It must be remembered that L'Estrange was not an Englishman. There is, I think, a certain oneness of nature about the Anglo-Saxon race that renders it very difficult for its members to understand the emotional, impulsive, two-sided character of the Celt, the Latin or the Greek. An Englishman is eminently straightforward. He does not stop to analyze. Be his object good or bad, he is given to carrying it out perseveringly, leaving to the future thoughts of compunction or self-gratulation. This is doubtless sweeping, as indeed all generalities must be, but possibly a truth underlies it—a truth which may explain the extreme lack of sympathy between ourselves and our southern neighbors. With Englishwomen the case is different. There is always something in the female character that answers to this two-sidedness. Its very weakness challenges a woman's sympathy. Muscular Christianity, strong, manly straightforwardness, is very attractive in its way, but not so dangerous, I am inclined to imagine, to the female heart as this emotional impulsiveness, ready at one moment with tears of sentiment and tender analysis of feeling, and at the next with passionate indignation and deep-breathed curses.
L'Estrange was a son of the South, a pupil of the great philosopher of Nature. From his childhood upward he had indulged in every emotion that ruffled the calm of his strong spirit. From Jean Jacques he had learnt to invert the eternal unity of beauty and goodness, calling that fair which is wanting in truth. Therefore, when involuntarily, as he gazed on the child, who had sobbed herself to sleep on his shoulder, the moisture dimmed his eyes and his heart softened before her fair innocence, he felt a certain glow of self-approbation. "I am certainly becoming a better man," he thought, but he did not make up his mind to restore the child to her mother—the woman he had once loved, the woman he had robbed of every joy.
His heart ached for her sadness as in the soft emotion of that evening her pale face came before his mind; but if he would do her good at all, it should be in his own way.
And so they drove on—Laura, wearied out with her tears and the excitement, fast asleep in the arms of the man who had taken her from her mother; L'Estrange scarcely daring to stir. In his strange way he thanked God for this sleep.
The stopping of the carriage aroused the child. They were at a station some miles distant from the one by which they usually went from Middlethorpe to York.
The night was dark; only a few stars shone through the cloud-rents. Laura started up. "Mamma!" she cried; then looking round her, she remembered and said no more. L'Estrange was watching her narrowly. He had dreaded this awakening, for he feared a passionate outburst of grief, but it did not come.
The child looked out and around her with that far-seeing look that some children have, as if they can see into the invisible, and then, as they entered the dimly-lighted station—for the little lady had insisted upon being put down to the ground—she looked up again into his face. It was the same, mournful, searching gaze that had already touched him so deeply.
Apparently the scrutiny satisfied her, or it may be her woman's instinct showed her the uselessness of resistance, for she gazed away again into the night and said no more till she found herself wrapped up tenderly and laid amongst the cushions of a first-class railway carriage. L'Estrange took his seat beside her and the train began to move.
Then first the child's lip trembled, and there came a look of distress into her small face. L'Estrange stooped over her: "Are you frightened, darling?"
"Not frightened," said the little girl; "but—"