Comfortable thoughts these, to fill the mind when standing beside an open grave; but they were Alick Dudley’s thoughts, nevertheless, and they made him hold himself aloof as far as possible from the man who had, he believed, first stolen Bessie away, and then striven to be kind to Lally, as a sort of offset against the shame he had brought amongst them.
He was contemptible altogether, the lad decided, too mean for him even to despise, and yet Alick would have liked to fight this despicable individual—to put some terrible affront on him—to do him a serious bodily injury—to tell him, that although Bessie was not worth fretting after, still the man who had lured her away was worth punishing.
Nothing Mr. Croft could say or do, Alick kept declaring to himself, should ever induce him to grasp his hand in friendship; and when all was over, when the body of the child who had never known of her own experience the meaning of the word “loneliness,” was left to lie solitary under the shadow of that grey church-tower till the day of judgment, Alick acted upon this decision, and drawing back from the little group which clustered around Arthur, found himself walking side by side with Lord Kemms.
Heaven knows what put such a thought into the young man’s mind at the moment; but, after they had passed through the gates, Alick suddenly asked his companion:
“How is Nellie?”
“Stone blind, as you said she would be,” was the reply.
“And I have not yet made the fortune out of which I was to repay you,” remarked Alick.
“I am sorry to hear it, though not for the reason you mention,” Lord Kemms answered. “It would have been better, however, perhaps, for all of you had I never bought her. The money she fetched was the first your brother advanced into the Protector.”
“Poor Arthur!” murmured the Squire’s brother; “but it was not the Protector that brought us back to Fifield to-day.”
“True,” rejoined his companion; “but, perhaps, your brother’s child might have lived a little longer had she never left Berrie Down.”