Bill Saunders followed the young couple at a little distance, carrying a basket, containing some light refreshment to be partaken of in the grotto. Bill had grown very philosophical; he found the life he led an easy one, rather too much so, for he would willingly have exerted his tongue more than he did, but he made poor progress in the language, though the females of the establishment, who liked the good-tempered and very good-looking seaman, took considerable pains to teach him. However, Bill smoked his pipe in the yard, helped the old gardener in his rough work, and as the old man had been deaf and dumb for the last two years of his life, they got on remarkably well; that is, they both made signs and nodded their heads, and remained quite satisfied as if they each understood the other. Bill had instructions from his master, as he would style Lieutenant Thornton, that if ever he came in the way of a stranger, to pretend that he was deaf and dumb, and hitherto he had managed to act his part well; but this day his discretion was to be put to a severer test.
Our hero and his fair companions rambled on through the very pretty country surrounding the château, conversing on various and numerous subjects. Sometimes he would climb a rock to gather some wild flower, to give to Mademoiselle de Tourville, and receive in return a smile and a glance of pleasure from her large dark eyes that strangely confused his brain.
“You remind me, in some respects,” he once remarked, “of little Mabel Coulancourt; so much so, that I get quite bewildered with the resemblance; it is in the eyes, I fancy.”
“But why, Monsieur Thornton,” said Julia Plessis, laughing, “do you always call Mademoiselle Coulancourt ‘little Mabel?’ surely she is not a dwarf.”
Marie de Tourville looked with a peculiar smile into the lieutenant’s eyes.
“Dwarf,” he repeated, “oh, no; I daresay she may be a tall elegant girl. But somehow she always appears before my eyes as the dear, engaging, tender-hearted child, with her thin, pale face, so expressive of all the sufferings she had gone through; and then the pleading look of her large lustrous eyes. I would have sacrificed my boyish life for her; and God knows I would do so now, as for a fondly loved sister.”
The lieutenant looked up as he spoke, and Marie de Tourville turned aside her head as if gazing round her; he fancied that her eyes filled with tears.
“This is very strange,” thought our hero, “I have observed this emotion before; indeed, it is always obvious whenever we speak of Mabel Coulancourt.”
“It is a great pity, Monsieur Thornton,” observed Julia Plessis, with a very demure and serious look, “that you have not been faithful to your fair protégée; instead of loving her as a sister, you ought to have given and kept for her your fondest affection—the affection of a lover.”
“You forget, fair Julia,” replied our hero, somewhat seriously, “that when we parted Mabel was but a child. What might have been my feelings in after years, had circumstances thrown us together, who can say? The human heart is a strange piece of mechanism; we can with difficulty control or command its impulses.”