She said, simply looking at the big dome sullenly throwing off the sunbeams, and at the glancing arrowheads, of more impressible and delicate kind, “I think it is very pretty, with all those different spires and towers; but do you mean it is the poor people who are so very ignorant? It seems as though people could scarcely help learning who live there.”
“Yes, the poor people—I mean all of us,” said Louis slowly, and with a certain painful emphasis. “A great many of the villagers, it is true, have never been to school; but I do not count a man ignorant who knows what he has to do, and how to do it, though he never reads a book, nor has pen in hand all his life. I save my pity for a more unfortunate ignorance than that.”
“But that is very bad,” said Marian decidedly, “because there is more to do than just to work, and we ought to know about—about a great many things. Agnes knows better than I.”
This was said very abruptly, and meant that Agnes knew better what Marian meant to say than she herself did. The youth at her side, however, showed no inclination for any interpreter. He seemed, indeed, to be rather pleased than otherwise with this breaking off.
“When I was away, I was in strange enough quarters, and learnt something about knowledge,” said Louis, “though not much knowledge itself—heaven help me! I suppose I was not worthy of that.”
“And did you really run away?” asked Marian, growing bolder with this quickening of personal interest.
“I really ran away,” said the young man, a hot flush passing for an instant over his brow; and then he smiled—a kind of daring desperate smile, which seemed to say “what I have done once I can do again.”
“And what did you do?” said Marian, continuing her inquiries: she forgot her shyness in following up this story, which she knew and did not know.
“What all the village lads do who get into scrapes and break the hearts of the old women,” said Louis, with a somewhat bitter jesting. “I listed for a soldier—but there was not even an old woman to break her heart for me.”
“Oh, there was Rachel!” cried Marian eagerly.