The natural
beauty of Wallencamp had impressed me daily more and more, and the people
were harmless, to say the least. I thought he should have enjoyed them;
he had a humorous vein; he was not too snobbish; and he seemed of a
nature to wish to make himself generally agreeable to people; but for
these special objects of my care he had expressed only derision and
contempt, with often a touch of positive malice; and had not been able to
abstain from giving me a hard cut or two on my mission, barely avoiding
it in his letter, and rejoicing with what seemed to me an unwarrantable
warmth in the hope that I should soon quit forever the abominable place.
Then, in my miserable short-sightedness, my thoughts wandered indirectly
to Rebecca. I wondered if she had taken to heart anything in the
acquaintance she was said to have had with Mr. Rollin, before I came to
Wallencamp, which had caused the change in her. I did not believe she
had. The girl was too artless and simple to have concealed so completely
the resentment she would naturally have cherished--too childish to have
borne it so silently. As far as the fisherman was implicated in the
affair, even if he had trifled a little for his own amusement with the
vague impulses, possibly the affections, of this unsophisticated girl,
the act was by no means unprecedented among people of wealth and
respectability.
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