A Red Wallflower Part 16

'And what then?'

'Then I will take them out, papa. It's an old book.'

'And what will you do with them?'

'I will keep them, sir.'

'What is the use of keeping the flowers after their beauty is gone? I do not think that is worth while.'

'_Some_ of their beauty is gone,' said Esther, with a certain tenderness for the plants manifested in her manner,--'but I love them yet, papa.'

'That is not wise, my child. Why should you love a parcel of dry leaves? Love what is worthy to be loved. I think I would throw them all in the fire.'

'Oh, papa!'

'That's the best, my dear. They are only rubbish. I object to the h.o.a.rding of rubbish. It is a poor habit.'

The colonel turned his attention again to his book, and perhaps did not even remark how Esther sat with a disconsolate face on the floor, looking at her condemned treasures. He would not have understood it if he had seen. In his nature there was no key to the feeling which now was driving the tears into Esther's eyes and making her heart swell.

Like many men, and many women, for the matter of that, Colonel Gainsborough had very little power of a.s.sociation. He would indeed have regarded with sacred reverence anything that had once belonged to his wife, down to her shoe; in that one instance the tension of feeling was strong enough to make the chords tremble under the lightest touch. In other relations, what did it matter? They were nothing to him; and if Colonel Gainsborough made his own estimate the standard of the worth of things, he only did what I am afraid we all do, more or less. At any rate, his was not one of those finer strung natures which recognise the possibility of worlds of knowledge and feeling not open to themselves.

It is also just possible that he divined his daughter's sentiment in regard to the flowers enough to be jealous of it.

But Esther did not immediately move to obey his order. She sat on the floor with the big book before her, the open page showing a half dry blossom of the Mecranthon geranium which was still to her eyes very beautiful. And all the a.s.sociations of that pleasant Christmas afternoon when Pitt had brought it and told her what its name was, rose up before her. She was exceedingly unwilling to burn it. The colonel perhaps had a guess that he had given a hard command; for he did not look again at Esther or speak to her, or take any notice of her delay of obedience. That she would obey he knew; and he let her take her time. So he did not see the big tears that filled her eyes, nor the quiet way in which she got rid of them; while the hurt, sorrowful, regretful look on her face would have certainly moved Pitt to indignation if he had been where he could see it. I am afraid, if the colonel had seen it, _he_ would have been moved quite in a different way. Not to anger, indeed; Colonel Gainsborough was never angry with his child, as truly she never gave him cause; but I think he would privately have applauded the wisdom of his regulation, which removed such objects of misplaced sentiment out of the way of doing further harm. And Esther sat and looked at the Mecranthon, brushed away her tears softly, swallowed her regrets and unwillingness, and finally rose up, carried her book to the fire, and one by one, turning the leaves, took out her drying favourites and threw them into the glowing grate.

It was done; and she carried the book away and put it in its old place.

But a week later it happened that Esther bethought her to open the Encyclopaedia again, to look at _the marks her flowers had left_ on the pages. For they _had_ stained the book a little, and here and there she could discern the outline of a sprig, and trace a faint dash of colour left behind by the petals of some flower rich in its dyes. If it appears from this that the colonel was right in checking the feeling which ran to such extremes, I cannot help that; I am reporting the facts. Esther turned over the book from one place to another where her flowers had lain. Here had been heath; there coronilla; here--oh, here was _still_ the wallflower! Dried beautifully; delicate and unbroken, and perfect and sweet. There was nothing else left, but here was the wallflower. A great movement of joy filled Esther's heart; then came a doubt. Must this be burned too? Would this one little sprig matter? She had obeyed her father, and destroyed all the rest of the bouquet; and this wallflower had been preserved without her knowledge. Since it had been saved, might it not be saved? Esther looked, studied, hesitated; and finally could not make up her mind without further order to destroy this last blossom. She never thought of asking her father's mind about it. The child knew instinctively that he would not understand her; a sorrowful thing for a child to know; it did not occur to her that if he _had_ understood her feeling, he would have been still less likely to favour it. She kept the wallflower, took it away from its exposed situation in the Encyclopaedia, and put it in great safety among her own private possessions.

CHAPTER IX.

_WANT OF COMFORT_.

The months were many and long before there came another break in the monotony of Esther's life. The little girl was thrown upon her own ressources, and that is too hard a position for her years, or perhaps for any years. She had literally no companion but her father, and it is a stretch of courtesy to give the name to him. Another child would have fled to the kitchen for society, at least to hear human voices. Esther did not. The instincts of a natural high breeding restrained her, as well as the habits in which she had been brought up. Mrs. Barker waited upon her at night and in the morning, at her dressing and undressing: sometimes Esther went for a walk, attended by Christopher; the rest of the time she was either alone, or in the large, orderly room where Colonel Gainsborough lay upon the sofa, and there Esther was rather more alone than anywhere else. The colonel was reading; reverence obliged her to keep quiet; he drew long breaths of weariness or sadness every now and then, which every time came like a cloud over such suns.h.i.+ne as she had been able to conjure up; and besides all that, notwithstanding the sighs and the reading, her father always noticed and knew what she was doing. Now it is needless to say that Colonel Gainsborough had forgotten what it was to be a child; he was therefore an incompetent critic of a child's doings or judge of a child's wants.

He had an impatience for what he called a 'waste of time;' but Esther was hardly old enough to busy herself exclusively with history and geography; and the little innocent amus.e.m.e.nts to which she had recourse stood but a poor chance under his censors.h.i.+p. 'A waste of time, my daughter,' he would say, when he saw Esther busy perhaps with some childish fancy work, or reading something from which she promised herself entertainment, but which the colonel knew promised nothing more. A word from him was enough. Esther would lay down her work or put away the book, and then sit in forlorn uncertainty what she should do to make the long hours drag less heavily. History and geography and arithmetic she studied, in a sort, with her father; and Colonel Gainsborough was not a bad teacher, so far as the progress of his scholar was concerned. So far as her pleasure went, the lessons were very far behind those she used to have with Pitt. And the recitations were short. Colonel Gainsborough gave his orders, as if he were on a campaign, and expected to see them fulfilled. Seeing them fulfilled, he turned his attention at once to something else.

Esther longed for her former friend and instructor with a longing which cannot be put into words. Yet longing is hardly the expression for it; she was not a child to sit and wish for the unattainable; it was rather a deep and aching sense of want. She never forgot him. If Pitt's own mother thought of him more constantly, she was the only person in the world of whom that was true. Pitt sometimes wrote to Colonel Gainsborough, and then Esther treasured up every revelation and detail of the letter and added them to what she knew already, so as to piece out as full an image as possible of Pitt's life and doings. But how the child wanted him, missed him, and wept for him! Though of the latter not much; she was not a child given to crying. The harder for her, perhaps.

The Dallases, husband and wife, were not much seen at this time in the colonel's quiet house. Mr. Dallas did come sometimes of an evening and sat and talked with its master; and he was not refres.h.i.+ng to Esther, not even when the talk ran upon his absent son; for the question had begun to be mooted publicly, whether Pitt should go to England to finish his education. It began to be spoken of in Pitt's letters too; he supposed it would come to that, he said; his mother and father had set their hearts on Oxford or Cambridge. Colonel Gainsborough heartily approved. It was like a knell of fate to Esther.

They were alone together one day, as usual, the father and daughter; and silence had reigned a long while in the room, when Esther broke it.

She had been sitting poring over a book; now she looked up with a very burdened brow and put her question.

'Papa, how do people get comfort out of the Bible?'

'Eh--what, my dear?' said the colonel, rousing his attention.

'What must one do, to get comfort out of the Bible?'

'Comfort?' repeated the colonel, now looking round at her. 'Are you in want of comfort, Esther?'

'I would like to know how to find it, papa, if it is here.'

'Here? What have you got there? Come where I can see you.'

Esther drew near, unwillingly. 'It is the Bible, papa.'

'And _what_ is it you want from the Bible?--Comfort?'

'Mamma used to say one could get comfort in the Bible, and I wanted to know how.'

'Did she?' said the colonel with grave thoughtfulness. But he said no more. Esther waited. Her father's tone had changed; he seemed to have gone back into regions of the past, and to have forgotten her. The minutes ran on, without her daring to remind him that her question was still unanswered. The colonel at last, with a long sigh, took up his book again; then seemed to bethink him, and turned to Esther.

'I do not know, my dear,' he said. 'I never could get it there myself, except in a very modified way. Perhaps it is my fault.'

The subject was disposed of, as far as the colonel was concerned.

Esther could ask him no more. But that evening, when Mrs. Barker was attending upon her, she made one more trial.

'Barker, do you know the Bible much?'

'The Bible, Miss Esther!'

'Yes. Have you read it a great deal? do you know what is in it?'

'Well, Miss Esther, I ain't a heathen. I do read my Bible, to be sure, more or less, all my life, so to speak; which is to say, ever since I could read at all.'

'Did you ever find comfort in it?'

'Comfort, Miss Esther? Did I ever find _comfort_ in it, did ye ask?'

the housekeeper repeated, very much puzzled. 'Well, I can't just say.

Mebbe I never was just particlarly lookin' for that article when I went to my Bible. I don't remember as I never was in no special want o'

comfort--sich as should set me to lookin' for it; 'thout it was when missus died.'

'_She_ said, one could find comfort in the Bible,' Esther went on, with a tender thrill in the voice that uttered the beloved p.r.o.noun.

'Most likely it's so, Miss Esther. What my mistress said was sure and certain true; but myself, it is something which I have no knowledge of.'

'How do you suppose one could find comfort in the Bible, Barker? How should one look for it?'

''Deed, Miss Esther, your questions is too hard for me. I'd ask the colonel, if I was you.'

'But I ask you, if you can tell me.'

'And that's just which I ain't wise enough for. But when I don't know where a thing is, Miss Esther, I allays begins at one end and goes clean through to the other end; and then, if the thing ain't there, why I knows it, and if it is there, I gets it.'

'It would take a good while,' said Esther musingly, 'to go through the whole Bible from one end to the other.'

'That's which I am thinkin', Miss Esther. I'm thinkin' one might forget what one started to look for, before one found it. But there! the Bible ain't just like a store closet, neither, with all the things ticketed on shelves. I'm thinkin' a body must do summat besides look in it.'