“I thought you said yesterday that the fish in this river are hardly worth the taking,” the young lady interrupted, surprised.
Mervyn colored a trifle, remembering his perversity during the morning walk of the day before.
“Oh, I was sad—and rather bad,” he remarked.
Her aunt had disappeared within, and she put her foot on the step where her relative had just stood. It brought her face almost on a level with his, and the gaze of her beautiful eyes at these close quarters was rather bewildering.
“It is very bad for you to be sad,” she said softly, and his heart beat so fast and so loud that he feared she might hear it. “And it is very sad for you to be bad,” she stipulated, and went smiling into the house with a languid relish of her jest.
He followed into the parlor, begging Mrs. Annandale for the coveted invitation, protesting that what he wanted was a bit of talk to keep them all from being lonely, and—with a glance at the lute on the window-seat—to hear the new songs they were singing at Vauxhall Gardens and Ranelagh, and to hear the old songs that Arabella used to sing down in Kent. Might he come? And might he send the fish?
“No supper—no song,” Mrs. Annandale at last assented, and Mervyn went off in a glow of happiness to confer cautiously with the officer of the day, to order the great gate closed, to himself inspect the guard and visit each sentinel, to climb to the warder’s tower and thence gaze over the great spaces of the picturesque country—the stretches of mountains looming purple and dark, save where the residuum of snow still glimmered in a deep ravine, the river between the silent hills, the fluctuating lights of Keowee Town on the opposite side of the stream, and the stars whitely a-gleam in the great concave of the sky, all clear, save to the west, where a dark cloud, voluminous, of variant degrees of density and with flocculent white verges, was slowly rising above the horizon. It held rain—mayhap wind. It would strike the rescue expedition before it would reach Fort Prince George. But Mervyn’s interests were within the work. He personally looked to every precaution for its safety before, arrayed anew with great particularity, he repaired to the commandant’s quarters, whither his dish of fish had preceded him.
Arabella, sick at heart, nervous and anxious, sitting in her own room with her aunt before the wood fire, with every detail of its scant and simple furnishings reminding her of the love and care of her father and his thought and devices with such meagre materials for her comfort,—the rose-tinted hangings, the large mirror, so difficult to transport through the wilderness, the chairs and tables, each constructed by his orders,—felt that she could hardly support the ordeal of an evening with a stranger—at least a comparative stranger. She wished the occasion to be one of scant ceremony. She said to her aunt that she intended to appear in the dress she had worn throughout the day.
“I have no mind for bedizenment and festivity,” she complained. “My head aches. I can hear those savage yells every time I listen.”
“Then—don’t listen,” interpolated her aunt.