'Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
No daisy makes comparison
(Who sees them is undone);
For streaks of red were mingled there,
Such as are on a Catherine pear,
The side that's next the sun.'
He has not gone above a hundred yards when he hears a small thunder of feet behind him, and turning, finds Miss Harborough flying at the top of her speed to overtake him.
'Mammy said I might go with you,' cries she breathlessly.
He stops and hesitates. Is it possible that she has sent this innocent child to be an unconscious spy upon him?
'Mammy said I might go with you,' repeats Lily, seeing his hesitation, and beginning to drop her long lashes, and rub her cheek with her shoulder, according to her most approved methods of fascination.
'But I did not say so,' returns he gravely.
'Oh, but you will,' cries she, flinging herself boisterously into his arms; 'and I--I'll help you over the stiles.'
Who could resist such a bribe as this? Certainly not Talbot. They walk off amicably hand-in-hand. After all, he ought to be thankful for anything that distracts him from his own thoughts, which are certainly neither pleasant nor profitable enough to be worth thinking. To-day he is sad, not only on his own account, but on Margaret's. Short as has been the time of his acquaintance with her, he has got into a habit, which seems long, of being sorry with her sorrows. He knows that to-day will be a black day for Prue, and that Peggy will be darkened in company. Is it not better then, seeing that he cannot stir a finger to lift the weight from the three hearts he would fain lighten, that he should have his eight-year-old companion's chatter to be distracted by, that he should be initiated into the hierarchy of her affections, and learn the order and degree in which her relations and friends are dear to her? He is surprised and flattered at the extremely high place assigned to himself immediately after father, and some way above mammy; but is less exhilarated on finding out that he shares it with the odd-man, who has made and presented a whistle to her.
'And Franky? where does Franky come?' asks John, really quite interested in the subject.
'My dear little brother!' exclaims Lily, with an extravagant affection of sisterly tenderness. 'I am so fond of him! Poor little brother! he has no toys!'
John smiles rather grimly. He knows that Miss Lily squabbles frightfully with her little brother in real life; and how entirely mendacious is her statement as to his destitution of playthings.
'I have given him most of mine,' pursues Lily, casting one eye subtly up to watch the effect of her words, 'but he has broken them nearly all, and now we neither of us have any!'
John receives this broad hint in a silence which Miss Lily feels to be sceptical; but as her attention is at the same moment diverted by the sight of Miss Lambton's Red House, and of Mink's face looking through the bars of the gate, on the anxious watch for passing market-carts to insult, she does not pursue the subject.
Mink takes them for a market-cart at first, and insults them; but afterwards apologises, and shows them the way to the garden, jumping up at Lily's nose, with an affectation of far greater pleasure than he can really feel.
They find his mistress standing alone in the middle of her domain, a great gutta-percha snake lying on the ground behind her, and the hose directed at a thirsty verbena-bed.
As they come up with her, the chiming church clock, having finished its preliminary stave of 'Home, Sweet Home,' strikes five. Whether the chimes or her own thoughts have deafened her, she does not hear their approach.
'Is not that punctuality?' asks Talbot, drawing near. 'Which is better, to have only one very small virtue, and to have it in absolute perfection, or to have a smattering of several large ones?'
At his voice she starts, and turns, her eye falling upon him, and also, of course, upon the child. The latter instantly flings herself into her arms.
'Mammy and John Talbot said I might come!' cries she effusively.
'You did not give John Talbot much choice in the matter,' returns he drily.
'But mammy told me to come,' urges Lily in eager self-defence; 'she told me to run fast that I might be sure to overtake you!'
John feels a dull red rising to his brow; but he will not let his eyes sink: they meet Peggy's full and straight. She shall see that this time, at all events, he has been neither ashamed nor afraid to proclaim his visit to her.
Peggy has gently unclasped the child's arms from about her neck.
'What a dear little doggy!' cries Lily, chattering on, and deceived by Mink's manner, as all strangers are, into the belief that he has conceived a peculiar fancy for her. 'What is his name?'
'Mink.'
'And what kind of dog is he?'
'That is what no one--not even himself--has ever been able to make out,' returns Margaret, with a smile. 'Sometimes he thinks that he is a Yorkshire terrier, and sometimes he does not. I bought him at the Dogs' Home, because he was the most miserable little dog there, and because I was quite certain that if I did not, nobody else would. He has grown so uppish now that sometimes I have to remind him of his origin--have not I, Minky?'
'Mammy had a Yorkshire terrier once,' says Miss Harborough thoughtfully--'John Talbot gave it her--but he died. She had him stuffed: he looks horrid now!'
Talbot writhes. It seems to him as if he had never before tasted the full degradation of his position. He makes a clumsy plunge at changing the conversation by inquiring after Prue.
'She is lying down,' replies Peggy, while he sees a furrow come upon her white forehead. 'The heat tries her; at least'--her eye meeting his with a sort of appeal--'she is very easily tired; and she has been waiting all afternoon with her habit on. She was engaged to go out riding at three, and now it is five; people ought not to make engagements if they are not prepared to keep them!'
'I am afraid he had forgotten all about it,' answers Talbot sadly.
Margaret's only answer is a dispirited shrug; and Lily having by this time scampered off to visit the fox; if possible, with safety, pull his brush; eat anything that is eatable in the kitchen-garden; and make friendly advances to the stable-boy--Miss Lambton again takes up the hose.
'This,' says she, looking at it affectionately, 'is the one solid good I have ever got from the Big House!'
He does not answer. Though he certainly does not class himself under the head of a solid good, her words give him a vague chill.
'It sounds ungrateful,' pursues Peggy; 'but I often wish we could move this acre of ground, with everything that is on it, fifty miles farther away.'
'Do you?'
'Of course,' pursues she gravely, 'we get a great deal more society here than we should anywhere else; but I often think that that is a doubtful good. We grow to know people whose acquaintance we should be far better without.'
He winces. Does he himself come under this category? But she means no offence.
'You can have no notion how our lives are cut up,' she continues. 'We live in a whirl of tiny excitements, that would not be excitements to anybody but us. We never can settle to any serious occupation; the moment we take up a book there is a note: "Prue, come out riding;" "Peggy, come and look over the accounts of the Boot and Shoe Club;" "Peggy and Prue, come and dine to meet the--the----"'
Harboroughs is the name which rises to her lips, and which she suppresses out of politeness to him.
He knows, too, that the plural pronoun which she has employed throughout has been used only as a veil for Prue's weakness; that the picture she has drawn has no likeness to her own steady soul.
'I sometimes think seriously of moving,' she says presently. 'It would be a wrench'--looking round wistfully. 'The only two big things that ever happened to me have happened here: Prue was born here, and mother died here. Yes, it would be a wrench.'
He listens to her in a respectful silence. It would be impertinent in him to express overt sympathy in her trouble, the trouble she has never put into words.
'Sometimes I think that we should do better in London,' she goes on, looking at him almost as if appealing to him for counsel; 'there would be more to interest and distract us in London.'
'What, and leave the garden?' says he, lifting his eyebrows.
'She does not care really about the garden,' answers Margaret, forgetting herself, and using the singular pronoun which she might have employed all along. 'And as for me'--with a little laugh--'I would grow mignonette in a box; and buy a load of hay, as I heard of one country-sick lady doing, and make myself a haycock in the back-yard.'
'I cannot fancy you in a town,' says he, almost under his breath.
It is true. It is impossible to him to picture her except with a background of waving trees, a floor of blossoming flowers, a spicy wind to toss her hair, and finches to sing to her. His imagination is not strong enough to transplant her to the narrow bounds of a little South Kensington home, lost in the grimy monotony of ten thousand others.
'It is very difficult to know what to decide,' she says, almost plaintively, 'and I have no one to advise me. Though I am not very young--twenty-two--I have very little experience of life. There must be a best; but it is hard to find. Do you never feel it so?'
Her large pure eyes are upon him, asking him, as well as her mouth does, for an answer to this unanswerable question. For a moment he hesitates, then:
'Do not you know that there are some people who have arranged their lives so ingeniously that for them there is no best; that the only choice left them lies between bad and worse?'
'I do not believe it,' answers she solemnly. 'God gives us all a best, if we will only look for it; and' (in a lighter key) 'never fear but I shall find mine before I have done!'
After that they finish their watering almost in silence. When he bids her good-bye, having recaptured his Miss Harborough, who is restored to him a good deal smirched by a delirious half-hour in the hayloft with a litter of kittens, Margaret thanks him simply, yet very heartily, for his services to her.
'Why are you so grateful to-day particularly?' asks he, alarmed. 'You make me feel as if the band were playing "God Save the Queen," and everything was at an end.'
'Jacob comes back to his work to-morrow,' answers she, 'and you know,' with a smile, 'I cannot afford to keep two gardeners.'
'He must be very weak still.'
'Do not be afraid,' laughing again; 'I will not overwork him.'
'Then I am to consider myself dismissed?'
'With thanks--yes.'
'Out of work? Turned into the street?'
'Yes.'
'And without a character?'
'I daresay you will not miss it,' replies she, a little cynically. 'Many people do without one.'
He winces. She is not half so nice when she is cynical.
'Come along, Lily,' he says, in a vexed voice; 'we are not wanted here any longer. We are old shoes, sucked lemons, last year's almanacs. Let us go.'
'My child!' cries Margaret, her eye falling for the first time on a gigantic rift in the front of Miss Harborough's frock, 'what have you done to yourself? What will Nanny say to you?'
'I do not care what she says!' replies Lily swaggeringly. 'She is an old beast! Oh, Miss Lambton,' with a sudden change of key, 'may not I come again to-morrow? Alfred wants me to come again to-morrow.' (Alfred is the stable-boy.) 'May not I come with John Talbot again to-morrow?'
'You see that we are both of one mind,' says John, with a melancholy whine, walking off with his young lady.
