"Miss Stanley," said Randolph Jordan, addressing Miss Matilda, "won't you trust yourself to me. I promise to steer carefully, and I can say what every one cannot, that I have never spilled my cargo yet."
"Thanks, Mr. Randolph, I do not mistrust you in the least; but really--it is so long since I got upon a toboggan--that I--I shall just stay here with Mr. Considine, now I have got to the top of the hill, and watch you young people like a sedate chaperon. But here is my cousin, Betsey Bunce; I am sure she will be delighted. They do not toboggan at St. Euphrase, and I am sure she never saw one in Upper Canada. Oh!"--with a little scream--"It really is quite frightful to see them start. And that is Muriel, I declare, and Gerald Herkimer. He will break the child's neck, I do believe; he is so heedless. I wish we were home again."
"Oh, law!" cried Betsey; "are you sure it is quite safe? I used to coast with my hand-sled, like the rest of the kids, when I was little, but it kind of frightens one to see the go-off. Are you quite sure you can protect my bones, Mr. Jordan?"--looking clingingly in his face in search of encouragement--"I feel awful frightened."
"Well, perhaps you are right," said Randolph, impervious to the cling; "it is a good plan to watch the others for a while first, it gives one confidence," and he was gone. He had paid his duty invitation to the head of the party, and, not having bargained for Betsey as a substitute, availed himself at once of the simulated dread which was intended merely to make him urgent and assiduous. Betsey felt foolish, and turned round to Matilda, but she, supposing she had provided for her charge, had taken Considine's arm and strolled away. Betsey was pretty well able to do for herself, however, and ere long she descried a bachelor, unprovided with a maid, and whom she had danced with the evening before; he, on her recognizing him, was not averse to taking her on his conveyance faute de mieux, it being "kind o' lonesome," as he told himself, to ride alone, "when every other fellow was provided with his bit of muslin."
Randolph was at Miss Rouget's side in a moment, tendering his respectful services, which she at once accepted with the grave bow of a maiden obedient to her parents, who feels gratified in her conscience with the sense of a duty fulfilled, in doing what she knows they would approve--the superior satisfaction of a well-regulated mind, higher, because a moral pleasure, than the indulgence of mere personal preference, but by no means so gratifying to the gentleman, if he only knew it, which, fortunately, he seldom does. Randolph's feelings, too, might perhaps be considered as of that same higher moral sort, which dispenses with good honest attachment of the natural kind; more exactly to be described as indifference touched with filial piety and flavoured with a pinch of self-interest.
Old Jordan had been immensely impressed by the mining discoveries at La Hache, and although it was a damper to recognize in the desired father-in-law of his son a rapid and an unsuccessful gambler, still, the man's interest in the mine could be saved, he thought, by settling it upon his daughter as dot, if the old man were permitted to enjoy the usufruct during his life; besides, was there not a certain institution where troublesome old gentlemen had been locked up ere then, at the instance of wives or heirs? and was not monsieur the seignior eccentric enough for any purpose, with skilful counsel to lay it properly before a jury? Randolph was the impediment himself; he was like a badly-ridden colt, whom the horseman, armed with whip and spur, which he has not the judgment to use, vexes into rebellion which he cannot overbear.
It was humiliating, but his sight was clear enough to see that Amelia, in opposition to whom all his dealings with his son hitherto had been taken, must now be called in to use the very influence which had hitherto made the lad so unruly, and render him tractable for once. Amelia, for a wonder, lent a favourable ear. She recognized it as a tribute, and an admission, in arranging the most important circumstance in her son's life, that the arrogant block-head, who had attempted to lord it with so high a hand over herself and the boy, had come to see his impotence at last. The sense of victory soothed her, and made her gentle, as a filly has been known to become under coaxings with lump sugar and carrots, when rougher means had failed. She agreed to take the youth in hand, and she moulded him without his knowledge, as she had done all his life before, like wax between her fingers.
He had as yet--whatever later years might bring him--no very pronounced faculty of love for other than himself; his attachment to herself, as she saw full well, being due chiefly to what she could do for him and give him in the way of flattery, sympathy, and help to assist himself, and so forth. She saw it without much pain, though she was his mother, for she was a practical-minded person who indulged in the affections but sparingly as being too luscious and apt to pall; "it was just," she thought, "the way of the coarser sex--brutal, selfish, stupid--overbearing in the rude strength of their muscle, the delicate nerve-power of the women." "But brain-fibre was more than a match in the long run for such fibre as theirs," she told herself; and after all the boy was her own, to be proud of among other women, and to make do in the long run, as she only could make him, by delicately pulling the strings she wot of in his being, pretty much as she would.
She was aware, of course, of his kindness for Muriel, but she divined that its roots did not go deep, and when she now took him in hand to direct his attachments, his own description confessed the truth when he spoke of her as "a jolly little girl, and awfully pretty, whom the fellows were crazy after, and he meant to take the cake from them all."
"I am not so sure that you can, my boy; having been a girl myself I am likely to guess nearer the truth than you can; girls are such goosy little things, and I should say your friend Gerald has the best chance there."