“That’s no comfort to me,” said Captain Howard, visibly comforted, nevertheless.
Mervyn, roused from the soft conceits of superiority, sought to follow her lead.
“I think, since you permit me to express my opinion, sir, that the detachment is in far less danger from the inclemency of the weather than from Ensign Raymond’s inexperience. A judicious officer would have faced about at once and returned to the fort before he could be blockaded, with the drifts filling the mountain defiles. I should, I am sure.”
“And a very damn fool you would have been!” exclaimed Captain Howard, testily.
“Dear Brother! In Arabella’s presence!” Mrs. Annandale admonished him, as she sat in her big arm-chair, busy with her knotting, which she dextrously accomplished without other illumination than the light of the fire, which was reflected from the jewels on her slender twinkling fingers and flashed back from the glittering beads of her gorgeous knotting-bag. She deprecated this caustic discourtesy to Captain-Lieutenant Mervyn.
“I am not afraid Arabella will learn to swear, and I don’t see any other harm that anything I say can do to her,” retorted Captain Howard. He was even less pleased with the suggestion that the man to whom he had entrusted the lives of twenty of his soldiers was an unwise selection, than that, if he had had more prudential forethought, he might have divined the coming of the obstructive tempest.
Mervyn was rather more stiffly erect than usual, and his long pale face had flushed to the roots of his powdered hair. It was most obvious, despite his calm, contained manner that he considered himself needlessly affronted. “But like father, like daughter,” Mrs. Annandale reflected, when Arabella, without the scantiest notice of his aspect, once more joined in the discussion.
“Now that is just how I think you show your knowledge of men and opportunities, papa,” she remarked. “A more experienced officer than Mr. Raymond—Mr. Mervyn, for instance—would have turned back and lost your opportunity, who knows for how long, and the men would have been so demoralized by relinquishing the march for a snow-storm that they might not have made their way back even to Fort Prince George—remember how sudden it was, and how soon those nearest defiles were full of drifts. A man can be snowed under in twenty miles of forest as easily as in a hundred. But a young, ardent, dreadnaught like Mr. Raymond will push the men through by the sheer impetus of his own character. His buoyant spirit will make the march a lark for the whole command.”
Mervyn’s eyes widened as he listened in stultified surprise. He was amazed at his lady-love’s temerity, to thus suggest Raymond’s superiority to him in aught. He sought to meet her eye with a gaze of dignified reproof. But she was evidently not thinking of him. In truth, Arabella’s heart was soft with sympathy for the commandant, yearning after his twenty odd hardened, harum-scarum young soldiers, as if they were the babes in the wood. He was afraid he had unduly exposed them to danger, and in the thought no woman could have been more troubled and tender,—in fact, for such a cause his sister could never have been so softened, so hysterically anxious.
“You are right, Arabella; Raymond has something better than caution or judgment. He is pertinacious and insistent, carries things before him, won’t take no for an answer—he is a very good fighting man, too.”