“Did he marry again?” said Marian, as Mamma came to a sudden and unexpected pause.
“No, my dear; for then trouble came,” said Mrs Atheling. “Miss Anastasia was a beautiful young lady, always very proud, and very wise and sensible, but a great beauty for all that; and she was to be married to a young gentleman, a baronet and a very great man, out of Warwickshire. The present lord was then the Honourable Reginald Rivers, and dreadful wild. Somehow, I cannot tell how it was, he and Sir Frederick quarrelled, and then they fought; and after his wound that fine young gentleman fell into a wasting and a consumption, and died at twenty-five; and that is the reason why Miss Anastasia has never been married, and I am afraid, though it is so very wrong to say so, hates Lord Winterbourne.”
“Oh, mamma! I am sure I should, if I had been like her!” cried Marian, almost moved to tears.
“No, my darling, not to hate him,” said Mrs Atheling, shaking her head, “or you would forget all you have been taught since you were a child.”
“I do not understand him, mamma,” said Agnes: “does everybody hate him—has he done wrong to every one?”
Mrs Atheling sighed. “My dears, if I tell you, you must forget it again, and never mention it to any one. Papa had a pretty young sister, little Bride, as they all called her, the sweetest girl I ever saw. Mr Reginald come courting her a long time, but at last she found out—oh girls! oh, children!—that what he meant was not true love, but something that it would be a shame and a sin so much as to name; and it broke her dear heart, and she died. Her grave is at Winterbourne; that was what papa and I went to see the first day.”
“Mamma,” cried Agnes, starting up in great excitement and agitation, “why did you suffer us to know any one belonging to such a man?”
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs Atheling, a little discomposed by this appeal. “I thought it was for the best. Coming here, we were sure to be thrown into their way—and perhaps he may have repented. And then Mrs Edgerley was very kind to you, and I did not think it right, for the father’s sake, to judge harshly of the child.”
Marian, who had covered her face with her hands, looked up now with abashed and glistening eyes. “Is that why papa dislikes him so?” said Marian, very low, and still sheltering with her raised hands her dismayed and blushing face.
Mrs Atheling hesitated a moment. “Yes,” she said doubtfully, after a pause of consideration—“yes; that and other things.”