“You might take Carlo and me in exchange for Reiver and Berry. I think you could make something of us—get us to run unprofessionally, and do a little work in time.”
She looked up quickly to see how much he was in jest, and how much in earnest. She looked down again, and said hastily, “Carlo and you do not need me or any one to make you run and work, when it is in you both to run faster and work better than the rest of the world, if you choose.”
She did not intend to flatter him by any means, but he was not displeased with her answer—not though she put aside his petition.
The conviction had been growing upon De Vaux, till it was like an inspiration, that Lady Margaret and her brother held the right standard which he had missed—the one bracing and ennobling view of life—in which a man can live and die, serve God and man, and cast behind him self with all its weakness and waywardness.
He could do it as he was a Christian man, Heaven helping him. He had known what she had meant by a crusade all around us, for every man and woman, always. He had remembered who had first bidden man take up the cross, and condemned the servant who had hidden his talent in the earth. It made De Vaux thoughtful and sorrowful; but in spite of his sorrow, and the humility which was at its root, he was more hopeful than he had been since boyhood in taking these reflections to heart, and in seeing in the light of Lady Margaret’s conception of duty what an egotist he had been, and how near he had got to making shipwreck of his life, by yielding to scruples and whims, and forgetting the great call which is on him and every man.
My lady never had reason to regret having summoned Lady Margaret to stimulate De Vaux. Lady Margaret did finally take both man and brute in hand; but De Vaux had learned to work to purpose long before then, having, as she had said, the power to work in him, while it was his own fault if it lay dormant and shrivelled away. She never could or would accept the credit of his working, but she was ready to allow that she had helped to make Carlo a more cheerful dog than she had found him. She had not done everything, for Carlo had always reflected his master’s mood, and when De Vaux looked alive, and stepped out briskly to keep some engagement which went against the grain with him, but the obligation of which he had come to recognise, Carlo looked alive also, and accommodated himself to his master’s quickened pace, and even to the spring which had entered into the young man’s tread with the light in his eye. But Carlo could not go everywhere with his master—could not even be so much with him as formerly, after De Vaux grew a busy man with ever-increasing engagements; so that it was all the better for the dog that he had a brave little lady by whose side he could trot on her numberless errands, until he had no time left to fall back into his old painful consideration of the stumbles, the blunders, the coarseness and vulgarity of his neighbours, or to indulge in morbid moping and pining.
