The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes. Yonge Charlotte Mary

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 must be reformation.

      For a week Gilbert went on steadily, but at the end of that time his arrivals at home became irregular, and one day there was another great aberration. On a doubtful day, when it had been decided that he might go safely between the showers, he never came to Tremblam at all, and Mr. Salsted sent a note to Mr. Kendal to let him know that his son had been at the races—village races, managed by the sporting farmers of the neighbourhood. There was a sense of despair, and again a talk, bringing at once those ever-ready tears and protestations, sorrow genuine, but fruitless. ‘It was all Archie’s fault, he had overtaken him, persuaded him that Mr. Salsted would not expect him, promised him that he should see the celebrated ‘Blunderbuss,’ Sam Shepherd’s horse, that won the race last year. Gilbert had gone ‘because he could not help it.’

      ‘Not help it!’ cried Albinia, looking at him with her clear indignant eyes. ‘How can you be such a poor creature, Gilbert?’

      ‘It is very hard!’ exclaimed Gilbert; ‘I must go past Robble’s Leigh twice every day of my life, and Archie will come out and be at me.’

      ‘That is the very temptation you have to resist,’ said Albinia. ‘Fight against it, pray against it, resolve against it; ride fast, and don’t linger and look after him.’

      He looked desponding and miserable. If she could only have put a spirit into him!

      ‘Shall I walk and meet you sometimes before you get to Robbie’s Leigh!’

      His face cleared up, but the cloud returned in a moment.

      ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Only tell me. You know I wish for nothing so much as to help you.’

      He did confess that there was nothing he should like better, if Archie would not be all the worse another time, whenever he should catch him alone.

      ‘But surely, Gilbert, he is not always lying in ambush for you, like a cat for a mouse. You can’t be his sole game.’

      ‘No, but he is coming or going, or out with his gun, and he will often come part of the way with me, and he is such a droll fellow!’

      Albinia thought that there was but one cure. To leave Gilbert daily exposed to the temptation must be wrong, and she laid the case before Mr. Kendal with so much earnestness, that he allowed that it would be better to send the boy from home; and in the meantime, Albinia obtained that Mr. Kendal should ride some way on the Tremblam road with his son in the morning, so as to convoy him out of reach of the tempter; whilst she tried to meet him in the afternoon, and managed so that he should be seldom without the hope of meeting her.

      Albinia’s likings had taken a current absolutely contrary to all her preconceived notions; Sophia, with her sullen truth, was respected, but it was not easy to like her even as well as Lucy, who, though pert and empty, had much good-nature and good-temper, and was not indocile; while Gilbert, in spite of a weak, shallow character, habits of deception, and low ungentlemanly tastes, had won her affection, and occupied the chief of her time and thoughts; and she dreaded the moment of parting with him, as removing the most available and agreeable of her young companions.

      That moment of parting, though acknowledged to be expedient, did not approach. Gilbert, could not be sent to a public school without risk and anxiety which his father did not like, and which would have been horror to his grandmother; and Albinia herself did not feel certain that he was fit for it, nor that it was her part to enforce it. She wrote to her brother, and found that he likewise thought a tutor would be a safe alternative; but then he must be a perfect man in a perfect climate, and Mr. Kendal was not the man to make researches. Mr. Dusautoy mentioned one clergyman who took pupils, Maurice Ferrars another, but there was something against each. Mr. Kendal wrote four letters, and was undecided—a third was heard of, but the locality was doubtful, and the plan went off, because Mr. Kendal could not make up his mind to go thirty miles to see the place, and talk to a stranger.

      Albinia found that her power did not extend beyond driving him from ‘I’ll see about it,’ to ‘Yes, by all means.’ Action was a length to which he could not be brought. Mr. Nugent was very anxious that he should qualify as a magistrate СКАЧАТЬ