THE next morning, while the mother and daughters were still in the full fervour of discussion about this same remarkable Louis, he himself was seen for the first time in the early daylight passing the window, with that singular rapidity of step which he possessed in common with his sister. They ceased their argument after seeing him—why, no one could have told; but quite unresolved as the question was, and though Mamma’s first judgment, unsoftened by that twilight walk, was still decidedly unfavourable to Louis, they all dropped the subject tacitly and at once. Then Mamma went about various domestic occupations; then Agnes dropped into the chair which stood before that writing-book upon the table, and, with an attention much broken and distracted, gradually fell away into her own ideal world; and then Marian, leading Bell and Beau with meditative hands, glided forth softly to the garden, with downcast face and drooping eyes, full of thought. The children ran away from her at once when their little feet touched the grass, but Marian went straying along the paths, absorbed in her meditation, her pretty arms hanging by her side, her pretty head bent, her light fair figure gliding softly in shadow over the low mossy paling and the close-clipped hedge within. She was thinking only what it was most natural she should think, about the stranger of last night; yet now and then into the stream of her musing dropped, with the strangest disturbance and commotion, these few quiet words spoken in her ear,—“It was here I saw you first.” How many times, then, had Louis seen her? and why did he recollect so well that first occasion? and what did he mean?
While she was busy with these fancies, all at once, Marian could not tell how, as suddenly as he appeared last night, Louis was here again—here, within the garden of the Old Wood Lodge, walking by Marian’s side, a second long shadow upon the close-clipped hedge and the mossy paling, rousing her to a guilty consciousness that she had been thinking of him, which brought blush after blush in a flutter of “sweet shamefacednesse” to her cheek, and weighed down still more heavily the shy and dreamy lids of these beautiful eyes.
The most unaccountable thing in the world! but Marian, who had received with perfect coolness the homage of Sir Langham, and whose conscience smote her with no compunctions for the slaying of the gifted American, had strangely lost her self-possession to-day. She only replied in the sedatest and gravest manner possible to the questions of her companion—looked anxiously at the parlour window for an opportunity of calling Agnes, and with the greatest embarrassment longed for the presence of some one to end this tête-à-tête. Louis, on the contrary, exerted himself for her amusement, and was as different from the Louis of last night as it was possible to conceive.
“Ay, there it is,” said Louis, who had just asked her what she knew of Oxford—“there it is, the seat of learning, thrusting up all its pinnacles to the sun; but I think, if the world were wise, this glitter and shining might point to the dark, dark ignorance outside of it, even more than to the little glow within.”
Now this was not much in Marian’s way—but her young squire, who would have submitted himself willingly to her guidance had she given any, was not yet acquainted at all with the ways of Marian.
She said, simply looking at the big dome sullenly throwing off the sunbeams, and at the glancing arrowheads, of more impressible and delicate kind, “I think it is very pretty, with all those different spires and towers; but do you mean it is the poor people who are so very ignorant? It seems as though people could scarcely help learning who live there.”
“Yes, the poor people—I mean all of us,” said Louis slowly, and with a certain painful emphasis. “A great many of the villagers, it is true, have never been to school; but I do not count a man ignorant who knows what he has to do, and how to do it, though he never reads a book, nor has pen in hand all his life. I save my pity for a more unfortunate ignorance than that.”
“But that is very bad,” said Marian decidedly, “because there is more to do than just to work, and we ought to know about—about a great many things. Agnes knows better than I.”
This was said very abruptly, and meant that Agnes knew better what Marian meant to say than she herself did. The youth at her side, however, showed no inclination for any interpreter. He seemed, indeed, to be rather pleased than otherwise with this breaking off.
“When I was away, I was in strange enough quarters, and learnt something about knowledge,” said Louis, “though not much knowledge itself—heaven help me! I suppose I was not worthy of that.”
“And did you really run away?” asked Marian, growing bolder with this quickening of personal interest.
“I really ran away,” said the young man, a hot flush passing for an instant over his brow; and then he smiled—a kind of daring desperate smile, which seemed to say “what I have done once I can do again.”
“And what did you do?” said Marian, continuing her inquiries: she forgot her shyness in following up this story, which she knew and did not know.
“What all the village lads do who get into scrapes and break the hearts of the old women,” said Louis, with a somewhat bitter jesting. “I listed for a soldier—but there was not even an old woman to break her heart for me.”
“Oh, there was Rachel!” cried Marian eagerly.
“Yes, indeed, there was Rachel, my good little sister,” answered the young man; “but her kind heart would have mended again had they let me alone. It would have been better for us both.”
He said this with a painful compression of his lip, which a certain wistful sympathy in the mind of Marian taught her to recognise as the sign of tumult and contention in this turbulent spirit. She hastened with a womanly instinct to direct him to the external circumstances again.
“And you were really a soldier—a—not an officer—only a common man.” Marian shrunk visibly from this, which was an actual and possible degradation, feared as the last downfall for the “wild sons” of the respectable families in the neighbourhood of Bellevue.
“Yes, I belong to a class which has no privileges; there was not a drummer in the regiment but was of better birth than I,” exclaimed Louis. “Ah, that is folly—I did very well. In Napoleon’s army, had I belonged to that day!—but in my time there was neither a general nor a war.”
“Surely,” said Marian, who began to be anxious about this unfortunate young man’s “principles,” “you would not wish for a war?”
“Should you think it very wrong?” said Louis with a smile.
“Yes,” answered the young Mentor with immediate decision; for this conversation befell in those times, not so very long ago, when everybody declared that such convulsions were over, and that it was impossible, in the face of civilisation, steamboats, and the electric telegraph, to entertain the faintest idea of a war.
They had reached this point in their talk, gradually growing more at ease and familiar with each other, when it suddenly chanced that Mamma, passing from her own sleeping-room to that of the girls, paused a moment to look out at the small middle window in the passage between them, and looking down, was amazed to see this haughty and misanthropic Louis passing quietly along the trim pathway of the garden, keeping his place steadily by Marian’s side. Mrs Atheling was not a mercenary mother, neither was she one much given to alarm for her daughters, lest they should make bad marriages or fall into unfortunate love; but Mrs Atheling, who was scrupulously proper, did not like to see her pretty Marian in such friendly companionship with “a young man in such an equivocal position,” even though he was the brother of her friend. “We may be kind to them,” said Mamma to herself, “but we are not to go any further; and, indeed, it would be very sad if he should come to more grief about Marian, poor young man;—how pretty she is!”
Yes, it was full time Mrs Atheling should hasten down stairs, and, in the most accidental manner in the world, step out into the garden. Marian, unfortunate child! with her young roses startled on her sweet young cheeks by this faint presaging breath of a new existence, had never been so pretty all her life.