“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.
“Yes, indeed, there was Rachel, my good little sister,” answered the young man; “but her kind heart would have mended again had they let me alone. It would have been better for us both.”
He said this with a painful compression of his lip, which a certain wistful sympathy in the mind of Marian taught her to recognise as the sign of tumult and contention in this turbulent spirit. She hastened with a womanly instinct to direct him to the external circumstances again.
“And you were really a soldier—a—not an officer—only a common man.” Marian shrunk visibly from this, which was an actual and possible degradation, feared as the last downfall for the “wild sons” of the respectable families in the neighbourhood of Bellevue.
“Yes, I belong to a class which has no privileges; there was not a drummer in the regiment but was of better birth than I,” exclaimed Louis. “Ah, that is folly—I did very well. In Napoleon’s army, had I belonged to that day!—but in my time there was neither a general nor a war.”
“Surely,” said Marian, who began to be anxious about this unfortunate young man’s “principles,” “you would not wish for a war?”
“Should you think it very wrong?” said Louis with a smile.