“Most readily do I accede to your wish,” said Mr. Ewart, “but we must say nothing to excite him just now, while he is so feverish; and it is better that he should know nothing of the change until all is more decided and settled. I am just going to write to your uncle.”
“My uncle!” said Charles, looking again rather grave; “ah, how astonished he will be, and Aunt Matilda, and Clementina! I wonder if it will make them feel differently towards me—if I shall lose many friends with my title.”
“There is one at least whom you will gain.”
“Ah, a brother! I daresay that Mark and I will love each other, only I can never fancy him a lord.” Charles almost laughed at the idea.
“You must be to him what Jonathan was to David. One might have feared that the son of King Saul, who must naturally have once hoped to succeed to the throne of his father, would have beheld with jealousy the shepherd boy who was chosen to rule in his stead. Yet between the two there was only confidence and love, love which, however much we may admire it in David, appears tenfold more beautiful in his friend.”
“We must be like Christian and Faithful in the Pilgrim’s Progress,” said Charles, now quite regaining his usual cheerfulness of manner. “He has been passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and struggling under all manner of trials, and now the way is growing smooth beneath his feet, and he will have a brother to walk beside him. He will teach me something of the Valley of Humility, and I will tell him what I know of Vanity Fair. I feel really ashamed of myself now—what a worldly, self-seeking pilgrim I have been!”
“God be praised!” murmured the clergyman, as he quitted the room; “God be praised, who has supported and strengthened my dear pupil in the hour of his sore temptation.”
“I have sowed, and you have reaped; and the day is coming when ‘both he that soweth and they that reap shall rejoice together:’ that is, if you hold out; ‘for in due season ye shall reap, if ye faint not.’”—_Pilgrim’s Progress._
A few days after, as Mr. Ewart entered the room in which Mark, or rather Ernest, as we must now call him, was sitting in an armchair, propped up by cushions, and looking exceedingly pale, Charles, who was looking over the back of the chair, addressed his tutor playfully with the words, “I am so much disappointed, Mr. Ewart; here’s a young nobleman to whom I have been telling all sorts of good news, and he looks as grave as a judge upon them all.”