"Forgetful!--and of what?" asked he.
"I have left the book I was reading to grandpapa on the rock where we were sitting. I must go and fetch it."
"May I go with you?" asked he, half timidly.
"Yes, if you like."
"And your book,--what was it?"
"Oh, a charming book,--such a delightful story! So many people one would have loved to know!--such scenes one would have loved to visit!--incidents, too, that keep the heart in intense anxiety, that you wonder how he who imagined them could have sustained the thrilling interest, and held his own heart so long in terrible suspense!"
"And the name of this wonderful book is--"
""Waverley.""
"I have read it," said he, coldly.
"And have you not longed to be a soldier? Has not your heart bounded with eagerness for a life of adventure and peril?"
"I am a soldier," said he, quietly.
"Indeed!" replied she, slowly, while her steadfast glance scanned him calmly and deliberately.
"You find it hard to recognize as a soldier one dressed as I am, and probably wonder how such a life as this consorts with enterprise and danger. Is not that what is pa.s.sing in your mind?"
"Mayhap," said she, in a low voice.
"It is all because the world has changed a good deal since Waverley"s time."
"How sorry I am to hear it!"
"Nay, for your sake it is all the better. Young ladies have a pleasanter existence now than they had sixty years since. They lived then lives of household drudgery or utter weariness."
"And what have they now?" asked she, eagerly.
"What have they not! All that can embellish life is around them; they are taught in a hundred ways to employ the faculties which give to existence its highest charm. They draw, sing, dance, ride, dress becomingly, read what may give to their conversation an added elegance and make their presence felt as an added l.u.s.tre."
"How unlike all this was our convent life!" said she, slowly. "The beads in my rosary were not more alike than the days that followed each other, and but for the change of season I should have thought life a dreary sleep. Oh, if you but knew what a charm there is in the changeful year to one who lives in any bondage!"
"And yet I remember to have heard how you hoped you might not be taken away from that convent life, and be compelled to enter the world," said he, with a malicious twinkle of the eye.
"True; and had I lived there still I had not asked for other. But how came it that you should have heard of me? I never heard of _you!_"
"That is easily told. I was your aunt"s guest at the time she resolved to come abroad to see you and fetch you home. I used to hear all her plans about you, so that at last--I blush to own--I talked of Josephine as though she were my sister."
"How strangely cold you were, then, when we met!" said she, quietly.
"Was it that you found me so unlike what you expected?"
"Unlike, indeed!"
"Tell me how--tell me, I pray you, what you had pictured me."
"It was not mere fancy I drew from. There was a miniature of you as a child at the cottage, and I have looked at it till I could recall every line of it."
"Go on!" cried she, as he hesitated.
"The child"s face was very serious,--actually grave for childhood,--and had something almost stern in its expression; and yet I see nothing of this in yours."
"So that, like grandpapa," said she, laughing, "you were disappointed in not finding me a young tiger from Bengal; but be patient, and remember how long it is since I left the jungle."
Sportively as the words were uttered, her eyes flashed and her cheek colored, and Conyers saw for the first time how she resembled her portrait in infancy.
"Yes," added she, as though answering what was pa.s.sing in his mind, "you are thinking just like the sisters, "What years and years it would take to discipline one of such a race!" I have heard that given as a reason for numberless inflictions. And now, all of a sudden, comes grandpapa to say, "We love you so because you are one of us." Can you understand this?"
"I think I can,--that is, I think I can understand why--" he was going to add, "why they should love you;" but he stopped, ashamed of his own eagerness.
She waited a moment for him to continue, and then, herself blushing, as though she had guessed his embarra.s.sment, she turned away.
"And this book that we have been forgetting,--let us go and search for it," said she, walking on rapidly in front of him; but he was speedily at her side again.
"Look there, brother Peter,--look there!" said Miss Dinah, as she pointed after them, "and see how well fitted we are to be guardians to a young lady!"
"I see no harm in it, Dinah,--I protest, I see no harm in it."
"Possibly not, brother Peter, and it may only be a part of your system for making her--as you phrase it--feel a holy horror of the convent."
"Well," said he, meditatively, "he seems a fine, frank-hearted young fellow, and in this world she is about to enter, her first experiences might easily be worse."
"I vow and declare," cried she, warmly, "I believe it is your slipshod philosophy that makes me as severe as a holy inquisitor!"
"Every evil calls forth its own correction, Dinah," said he, laughing.
"If there were no fools to skate on the Serpentine, there had been no Humane Society."
"One might grow tired of the task of resuscitating, Peter Barrington,"
said she, hardly.
"Not you, not you, Dinah,--at least, if I was the drowned man," said he, drawing her affectionately to his side; "and as for those young creatures yonder, it"s like gathering dog-roses, and they "ll stop when they have p.r.i.c.ked their fingers."
"I"ll go and look after the nosegay myself," said she, turning hastily away, and following them.
A real liking for Conyers, and a sincere interest in him were the great correctives to the part of Dragon which Miss Dinah declared she foresaw to be her future lot in life. For years and years had she believed that the cares of a household and the rule of servants were the last trials of human patience. The larder, the dairy, and the garden were each of them departments with special opportunities for deception and embezzlement, and it seemed to her that new discoveries in roguery kept pace with the inventions of science; but she was energetic and active, and kept herself at what the French would call "the level of the situation;" and neither the cook nor the dairymaid nor Darby could be vainglorious over their battles with her. And now, all of a sudden, a new part was a.s.signed her, with new duties, functions, and requirements; and she was called on to exercise qualities which had lain long dormant and in disuse, and renew a knowledge she had not employed for many a year. And what a strange blending of pleasure and pain must have come of that memory of long ago! Old conquests revived, old rivalries and jealousies and triumphs; glorious little glimpses of brilliant delight, and some dark hours, too, of disappointment,--almost despair!
"Once a bishop, always a bishop," says the canon; but might we not with almost as much truth say, "Once a beauty, always a beauty"?--not in lineament and feature, in downy cheek or silky tresses, but in the heartfelt consciousness of a once sovereign power, in that sense of having been able to exact a homage and enforce a tribute. And as we see in the deposed monarch how the dignity of kingcraft clings to him, how through all he does and says there runs a vein of royal graciousness as from one the fount of honor, so it is with beauty. There lives through all its wreck the splendid memory of a despotism the most absolute, the most fascinating of all!
"I am so glad that young Conyers has no plans, Dinah," said Barrington; "he says he will join us if we permit him."
"Humph!" said Miss Barrington, as she went on with her knitting.