“He looks like a Johnnie,” said Fanshawe, with a laugh.
It was unpardonably impertinent, he felt, the next moment; but his feelings demanded some relief.
“He is very good and very kind,” said Marjory, majestically, casting a look upon him which avenged poor Johnnie. Fanshawe grew meek as a child in a moment, and begged pardon as humbly as Milly herself could have done.
“And now we can go to the old house,” he said, going after her with intense satisfaction, as she went to the door.
“Not now; I am too tired. I cannot do more to-day,” said Marjory; and he heard the sound of a low sob as she escaped, little Milly rushing after her.
“It is all that fellow’s fault,” was Fanshawe’s comment, as he went back to his bow-window, and sat down and looked out disconsolately upon the leaden sea and the white choking mist. What was it to him whose fault it was? But Marjory Heriot was the only thing he had to interest him, and he took a great interest in all that affected her—for the moment at least.
CHAPTER XI.
Marjory, I am sorry to say, thought nothing at all of the interest she had excited; she was not so much as conscious of it; and she did not even think of Fanshawe, who was rather an embarrassment than a comfort to the household. She had been sinking into a certain calm, close as she still was to the great misfortune which had befallen her family; but time travels very quickly at such moments, and it already seemed ages to her since she entered poor Tom’s sick-chamber, and since she saw him die. She had been quieted by the calm of the silent Sunday after the funeral; but her visitors had driven all her quiet away. When the Minister had bidden her to be resigned, she had felt a wild impatience fill her mind; she hastened to her own room, dismissing Milly, and then threw herself upon her sofa, and wept as a child weeps. It was sorrow, but it was not such sorrow as Marjory was capable of feeling. Her brother had been dear to her; but he was not all in all to her. Impatience, a painful sense of the narrowness of human sympathy, and the imperfection of human good sense, mingled, in this little outburst, with natural grief, and that painful pity with which, wherever no deep religious sense of gain comes in, the death of a young man cut off in his prime must be regarded.
Marjory’s mind was not one of those which are apt to speculate upon the possibilities of damnation; but on the other hand, it was impossible to think of poor Tom as an evangelical conqueror, a saint-like personage in robes of white and crown of glory. He could not have reached that height, poor fellow! and therefore the ache of pity with which his sister thought of his early severance from all he had cared for, was very sore and painful. The human comparison seemed to add an edge of sharper pain to grief. His companions lived and flourished—and he was gone. They had their easy mornings, their gay evenings, their sports and amusements, and enjoyed them all with light hearts. In the papers that very day, had been an announcement of the marriage of one of them—and Tom was dead!
Marjory’s heart contracted with a pang of pain, as though some gigantic hand had crushed it. She thought it was grief, but it was something more than simple grief. Under the sway of this feeling she went to the table upon which his desk had been placed, and seated herself once more before it. The last time she had done so—that time when she had ineffectually questioned Fanshawe—she had felt herself shrink from the painful task, and had not really made any investigation into poor Tom’s secrets. Now she opened the desk with her eyes full of tears for him, with that painful contraction at her heart.