CHAPTER XXXIII.
The end of the season arrived, Cosmo came home, leaving his fellow-student, who would not even accept an invitation to Norlaw, behind him in Edinburgh. Cameron thought it half a weakness on his part, the sudden affection to which the boy had moved him, but he would not yield so much to it as to lay himself under “an obligation,” nor suffer any one to suppose that any motive whatever, save pure liking, mingled in the unlikely friendship he had permitted himself to form. Inveterate poverty teaches its victims a strange suspiciousness; he was half afraid that some one might think he wanted to share the comforts of Cosmo’s home; so, as he was not going home himself, he remained in Edinburgh, working and sparing as usual, and once more expanding a little with the idea, so often proved vain hitherto, of getting so much additional work as to provide for his next session, leaving it free to its own proper studies; and Cosmo returned to rejoice the hearts of the women in Norlaw.
Who found him grown and altered, and “mair manlike,” and stronger, and every way improved, to their hearts’ content. The Mistress was not given to caresses or demonstrations of affection—but when the lad got home, and saw his mother’s eye brighten, and her brow clear every time she looked at him, he felt, with a compunction for his own discontented thoughts, of how much importance he was to the widow, and tried hard to restrain the instinct of wandering, which many circumstances had combined to strengthen in his mind, although he had never spoken of it. Discontent with his present destination for one thing; the example of Huntley and Patrick; the perpetual spur to his energy which had been before him during all his stay in Edinburgh, in the person of Cameron; his eager visionary desire to seek Mary of Melmar, whom the boy had a strong fancy that he was destined to find; and, above and beyond all, a certain vague ambition, which he could not have described to any one, but which lured him with a hundred fanciful charms—moved him to the new world and the unknown places, which charmed chiefly because they were new and unknown. Cosmo had written verses secretly for a year or two, and lately had sent some to an Edinburgh paper, which, miracle of fortune! published them. He was not quite assured that he was a poet, but he thought he could be something if he might but reach that big, glorious world which all young fancies long for, and the locality of which dazzling impossible vision, is so oddly and so often placed in London. Cosmo was not sure that it was in London—but he rather thought it was not in Edinburgh, and he was very confident it could not be in Norlaw.
About the same time, Joanna Huntley came home for the long summer holidays. Joanna had persuaded her father into giving her a pony, on which she trotted about everywhere unattended, to the terror of her mother and the disgust of Patricia, who was too timid for any such impropriety. Pony and girl together, on their rambles, were perpetually falling in with Cosmo Livingstone, whom Joanna rather meant to make a friend of, and to whom she could speak on one subject which occupied, at the present time, two thirds of her disorderly thoughts, and deafened, with perpetual repetition, the indifferent household of Melmar.
This was Desirée. The first of first loves for a girl is generally another girl, or young woman, a little older than herself; and nothing can surpass the devotion of the worshiper.
Desirée was only a year older than Joanna, but she was almost every thing which Joanna was not; and she was French, and had been in Paris and London, and was of a womanly and orderly temper, which increased the difference in years. She was, for the time being, Joanna’s supreme mistress, queen, and lady-love.
“I’m very glad you saw her, Cosmo,” cried the girl, in one of their encounters, “because now you’ll know that what I say is true. They laugh at me at Melmar; and Patricia (she’s a cat!) goes on about her Clapham school, and says Desirée is only a little French governess—as if I did not know better than that!”
“Is she a governess?” asked Cosmo.
“She’s a lady!” said Joanna, reddening suddenly; “but she does not pay as much as we do; and she talks French with the girls, and sometimes she helps the little ones on with their music, and—but as for a governess like madame, or like Miss Trimmer, or even Mrs. Payne herself—she is no more like one of them than you are. Cosmo. I think Desirée would like you!”
“Do you think so?” said Cosmo, with a boyish blush and laugh.