He started, as the idea recurred to him, and at first he wondered what train of thought could have brought back those words in connection with Theresa’s image. But, as he grew accustomed to his own thought, it became, as it were, the father to the wish; and he began to consider how pretty and gentle she was, and how delicate her slight, rounded figure, and how soft and low her voice. Then he remembered that she had looked at him twice or thrice during the day, with an expression which he had never seen in a woman’s eye before, and which, though he understood it not, did not bode ill to his success; and lastly, the worst, bitterest thought of all arose in his mind, and retained possession of it. “I will spite them all,” he thought, “that proud, insolent young sailor, who, because he is a few years older than I, and has seen swords drawn once or twice—for all, I doubt if he can fence or shoot any better than I, or if he be a whit more active—affects to look down upon me as a stripling. His young friend, truly! let him look out, whether he have not cause to term me something else ere he die. By God! I believe he loves the girl, too! he looked black as a thunder-cloud over Dartmoor, when she smiled on me! And my father—by my soul! I think he’s doting; and her dainty ladyship, too! I’ll see if I cannot have her more eager to hear me, than she has shown herself to-day. I will do it—I will, by all that’s holy! Heaven! how it will spite them!”
Then he laid his head down on the pillow, and began to reflect how he should act, and what were his chances of success in the villainy which he meditated; and he even asked himself, with something of the boy’s diffidence in his first encounter with woman, “but can I, can I win her affection?” and vanity and the peculiar audacity of his race, of his own character, made answer instantly, “Ay, can I? Am I not handsomer, and cleverer, and more courtly; am I not higher born and higher bred, and higher mannered, not only than that seafaring lout, but than any one she has ever met withal? Ay, can I, and ay, will I!”
And in obedience to this last and base resolve, the worst and barest that ever had crossed the boy’s mind, no sooner had they returned from the adjoining room, after the conclusion of the evening meal, than he contrived entirely to monopolize Theresa.
First, he asked her to play at chess with him; and then, after spending a couple of hours, under the pretence of playing, but in reality gazing into her blue eyes, and talking all sorts of wild, enthusiastical, poetical romance, half earnest and half affected, he declared that his head ached, and asked her to read aloud to him; and when she did so, sitting without a thought of ill beside his pillow, while their fathers were conversing in a low tone over the hearth, and Durzil was absent making his preparations for the next day’s journey, he let his hand fall, as if unconsciously, on hers, and after a little while, emboldened by her unsuspicious calmness, imprisoned it between his fingers.
It might have been that she was so much engrossed in reading, for it was Shakspeare’s sweet Rosalind that the boy had chosen for her subject, that she was not aware that her hand was clasped in his. It might have been, that, accustomed to its pressure, from his involuntary retention of it during his lethargic sleep on the preceding day, she let it pass as a matter of no consequence. It might have been, that almost unsuspected by herself, a feeling of interest and affection, which might easily be ripened into love, was already awakened in her bosom, for the high-spirited, handsome, fearless boy, who in some measure owed his life to her assistance.
At all events, she made no effort to withdraw it, but let it lie in his, passive, indeed, and motionless, save for its quivering pulse, but warm and soft and sensitive. And the boy waxing bolder, and moved into earnestness by the charms of the position, ventured to press it once or twice, as she read some moving line, and murmured praises of the author’s beauties, and of the sweet, low voice that lent to those beauties a more thrilling loveliness, and still the fairy fingers were not withdrawn from his hold, though her eye met not his, nor any word of hers answered his whispered praises.
At length a quick, strong step came suddenly to the door of the room, and almost before there was time for thought, the door was thrown open, and Durzil Olifaunt entered.
Instantly Theresa started at the sound, and strove to withdraw her hand, while a deep blush of shame and agitation crimsoned her cheeks and brow, and even overspread her snowy neck and bosom.
It was not, as that bold boy fancied at the time, in the vanity and insolence of his uncorrected heart, that she knew all the time, that she was allowing what it was wrong, and immodest, and unmaidenly to endure, and that now she was afraid and ashamed, not of the error, but of the detection.
No. In the perfect purity of her heart, in the half pitiful, half protecting spirit which she felt toward Jasper, first as an invalid, and then as a mere boy—for although he was, perhaps, a year her senior, who does not know that boys in their eighteenth year are a full lustre younger than girls of the same age—she had thought nothing, dreamed nothing of impropriety in yielding her hand to the boy’s affectionate grasp, until the step of the man, whose proffered love she had that very day declined, led her to think intuitively what would be his feelings, and thence what must be Jasper’s, concerning that permitted license.