“Yes,” answered the young Mentor with immediate decision; for this conversation befell in those times, not so very long ago, when everybody declared that such convulsions were over, and that it was impossible, in the face of civilisation, steamboats, and the electric telegraph, to entertain the faintest idea of a war.
They had reached this point in their talk, gradually growing more at ease and familiar with each other, when it suddenly chanced that Mamma, passing from her own sleeping-room to that of the girls, paused a moment to look out at the small middle window in the passage between them, and looking down, was amazed to see this haughty and misanthropic Louis passing quietly along the trim pathway of the garden, keeping his place steadily by Marian’s side. Mrs Atheling was not a mercenary mother, neither was she one much given to alarm for her daughters, lest they should make bad marriages or fall into unfortunate love; but Mrs Atheling, who was scrupulously proper, did not like to see her pretty Marian in such friendly companionship with “a young man in such an equivocal position,” even though he was the brother of her friend. “We may be kind to them,” said Mamma to herself, “but we are not to go any further; and, indeed, it would be very sad if he should come to more grief about Marian, poor young man;—how pretty she is!”
Yes, it was full time Mrs Atheling should hasten down stairs, and, in the most accidental manner in the world, step out into the garden. Marian, unfortunate child! with her young roses startled on her sweet young cheeks by this faint presaging breath of a new existence, had never been so pretty all her life.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE YOUNG PEOPLE.
What Louis did or said, or how he made interest for himself in the tender heart of Mamma, no one very well knows; yet a certain fact it was, that from henceforward Mrs Atheling, like Miss Anastasia, became somewhat contemptuous of Rachel in the interest of Louis, and pursued eager and long investigations in her own mind—investigations most fruitless, yet most persevering—touching the old lord and the unknown conclusion of his life. All that was commonly known of the last years of the last Lord Winterbourne was, that he had died abroad. Under the pressure of family calamity he had gone to Italy, and there, people said, had wandered about for several years, leading a desultory and unsettled life, entirely out of the knowledge of any of his friends; and when the present bearer of the title came home, bearing the intelligence of his elder brother’s death, the most entire oblivion closed down upon the foreign grave of the old lord. Back into this darkness Mrs Atheling, who knew no more than common report, made vain efforts to strain her kindly eyes, but always returned with a sigh of despair. “No!” said Mamma, “he might be proud, but he was virtuous and honourable. I never heard a word said against the old lord. Louis is like him, but it must only be a chance resemblance. No! Mr Reginald was always a wild bad man. Poor things! they must be his children; for my lord, I am sure, never betrayed or deceived any creature all his life.”
But still she mused and dreamed concerning Louis; he seemed to exercise a positive fascination over all these elder people; and Mrs Atheling, more than she had ever desired a friendly gossip with Miss Willsie, longed to meet once more with the Honourable Anastasia, to talk over her conjectures and guesses respecting “the boy.”
In the mean time, Louis himself, relieved from that chaperonship and anxious introduction by his sister, which the haughty young man could not endure, made daily increase of his acquaintance with the strangers. He began to form part of their daily circle, expected and calculated upon; and somehow the family life seemed to flow in a stronger and fuller current with the addition of this vigorous element, the young man, who oddly enough seemed to belong to them rather more than if he had been their brother. He took the three girls, who were now so much like three sisters, on long and wearying excursions through the wood and over the hill. He did not mind tiring them out, nor was he extremely fastidious about the roads by which he led them; for, generous at heart as he was, the young man had the unconscious wilfulness of one who all his life had known no better guidance than his own will. Sometimes, in those long walks of theirs, the young Athelings were startled by some singular characteristic of their squire, bringing to light in him, by a sudden chance, things of which these gentle-hearted girls had never dreamed. Once they discovered, lying deep among the great fern-leaves, all brown and rusty with seed, the bright plumage of some dead game, for the reception of which a village boy was making a bag of his pinafore. “Carry it openly,” said Louis, at whose voice the lad started; “and if any one asks you where it came from, send them to me.” This was his custom, which all the village knew and profited by; he would not permit himself to be restrained from the sport, but he scorned to lift the slain bird, which might be supposed to be Lord Winterbourne’s, and left it to be picked up by the chance foragers of the hamlet. At the first perception of this, the girls, we are obliged to confess, were greatly shocked—tears even came to Marian’s eyes. She said it was cruel, in a little outbreak of terror, pity, and indignation. “Cruel—no!” said Louis: “did my gun give a sharper wound than one of the score of fashionable guns that will be waking all the echoes in a day or two?” But Marian only glanced up at him hurriedly with her shy eyes, and said, with a half smile, “Perhaps though the wound was no sharper, the poor bird might have liked another week of life.”
And the young man looked up into the warm blue sky over-head, all crossed and trellised with green leaves, and looked around into the deep September foliage, flaming here and there in a yellow leaf, a point of fire among the green. “I think it very doubtful,” he said, sinking his voice, though every one heard him among the noonday hush of the trees, “if I ever can be so happy again. Do you not suppose it would be something worth living for, instead of a week or a year of sadder chances, to be shot upon the wing now?”
Marian did not say a word, but shrank away among the bushes, clinging to Rachel’s arm, with a shy instinctive motion. “Choose for yourself,” said Agnes; “but do not decide so coolly upon the likings of the poor bird. I am sure, had he been consulted, he would rather have taken his chance of the guns next week than lain so quiet under the fern-leaves now.”
Whereupon the blush of youth for his own super-elevated and unreal sentiment came over Louis’s face. Agnes, by some amusing process common to young girls who are elder sisters, and whom nobody is in love with, had made herself out to be older than Louis, and was rather disposed now and then to interfere for the regulation of this youth’s improper sentiments, and to give him good advice.