I WAS in the garden, where I almost lived in the sweet summer days in those times of my youth; it was June, and I did not fear the windows of Corpus, which looked out upon the trees with their numberless leaves, the trees which were quite shelter enough for me. If I had begun to have visions of the universal romance of youth, my thoughts were much too exalted to think of vulgar fallings in love, and though I constantly hailed as neighbors these kindly lights in the windows of the collegiate buildings, I was troubled by no thought of the young gownsmen, the possible possessors of the same; and so it came about that I went as freely to the garden of our quaint old house, overlooked by the windows of Corpus Christi College as I had been used to go in the garden of Cottiswoode, which was not overlooked by anything within a dozen miles, save the fruit trees in the orchard, and the great walnut by the house.
This was now the second summer since we came to Cambridge, and this garden was no longer the wilderness which it was when I saw it first. My father had a peculiar fancy in gardening—everything in this sunny strip of land was enclosed in a soft frame of greensward—where a path was indispensable, it was a hard, yellow sandy path that glistened in the sun, and threw off the moisture; but instead of geometrical divisions and cross-roads through our garden, you could scarcely see either gravel or soil for the velvet turf that pressed over the roots of the trees, and round the flower-beds; and for the thick and close luxuriance of the flowers that grew within. The one or two Cambridge ladies who came to see me sometimes, shook their heads at our grassy garden, and hoped I took care never to go out when the turf was damp; but, indeed, I took no such care, and was very proud of our full and verdant enclosure in comparison with other people’s flower-beds, where nothing grew so well as ours, though everything had more room to grow. On this day of which I am now speaking, the sweet greensward was warm with sunshine in every corner. It was afternoon, and the streets were sultry, the wayfarers flushed and weary, the fields parched and dry; but the sun was playing in the leaves about me, and making playful figures with his light and shadow on the grass under my feet—figures which changed and varied with sweet caprice as the wind swayed the leaves about, and as the sun stole by invisible degrees towards the west—and everything was fresh and sweet and full of fragrance in this charmed country of mine. I was within the little fanciful greenhouse which was no less a bower for me, than a shelter for the rarer flowers, and I was busy about some of my favorites, which I used to care for with great devotion by fits, making up for it by such negligence at other times, that this pretty place would soon have been a very woeful one had it been left to me. Just on the threshold of this green-house door, was the stool on which I had been sitting, with a piece of embroidery at which I had been working thrown down upon it, and beyond that, on the grass, was a book which I had not been reading; for it was not in my girlish, impatient nature to dally with anything readable—I either devoured it, or I let it alone. I was busy among the plants, and so enclosed by them that I was not visible from the garden—but at this moment I was not aware of that.
I did not hear their footsteps upon the soft grass, but I heard the voices of my father and his friend, Mr. Osborne, a fellow of Corpus, who visited us constantly, and always seemed in my father’s confidence. They came to the green-house door and lingered there, and Mr. Osborne stood before the door, with his gown streaming and rustling behind him, effectually concealing me if I had not been concealed already. I had no reason to suppose that their talk concerned me; nor was I much interested to listen to it. I went on with my occupation, plunging some slips of favorite plants into little pots of rich vegetable mould, and singing to myself half under my breath. I was quite unsuspicious and so were they.
“No,” said my father, “Hester does not know of it. Hester is a girl, Osborne—I have no desire to make a woman of her before her time.”
“Yet girls find out for themselves what interest they have in these matters,” said Mr. Osborne, in his quiet, half sarcastic tone, “and have speculations in those quiet eyes of theirs, whether we will or no, my friend.”
“There are few girls like Hester,” said my father, proudly; “pardon me, Osborne, but you have no child—I want to preserve her as she is—why should I bring a disturbing element into our peaceful life?”
“Why? do you think your little girl is safely through her probation, when she has had the measles and the hooping-cough?” said Mr. Osborne, laughing. “Nonsense, man—d’ye think ye save her from the epidemic of youth by shutting her up in this garden here? Take my word for it, these obnoxious things that you call the world and society, are much better preventives than this leisure and solitude. Why look at these windows, and be a sensible man, Southcote; d’ye think nobody in Corpus but an old fellow like me has seen your Proserpine among the flowers? How old is the child? tell me that, and I will tell you how soon there will be moonlight meditations, and breaking hearts, disturbing your peaceful life for you. Hester is a very good girl—of course, she is—but what is that to the question, I should be glad to know?”
I was very indignant by this time. I had very nearly caught his streaming gown, and shaken it with vehement displeasure, but, withal, I was very curious to know what was the origin of this conversation, and I subsided into a perfect guilty silence, and listened with all my might.
“You do not understand Hester, Osborne,” said my father.
“Granted,” said his friend, quickly, “and perhaps the young lady is not quite an orthodox subject of study, I allow you; but pray what do you intend to do with her? is she to live in this garden for ever, like that fantastic boy’s lady of Shalott?”
My father paused and I listened eagerly. It was some time before he answered, and there was hesitation in his usually firm tones.
“Life has deluded me,” he said, slowly. “I am at a loss to know how to guard Hester, that it may not delude her also.”
“Southcote,” said his companion, earnestly, “listen to me a moment. Life deludes no man. You are a self-devourer. You have deluded yourself; nay, take offence and, of course, I have done at once. I do not know the innocent mind of a young girl, very true; but I know that imagination is the very breath of youth—it must look forward, and it must dream—what is Hester to dream about, think you? not of the triumph of an examination, I suppose, nor of going in for honors; you have not even tried to kill the woman in her, and make her a scholar. The child is shamefully ignorant, Southcote. Why here’s this feminine rubbish lying under my very feet—look here!” and he pulled up my mangled embroidery. “I should not be surprised now if it pleased your fancy to see her bending her pretty head over this stuff—what’s she thinking of all this time, my friend? Nothing, eh? or only how to arrange the stitches, and make one little turn the same as another? I’ll trust Hester for that.”
There was another pause, and there he stood turning over my work, and I not able to rush forward and snatch it out of his hand. My cheeks burned with shame and anger—how dared any man discuss my thoughts and fancies so!
“Well, here is the real matter,” said my father, slowly; “Edgar Southcote, it appears, is eighteen—two years older than my Hester, and old enough, he thinks, as he tells me, to decide upon the most important event of his life for himself—so he sends me a formal proposal for the hand of his cousin. My difficulty is not whether to accept the proposal—you understand that, Osborne—but whether, before giving it a peremptory and decided negative, I ought to make it known to Hester?”
“I understand. Well now, waiving that principal difficulty, might one ask why this young man’s very reasonable proposal should have such a peremptory negative?” said Mr. Osborne; “for my own part I do not see that this is at all a necessary conclusion.”
“I am afraid it must suffice that I think it so,” said my father, in his firmest and coldest tone.
“On your high horse again, Southcote? Patience a little, now. Your brother Brian was not a strong-minded man—but a very good fellow for all that. What’s your objection now to his son?”
I almost trembled for this cool scrutinizing of my father’s motives and opinions, which he never revealed to any one—yet I too listened with interest for the answer. No answer came. My father spoke hurriedly and with irritation; but he did not reply.
“I presume you will permit us some little exercise of our own will as to the person whom we admit into our family,” he said; “but enough of this. Do you advise me to tell Hester, or to dispose of the affair on my own responsibility?”
Mr. Osborne seemed bent upon provoking my father’s slumbering resentment.
“Well,” he said with a pause of much consideration, “had the boy proposed to you, the answer would have lain with you of course—but I think it quite possible that some time or other in her life, Hester might remember that her old home in all its revenues, and, I have no doubt, a very worthy and generous youth along with them, had been laid at her feet, and her father, on his own responsibility, threw them away.”
“Osborne!” cried my father—I almost expected he would command him away, and bid him never more enter our house. I am sure I felt that I never could address him with ordinary civility again—but instead of that, after a moment’s pause, my father resumed, in vehement tones certainly, but not in tones of anger at the speaker. “Generous! and you think I would give my daughter to one who sought her from a generous impulse; you forget my life and you forget me.”
How my heart throbbed and resounded in its quick and painful beating!—I cannot tell how strangely I felt the possibility that I myself might one day or other realize in my own person the misfortune of my father’s life. Yes, Mr. Osborne was right thus far, I had not been thinking of nothing while I sat in the sunshine working at my embroidery. I had already seen dimly through the golden mists the hero, the prince, the red cross knight. I had already seen myself worshipped with the pure devotedness of chivalry. I had already, like a true girl and woman, imagined all manner of glories and honors won for me by my true knight, and prized because they made him nobler, and not because they exalted me. Yes! I had been dreaming innocent, beautiful, unworldly dreams—when lo! there fell upon me a vision of my cousin Edgar, and his generous impulse. I clenched my hands upon my little plant in a passion of indignation. The words stung me to the heart.
“Well—I am not astonished that you regard it in this light,” said Mr. Osborne, “but you must confess, at the same time, Southcote, that there is a more common sense way of looking at it. The boy is a good boy, and feels that he has been the means of injuring his cousin—what more natural than that the two branches of the family should unite their claims in this most satisfactory way—what is your objection to it? A punctilio? Come, don’t talk of it to Hester yet—let’s have a fight, old friend. I flatter myself you were none the worse in the old days of arguing out the matter with Frank Osborne. Now, then, for your arguments. Heigho! Howard, my boy, do you recollect the last time?”
There was so long a pause that I could not help stealing forward to look what was the reason. My father’s face was as black as night, and he stood opposite his friend in a rigid fixed attitude, vacantly looking at him—then he turned suddenly on his heel, “Excuse me—I am faint—I will return to you instantly,” he said, as he hurried in. Mr. Osborne shrugged his shoulders, gazed after him, shrugged again, began to whistle, and then suddenly turning round found himself face to face with me.
For the first moment I think I was the least disconcerted—for I was very angry and indignant beyond measure; but, as his face gradually brightened into its usual expression of shrewdness and good-humored sarcasm, my own courage fell. I had been eavesdropping, finding out my father’s secrets without his knowledge—playing a very shabby part—I who piqued myself upon my sense of honor.
“So!” said Mr. Osborne, “your father is right, young lady. I see I did not understand Hester; pray what may you be doing here?”
And I, who had intended to denounce his paltry views, and to pour out the full tide of my indignation upon him for thwarting and chafing my father—I was ready to cry with vexation and mortified pride. “I did not intend to listen—I was only here by chance—and, at first, I thought you knew I was here,” said I, making a pause between each sentence, swallowing down my ire and my humiliation. After all I had heard, to have to excuse myself to him!
“Well, your father’s run away,” said Mr. Osborne; “suppose we finish the argument, Hester. It is your concern after all; but I suppose such a thing as a sweetheart, or the dim possibility of being wooed and married never entered your guileless thoughts at all?”
I did not answer him—my girlish pride was on fire, and my cheeks burnt, but I could find nothing sufficiently annihilating to reply to Mr. Osborne.
We heard the noise of an opened door just then, and of a footstep in the passage which led to the garden. Mr. Osborne glanced hastily round him, and then bent forward to me.
“Hester, attend to me. You are very young, and have had a wild education; try, if you can think before you permit your father to decide on this. Do you mark me? I know this boy—he is a better boy than you are, and he has a fantastic fancy for you, as great as you could desire. Hester, here’s your father. I’ll keep your secret, and do you think of what I say.”
My father joined us immediately. If it surprised him to find me there, he took no notice of it, and I was glad to pick up my embroidery and hurry away. I was impressed with an uncomfortable necessity for thinking about it, from what Mr. Osborne had said, and I went to my own room to recollect myself. I could not deny either that I was a little excited and agitated about this new appearance of Edgar Southcote. It did not soften my heart to him, but it awoke my curiosity, and it made a step in my life. I said to myself with a beating heart—a heart disturbed with wonder, with anger, with surprise, and something like affright, that I was no longer a girl, but a woman now, standing upon the threshold of my life. I was sixteen. I thought I was rapidly maturing and growing old, for in this old house of ours, so quiet and withdrawn from common company, the days were peopled with fancies and imaginary scenes, and I did not know how very, very young and girlish were my secret conceptions of life and of the world.
Life! Here was my father, a man in whom I could see no blemish—what was his existence? Such as it was, he lived it in his library, among his books; talking with me now and then, and coming forth to take a long silent solitary walk, or a stroll in the garden in the evening, once or twice a week. Was this all? yes! and I said within myself in reverent explanation of it, that his life had been blighted and cast down by one wrong that always gnawed at his heart; he had married for love; but my mother had married him for pity. Was not this enough to account for the sombre shade in which he lived and walked? I said yes, yes! in eager youthful enthusiasm—yes, this was surely enough to decide for good or evil the whole tenor of a life.
And then there was Alice! Nothing in this house or about it, not even the sunshine, cheered my heart like the smile of Alice; yet she was not merry, and had little to be merry for. Alice was like one who had come out of a desert, leaving all her loves and treasures there behind her—she had lost everything, everything but her life—what had she to live for? I shuddered while I said so; for without Alice how dreary would my days be; and then I paused to recollect that on the borders of this grand and momentous existence, where my father had failed in his own enterprise for happiness, and in which Alice had lost all she loved, my own feet were standing now.
This was what I thought on the subject which Mr. Osborne recommended to my consideration; when I thought again of Edgar, it was with a renewed flush of anger and mortification. My cousin pitied me, who dreamed of inspiring some true knight with the loftiest ambitions, and rewarding him sufficiently with a smile. I was to be subjected to the humiliating proposals which Edgar Southcote’s “generous impulse” suggested to him! These were unfortunate words—how often they have clamored in my ear, and haunted me since then.
I did not go into the garden again that day; not even when it was twilight, and the dews were culling out the odors, and the murmur of hushed sounds and distant voices from the quiet town charmed the dim air into an enchanted calm. In my new-born consciousness, I walked up and down the dim close, at the other side of the house, where there were no windows overlooking the high walls and its glistening ivy. I would be no Proserpine among the flowers, to any foolish boy who dared spy upon my retirement from the college windows. Proserpine! if Mr. Osborne had known I heard him, he never would have called me by that name, nor supposed that any gownsman of Corpus could ever interest me! I had a great contempt for my next neighbors in my girlish loftiness and maturity. I could not have been more insulted than by such an insinuation as this.
And then I went to the drawing-room, and stationed myself at my usual place in the window; the long room was nearly dark, though the pale half-light streamed through it from window to window, and it was strange to look across the whole length of the room to the ivy leaves faintly quivering on the wall at the other side. My father and Mr. Osborne, who had dined with us, were walking in the garden, talking earnestly, and with some indignation I watched them, wondering if they still talked of me. Then there came out, one by one, these lights in the windows, some of them looking faint and steady like true students’ lamps, some suspiciously bright as though there was merry-making within. It pleased me to watch them, as window after window brightened on the night. I scorned the inmates; but I did not scorn these neighborly and kindly lights.
My father came in very soon, and Mr. Osborne called me to say good-night; I went down to him where he stood at the door, and he held my hand a moment, and looked into my face. “Now, Hester, good night—think of what I said,” he repeated. These words induced me to return very quickly upstairs, where my father had gone, following Alice with the lamp. When she had placed it on the table and left the room, I went to my father and stood beside him, till he lifted his eyes from the book. He looked at me with a kind loving look, as if he had pleasure in seeing me—a look not very usual to my father—and took my hand as he always used to do, when I stood at his knee, to ask anything of him as a child, and said, “Well, Hester?” I was full of excitement and resolution, and came to my subject at once, without remembering that I might be blamed for what I had to say first. “I was in the greenhouse, papa, when you were talking there with Mr. Osborne to-day,” I said, firmly—and then I paused with a sudden recollection that this was not quite consistent either with my father’s code of honor or my own.
“I did not intend to listen—it was very wrong—but I could not conceal it from you, now it is done,” I proceeded hurriedly, “and I have come to say, papa, that I heard what you told Mr. Osborne about Edgar Southcote. I wonder how he dares presume upon us so; I think a true gentleman would be sorry to let us see that he was able to be generous to us; and I hope you will write to him at once, papa, and if it is necessary to say anything from me, let it be that I hope there never will be any communication between us, nor any need for me to tell him what I think in plain words.”
My father continued to smile upon me, holding my hand, but without speaking—then he said, still with a smile—“This is a very enigmatical message, Hester—I am afraid I must make it plainer; for this young man, your cousin, has not dared nor presumed so much as you seem to think, my love; I am to tell him that we cannot entertain any proposal for an alliance between the rival branches of the house of Southcote, that we beg his overtures may not be repeated, and though sensible of the great honor he does us, we must beg to decline any further correspondence on the subject—is that what you mean, Hester? I think that is about as much as we are entitled to say.”
I was scarcely pleased at the playful manner in which my father now treated a matter which he evidently had not looked on in a playful light a few hours ago; but, at the same time, his tone made me ashamed of my own vehemence, and I assented hastily. He still held my hand, and his face became quite grave—he seemed to see that I was surprised, and wanted explanation of what he had said.
“I am afraid we are thinking of this young man with a little bitterness, Hester,” said my father, raising his lofty head, “which is not very creditable to us, I fear, my love;—that he has claimed and won what is justly his own, can be no wrong or offence to us. It is rather my part to thank him that he has set me right, than to imply that he has injured me. This last is by no means a dignified assumption, Hester, and it is more or less implied in every harsh judgment we give against your cousin—whereas he is simply indifferent to us, and in rejecting this proposal, I do it with civility, you perceive, just as I would any proposal which was distasteful, from whomsoever it came.”
This speech of my father’s impressed me very greatly; I left him holding my head erect, yet feeling humbled. Yes, I had been very bitter in my heart against Edgar Southcote—I had felt resentment against him, strong and violent, as the supplanter of my father; but it was mean to dislike him on such a ground—it was what Alice called “a poor pride;” yet I confess, it was somewhat difficult to rise, in anything but words, to the altitude of the other pride, and say “he is quite indifferent to me—he has done me no wrong—it is not possible that I can have any grudge against my cousin.”
It was thus that I returned to my window-seat; when I placed myself in my favorite corner, I looped up the curtain, so that I could look in as well as out. The room was dim with that summer dimness which only the evening firelight drives away, and the mild light of the lamp shone softly in the middle of the silent apartment, throwing every piece of furniture near in shadows on the carpet, and leaving all the corners in a faint half-shade of darkness. The point of light in the room was my father’s high white forehead, looking like marble with that illumination on it, and contrasting so strangely with his black hair. I looked at him as I might have looked at a picture. On one of his thin white fingers he had a ring, a very fine diamond in a slender circle of gold, which flashed and shone in the light as he raised his hand, now and then, to turn a leaf—behind him and around him there was shadow and darkness, but the light had gathered on his face, and shone there like a star to me, as I lay within the curtain looking out into the stillness: and on my other hand was the soft gloom of a summer night lying close with its downy plumes upon the trees, and the soft pale skies with a faint star in them here and there, and the lights in the college windows glowing upon youth and untried strength like mine. Rest and calm, and the mild oblivion of the night enclosed us like the arms of angels, but did not silence the swell of the rising tide in my heart.