“Yet you do not seem to like it,” said Colin, with a little curiosity.
This time she made him no direct answer. Her eyes were following her brother and Lauderdale as they walked about the deck. “Is _he_ nice?” she asked, with a little timidity, pointing at Lauderdale, and giving another hasty wistful look at Colin’s face.
“I don’t know if you would think so,” said Colin; “he is very Scotch, and a little odd sometimes; but kinder and better, and more truly a friend than words can describe. He is tender and true,” said the young man, with a little enthusiasm which woke up the palest ghost of an answering light in his young companion’s face.
“Being Scotch is a recommendation to me,” she said; “the only person I ever loved, except Arthur, of course,--and those who are gone--was Scotch.” After this quaint intimation, which woke in Colin’s mind an incipient spark of the earliest stage of jealousy--not jealousy proper, but only a lively and contemptuous curiosity to know “who the fellow was”--she dropped back again into her habitual silence. When Colin tried to bring her back by ordinary remarks about the voyage and their destination, she answered him simply by “Yes,” or “No.” She was of one idea, incapable apparently of exerting her mind on any other subject. When they had been thus sitting silent for some time, she began again abruptly at the point where she had left off.
“If you were to come to the same place,” she said--“Arthur can speak Italian very well, and I know it a little--we might be able to help you, and you would have very good air--pure air off the sea. If he had society he would soon be better.” This was said softly to herself; and then she went on, drawn farther and farther by the sympathy which she felt in her listener. “There are only us two in the world.”
“If I can do anything,” said Colin, “as long as we are here at least; but there is no lack of society,” he said, pointing to the groups on the quarter-deck, at which Alice Meredith shook her head.
“He frightens them,” she said; “they prefer to go out of his way; they don’t want to answer his questions. I don’t know why he does it. When he was young he was fond of society, and went out a great deal, but he has changed so much of late,” said the anxious sister, with a certain look of doubt and wonder on her face. She was not quite sure whether the change was an improvement. “I don’t understand it very well myself,” she went on, with a sigh; “perhaps I have not thought enough about it. And then he does not mind what I say to him--men never do; I suppose it is natural. But, if he had society, and you would talk and keep him from writing--”