Olive began, but it was difficult for Mildred to follow the long rambling confession; with all her love for truth, Olive's morbid sensitiveness tinged most things with exaggeration. Mildred hardly knew if her timidity and incoherence were not jumbling facts and suppositions together with a great deal of intuitive wisdom and perception. There was a sad amount of guess-work and unreality, but after a few leading questions, and by dint of allowing Olive to tell her story in her own way, she contrived to get tolerably near the true state of the case.
It appeared that Olive had for a long time been seriously unhappy about her brothers. Truthful and uncompromising herself, there had seemed to her a want of integrity and a blamable lack of openness in their dealings with their father. With the best intentions, they were absolutely deceiving him by leaving him in such complete, ignorance of their wishes and intentions. Royal especially was making shipwreck of his father's hopes concerning him, devoting most of his time and energies to a secret pursuit; while his careless preparation for his tutor was practical, if not actual, dishonesty.
'At least Cardie works hard enough,' interrupted Mildred at this point.
'Yes, because it will serve either purpose; but, Aunt Milly, he ought to tell papa how he dreads the idea of being ordained; it is not right; he is unfit for it; it is worse than wrong—absolute sacrilege;' and Olive poured out tremblingly into her aunt's shocked ear that she knew Cardie had doubts, that he was unhappy about himself. No—no one had told her, but she knew it; she had watched him, and heard him talk, and she burst into tears as she told Mildred that once he absolutely sneered at something in his father's sermon which he declared obsolete, and not a matter of faith at all.
'But, my dear,' interrupted the elder woman, anxiously, 'my brother ought to know. I—some one—must speak to Richard.'
'Oh, Aunt Milly, you will hear—it is I—who have done the mischief; but you told me there were no such things as conflicting duties; and what is the use of a conscience if it be not to guide and make us do unpleasant things?'
'You mean you spoke to Richard?'
'I have often tried to speak to him, but he was always angry, and muttered something about my interference; he could not bear me to read him so truly. I know it was all Mr. Macdonald. Papa had him to stay here for a month, and he did Cardie so much harm.'
'Who is he—I never heard of him?' And Olive explained, in her rambling way, that he was an old college friend of her father's and a very clever barrister, and he had come to them to recruit after a long illness. According to her accounts, his was just the sort of character to attract a nature like Richard's. His brilliant and subtle reasoning, his long and interesting disquisitions on all manner of subjects, his sceptical hints, conveying the notion of danger, and yet never exactly touching on forbidden ground, though they involved a perilous breadth of views, all made him a very unsafe companion for Richard's clever, inquisitive mind. Olive guessed, rather than knew, that things were freely canvassed in those long country walks that would have shocked her father; though, to his credit be it said, Henry Macdonald had no idea of the mischievous seed he had scattered in the ardent soil of a young and undeveloped nature.
Mildred was very greatly dismayed too when she heard that Richard had read books against which he had been warned, and which must have further unsettled his views. 'I think mamma guessed he had something on his mind, for she was always trying to make him talk to papa, and telling him papa could help him; but I heard him say to her once that he could not bear to disappoint him so, that he must have time, and battle through it alone. I know mamma could not endure Mr. Macdonald; and when papa wanted to have him again, she said, once quite decidedly, "No, she did not like him, and he was not good for Richard." I noticed papa seemed quite surprised and taken aback.'