And Mr Rivers looked at Agnes with an answering flash of pique and offence, which was as much as to say, “I am very much annoyed; I had thought of very different relationships; and it is all owing to you.”
“Many very good critics,” said Mrs Atheling, piqued in her turn—“a great many people, I assure you, who know about such things, have been very much pleased with Agnes’s book.”
The Rector made no answer—did not even make a pause—but as if all this was merely irrelevant and an interruption to his real business, said rapidly, yet with some solemnity, and without a word of preface, “Lord Winterbourne’s son is dead.”
“Who?” said Agnes, whom, unconsciously, he was addressing—and they all turned to him with a little anxiety. Rachel became very pale, and even Marian, who was not thinking at all of what Mr Rivers said, drew a little nearer the table, and looked up at him wistfully, with her beautiful eyes.
“Lord Winterbourne’s son, George Rivers, the heir of the family—he who has been abroad so long; a young man, I hear, whom every one esteemed,” said the Rector, bending down his head, as if he exacted from himself a certain sadness, and did indeed endeavour to see how sad it was—“he is dead.”
Mrs Atheling rose, greatly moved. “Oh, Mr Rivers!—did you say his son? his only son? a young man? Oh, I pray God have pity upon him! It will kill him;—it will be more than he can bear!”
The Rector looked up at the grief in the good mother’s face, with a look and gesture of surprise. “I never heard any one give Lord Winterbourne credit for so much feeling,” he said, looking at her with some suspicion; “and surely he has not shown much of it to you.”
“Oh, feeling! don’t speak of feeling!” cried Mrs Atheling. “It is not that I am thinking of. You know a great many things, Mr Rivers, but you never lost a child.”
“No,” he said; and then, after a pause, he added, in a lower tone, “in the whole matter, certainly, I never before thought of Lord Winterbourne.”
And there was nobody nigh to point out to him what a world beyond and above his philosophy was this simple woman’s burst of nature. Yet in his own mind he caught a moment’s glimpse of it; for the instant he was abashed, and bent his lofty head with involuntary self-humiliation; but looking up, saw his own thought still clearer in the eye of Agnes, and turned defiant upon her, as if it had been a spoken reproof.