Clarissa and Dulcie did do the young men service in their calling. They said it would be a shame not to help two such likely fellows (you know they had undauntedly set the one down as a fright and the other as a goose in the morning); they were sure they were industrious and worthy, and they would give bail for their honesty. So they spoke right and left to the few influential families who were at Redwater of the two young painters, who by mere luck had come with them in the waggon, had put up at the "Rod and Fly," and were waiting for commissions. Had the Warrens or the Lorimers not heard of them? they would come bound they were a couple of geniuses, from their conversation.
The old world grinned, and said to the girls' faces that the lasses had better not be too zealous for the lads; they were generally fit to manage their own business, and some[Page 123]thing more into the bargain. Uncle Barnet would not care to have his niece Clary fling herself away with her tidy fortune on a walking gentleman, though he were a genius.
The result was that Dulcie "bridled" in a twitter of wounded faith and anger. Clarissa was superb and scornful. She ordered a full-length portrait, and fixed the hour for the sitting within the week. Dulcie set off alone with Master Will Locke—Dulcie, who knew no more of Redwater than he should have done, if his wits had not been woolgathering—to find the meadow which was beginning to purple over with the meadow saffron.
But for all the townspeople laughed at Mistress Clary's and Mistress Dulcie's flights, they never dreamt of them as unbecoming or containing a bit of harm. Fine girls like Clary and Dulcie, especially an accomplished girl like Clary, who could read French and do japan, besides working to a wish in cross-stitch and tent-sketch, were not persons to be slighted. The inhabitants saw for themselves that the painters had coats which were not out at elbows, and tongues, one of which was always wagging, and the other generally at rest, but which never said a word fairly out of joint. They needed no further introduction; the gentlemen called for the young men, the ladies curtsied to them in the bar of the "Rod and Fly," in the church-porch, in the common shop, and began conversations with them while they were chaffering at the same counter for the same red ribbons to tie up the men and the women's hair alike; and they felt that their manners were vastly polite and gracious, an opinion which was not far from the truth.
[Page 124]The Vicar lent the painters books. The Mayor invited them to supper. The nearest Justice, who was a family man, with a notable wife, had them to a domestic party, where they heard a little girl repeat a fable, and saw the little coach which the Justice had presented to his son and heir, then in long clothes, in which he was to be drawn along the smooth oak boarded passages of the paternal mansion as soon as he could sit upright.
Lastly, Clarissa Gage, under the sufficient guardianship of Cambridge, treated the strangers to a real piece of sport—a hop on the washing-green, under her mulberry-tree. It commenced at four o'clock in the afternoon, and ended with dusk and the bats, and a gipsy fire, and roasting groats and potatoes in the hot ashes, in imitation of the freakish oyster supper which Clary had attended in town.
Clary took care to have her six couples well assorted, and not to be severed till the merry-making was over; she did not mind uniting herself to Master Sam Winnington, and Dulcie to Master Will Locke—mind! the arrangement was a courteous compliment to the chief guests, and it gave continual point to the entertainment. The company took a hilarious pleasure in associating the four two-and-two, and commented openly on the distribution: "Mistress Clary is mighty condescending to this jackanapes." "Mistress Dulcie and t'other form a genteel pair."
To be sure the two young men heard the remarks, which they might have taken as broad hints, and the girls heard them too, uttered as they were without disguise; but so healthy were our ancestors, that nobody was put out—not even soft, mooning Will Locke. Nothing came of [Page 125]it that evening, unless a way Dulcie had of pressing her red lips together, throwing back her little brown head, shaking out the powder from her curls, and shaking down the curls themselves, with a gleeful laugh, which appeared to turn her own "bridling" into derision; and a high assertion of Clary's that she was determined never to wed a man beneath the rank of a county member or a peer. Now, really, after Clary had danced fifteen dances, and was about to dance other five, without stopping, with a portrait painter, of her own free will, this was drawing a longish and very unnecessary bow. But then Sam Winnington did not take it amiss or contradict her. He said she was right, and he had no doubt she would keep her word, and there was a quick, half-comic, half-serious gleam from the depths of his grey eyes which made Clarissa Gage look more bashful and lovelier than any man had ever yet beheld her. Pity the member or the peer could not have been that man!
Imagine the party after Mistress Cambridge had provided them with some of her favourite chickens, and more substantial Dutch beef, with wet fruit and dry, cold Rhenish and sugar, and mulled wine against the dew and damp feet, collecting merrily round the smoky fire, with little jets of flame shooting up and flashing out on the six couples! Sam Winnington in his silk stockings and points neatly trussed at the knee, was on all-fours poking the blue and red potatoes into the glowing holes. Another man with rough waggishness suddenly stirred the fire with an oak branch, and sent a shower of sparks like rockets into the dark blue sky, but so near that it [Page 126]caused the women to recoil, screaming and hiding their faces on convenient shoulders, and lodged half-a-dozen instruments of ignition and combustion in Sam Winnington's hair, singeing it and scorching his ears. Had Sam not been the best-natured and most politic fellow in the world, he would have dragged the aggressor by the collar or the cuff over the smoking crackling wood, and made the ladies shriek in greater earnest.
There was the strange ruddy light now on this face, now on that—on Will Locke's as he overturned a shovel of groats at Dulcie's feet, and on Dulcie's, so eager to cover his blunder, that she quite forgot the circumstances of the case, and never came to herself till she had burnt all the five tips of her rosy fingers catching the miller's pearls. Then Will Locke was so sorry, stroked the fingers so daintily, hung upon Cambridge so beseechingly, imploring her to prepare a cool mash for Mistress Dulcie's finger points, the moment they were all gone—that Dulcie could have cried for his tenderness of heart, and quickness and keenness of remorse.
Conjure up the whole fourteen—the Vicar and Cambridge of the number—when the fire had sunk white in ashes, when they could scarcely see each other's faces, and only guess each other's garments, having a round at "Puss in the corner," running here and rushing there, seizing this shoulder-knot, holding tight like a child by that skirt, drawing up, pulling back, whirling round all blowsy, all panting, all faint with fun and laughter, and the roguish familiarity which yet thought no evil. Very romping, was it not? very hoydenish? yes certainly. [Page 127]Very improper? by no means. It was practised by dignitaries of the Church, still more classic than the Vicar scuttling and ducking after Cambridge (you never saw the like), and by the pink and pride of English womanhood.
Redwater was hospitable to these painter lads, as we understand hospitality, unquestionably, ungrudgingly hospitable; but it was more than hospitable to them, it was profitable to them in a pecuniary sense, without which great test of its merits they could not long have tarried within its bounds. They were neither fools nor hypocrites to pretend to be clean indifferent to the main chance.
The Vicar fancied a likeness of himself in his surplice, which his parishioners might buy and engrave, if they had a mind to preserve his lineaments when he was no longer among them. The Justice took a notion to have his big girls and his little girls, his boy and nurse, his wife, and himself as the sheltering stem of the whole young growth, in one canvas.
But the great achievement was Sam Winnington's picture of Clarissa, "not as a crazy Kate this time," she told him saucily, "but myself in my hair and brocade, to show what a grand lady I can be." Thus Clarissa dressed herself out in one of those magnificent toilettes all in the autumn mornings, and sat there in state for hours, for the sole benefit of posterity, unless Sam Winnington was to reap a passing advantage by the process. Clarissa in her brocade, with the stiff body and the skirt standing on end, her neckerchief drawn through the straps of her bodice, her bouquet pinned, "French fashion," on her side; [Page 128]surely that picture was a masterpiece. So speaking was the copy of her deep brown hair, her soft, proud cheek, the wave of her ripe red lips, that a tame white pigeon, accustomed to sit on her shoulder, flew into the window right at the canvas, and, striking against the hard, flat surface, fell flutteri............