LITMIR.BIZ

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Kendal, smiling mournfully, as he met her gaze. ‘It was the most beautiful countenance I ever saw, full of life and joy; and there were wonderful expressions in the eyes when he was thinking or listening. He used to read the Greek Testament with me every morning, and his questions and remarks rise up before me again. That text—You have seen it in church.’

      ‘Because I live, ye shall live also,’ Albinia repeated.

      ‘Yes. A little before his illness we came to that. He rested on it, as he used to do on anything that struck him, and asked me, “whether it meant the life hereafter, or the life that is hidden here?” We went over it with such comments as I could find, but his mind was not satisfied; and it must have gone on working on it, for one night, when I had been thinking him delirious, he called me, and the light shone out of those bright dark eyes of his as he said, joyfully, “It is both, papa! It is hidden here, but it will shine out there,” and as I did not catch his meaning, he repeated the Greek words.’

      ‘Dear boy! Some day we shall be glad that the full life and glory came so soon.’

      He shook his head, the parting was still too recent, and it was the first time he had been able to speak of his son. It was a great satisfaction to her that the reserve had once been broken; it seemed like compensation for the present trouble, though that was acutely felt, and not softened by the curious eyes and leading questions of the sisters, when she returned to give what attention she could to their interrupted lessons.

      Gilbert returned, unsuspicious of the storm, till his father’s stern gravity, and her depressed, pre-occupied manner, excited his attention, and he asked her anxiously whether anything were the matter. A sad gesture replied, and perhaps revealed the state of the case, for he became absolutely silent. Albinia left them together. She watched anxiously, and hurried after Mr. Kendal into the study, where his manner showed her not to be unwelcome as the sharer of his trouble. ‘I do not know what to do,’ he said, dejectedly. ‘I can make nothing of him. It is all prevarication and sulkiness! I do not think he felt one word that I said.’

      ‘People often feel more than they show.’

      He groaned.

      ‘Will you go to him?’ he presently added. ‘Perhaps I grew too angry at last, and I believe he loves you. At least, if he does not, he must be more unfeeling than I can think him. You do not dislike it, dearest.’

      ‘O no, no! If I only knew what would be best for him!’

      ‘He may be more unreserved with you,’ said Mr. Kendal; and as he was anxious for her to make the attempt, she moved away, though in perplexity, and in the revulsion of feeling, with a sort of disgust towards the boy who had deceived her so long.

      She found him seated on a wheelbarrow by the pond, chucking pebbles into the still black water, and disturbing the duckweed on the surface. His colour was gone, and his face was dark and moody, and strove not to relax, as she said, ‘O Gilbert, how could you?’

      He turned sharply away, muttering, ‘She is coming to bother, now!’

      It cut her to the heart. ‘Gilbert!’ was all she could exclaim, but the tone of pain made him look at her, as if in spite of himself, and as he saw the tears he exclaimed in an impatient voice of rude consolation, ‘There’s nothing to take so much to heart. No one thinks anything of it!’

      ‘What would Edmund have thought?’ said Albinia; but the appeal came too soon, he made an angry gesture and said, ‘He was nearly three years younger than I am now! He would not have been kept in these abominable leading-strings.’

      She was too much shocked to find an answer, and Gilbert went on, ‘Watched and examined wherever I go—not a minute to myself—nothing but lessons at Tremblam, and bother at home; driven about hither and thither, and not allowed a friend of my own, nor to do one single thing! There’s no standing it, and I won’t!’

      ‘I am very sorry,’ said Albinia, struggling with choking tears. ‘It has been my great wish to make things pleasant to you. I hope I have not teased or driven you to—’

      ‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Gilbert, disrespectfully indeed, but from the bottom of his heart, and breaking at once into a flood of tears. ‘You are the only creature that has been kind to me since I lost my mother and Ned, and now they have been and turned you against me too;’ and he sobbed violently.

      ‘I don’t know what you mean, Gilbert. If I stand in your mother’s place, I can’t be turned against you, any more than she could,’ and she stroked his brow, which she found so throbbing as to account for his paleness. ‘You can grieve and hurt me, but you can’t prevent me from feeling for you, nor for your dear father’s grief.’

      He declared that people at home knew nothing about boys, and made an uproar about nothing.

      ‘Do you call falsehood nothing?’

      ‘Falsehood! A mere trifle now and then, when I am driven to it by being kept so strictly.’

      ‘I don’t know how to talk to you, Gilbert,’ said Albinia, rising; ‘your conscience knows better than your tongue.’

      ‘Don’t go;’ and he went off into another paroxysm of crying, as he caught hold of her dress; and when he spoke again his mood was changed; he was very miserable, nobody cared for him, he did not know what to do; he wanted to do right, and to please her, but Archie Tritton would not let him alone; he wished he had never seen Archie Tritton. At last, walking up and down with him, she drew from him a full confidence, and began to understand how, when health and strength had come back to him in greater measure than he had ever before enjoyed, the craving for boyish sports had awakened, just after he had been deprived of his brother, and was debarred from almost every wholesome manner of gratifying it. To fall in with young Tritton was as great a misfortune as could well have befallen a boy, with a dreary home, melancholy, reserved father, and wearisome aunt. Tritton was a youth of seventeen, who had newly finished his education at an inferior commercial school, and lived on his father’s farm, giving himself the airs of a sporting character, and fast hurrying into dissipation.

      He was really good-natured, and Gilbert dwelt on his kindness with warmth and gratitude, and on his prowess in all sporting accomplishments with a perfect effervescence of admiration. He evidently patronized Gilbert, partly from good-natured pity, and partly as flattered by the adherence of a boy of a grade above him; and Gilbert was proud of the notice of one who seemed to him a man, and an adept in all athletic games. It was a dangerous intimacy, and her heart sank as she found that the pleasures to which he had been introducing Gilbert, were not merely the free exercise, the rabbit-shooting and rat-hunting of the farm, nor even the village cricket-match, all of which, in other company, would have had her full sympathy. But there had been such low and cruel sports that she turned her head away sickened at the notion of any one dear to her having been engaged in such amusements, and when Gilbert in excuse said that every one did it, she answered indignantly, ‘My brothers never!’

      ‘It is no use talking about what swells do that hunt and shoot and go to school,’ answered Gilbert.

      ‘Do you wish you went to school?’ asked Albinia.

      ‘I wish I was out of it all!’

      He was in a very different frame. He owned that he knew how wrong it had been to deceive, but he seemed to look upon it as a sort of fate; he wished he could help it, but could not, he was so much afraid of his father that he did not know what he said; Archie Tritton said no one could get on without.—There was an utter bewilderment in his notions, here and there showing a better tone, but obscured by the fancies imbibed from his companion, that the knowledge and practice of evil were manly. At one moment he cried bitterly, and declared that he was wretched; at another he defended each particular case with all his might, changing and slipping away so that she did not know where to take him. However, the conclusion was far more in pity than anger, and after receiving many promises that if she would shield him from his father and bear with him, he would abstain from all she disapproved, she caressed and soothed the aching head, and returned to his father hopeful and encouraged, certain that the evil had been chiefly caused by weakness and neglect and believing that here was a beginning of repentance. Since there was sorrow and confession, there surely

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