In a minute more, the sounds of the wheels had died away under the trees of the gravelled avenue; and with a feeling of loneliness, and something of dread, lest those two men were preparing a snare for me, bewildered by all that was passing through my mind, I returned to the parlour which I had just left.
CHAPTER VI.
AMY LEE.
In my career there have been some days and incidents to which I shall ever look back with pleasure and delight, and among these I number my brief sojourn at Applewood.
Amy Lee received me with a blush of pleasure on her pale and somewhat saddened young face, for the atmosphere of the sick-room and the dull life she led had impressed her features with premature thought; and when seated with her at supper in the long dining-room of Applewood, with the wigged and breastplated portraits of past generations staring down upon us from the walls, with plate and crystal glittering on the table, amid the wax-lights of the chandelier and girandoles, and with two servants in showy livery attending us, I felt all the sudden novelty of the situation with an emotion of delight at the beauty of the young girl.
The loss of her parents, travel, the scenes she had seen in India, and the life she had since led with her aunt, made Amy older than her years, and thoughtful in her youth. Motherless and fatherless almost from infancy, Amy had been, like myself, early accustomed to rely upon her own reflections and resources. Her father was an officer who had served long and faithfully in Indian wars; thus we had much that was in common between us, and in five minutes were as intimate as old friends.
The musical inflections of her voice had in them a chord which proved singularly seductive. The smile in her dark-blue eyes was full of drollery and sadness by turns—of witchery always—and the extreme blackness of their lashes, when contrasted with the whiteness of their nervous lids, lent a darker tint to them at all times,—a deeper colour than they really possessed.
Boylike, I felt a fond and sudden interest in this attractive girl; but to tell the secret I possessed—to reveal what hung over her, the wrong her nearest relative meditated,—would be to betray and impeach the supposed-to-be irreproachable Macfarisee; thus I was troubled, restless, and wretched, amid the charms of her presence and of her society; and while she poured out wine for me, with little hands that trembled when they grasped the heavy crystal decanters, and selected the best fruit in the salvers for my plate, acting the hostess with a grace peculiarly her own, when she chatted and smiled to me, I relapsed frequently into silence and thought.
"And the task for which you have been left here is to prepare some inventories for my aunt?" she observed, after one of those awkward pauses which at times ensue in the conversation of strangers.
"It would seem so."