we came," says Robert, with a great sigh of good-bye, looking down at the long stretch of bruised grass that indicates his late resting-place.
"Do you think so?" exclaims Esther, opening her eyes very wide, and the most violent negative could not have expressed dissent more clearly.
So they pass home through the loudly vocal wood, and he parts from her under the porch. He had meant to squeeze her hand at parting; perhaps still bolder forms of adieu flitted before his mind's eye, but a certain expression in her face makes all such plans take to their heels. He looks as if he would come in if he were asked; but he is not asked, therefore, courage failing him, he departs. She stands in the shadow watching him, and thinks, "What bad boots! and is not one shoulder rather higher than the other?" It is not the least bit higher; no young fir is straighter than he; but when a thing belongs, or may possibly belong, to oneself, one waxes marvellous critical.
CHAPTER VI.
"Something new! something new!" cried the Athenians; and across two thousand years we catch up and echo their greedy cry. But why do we? We all know well enough that there is nothing new; there was not even in King Solomon's time—not even in all his treasure-house, nor among his seven hundred wives. What an advantage those ancients who saw the world's infancy had over us—over us, who have to content ourselves with the lees of the wine, which the few dropped ears scattered about the great reaped harvest field! Who would not fain have lived in the days when nothing had yet been said—when everything, consequently, remained to be said? Who could be trite then, in that blest epoch when platitudes were unborn, when Tupper was an impossibility, and even the statement that two and two make four had something startlingly novel about it? Then a man's thoughts were his own, his very own, his own by the best of all rights—creation; now they are the bastard product of ten thousand buried men's dead ideas.
Original is a pleasant word, is it not?—fair and well-sounding; but it is like the sample figs at the top of the box: it represents nothing, or something infinitely smaller than itself behind and underneath it. Is it too much to say that it is impossible to find an original idea in any writer we wot of? You meet, perhaps, some day in a book a thought, an image that strikes you. You say, "This is this thinker's own; there is the stamp of this one individual mind upon it;" when lo! mayhap but a few hours later you are reading the thoughts of some elder scribe, one that has been dust nigh ten or twenty centuries back, and you find the same thought, half fledged or quarter fledged, only in the egg, perhaps—but still it is there. There is nothing new under the sun.
And if this is true of other subjects, how much truer of that most outworn, threadbare old theme, Love! The world has been spinning round six thousand years at the lowest, most exploded computation; in any thousand years there have been thirty or forty generations, and each unit in every one of those generations, if he has lived to man's estate, has surely loved after one fashion or another. Whosoever has done any worthy thing, whosoever has sent out his thoughts in writing or speech or action to the world, has felt the stirrings of this strange instinct; unconsciously it has moulded and permeated his deeds and his words: and yet, old as it is, we are not tired of it, any more than we are of the back-coming green of the spring, or the never-extinguished lamps of the stars.
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended;" at least well nigh ended. Jack and Esther are at breakfast: outside the scarlet geraniums are blazing away in the morning sun, trying their best to shine as brightly as he is doing, and the gnats are dancing round and round on the buoyant floor of their ball-room—the air. I wonder that that incessant valsing does not make them giddy. I am not sure that human beings, like the lions and tigers and uneasy black bears in the Zoological, look their best at feeding-time; but such as they are, here they are.
Esther in a chintz gown, sown all over with little red carnations as thickly as the firmament with heavenly bodies. She looks as fresh as a daisy—as an Englishwoman, to whom morning déshabille, wrapper, slippers, undressed hair, are unknown Gallic abominations—and is eating porridge with a spoon. Jack reading his letters, which look all bills and circulars, after the fashion of men's correspondence; for what man made after the fashion of a man, would sit down to indite an epistle to another man, were it his alter ego unless he had something to say about a horse or a dog or a gun? Presently he finishes this cursory survey, crumples up the last blue envelope in his hand, flings it with manly untidiness into the summer-dressed grate, and says, resuming a conversation which had been interrupted a quarter of an hour ago by the entrance of prayers and the urn, "I cannot imagine what you have done to the fellow! he used not to be half a bad fellow to talk to. Never a genius, you know, but still I used to like to have him to walk over the farm with me—not that he knows a swede from a mangold: don't see much sign of his old mother's farming mantle falling upon him. But now he has not a word to throw to a dog; he is as stupid as a stuck pig."
"I have not cut out his tongue or tied it up in a bag, if that is what you are hinting at," says Esther, with a smile as confused as a dog's, when, not quite sure of his reception, he sneaks up to you sideways, lifting his upper lip, and from tail to muzzle one nervous wriggle. "Perhaps he is like the birds, and gets silent towards the end of the summer."
"Why you keep him dangling after you, like the tail of a kite, I cannot conceive," Mr. Craven cries, crumbling his bread with a little irritation. "It must be such a nuisance having a great long thing like him knocking about under your feet morning, noon, and night."
Esther is silent; only her head droops lower, lower, till her little nose almost immerses itself in her stirabout.
"Whereas," pursues Jack, helping himself to a great deal of cold beef, "if you were to give him his congé now (Jack is by no means neglectful of the g in the French word), he would be all right again in a fortnight, ready for the shooting."
"He would, would he?" says Esther, lifting up her nose and reddening with vexation.
No woman likes to think of her empire as anything short of eternal.
"If you don't like to do it yourself, I'll do it for you," pursues her brother, making a magnanimously handsome offer. "I would say to him, 'My dear fellow, it is no good, she does not seem to care about you,' as soon as look at him."
"What a delicate way of breaking the news!" cries Esther, ironically. "Commend me to a man for gentle finesse."
"I don't believe in breaking news," replies Jack, sturdily. "If you were to go off in a fit, or the bay colt was to break his leg, or anything to go wrong, I'd far sooner people would tell me so without any humming and hawing and keeping me on the tenter hooks. Breaking news is like half cutting your throat before you are hanged, making you die two deaths instead of one."
"But suppose I do seem to care a little about him?" suggests Esther, blushing furiously, but holding up her head bravely, and looking straight at her brother.