A Red Wallflower

'He's very persistent,' repeated the mother. 'He always did stick to anything he once resolved upon.'

'He is not resolved upon this yet. Distraction is the best thing, not talk. Where's Betty Frere? I thought she was coming.'

'She is coming. She will be here in a few days. I cannot imagine what has set Pitt upon this strange way of thinking. He has got hold of some Methodist or some other dreadful person; but where? It couldn't be at Oxford; and I am certain it was never in Uncle Strahan's house; where could it be?'

'Methodism began at Oxford, my dear.'

'It is one mercy that the Gainsboroughs are gone.'

'Yes,' said her husband; 'that was well done. Does he know?'

'I have never told him. He will be asking about them directly.'

'Say as little as you can, and get Betty Frere here.'

Pitt meanwhile had gone to his old room, his work-room, the scene of many a pleasant hour, and where those aforetime lessons to Esther Gainsborough had been given. He stood and looked about him. All was severe order and emptiness, telling that the master had been away; his treasures were safe packed up, under lock and key, or stowed away upon cupboard shelves; there was no pleasant litter on tables and floor, alluring to work or play. Was that old life, of work and play which mixed and mingled, light-hearted and sweet, gone for ever? Pitt stood in the middle of the floor looking about him, gathering up many a broken thread of association; and then, obeying an impulse which had been on him all the morning, he turned, caught up his hat, and went out.

He loitered down the village street. It was mid-morning now, the summer sun beating down on the wide space and making every big tree shadow grateful. Great overarching elms, sometimes an oak or a maple, ranged along in straight course and near neighbourhood, making the village look green and bowery, and giving the impression of an easy-going thrift and habit of pleasant conditions, which perhaps was not untrue to the character of the people. The capital order in which everything was kept confirmed the impression. Pitt, however, was not thinking of this, though he noticed it; the village was familiar to him from his childhood, and looked just as it had always done, only that the elms and maples had grown a little more bowery with every year. He walked along, not thinking of that, nor seeing the roses and syringa blossoms which gave him a sweet breath out of some of the gardens. He was not in a hurry. He was going back in mind to that which furnished the real answer to his mother's wondering query, – whence Pitt could have got his new ideas? It was nobody at Oxford or in London, neither conventicle nor discourse; but a girl's letter. He went on and on, thinking of it and of the writer. What would she say to his disclosures, which his father and mother could do nothing with? Would she be in condition to give him the help he knew he must not expect from them? She, a girl? who did not know the world? Yet she was the goal of Pitt's present thoughts, and her house the point his footsteps were seeking, slowly and thoughtfully.

He was not in a hurry. Indeed, he was too absorbedly busy with his own cogitations and questions to give full place to the thought of Esther and the visit he was about to make. Besides, it was not as in the old time. He had no image before him now of a forlorn, lonely child, awaiting his coming as the flowers look for the sun. Things were rather turned about; he thought of Esther as the one in the sunlight, and himself as in need of illumination. He thought of her as needing no comfort that he could give; he half hoped to find the way to peace through her leading. But yes, she would be glad to see him; she would not have forgotten him nor lost her old affection for her old playfellow, though the entire cessation of letters from either her or her father had certainly been inexplicable. Probably it might be explained by some crankiness of the colonel. Esther would certainly be glad to see him. He quickened his steps to reach the house.

He hardly knew it when he came to it, the aspect of things was so different from what he remembered. Truly it had been always a quiet house, with never a rush of company or a crowd of voices; but there had been life; and now? – Pitt stood still at the little gate and looked, with a sudden blank of disappointment. There could be nobody there. The house was shut up and dead. Not a window was open; not a door. In the little front garden the flowers had grown up wild and were struggling with weeds; the grass of the lawn at the side was rank and unmown; the honeysuckle vines in places were hanging loose and uncared-for, waving in the wind in a way that said eloquently, 'Nobody is here.' There was not much wind that summer day, just enough to move the honeysuckle sprays. Pitt stood and looked and queried; then yielding to some unconscious impulse, he went in through the neglected flowers to the deserted verandah, and spent a quarter of an hour in twining and securing the loose vines. He was thinking hard all the time. This was the place where he remembered sitting with Esther that day when she asked help of him about getting comfort. He remembered it well; he recalled the girl's subdued manner, and the sorrowful craving in the large beautiful eyes. Now Esther had found what she sought, and to-day he was nearly as unable to understand her as he had been to help her then. He fastened up the honeysuckles, and then he went and sat down on the step of the verandah and took Esther's letter out of his breast pocket, and read it over. He had read it many times. He did not comprehend it; but this he comprehended – that to her at least there was something in religion more heartfelt than a form, and more satisfying than a profession. To her it was a reality. The letter had set him thinking, and he had been thinking ever since. He had come here this morning, hoping that in talking with her she might perhaps give him some more light, and now she had disappeared. Strange that his mother should not have told him! What could be the explanation of this sudden disappearance? Disaster or death it could not be, for that she certainly would have told him.

Sitting there and musing over many things, his own great question ever and again, he heard a mower whetting his scythe somewhere in the neighbourhood. Pitt set about searching for the unseen labourer, and presently saw the man, who was cutting the grass in an adjoining field. Dismissing thought for action, in two minutes he had sprung over the fence and was beside the man; but the mower did not intermit the long sweeps of his scythe, until he heard Pitt's civil 'Good morning.' Then he stopped, straightened himself up, and looked at his visitor – looked him all over.

'Good mornin',' he replied. 'Guess you're the young squoire, ain't ye?'

If Pitt's appearance had been less supremely neat and faultless, I think the honest worker would have offered his hand; but the white linen summer suit, the polished boots, the delicate gloves, were too much of a contrast with his own dusty and rough exterior. It was no feeling of inferiority, be it well understood, that moved him to this bit of self-denial; only a self-respecting feeling of fitness. He himself would not have wanted to touch a dusty hand with those gloves on his own. But he spoke his welcome.

'Glad to see ye hum, squoire. When did ye come?'

'Last night, thank you. Whom am I talking to? I have been so long away,

I have forgotten my friends.'

'I guess there's nobody hain't forgotten you, you'll find,' said the man, wiping his scythe blade with a wisp of grass; needlessly, for he had just whetted it; but it gave him an opportunity to look at the figure beside him.

'More than I deserve,' said Pitt. 'But I seem not to find some of my old friends. Do you know where is the family that used to live here?'

'Gone away, I guess.'

'I see they have gone away; but where have they gone?'

'Dunno, no more'n the dead,' said the man, beginning to mow again.

'You know whom I am speaking of? – Colonel Gainsborough.'

'I know. He's gone – that's all I kin tell ye.'

'Who takes care of the place?'

'The place? If you mean the house, nobody takes keer of it, I guess. There ain't nobody in it. The land hez as good keer as it ever hed. The squoire, he sees to that.'

'My father, do you mean?'

'Who else? It belongs to the squoire now, and he takes good keer o' allhe sees to. He bought it, ye know, when the cunnel went away,' said the man, stopping work and resting on his scythe to look at Pitt again. 'He'd ha' let it, I guess, ef he could; but you see there ain't nobody that wants it. The folks in Seaforth all hez their own houses, and don't want nobody else's. There is folks, they say, as 'd like to live in two houses to once, ef they could manage it; but I never heerd o' no one that could.'

'Do you know at all why the colonel went away?'

'Hain't an idee. Never knowed him particular, ye see, and so never heerd tell. The cunnel he warn't a sociable man by no means, and kep' himself mostly shut up. I think it's a man's loss; but there's different opinions, I suppose, on that p'int. As on every other! Folks du say, the cunnel warn't never to hum in Seaforth. Anyway, he ain't now.'

With which utterance he went to mowing again, and Pitt, after a courteous 'Good day,' left him.

Where could they be gone? And why should they have gone? And how was it that his mother in her many letters had never said a word about it? Nay, had let him go out this very morning to look for what she knew he would not find? And his father had bought the ground! There was something here to be inquired into. Meanwhile, for the present, he must do his thinking without Esther.

He walked on and on, slowly, under the shade of the great trees, along the empty, grassy street. He had plucked one or two shoots from the honeysuckles, long shoots full of sweetness; and as he went on and thought, they seemed to put in a word now and then. A word of reminder, not distinct nor logical, but with a blended meaning of Esther and sweetness and truth. Not her sweetness and truth, but that which she testified to, and which an inner voice in Pitt's heart kept declaring to be genuine. That lured him and beckoned him one way; and the other way sounded voices as if of a thousand sirens. Pleasure, pride, distinction, dominion, applause, achievement, power, and ease. Various forms of them, various colours, started up before his mind's eye; vaguely discerned, as to individual form, but every one of them, like the picadors in a bull-fight, shaking its little banner of distraction and allurement. Pitt felt the confusion of them, and at the same time was more than vaguely conscious on the other side of a certain steady white light which attracted towards another goal. He walked on in meditative musing, slowly and carelessly, not knowing where he was going nor what he passed on the way; till he had walked far. And then he suddenly stopped, turned, and set out to go back the road he had come, but now with a quick, measured, steady footfall which gave no indication of a vacillating mind or a laboured question.

He went into the breakfast-room when he got home, which was also the common sitting-room and where he found, as he expected, his mother alone. She looked anxious; which was not a usual thing with Mrs. Dallas.

'Pitt, my dear! – out all this time? Are you not very hot?'

'I do not know, mother; I think not. I have not thought about the heat,

I believe.'

He had kept the honeysuckle sprays in his hand all this while, and he now went forward to stick them in the huge jar which occupied the fireplace, and which was full of green branches. Turning when he had done this, he did not draw up a chair, but threw himself down upon the rug at his mother's feet, so that he could lay back his head upon her knees. Presently he put up his two hands behind him and found her hands, which he gently drew down and laid on each side of his head, holding them there in caressing fashion. Caresses were never the order of the day in this family; rarely exchanged even between mother and son, who yet were devoted faithfully to each other. The action moved Mrs. Dallas greatly; she bent down over him and kissed her son's brow, and then loosening one of her hands thrust it fondly among the thick brown wavy locks of hair that were such a pride to her. She admired him unqualifiedly, with that blissful delight in him which a good mother gives to her son, if his bodily and mental properties will anyway allow of it. Mrs. Dallas's pride in this son had always been satisfied and unalloyed; all the more now was the chagrin she felt at the first jar to this satisfaction. Her face showed both feelings, the pride and the trouble, but for a time she kept silence. She was burning to discuss further with him the subject of the morning; devoured with restless curiosity as to how it could ever have got such a lodgment in Pitt's mind; at the same time she did not know how to touch it, and was afraid of touching it wrong. Her husband's counsel, not to talk, she did not indeed forget; but Mrs. Dallas had her own views of things, and did not always take her husband's advice. She was not minded to follow it now, but she was uncertain how best to begin. Pitt was busy with his own thoughts.

'I have invited somebody to come and make your holiday pass pleasantly,' Mrs. Dallas said at last, beginning far away from the burden of her thoughts.

'Somebody? – whom?' asked Pitt a little eagerly, but without changing his attitude.

'Miss Betty Frere.'

'Who is she, that she should put her hand on my holiday? I do not want any hands but yours, mother. How often I have wanted them!'

'But Miss Frere will make your time pass more pleasantly, my boy. Miss Frere is one of the most admired women who have appeared in Washington this year. She is a sort of cousin of your father's, too; distant, but enough to make a connection. You will see for yourself what she is.'

'Where did you find her out?'

'In Washington, last winter.'

'And she is coming?'

'She said she would come. I asked her to come and help me make the time pass pleasantly for you.'

'Which means, that I must help you make the time pass pleasantly for her.'

'That will be easy.'