THE YOUNG PEOPLE.
What Louis did or said, or how he made interest for himself in the
tender heart of Mamma, no one very well knows; yet a certain fact it
was, that from henceforward Mrs Atheling, like Miss Anastasia, became
somewhat contemptuous of Rachel in the interest of Louis, and pursued
eager and long investigations in her own mind--investigations most
fruitless, yet most persevering--touching the old lord and the unknown
conclusion of his life. All that was commonly known of the last years of
the last Lord Winterbourne was, that he had died abroad. Under the
pressure of family calamity he had gone to Italy, and there, people
said, had wandered about for several years, leading a desultory and
unsettled life, entirely out of the knowledge of any of his friends; and
when the present bearer of the title came home, bearing the intelligence
of his elder brother’s death, the most entire oblivion closed down upon
the foreign grave of the old lord. Back into this darkness Mrs
Atheling, who knew no more than common report, made vain efforts to
strain her kindly eyes, but always returned with a sigh of despair.
“No!” said Mamma, “he might be proud, but he was virtuous and
honourable. I never heard a word said against the old lord. Louis is
like him, but it must only be a chance resemblance. No! Mr Reginald was
always a wild bad man. Poor things! they _must_ be his children; for my
lord, I am sure, never betrayed or deceived any creature all his life.”
But still she mused and dreamed concerning Louis; he seemed to exercise
a positive fascination over all these elder people; and Mrs Atheling,
more than she had ever desired a friendly gossip with Miss Willsie,
longed to meet once more with the Honourable Anastasia, to talk over her
conjectures and guesses respecting “the boy.”
In the mean time, Louis himself, relieved from that chaperonship and
anxious introduction by his sister, which the haughty young man could
not endure, made daily increase of his acquaintance with the strangers.
He began to form part of their daily circle, expected and calculated
upon; and somehow the family life seemed to flow in a stronger and
fuller current with the addition of this vigorous element, the young
man, who oddly enough seemed to belong to them rather more than if he
had been their brother. He took the three girls, who were now so much
like three sisters, on long and wearying excursions through the wood and
over the hill. He did not mind tiring them out, nor was he extremely
fastidious about the roads by which he led them; for, generous at heart
as he was, the young man had the unconscious wilfulness of one who all
his life had known no better guidance than his own will. Sometimes, in
those long walks of theirs, the young Athelings were startled by some
singular characteristic of their squire, bringing to light in him, by a
sudden chance, things of which these gentle-hearted girls had never
dreamed. Once they discovered, lying deep among the great fern-leaves,
all brown and rusty with seed, the bright plumage of some dead game, for
the reception of which a village boy was making a bag of his pinafore.
“Carry it openly,” said Louis, at whose voice the lad started; “and if
any one asks you where it came from, send them to me.” This was his
custom, which all the village knew and profited by; he would not permit
himself to be restrained from the sport, but he scorned to lift the
slain bird, which might be supposed to be Lord Winterbourne’s, and left
it to be picked up by the chance foragers of the hamlet. At the first
perception of this, the girls, we are obliged to confess, were greatly
shocked--tears even came to Marian’s eyes. She said it was cruel, in a
little outbreak of terror, pity, and indignation. “Cruel--no!” said
Louis: “did my gun give a sharper wound than one of the score of
fashionable guns that will be waking all the echoes in a day or two?”
But Marian only glanced up at him hurriedly with her shy eyes, and said,
with a half smile, “Perhaps though the wound was no sharper, the poor
bird might have liked another week of life.”
And the young man looked up into the warm blue sky over-head, all
crossed and trellised with green leaves, and looked around into the deep
September foliage, flaming here and there in a yellow leaf, a point of
fire among the green. “I think it very doubtful,” he said, sinking his
voice, though every one heard him among the noonday hush of the trees,
“if I ever can be so happy again. Do you not suppose it would be
something worth living for, instead of a week or a year of sadder
chances, to be shot upon the wing _now_?”
Marian did not say a word, but shrank away among the bushes, clinging to
Rachel’s arm, with a shy instinctive motion. “Choose for yourself,” said
Agnes; “but do not decide so coolly upon the likings of the poor bird. I
am sure, had _he_ been consulted, he would rather have taken his chance
of the guns next week than lain so quiet under the fern-leaves now.”
Whereupon the blush of youth for his own super-elevated and unreal
sentiment came over Louis’s face. Agnes, by some amusing process common
to young girls who are elder sisters, and whom nobody is in love with,
had made herself out to be older than Louis, and was rather disposed now
and then to interfere for the regulation of this youth’s improper
sentiments, and to give him good advice.
And Lord Winterbourne arrived: they discovered the fact immediately by
the entire commotion and disturbance of everything about the village, by
the noise of wheels, and the flight of servants, to be descried
instantly in the startled neighbourhood. Then they began to see visions
of sportsmen, and flutters of fine ladies; and even without these
visible and evident signs, it would have been easy enough to read the
information of the arrivals in the clouded and lowering brow of Louis,
and in poor little Rachel’s distress, anxiety, and agitation. She, poor
child, could no longer join their little kindly party in the evening;
and when her brother came without her, he burst into violent outbreaks
of rage, indignation, and despair, dreadful to see. Neither mother nor
daughters knew how to soothe him; for it was even more terrible in their
fancy than in his experience to be the Pariah and child of degradation
in this great house. Moved by the intolerable burden of this his time of
trial, Louis at last threw himself upon the confidence of his new
friends, confided his uncertain and conflicting plans to them, relieved
himself of his passionate resentment, and accepted their sympathy.
Every day he came goaded half to madness, vowing his determination to
bear it no longer; but every day, as he sat in the old easy-chair, with
his handsome head half-buried in his hands, a solace, sweet and
indescribable, stole into Louis’s heart; he was inspired to go at the
very same moment that he was impelled to stay, by that same vision which
he had first seen in the summer twilight at the old garden-gate.