The Beast Party is over. It has not differed materially from its predecessors, though it may perhaps glory in the bad pre-eminence of having left even more ill-feeling and mortification in its wake than did they.
The little Evanses, indeed, bless its memory, gobbling the bonbons and strutting about the Vicarage garden in the masks and fools' caps that they have extracted out of its crackers. And Lady Roupell, too, is perfectly satisfied with it. Her guests have come, have eaten and drunk, have gone away again, and she need not trouble her head about them for another six months. To-day she gets rid of all her friends except the Harborough children, and is left at liberty to waddle about in her frieze coat, and with her spud in her hand, in peace--a peace which, at the worst of times, she never allows to be very seriously infringed. But there are gradations of age and shabbiness in her frieze coats, and to-day she may don the oldest.
The peace of the Manor, like its gaieties, is apt to be reflected in the Cottage: an exodus from the one is virtually an exodus from the other; and, as such, is apt to be rejoiced over by Margaret as the signal for Prue to begin to eat her dinner better, sleep sounder, and engage in some other occupation than running to the end of the garden to see whether there is a sign of any messenger coming from the Manor. She is at her post of predilection this morning--the end of the garden that overhangs the highway--that highway along which all arrivers at and departers from the Big House must needs travel. She is looking eagerly down the road.
'Prue!' cries her sister from under the Judas-tree, where she is sitting, for a wonder, unoccupied.
'Yes,' replies Prue, but without offering to stir from her post of observation.
'Come here. I want to talk to you.'
'In a minute--directly--by and by.'
A few moments pass.
'Prue?'
'Yes.'
'What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?'
'I am waiting for the Harboroughs to pass. I want to kiss my hand to Lady Betty as she goes by; she asked me to.'
Margaret makes a gesture of annoyance, and irritably upsets Mink, who has just curled himself upon her skirt; but she offers no remonstrance, and it is a quarter of an hour before--the brougham with its Harboroughs, late as usual, and galloping to catch the train, having whirled past and been watched till quite out of sight--Prue saunters up radiant.
'She kissed her hand to me all the way up the hill!' says she, beaming with pleasure at the recollection. 'I threw her a little bunch of jessamine just as the carriage went by. She put her head out in a second, and caught it in her teeth!' Was not it clever of her? She is so clever!'
'Why should she kiss her hand to you? Why should you throw her jessamine?' asks Peggy gloomily.
'Why should not I?' returns the other warmly. 'I am sure she has been kind enough to me, if you only knew!'
'You were not so fond of her last week,' says Margaret, lifting a pair of very troubled eyes to her sister's face. 'Have you already forgotten the three days running that she robbed you of your ride?'
'I cannot think how I could have been so silly!' returns Prue, with a rather forced laugh. 'Of course, it was a mere accident. He says he wonders how I could have been so silly; he was dreadfully hurt about it. He says he looks upon her quite as an elder sister.'
'An elder sister!' echoes Peggy, breaking into a short angry laugh. 'The same sort of elder sister, I think, as the nursery-maid is to the Life Guardsman!'
'I cannot think how you can be so censorious!' retorts Prue, reddening. 'He says it is your one weakness. He admires your character more than that of any one he knows--he says it is--it is--laid upon such large lines; but that he has often been hurt by the harshness of your judgments of other people.'
'Indeed!' says Peggy, with a sort of snort. 'But I daresay that Lady Betty bandages up his wounds.'
'You must have noticed how kind she was to me last night,' continues Prue, thinking it wiser to appear not to have heard this last thrust. 'Of course, every one was longing to talk to her, but she quite singled me out--me, of all people! Oh, if you only knew!'
'If I only knew what?' inquires Margaret, struck by the recurrence of this phrase, to which on its first utterance she had paid little heed, as being the vague expression of Prue's girlish enthusiasm.
Prue hesitates a moment.
'If--if--you only knew the delightful plan she has made!'
'What plan?' shortly and sternly.
'She--she--I cannot think why she did it; it must have been the purest kind-heartedness--she asked me to go and stay with her.'
The colour has mounted brave and bright from Margaret's cheeks to her brow.
'She asked you to stay with her?' repeats she, with slow incisiveness; 'she had the impudence to ask you to stay with her!'
Prue gives a start that is almost a bound.
'The impudence?'
'The woman who had the effrontery to sing that song last night,' pursues Peggy, her voice gathering indignation as it goes along, 'has now the impudence to invite a respectable girl like you to stay with her! Oh, Prue!' her tone changing suddenly to one of eager, tender pain, 'just think what I felt last night when I saw you standing among all those men in fits of laughter at her stupid indecencies! Oh! how could you laugh? What was there to laugh at?'
Prue has begun to whimper.
'They all laughed. I--I--laughed be--be--cause they laughed!'
'And now you want to go and stay with her!' says Margaret, touched and yet annoyed by her sister's easy tears, and letting her long arms fall to her side with a dispirited gesture, as if life were growing too hard for her.
'I am sure it would be no great wonder if I did,' says Prue, still snivelling. 'I, who never go anywhere. She--Lady Betty I mean--could not believe it when I told her I had only been to London twice in my life; and He says that the Harboroughs' is the pleasantest house in England!'
'What does He say?' inquires a soft, gay voice, coming up behind them. 'Why, Prue, what is this? Why are the waterworks turned on? It is early in the day for the fountains to begin playing!' and Freddy Ducane--the flower-like Freddy--with his charming complexion, his laughing eyes, and his beautifully-fitting clothes, stands between the agitated girls.
He has taken Prue's hands, both the one that contains the small damp ball of her pocket-handkerchief and the other. But she snatches them away and runs off.
'You seem to have been having rather a quick thing,' says the young man, bringing back his eyes from the flying to the stationary figure.
The latter has risen.
'Did you know of this invitation?' asks she abruptly, without any attempt at a preliminary salutation.
'I do not much like that dagger-and-bowl way of being asked questions,' returns Freddy, sinking pleasantly into the chair Margaret has just quitted. 'What invitation?'
'You know perfectly well what invitation!' retorts she, her breast beginning to heave and her nostril to quiver, while her pendent right hand unconsciously clenches itself.
Freddy has thrown back his curly head, and is regarding her luxuriously from under his tilted hat, and between his half-closed lids.
'I wish you would stay exactly as you are for just two minutes,' he says rapturously; 'I never saw you look better in my life! What a pose! And you fell into it so naturally, too! I declare, Peg, though we have our little differences, there is no one that at heart appreciates you half as much as I do!'
'I suppose that you suggested it?' says Margaret sternly, passing by with the most absolute silent contempt her companion's gallantries, and abandoning in the twinkling of an eye the admired posture which she had been invited to retain.
'I suggested it!' repeats Freddy, lifting his brows. 'Knowing my Peggy as I do, should I have been likely to call the chimney-pots down about my own head?'
'But you knew of it? You had heard of it?'
'I daresay I did. I hear a great many things that I do not pay much attention to.'
'And you think that Lady Betty Harborough would be a desirable friend for Prue?' says Peggy in bitter interrogation, and unintentionally falling back into her Medea attitude, a fact of which she becomes aware only by perceiving Freddy's hand covertly stealing to his pocket in search of a pencil and notebook to sketch her.
At the sight her exasperation culminates. She snatches the pencil out of his hand and throws it away.
'Cannot you be serious for one moment?' she asks passionately. 'If you knew how sick I am of your eternal froth and flummery!'
'Well, then, I am serious,' returns he, putting his hands in his pockets, and growing grave; 'and if you ask my opinion, I tell you,' with an air as if taking high moral ground, 'that I do not think we have any of us any business to say, "Stand by! I am holier than thou!" It has always been your besetting sin, Peggy, to say, "Stand by! I am holier than thou!"'
'Has it?' very drily.
'Now it is a sort of thing that I never can say' (warming with his theme). 'I do not take any special credit to myself, but I simply cannot. I say, "Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner!"'
'Indeed!'
'And so I naturally cannot see'--growing rather galled against his will by the excessive curtness of his companion's rejoinders--'that you have any right to turn your back upon poor Betty! Poor soul! what chance has she if we all turn our backs upon her?'
'And so Prue is to stay with Lady Betty to bolster up her decayed reputation?' cries Peggy, breaking into an ireful laugh. 'I never heard of a more feasible plan!'
'I think we ought all to stand shoulder to shoulder in the battle of life!' says Freddy loftily, growing rather red.
'I shall do my best to prevent Lady Betty and my Prue standing shoulder to shoulder anywhere,' retorts Peggy doggedly.
A pause.
'So that was what Prue was crying about?' says Freddy, with a quiet air of reflection. 'Poor Prue! if you have been addressing her with the same air of amenity that you have me, it does not surprise me. I sometimes wonder,' looking at her with an air of candid and temperate speculation, 'how you, who are so genuinely good at bottom, can have the heart to make that child cry in the way you do!'
'I did not mean to make her cry,' replies poor Peggy remorsefully. 'I hate to make her cry!'
'And yet you manage to do it pretty often, dear,' rejoins Freddy sweetly. 'Now, you know, to me it seems,' with a slight quiver in his voice, 'as if no handling could be too tender for her!'
Peggy gives an impatient groan. At his words, before her mind's eye rises the figure of Prue waiting ready dressed in her riding-habit day after day--watching, listening, running to the garden-end, and crawling dispiritedly back again; the face of Prue robbed of its roses, clipped of its roundness, drawn and oldened before its time by Freddy's 'tender handling.' A bitter speech rises to her lips; but she swallows it back. Of what use? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
Another pause, while Margaret looks blankly across the garden, and Freddy inhales the smell of the mignonette, and scratches Mink's little smirking gray head. At length:
'So you do not mean to let her go?' says the young man interrogatively.
'I think not,' replies Peggy witheringly. 'If I want her taught ribald songs I can send her to the alehouse in the village, and I do not know any other end that would be served by her going there.'
Freddy winces a little.
'I daresay you are right,' he rejoins blandly. 'I always say that there is no one whose judgment I would sooner take than yours; and, in point of fact, I am not very keen about the plan myself; it was only poor Prue's being so eager about it that made me advocate it. You see,' with a charming smile, 'I am not like you, Peggy. When persons come to me brimming over with pleasure in a project, I have not the strength of mind instantly to empty a jug of cold water all over them! I wish I had! it would,' sighing pensively, 'make life infinitely less difficult!'
'You are going to Harborough yourself, I suppose?' asks Peggy brusquely, brushing away like cobwebs her companion's compliments and aspirations.
He shrugs his shoulders.
'How can I tell? Do I ever know where I may drift to? I may wake up there some fine morning. It is not a bad berth, and,' with a return to the high moral tone, 'if one can help a person ever so little, I think that one has no right to turn one's back upon her!'
'Of course not!' ironically.
'And I have always told you,' with an air of candid admission, 'that I am fond of Betty!'
'I know,' returns Peggy, with a somewhat sarcastic demureness--'I have heard; you look upon her quite as an elder sister; it is a charming relationship!'
Freddy reddens, but instantly recovering himself:
'I am not so sure about that! I must consult Prue!' cries he, going off with a laugh, and with the last word.
