"Their names are Sir Thomas and Lady Gerard; they are old friends of the Cravens' father, and they live in——shire; that is all I know about them."
"A steady-going old couple, I suppose? Will not that be rather dull for a little gay thing like Esther?"
"There is a girl of about her own age, I believe, a ward of Sir Thomas's."
"A ward!—oh!"
"And also a son."
"A son! o—h!"
"Well, why should not there be a son? What harm is there in that?" asks Robert, raising his voice a little in irritation.
"No harm whatever! Much better thing than a daughter! Can push his own way in the world. Not that I know in the least what you are talking about," cries a young, saucy voice, which, with the little sleek, dark head it belongs to, appears uninvited at the door at this juncture. "Oh! I see you are all at dinner, so I'll stay outside till you have finished; it is so horrible to be watched when one is eating, isn't it? I hate it myself." And the head and the voice disappear again as quickly as they came.
A ruddier tinge rushes into Robert's already ruddy cheek—ruddy as King David's when he tended his few sheep in the Syrian pastures, before the weight of the heavy Israelitish crown, and of his own wars and murders had blanched it. Down go the carving knife and fork with a clatter, and, "like a doting mallard," he flies after the little vision, banging the door behind him with an impetus that makes his sisters bound up from their horsehair chairs like two small parched peas. Presently he brings her back in triumph.
"So you are going to run away from us, my love?" says Mrs. Brandon, holding Esther's young white hand in her old veiny one.
"Yes, I'm afraid so; it is a great bore, isn't it?" answers Esther, trying her best to lengthen her round face and look miserable.
"If it is a bore, why do you go?" inquires Miss Bessy, drily.
"Because I think I ought to make some friends for myself; I never met anybody before that had no friends, as Jack and I have not; we literally have not one—except all of you, of course," she ends with a happy after-thought.
"When you come to my age, my dear," says Mrs. Brandon, shaking her head, and all the innumerous stiff frillings of her cap, and bringing to bear on Esther's sanguine youth the weight of her own gloomy experiences, in the infuriating way that old people do, "you will have found out that a few good friends are worth more than a great many indifferent ones."
"But why should not these people be good friends?" asks the girl, a little incredulously. "Who knows? Surely there must be more good people in the world than bad ones; so the chances are in favour of them."
"We are expressly forbidden to judge," begins Miss Bessy, charitably; "otherwise——There's the first bell beginning; we had better go and put on our things, Jane."
CHAPTER VII.
Five minutes more, and three large brown parasols, a large black poke bonnet and two little dirt-coloured ones, are seen slowly pacing down the hill to the House of Prayer. The lovers have Plas Berwyn to themselves. Bob has gained his point, despite a parting fleer from Bessy as to the undesirability of neglecting the Creator for the creature.
"Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler! Tim Dowler!" cries Esther, joyously, jumping about the room like a child, and mimicking the one church bell which is heard clearly tinkling through the valley. "Listen, Bob! Does it not say 'Tim Dowler' just exactly as if it were speaking it? Oh! look here: I'll lose all their places for them in their good books, and I bet anything they'll never find them again." So saying, she proceeds to remove the paper-knife from the "Saturday Night of the World," and carefully closes "Stop the Leak."
"What spirits you are in to-day, Essie!" says Bob, balancing himself on the window-sill, with his long legs dangling lugubriously, and following her about the room with his eyes, as a child does a butterfly. "I believe it is because you are going to be rid of me for a fortnight."
"Partly, I think," replies Esther, nonchalantly. "It seems as if all my life I had seen and heard of nothing but Glan-yr-Afon and Plas Berwyn, Plas Berwyn and Glan-yr-Afon, and now I'm going to see and hear something fresh; it may be better and it may be worse; but, at all events, it will be something different. Perhaps I shall come back as the country mouse did, more in love than ever with my own cheeseparings and tallow-candle ends; perhaps"—swinging her Sunday bonnet by the strings and looking up maliciously—"perhaps I shall see some one I like better than you, and not come back at all."
"Hush!" he cries, hurriedly, putting up his hand before her mouth. "Don't say that; it is bad luck. I should not mind your saying it if it were not so horribly probable."
Esther subsides into gravity.
"I wish to Heaven you were not so fond of me!" she says, hastily; "please do try not to be: it makes me feel as if I were cheating all the time—having things and not paying for them."
"I could have given you up at first, if you had told me it must be so positively; I'm sure I could have made shift to do without you, as I have made shift to do without many a thing that other fellows consider necessaries of life; but now——"
He has seized her two hands, and now holds her standing there before him. To hold her hand is the one familiarity Robert is permitted; not once in all his life has he kissed his betrothed.
"It was a foolish, silly custom," she said one day, pettishly—"no sensibler than rubbing noses together, as the Feejee islanders did; for her part, she hated it, &c."
"But now, what? finish your sentence, please," says the little captive, gaily.
"Esther, I wish these people had not got a son."
"What people?"
"These Gerards."
"Why so? Do you think that they would have left you their money if they had not?"
"No, not that," smiling against his will. "But, Essie, you'll promise to write and tell me what he is like?"
"Yes."
"What sort of age?"
"Yes."
"Whether you see much of him?"
"Yes."
"What he says to you?"
"Come, I cannot promise that," says Esther, bursting out laughing. "Oh you dear old goose! are you jealous of a name, a shade, an imagination?"
"I am jealous," he answers, reddening. "I can no more help it than a man in the gout can help having twinges. I shall always be jealous until you are really mine past stealing or taking back again: after that I never shall."
"I should hope not," retorts she, with levity: "if you were, I should think it my duty to try and give you some cause."
The church bell has ceased; there is no sound in the quiet room but that of one fat-bodied bluebottle, labouring and buzzing up the pane, and then tumbling back again. Robert has abandoned the window-sill, finding it a painful and not luxurious seat: he is walking up and down, up and down; one stride and a half of his long legs taking him from end to end of the little room. Esther has thrown herself into an American rocking chair, and is rocking violently backwards and forwards, trying her best to tip herself over.
"Promise me, Essie," says the young man, coming to a sudden standstill beside her—"promise me that you'll talk seriously of—you know what—when you come home; I give you till then? Good heavens! what sort of stuff could Jacob have been made of to have held out all those fourteen years!"
"'The little maid replied,
Some say a little sighed,
And what shall we have for to eat, eat, eat?
Will the love that you're so