"I can hardly believe, uncle, that those pert misses are Langton's sisters. They need to be sent to a good stiff boarding-school to bring them down a peg or two."
"They are as much like you as girls can be like a boy," was the Colonel's cool rejoinder, "and that is why you do not fancy them."
CHAPTER XVII
Lord Bellingham soon began the systematic effort to induce Archy to give up his country for which he had, in truth, been sent for from France. But everything united to make against his scheme. While the time never had been that Archy would have abandoned his country and her cause, he was still less likely to do so in the hour of her triumph, when the English people had forced the King and his Ministry to abandon a fratricidal war. And the association for many months with two such men as Paul Jones and Dr. Franklin was not calculated to make any young and impressionable mind less American in its belief and sympathies. Nor was the splendid bait offered by Lord Bellingham half as attractive to Archy as it would have been to a young man of less adventurous life and habits. Full of an enthusiastic democracy, he rated the title as nothing at all; and as for the estates, it may be said to the honor of humanity that money has but little weight with a manly and generous nature in the freshness of youth. Archy really would have liked to own Bellingham Castle if he could have transported it to America, but he would cheerfully have given all the mediæval castles in England for one good ship of the line, and would have thrown in Westminster Abbey as a makeweight. And because little things as well as great things influence people, Lord Bellingham could not have devised a better way to defeat his own object than in bringing Archy in contact with his two cousins, Isabel and Mary. These two high-spirited young ladies were as determinedly English as Archy was aggressively American, and the result was warfare, in which quarter was neither asked nor given. Not one of the three was bad-tempered, so that, in spite of their continual bickerings, there was an odd sort of sympathy among them, the sympathy which comes from a community of tastes and amusements, which made them seek each other's society, apparently for the purpose of expressing their disesteem for each other's opinions—Mary and Isabel on the one side, and Archy on the other; Mrs. Langton vainly striving for peace, Colonel Baskerville an impartial umpire, and Lord Bellingham secretly diverted at the cut-and-come-again style in which his grandchildren disputed. But he grew grave one day when he came upon them engaged in an exciting discussion on the issues of the war in America, which Isabel ended by saying, loftily:
"At all events, we sha'n't be mortified by hearing you express such opinions in public, for you know grandpapa can't take you about the country visiting with him, because a great many people would not recognize you. They call you a rebel."
"Do they?" wrathfully replied Archy. "I'll give them to understand, then, that I'd rather be an American and a rebel—yes, by Jove! a rebel against tyrannical kings—than to be heir to Lord Bellingham's title and estates. And that I will show them, too!"
"I hope you will stick to it," said Isabel, tartly, "for it is a pity to have the estate go out of the family, and Trevor will get it if you don't. Dear Trevor!" Isabel, who was tender-hearted in spite of her high spirit, could not keep the tears out of her eyes at the mention of Trevor's name, and Archy, too, was softened, for he answered:
"Hang it, Isabel, why do you say such maddening things? If you were not Langton's sister and your mother's daughter I would serve you as William the Conqueror did the Princess Matilda—roll you in the mud until you cried peccavi," at which Isabel smiled in a superior manner. She was so tall and strong that William the Conqueror would have had trouble rolling her in the mud.