IN an easy house, where punctuality is not rampant, the hour before dinner is pleasant to young people. The lady of the house is gone to dress. If she is beginning to feel the weight of years, she perhaps likes a nap before dinner, and in any case she will change her dress in a leisurely manner and likes to have plenty of time; and the children have been carried off to the nursery that their toilet may be attended to, and no hurried call afterwards interfere with the tying of their sashes. The young lady of the house is not moved by either of these motives. Five minutes is enough for her, she thinks and says, and the room is so cosey and the half light so pleasant, and it is the hour for confidences. If she has another girl with her, they will drift into beginnings of the most intimate narrative, which must be finished in their own rooms after everybody has gone to bed; and if it is not a girl, but the other kind of companion, those confidences are perhaps even more exciting. Rosalind knew what Roland Hamerton wanted, vaguely: she was, on the surface, not displeased with his devotions. She had no intention of coming to so very decided a step as marriage, nor did she for a moment contemplate him as the lover whose absence surprised her. But he was nice enough. She liked well enough to talk to him. They were like brother and sister, she would have said. “Roland—why, I have known him all my life,” she would have exclaimed indignantly to any one who had blamed her for “encouraging” this poor young man. Indeed, Rosalind was so little perfect that she had already on several occasions defended herself in this way, and had not the slightest intention of accepting Roland, and yet allowed him to persuade her to linger and talk after Aunt Sophy had gone up-stairs. This was quite unjustifiable, and a more high-minded young woman would not have done it. But poor Rosalind, though her life had been crossed by a strain of tragedy and though her feelings were very deep and her experiences much out of the common, and her mind capable and ready to respond to very high claims, was yet not the ideal of a high-minded girl. It is to be hoped that she was unacquainted with flirtation and above it, but yet she did not dislike—so long as she could skilfully keep him from anything definite in the way of a proposal, anything that should be compromising and uncomfortable to sit and listen to—the vague adoration which was implied in Hamerton’s talk, and to feel that the poor young fellow was laying himself out to please her. It did please her, and it amused her—which was more. It was sport to her, though it might be death to him. She did not believe that there was anything sufficiently serious in young Hamerton’s feelings or in his character to involve anything like death, and she judged with some justice that he preferred the happiness of the moment, even if it inspired him with false hopes, to the collapse of all those hopes which a more conscientious treatment would have brought about. Accordingly, Rosalind lingered in the pleasant twilight. She sent her aunt’s butler, Saunders, away when he appeared to light the lamps.
“Not yet, Saunders,” she said, “we like the firelight,” in a manner which made Roland’s heart jump. It seemed to that deceived young man that nothing but a flattering response of sentiment in her mind would have made Rosalind, like himself, enjoy the firelight. “That was very sweet of you,” he said.
“What was sweet of me?” The undeserved praise awakened a compunction in her. “There is nothing good in saying what is true. I do like talking by this light. Summer evenings are different, they are always a little sad; but the fire is cheerful, and it makes people confidential.”
“If I could think you wanted me to be confidential, Rosalind!”
“Oh, I do; everybody! I like to talk about not only the outside, but what people are really thinking of. One hears so much of the outside: all the runs you have had, and how Captain Thornton jumps, and Miss Plympton keeps the lead.”
“If you imagine that I admire Miss Plympton—”
“I never thought anything of the kind. Why shouldn’t you admire her? Though she is a little too fond of hunting, she is a nice girl, and I like her. And she is very pretty. You might do a great deal worse, Roland,” said Rosalind, with maternal gravity, “than admire Ethel Plympton. She is quite a nice girl, not only when she is on horseback. But she would not have anything to say to you.”
“That is just as well,” said the young man, “for hers is not the sort of shrine I should ever worship at. The kind of girl I like doesn’t hunt, though she goes like a bird when it strikes her fancy. She is the queen at home, she makes a room like this into heaven. She makes a man feel that there’s nothing in life half so sweet as to be by her, whatever she is doing. She would make hard work and poverty and all that sort of thing delightful. She is—”
“A dreadful piece of perfection!” said Rosalind, with a slightly embarrassed laugh. “Don’t you know nobody likes to have that sort of person held up to them? One always suspects girls that are too good. But I hope you sometimes think of other things than girls,” she added, with an air of delightful gravity and disapproval. “I have wanted all this long time to know what you were going to do; and to find instead only that hyperbolical fiend, you know, that talks of nothing but ladies, is disappointing. What would you think of me,” Rosalind continued, turning upon him with still more imposing dignity, “if I talked to you of nothing but gentlemen?”
“Rosalind!—that’s blasphemy to think of; besides that I should feel like getting behind a hedge and shooting all of them,” the young man cried.
“Yes, it is a sort of blasphemy; you would all think a girl a dreadful creature if she did so. But you think you are different, and that it doesn’t matter; that is what everybody says; one law for men and one for women. But I, for one, will never give in to that. I want to know what you are going to do.”
“And suppose,” he cried, “that I were to return the question, since you say there must not be one law for men and one for women. Rosalind, what are you going to do?”
“I?” she said, and looked at him with surprise. “Alas! you know I have my work cut out for me, Roland. I have to bring up the children; they are very young, and it will be a great many years before they can do without me; there is no question about me. Perhaps it is a good thing to have your path quite clear before you, so that you can’t make any mistake about it,” she added, with a little sigh.
“But, Rosalind, that is completely out of the question, don’t you know. Sacrifice yourself and all your life to those children—why, it would be barbarous; nobody would permit it.”
“I don’t know,” said Rosalind, “who has any right to interfere. You think Uncle John, perhaps? Uncle John would never think of anything so foolish. It is much less his business than it is mine; and you forget that I am old enough to judge for myself.”
“Rosalind, you can’t really intend anything so dreadful! Oh, at present you are so young, you are all living in the same house, it does not make so much difference. But to sacrifice yourself, to give up your own life, to relinquish everything for a set of half—”
“You had better not make me angry,” she said. He had sprung to his feet and was pacing about in great excitement, his figure relieved against the blaze of the fire, while she sat in the shadow at one side, protected from the glow. “What am I giving up? In the first place, I know nothing that I am giving up; and I confess that it amuses me, Roland, to see you so excited about my life. I should like to hear what you are going to do with your own.”
“Can’t you understand?” he cried, hastily and in confusion, “that the one might—that the one might—involve perhaps—” And here the young man stopped and looked helplessly at her, not daring to risk what he had for the uncertainty of something better. But it was very hard, when he had gone so far, to refrain.
“Might involve perhaps— No, I can’t understand,” Rosalind said, almost with unconcern. “What I do understand is that you can’t hunt forever if you are going to be any good in life. And you don’t even hunt as a man ought that means to make hunting his object. Do something, Roland, as if you meant it!—that is what I am always telling you.”
“And don’t I always tell you the same thing, that I am no hero. I can’t hold on to an object, as you say. What do you mean by an object? I want a happy life. I should like very well to be kind to people, and do my duty and all that, but as for an object, Rosalind! If you expect me to become a reformer or a philanthropist or anything of that sort, or make a great man of myself—”
Rosalind shook her head softly in her shadowed corner. “I don’t expect that,” she said, with a tone of regret. “I might have done so, perhaps, at one time. At first one thinks every boy can do great things, but that is only for a little while, when one is without experience.”
“You see you don’t think very much of my powers, for all you say,” he cried, hastily, with the tone of offence which the humblest can scarcely help assuming when taken at his own low estimate. Roland knew very well that he had no greatness in him, but to have the fact acknowledged with this regretful certainty was somewhat hard.
“That is quite a different matter,” said Rosalind. “Only a few men (I see now) can be great. I know nobody of that kind,” she added, with once more that tone of regret, shaking her head. “But you can always do something, not hang on amusing yourself, for that is all you ever do, so far as I can see.”
“What does your Uncle John do?” he cried; “you have a great respect for him, and so have I; he is just the best man going. But what does he do? He loafs about; he goes out a great deal when he is in town; he goes to Scotland for the grouse, he goes to Homburg for his health, he comes down and sees you, and then back to London again. Oh, I think that’s all right, but if I am to take him for my example—and I don’t know where I could find a better—”
“There is no likeness between your case and his. Uncle John is old, he has nothing particular given him to do; he is—well, he is Uncle John. But you, Roland, you are just my age.”
“I’m good five years older, if not more.”
“What does that matter? You are my own age, or, according to all rules of comparison between boys and girls, a little younger than me. You have got to settle upon something. I am not like many people,” said Rosalind, loftily; “I don’t say do this or do that; I only say, for Heaven’s sake do something, Roland; don’t be idle all your life.”
“I should not mind so much if you did say do this or do that. Tell me something to do, Rosalind, and I’ll do it for your sake.”
“Oh! that is all folly; that belongs to fairy tales—a shawl that will go through a ring, or a little dog that will go into a nutshell, or a golden apple. They are all allegories, I suppose; the right thing, however, is to do what is right for the sake of what is right, and not because any one in particular tells you.”
“Shall I set up in chambers, and try to get briefs?” said Roland. “But then I have enough to live on, and half the poor beggars at the bar haven’t; and don’t you think it would be taking an unfair advantage, when I can afford to do without and they can’t, and when everybody knows there isn’t half enough business to keep all going? I ask you, Rosalind, do you think that would be fair?”
Here the monitress paused, and did not make her usual eager reply. “I don’t know that it is right to consider that sort of thing, Roland. You see, it would be good for you to try for briefs, and then probably the other men who want them more might be—cleverer than you are.”
“Oh, very well,” cried Roland, who had taken a chair close to his adviser, springing up with natural indignation; “if it is only by way of mortification, as a moral discipline, that you want me to go in for bar work.”
She put out her hand and laid it on his arm. “Oh, no! it would only be fair competition. Perhaps you would be cleverer than they—than some of them.”
“That’s a very doubtful perhaps,” he cried, with a laugh. But he was mollified and sat down again—the touch was very conciliatory. “The truth is,” he said, getting hold of the hand, which she withdrew very calmly after a moment, “I am in no haste; and,” with timidity, “the truth is, Rosalind, that I shall never do work anyhow by myself. If I had some one with me to stir me up and keep me going, and if I knew it was for her interest as well as for my own—”
“You mean if you were to marry?” said Rosalind, in a matter-of-fact tone, rising from her chair. “I don’t approve of a man who always has to be stirred up by his wife; but marry by all means, Roland, if you think that is the best way. Nobody would have the least objection; in short, I am sure all your best friends would like it, and I, for one, would give her the warmest welcome. But still I should prefer, you know, first to see you acting for yourself. Why, there is the quarter chiming, and I promised to let Saunders know when we went to dress. Aunt Sophy will be down-stairs directly. Ring the bell, and let us run; we shall be late again. But the firelight is so pleasant.” She disappeared out of the room before she had done speaking, flying up-stairs to escape the inevitable response, and left poor Roland, tantalized and troubled, to meet the gloomy looks of Saunders, who reminded him that there was but twelve minutes and a half to dress in, and that Mrs. Lennox was very particular about the fish. Saunders took liberties with the younger visitors, and he too had known young Mr. Hamerton all his life.