“I suppose you are safe enough,” he said, speaking to the elder sister. “You will not break your heart because she has forgotten the name of your book—but, heaven help them, there are hearts which do! There are unfortunate fools in this crazy world mad enough to be elated and to be thrown into misery by a butterfly of a fine lady, who makes reputations. You think them quite contemptible, do you? but there are such.”
“I suppose they must be people who have no friends and no home—or to whom it is of more importance than it is to me,” said Agnes; “for I am only a woman, and nothing could make me miserable out of this Old Lodge, or Bellevue.”
“Ah—that is now,” said Louis quickly, and he glanced with an instinctive reference at Marian, whose pallid roses and fluctuating mood already began to testify to some anxiety out of the boundary of these charmed walls. “The very sight of your security might possibly be hard enough upon us who have no home—no home! nothing at all under heaven.”
“Except such trifles as strength and youth and a stout heart, a sister very fond of you, and some—some friends—and heaven itself, after all, at the end. Oh, Louis!” said Agnes, who on this, as on other occasions, was much disposed to be this “boy’s” elder sister, and advised him “for his good.”
He did not say anything. When he looked up at all from his bending attitude leaning over the table, it was to glance with fiery devouring eyes at Marian—poor little sweet Marian, already pale with anxiety for him. Then he broke out suddenly—“That poor little sister who is very fond of me—do you know what she is doing at this moment—singing to them!—like the captives at Babylon, making mirth for the spoilers. And my friends—— heaven! you heard what that woman ventured to say to-day.”
“My dear,” said Mrs Atheling, who confessed to treating Louis as a “son of her own,” “think of heaven all the day long, and so much the better for you—but I cannot have you using in this way such a name.”
This simple little reproof did more for Louis than a hundred philosophies. He laughed low, and with emotion took Mrs Atheling’s hand for a moment between his own—said “thank you, mother,” with a momentary smile of delight and good pleasure. Then his face suddenly flushed with a dark and violent colour; he cast an apprehensive yet haughty glance at Mrs Atheling, and drew his hand away. The stain in his blood was a ghost by the side of Louis, and scarcely left him for an instant night nor day.
When he left them, they went to the door with him as they had been wont to do, the mother holding a shawl over her cap, the girls with their fair heads uncovered to the moon. They stood all together at the gate speaking cheerfully, and sending kind messages to Rachel as they bade him good-night—and none of the little group noticed a figure suddenly coming out of the darkness and gliding along past the paling of the garden. “What, boy, you here?” cried a voice suddenly behind Louis, which made him start aside, and they all shrank back a little to recognise in the moonlight the marble-white face of Lord Winterbourne.
“What do you mean, sir, wandering about the country at this hour?” said the stranger—“what conspiracy goes on here, eh?—what are you doing with a parcel of women? Home to your den, you skulking young vagabond—what are you doing here?”
Marian, the least courageous of the three, moved by a sudden impulse, which was not courage but terror, laid her hand quickly upon Louis’s arm. The young man, who had turned his face defiant and furious towards the intruder, turned in an instant, grasping at the little timid hand as a man in danger might grasp at a shield invulnerable, “You perceive, my lord, I am beyond the reach either of your insults or your patronage here,” said the youth, whose blood was dancing in his veins, and who at that moment cared less than the merest stranger, who had never heard his name, for Lord Winterbourne.