A Red Wallflower Part 98

'But what are you doing? That is beautiful!--but you are making it a great deal too elaborate and difficult for my scholar. She is not far enough advanced for that.'

'I'll take another piece of paper, then, and begin again. What do you want?'

'Just a tree, lightly sketched, and a bit of rock under it; something like that. She is a beginner.'

'A tree and a rock?' said Pitt. 'Well, here you shall have it. But, Queen Esther, this sort of thing cannot go on, you know?'

'For a while it must.'

'For a very little while! In fact, I do not see how it can go on at all. I will go and see your school madam and tell her you have made another engagement.'

'But every honest person fulfils the obligations he is under, before a.s.suming new ones.'

'That's past praying for!' said Pitt, with a shake of his head. 'You have a.s.sumed the new ones. Now the next thing is to get rid of the old.

I must go back to my work soon; and, Queen Esther, your majesty will not refuse to go with me?'

He turned and stretched out his hand to her as he spoke. In the action, in the intonation of the last words, in the look which went with them, there was something very difficult for Esther to withstand. It was so far from presuming, it was so delicate in its urgency, there was so much wistfulness in it, and at the same time the whole magnetism of his personal influence. Esther placed her hand within his, she could not help that; the bright colour flamed up in her cheeks; words were not ready.

'What are you thinking about?' said he.

'Papa,' Esther said, half aloud; but she was thinking of a thousand things all at once.

'I'll undertake the colonel,' said he, going back to his drawing, without letting go Esther's hand. 'Colonel Gainsborough is not a man to be persuaded; but I think in this case he will be of my mind.'

He was silent again, and Esther was silent too, with her heart beating, and a quiet feeling of happiness and rest gradually stealing into her heart and filling it; like as the tide at flood comes in upon the empty sh.o.r.e. Whatever her father might think upon the just mooted question, those two hands had found each other, once and for all. Thoughts went roving, aimlessly, meanwhile, as thoughts will, in such a flood-tide of content. Pitt worked on rapidly. Then a word came to Esther's lips.

'Pitt, you have become quite an Englishman, haven't you?'

'No more than you are a Englishwoman.'

'I think, I am rather an American,' said Esther; 'I have lived here nearly all my life.'

'Do you like New York?'

'I was not thinking of New York. Yes, I like it. I think I like any place where my home is.'

'Would you choose your future home rather in Seaforth, or in London?

You know, _I_ am at home in both.'

Esther would not speak the woman's answer that rose to her lips, the immediate response, that where he was would be what she liked best. It flushed in her cheek and it parted her lips, but it came not forth in words. Instead came a cairn question of business.

'What are the arguments on either side?'

'Well,' said Pitt, shaping his 'rock' with bold strokes of the pencil, 'in Seaforth the sun always shines, or that is my recollection of it.'

'Does it not shine in London?'

'No, as a rule.'

Esther thought it did not matter!

'Then, for another consideration, in Seaforth you would never see, I suppose,--almost never,--sights of human distress. There are no poor there.'

'And in London?'

'The distress is before you and all round you; and such distress as I suppose your heart cannot imagine.'

'Then,' said Esther softly, 'as far as _that_ goes, Pitt, it seems to me an argument for living in London.'

He met her eyes with an earnest warm look, of somewhat wistful recognition, intense with his own feeling of the subject, glad in her sympathy, and yet tenderly cognizant of the way the subject would affect her.

'There is one point, among many, on which you and Miss Frere differ,'

he said, however, coolly, going back to his drawing.

'She does not like, or would not like, living in London?'

'I beg your pardon! but she would object to your reason for living there.'

Esther was silent; her recollection of Betty quite agreed with this observation.

'You say you have seen her?' Pitt went on presently.

'Yes.'

'And talked with her?'

'Oh yes. And liked her too, in a way.'

'Did she know your name!' he asked suddenly, facing round.

'Why, certainly,' said Esther, smiling. 'We were properly introduced; and we talked for a long while, and very earnestly. She interested me.'

Pitt's brows drew together ominously. Poor Betty! The old Spanish proverb would have held good in her case; 'If you do not want a thing known of you, _don't do it_.' Pitt's pencil went on furiously fast, and Esther sat by, wondering what he was thinking of. But soon his brow cleared again as his drawing was done, and he flung down the pencil and turned to her.

'Esther,' he said, 'it is dawning on me, like a glory out of the sky, that you and I are not merely to live our earthly life together, and serve together, in London or anywhere, in the work given us to do. That is only the small beginning. Beyond all that stretches an endless life and ages of better service, in which we shall still be together and love and live with each other. In the light of such a distant glory, is it much, if we in this little life on earth give all we have to Him who has bought all that, and all this too, for us?'

'It is not much,' said Esther, with a sudden veil of moisture coming over her eyes, through which they shone like two stars. Pitt took both her hands.

'I mean it literally,' he said.

'So do I.'

'We will be only stewards, using faithfully everything, and doing everything, so as it seems would be most for His honour and best for His work.'

'Yes,' said Esther. But gladness was like to choke her from speaking at all.

'In India there is not the poorest Hindoo but puts by from his every meal of rice so much as a spoonful for his G.o.d. That is the utmost he can do. Shall we do less than our utmost?'