CHAPTER VII.

THE TERRACES.

Arrived at The Towers, I first slumbered a couple of hours, and then, the day still early, returned to my mistress’ bedside. She had bidden me wake her, but I just massaged her with a gentle touch, contemplating with a smile of pleasure that face whose charms I am soon no more to behold: and never did she show to me in so angel-like a light as then, for everything is suddenly changed in me, I find myself inclined to be kindly-minded to everybody, and then Miss Eve is ever beguiling, from her very breathing being given forth a breeze fraught with that fainting fragrance of frangipane, which is as essentially a part of her self as are her eyes or her smile. When her lids unclosed of their own action she once more bathed, and it was when I was doing her hands in making her toilette for the forenoon that she begged me to bear tea with my own hands to her, if she should happen to be in the small drawing-room after four that afternoon.

I at once suspected an interview with Monsieur le Comte de Courcy, and this proved true: for on looking into the small drawing-room in the afternoon, I saw the two alone at a window, and when I presently stole in bearing the tray, there they still were, Miss Eve considering something that had been entreated of her with her head bent, while Monsieur le Comte, in his grey frock-coat, spoke pressingly at her, eagerly fingering his imperial. Now, the sight of lovemaking always profoundly agitates me, causing me a shivering round my right knee; so, having announced the tea in a mutter, I could not, on stealing out, tear my ears away, but stood there by the stair-top, hung upon what was said; and presently could hear the Minister of the Interior say, “You have permitted me to hope these four months,” then mumble, mumble, and then the lips of Miss Eve were speaking, saying, “Days have their weirds and their weathers, if Thursday its drought, perchance Friday its showers: somehow to-day I am dull, empty of every reply.” “Only whisper to me the word ‘hope,’” I then heard Monsieur the Minister implore with much agitation, though what answer was made to this I could not catch; and he then said, “Soon?” to which she replied, “Soon necessarily, since you are going.” So he asked her, “To-morrow?” and the answer given was, “Well, to-morrow, if God will,” at which point I saw the boy-in-buttons rushing up, so went away.

For the evening Miss Eve had arranged for the party a ball, to which came a troop of neighbour visitors, though Miss Ruth and Mr. Vickery, of course, kept themselves from the levity of it. So, after preparing Miss Eve’s third bath—Miss Ruth, I have heard, considers it to be “worldly” to bathe her body as frequently as once in a week, as nuns believe!—after bathing Miss Eve anew, I advised her to put on for the evening the Chantilly over-skirt and the pearls, for I knew that Miss Savage in her crimson robe would be making Miss Eve’s pink appear pale; and having aided nature one wee bit by a touch on her cheeks, her lashes, and her eye-brows, I turned her out an object _chic_ to kiss the hand at, proudly certain in myself that she must prove the finest-costumed of the company; and still I had uttered no word to her as to my leaving her service immediately, it was so immense a step, like a ravine from which I shrank.

After dinner, till nearly nine, I was down in the housekeeper’s place, making a pretence at playing cards, and some moments after nine rose to rush off to meet him in the east shrubbery, as arranged; but just then my bell summoned me, and when I went to the shrubbery ten minutes late, with a rush of terrors I became aware that he was not there. I ran my hardest now, my heart raised to Heaven in a prayer that nothing had happened—down the mountain to the cliffs, down their face to his cave. He was not there, and I wrung my hands together in an anguish of apprehension, begging the good God not once again to bring me all the gall of the draught of frustration to drain to the dregs, and the bitterish bread of drabness to chew for ever: for there he was not, and where he could have gone to I could not guess. Thinking at last that I might have missed him in coming, I made my way back up, with runs and stoppages to take my breath, came back to the shrubbery, but failed to find him there. However, on looking out across the lake, I saw in the moonlight that laved the lawn-terraces two forms: one of them Miss Ruth, pacing there with her gaze poring upon the zodiac, and her rubric of devotion hung between her fingers; the other, whom I could just perceive, was lying flat, peeping into the drawing-room through a window, and I knew that it was he, for a rumour of the music and dancing came faintly to me there, and I knew that this must have seduced him to it. I could not but feel pleased to find him, but to my feet my being was pierced with fear to see him lying there, peeping carefully in. In a minute, however, he bounded to his feet, hearing, I presume, the step of Miss Ruth, and he ran some paces, looking back at her; but when she beckoned to him he waited, and in a minute I perceived them standing together engaged in speech.

I crept then through the bushes of the lake’s edge, till I came to the lawn; and there, observing their backs turned toward me, I stalked still further forward on my hands and knees, till I was in concealment beneath the stonework of a terrace—little dreaming that I had been overheard; and thence I heard the voice of Miss Ruth saying to the boy, “But you must have lived in a strange isolation never to have heard speak of Jesus Christ?” upon which he, gazing down upon the ground, said in a low tone that he was altogether ignorant, till two days ago having never met with anyone save his father and an idiot.

“Poor dear boy!” coos the voice of Miss Ruth, who, being but twenty-five years of age, has scarcely the right, I think, thus to soothe a youth of twenty. “And where,” says she, “was this?”

In a tone in his throat he replied, “On an island of the Outer Hebrides.”

“Why, I am even now from there!” she told him. “But your father, has he also never known the blessed name of Jesus?”

He answered her that his father possesses the sum of worldly wisdom, but that he had never at all heard from his father any mention of this personage.

“Why, this is strange!” she cries in a maze, with her azure eyes of a child widely agape at him: “to think of such pagans living in Christian England! Do you not, then, know the words ‘Christian,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘Christendom’?”

To this he answered that he had never heard these words.

“Tell me this, then,” said she: “in what year is it that we are now living?” to which he made her the amazing answer that we are now in the year six hundred thousand three hundred and sixty-three.

At this reply Miss Ruth smiled, and during some time appeared wrapped in silent prayer, until she suddenly asked him, “From what event, then, do you date this vast sum of years?”

“From the presumed date of the evolution of human life from the ape-state,” was his reply.

For a few moments Miss Ruth mused upon the young man, then threw up her hands with drollery in her little human way which just rescues her from being angelic; and she asked him, “But are not all dates reckoned among us from the Lord Christ?”

At these words of hers he seemed extremely perplexed, and, after frowning upon the ground, asked her if the Lord Jesus Christ was a Greek or a Roman.

“He was a Hebrew!” cries Miss Ruth.

“With an Arianised name,” said he: “lived, then, under the later Romans.”

“Just so,” said she: “how much you know for one of your station, and how little!”

“How little,” he said, and on a sudden knelt to her, begging her to bear with his ignorance, for that she was much more gracious and merciful to discourse with him than he deserved, as he was not only strange to the world, but his brain, moreover, was all in a whirl, inasmuch as he had only just made away from his father’s control, nor had ever before been intoxicated with strains of harmony such as those escaping from out of the house, nor beheld such blessed beings as she and those fabulous beldams moving beautifully to music over the floor of the drawing-room.... Upon this Miss Ruth raised him up, bid him wait, and, moving to a window of the drawing-room, peeped in to Miss Eve, becking her to come, too, to inspect the curiosity. I disliked her for it, since there was little need for him ever to have seen Miss Eve near at hand, save for this. At all events, out stepped Miss Eve now, very tall in the sheen of the moon, Miss Ruth seeming a midget near her, and even when the three stood face to face, still Miss Eve appeared the tallest of all. So Miss Ruth recounted now in how odd a solitude the young man had spent his existence, and then fell anew to talking of the Lord Christ, he eyeing Miss Eve steadily with the corner of his wild eye, speaking with a drooped head to Miss Ruth, eyeing steadily Miss Eve; till now Miss Ruth cried out, “He was man and God, too!” and only then did the ogler, peering in surprise at her, cease to eye Miss Eve. Immediately now, too, his meekness appeared to cease, for looking straight now at Miss Eve, he asked her if she also shared this belief.

Miss Eve had as yet uttered not a word, but now with her eyes turned downward, her lips muttered, “Why, yes.”

He smiled, and at the same time looked perfectly perplexed, turning his stare from one to the other lady, until Miss Ruth remarked to him, “Do not doubt it, though it is marvellous in all our eyes, so that even the cherubic natures of the skies deeply brood with admiration upon it,” and he then very impolitely replied to her that her consciousness of the size of this earth could not be alert.

To this answered Miss Ruth, “The earth? she is huge in momentousness, you know: with each tick of the clock a human being ceases to breathe——”

“A human being?” he replied with a cry of surprise: “with each tick of the clock a million worlds are burned, and are born!”

“Oh, La!” says she, startled a little at him.

Then she said, with that veiling of the eyes with the eyelids that lends her her air of Madonna saintliness, “That cannot be, I think.”

But the other sister murmured, “Ruth, it must truly be so, if the universe truly is termless: prove me one world that’s been burned, millions a minute must burn.”

“Let it be so, then,” said Miss Ruth, “since you say so, and glory be to God, for the remotest of them, I think, His hand holds, and His right hand guides it.”

“He is it,” the young man said.

“He is with it, I think,” Miss Ruth replied.

“And _you_ also say this?” he asked of Miss Eve.

“Yes,” she answered curtly, with a touch of pique, as it appeared to me.

Silent he stood now a while, with that smile of his that hides all the windings of his mind behind his brow, but still giving an impression of one plunged in bewilderment at the creatures he was speaking with. Then, glancing upward, he swept his fingers athwart the vault of the stars, with the remark that all that was a darksome mathematic, a perfection which was deaf.

But now Miss Eve, going rosy, frowned upon the ground, and in tones that trembled a little, she observed, “Perfect it _is_, though a Heart, not a Head, was its Father and Harper; tolling melodious notes, wrung with emotion it rolls;” and it was now that the young man suddenly caused my heart to bound into my mouth by coming out with the statement that, inasmuch as _the fourth_ sharer in the conversation would undoubtedly be found to contemplate the universe in the same sort of mood, he could only suppose that all ladies were prone to criticisms of the same quality.

The two ladies looked round, and “which ‘fourth sharer’ can he mean?” Miss Ruth wished to know of Miss Eve, while I crouched there beneath the terrace, trembling lest he should betray my whereabouts; but when they pressed him to say where I was, to my great gladness, he gave an evasive reply.

He next requested Miss Ruth to instruct him further in her views of the universe, upon which she begged him to come the next night that she might give him a Bible and teach him of the Lord Jesus; and as to his father, after some hesitation on her part, he gained from her a promise that, if his father, or his father’s agents, should get upon his scent, the sisters would not let out to them where he lurked down there in the river-cave. And next he began to beg Miss Eve for one of the begonias at her girdle, but at that moment, before he could be answered, Monsieur le Comte de Courcy stepped out of the house, and, really as if by magic, the instant he appeared the young man had vanished. By this time I had somewhat recovered of my fit of affright, my eyes were anew at the parapet-top, and I could spy the surprise of the ladies, who seemed unable to believe what their two eyes had seen: for though the nearest leafage was quite nineteen or twenty metres away, in the twinkling of an eye, as it seemed, he was within it, and gone like a ghost at cock-crow.

I, for my part, having crawled back to the lake, rushed through the shrubbery obliquely, meaning to meet him somewhere in his career downward: but he was nowhere to be found, until I was on the footpath above the cliffs, when down there in the moonlight I beheld him walking furiously to and fro before his cave’s mouth. Down, then, I scrambled, calling out to him, asking why he had not awaited me; but he is not very well-bred, went on silently walking, and on marking one of the swans glide past on the water, he suddenly darted to lie on his face and gaze at it.

“But why did you fly like that?” I asked him when he returned to me, “since the gentleman could not have hurt you?” but still he made me no reply.

“And what did you think of the two ladies?” I next asked him.

Then he: “Who are those ladies?”

I: “They are Miss Ruth and Miss Eve Vickery, the daughters of Mr. Richard Vickery, who is what is called ‘An Iron King,’ a very rich and an extremely religious man, who sometimes preaches in a chapel on Sundays.”

He: “Preaches?”—and I had now to try to explain that “preaching” means teaching the people how to be devout and grave; but I failed to get him to comprehend how Mr. Vickery could have attained to greater gravity than the rest, and he struck his brow in the misery of his failure to grasp the signification of a single word that I uttered as to this. “Well, it is so, and that is all,” I said at last; “but as to the ladies, you have still not told me which of the two you most admire.”

Then he: “Which is the first-born?”

So I: “That auburn-haired one is the elder by three years, being already twenty-five, and it is she who has the reputation of a saint in society, though it is Miss Eve who is so much the more queenly; so which of the sisters do you like, the auburn or the light?”

He: “A saint?”—and I had anew to make an explanation which he little comprehended, and then anew I wished to know of him which of the two sisters he the most admired.

And now he, making that stone like an ink-bottle which he keeps inside his shirt whirl about his forefinger without attachment in a quite wonderful way, his waist swaying to keep the thing whirling wildly quick, answered with whistling lips, “I like Miss Ruth.”

Then I: “Oh, you do? You like her better, I see, than you do Miss Eve?” upon which he, putting his hand behind his back for the stone to whirl behind there, answered, “Yes.”

Then I: “But leaving Miss Ruth out of the question, since she will never marry, which of the two do you most admire—Miss Eve or me?”

He: “You.”

I: “Oh, you do?”

He whistled quietly awhile, whirling the thing wildly with a swaying waist, as it were a wheel wheeling on his hand, and he answered, “Yes” to me; but I thought that my heart would be breaking with its rankling.

So I to him: “Well, since this is so, that you like me so very vastly better than Miss Eve and than all, why go to-morrow evening to get the Bible, since there is no need, really; it is all nonsense and make-believe, and will merely mean that you will be caught by your father,” upon which he, suddenly ceasing to wheel the thing, sharply asked if she had not promised not to betray him.

So I: “She has promised, yes, but she little means it, wait, you will see, you little know women, they are deceivers all; she will betray you surely enough, if she but has the chance.”

He glanced sharply at me, then said, “No.”

I: “But I say yes.”

He: “The lapwing says pee-wit.”

What he meant I was not sure, but I was so broken-hearted that night, that with sobs I threw myself now in a passion to his breast, and on my knees, kissing my own tears on his hands, implored him like a dear boy not to leave and despoil me, but to love me for ever, for if he left me, that would be my death, I said, and his death as well.

He smiled with his fixed little smile upon me, and I could believe that he meant well by me; so, getting up now, I told him how I had that day gained all information as to English marriages, and meant on the morrow to take the first measures; but as I was speaking of this, he, leaning aside, bent his ear to the ground, hearing God only knows what sound under the grass, and when I had bidden him good-night, and was going up the cliff’s brow again, on glancing back I beheld him bent down aside, eagerly listening with his ear near the ground.