Berwick nodded his head; he pushed a large box of cigars across the table which stood between them. "I know," he said, "I met Kingdon last week, and by a word he let fall I gathered that you were thinking of doing this. Well, of course I'm sorry, but I know you've done your best, and after all no one could have foreseen how difficult the position would be! I suppose they will have to go back to the unsatisfactory plan with McKirdy." But at the back of the speaker's mind was the thought that, if he was as much at the Priory as he hoped to be, he might himself be able to look into things rather more—
Neither man spoke again for a few moments; then Boringdon got up, and stood with his back to the fire, "But that," he said, "is not all I have come to say to you. I am really taking this step because it is my intention"—he hesitated, and Berwick perceived that a peculiarly dogged expression had come over the dark, rather narrow face,—"I wish to tell you that it is my intention," repeated Oliver, "to ask Mrs. Rebell to become my wife."
His host looked up at him with frank astonishment, and a good deal of concern. "But, my dear fellow," he began rather hurriedly, "is it possible that you don't know?——"
"I know everything." Boringdon raised his voice, then went on more calmly, "But I do not suppose that you yourself, Berwick, are aware that Mrs. Rebell's husband is dying, that there is every chance that in a few months, or perhaps in a few weeks, she will be a widow—free, that is, to accept an offer of marriage."
In one sense Boringdon had certainly succeeded in his object. More than he was ever destined to know, his words, his revelation, had brought the man before him sharp up to his bearings. James Berwick wasboth amazed and discomfited by this unexpected piece of news, and for the moment it made him very ill at ease.
He had been playing with a tortoiseshell paper knife; suddenly it snapped in two, and, with an oath, he threw the pieces down on the table and got up from the chair in which he had been lying back.
"Are you quite sure of your information?" he said slowly. "It's ill waiting for dead men's shoes." Then he felt ashamed of what he had just said, and he added, more to give himself time for thought than anything else: "Have you any reason to suppose that Mrs. Rebell——?" Then he stopped abruptly, realising that he had been betrayed into making a remark which to Boringdon must seem an outrage.
But the other had not apparently taken it in that sense. "No, I have no reason to suppose that Mrs. Rebell has ever thought of such a thing. I think far too well of her to suppose it for a moment," Oliver was speaking very deliberately. "I received the news of the man's state within a very few days of the fire at the Priory, and it has since been confirmed. He has, it seems, some kind of bad chest disease, accelerated, I fancy, by drink. As yet she knows nothing of it. Perhaps I ought to add that I have no reason to suppose that she will accept the offer I mean to make her as soon as a decent interval of time has elapsed. But, on the other hand, I should like to assure you that if she refuses me I intend to go on asking her. Nothing, short of her marriage to someone else, will make me give her up." He repeated, and as he did so Boringdon fixed his eyes on his friend with a peculiar, and what Berwick felt to be a terrible, look: "Nothing—you understand me, Berwick—nothing but hermarriageto another man."
The speaker of these strange words took a step forward. For a moment the two stood opposite one another. The man Barbara loved was a brave man, but he quailed before the other's eyes. "I have now told you what I came to say. Of late you seem to have become very intimate with Mrs. Rebell, and I wish to warn you that the day may come when I shall require your good offices. Good-night,"—and without offering to shake hands with Berwick, Boringdon turned on his heel and left the room.
"Shall I to Honour or to Love give way?
"Shall I to Honour or to Love give way?
For, as bright day, with black approach of night,Contending makes a doubtful puzzling light,So does my Honour and my Love togetherPuzzle me so I can decide on neither."
For, as bright day, with black approach of night,Contending makes a doubtful puzzling light,So does my Honour and my Love togetherPuzzle me so I can decide on neither."
Spenser.
Astime went on, as harsh winter turned into soft spring, Boringdon tried to assure himself that his conversation with Berwick had achieved all that he had hoped.
James Berwick was certainly less often at the Priory, but this was doubtless owing in a measure to the fact that he had to be constantly in London, attending to his Parliamentary duties. Even now he was far more frequently at Chancton than he had been the year before, and Oliver was still jealous, sometimes intolerably so, for some subtle instinct told him that he was on a very different footing with Mrs. Rebell from that on which she stood with Berwick. As to his own relation with the man with whom his intimacy had once been so close, it had become, since their conversation, that of mere formal acquaintance. Mrs. Boringdon felt sure there had been a quarrel, but she was afraid to ask, so taciturn, so unapproachable, had her son become.
Oliver had one subject of consolation. To the amazement of those about her, with the exception perhaps of Doctor McKirdy, the paralysed mistress of thePriory now caused herself to be moved down each day to the Blue drawing-room, and this, as Boringdon of course realised, made it very difficult for James Berwick, when at Chancton, to see much of Mrs. Rebell alone.
And Barbara? To her, as to Berwick, the weeks which had immediately followed the fire had been a time of deep content and tranquil happiness. She was well aware that there must come a day of painful reckoning; but, unlike Berwick, she put off the evil moment of making up her mind as to what form that reckoning would take.
She looked back with a kind of shrinking horror to the mental struggle she had gone through before the accident which had so wholly changed all the circumstances of her life. Those days when she believed that Berwick would never return to her were ill to remember. Then had come the fire, followed by hours of physical pain and terror of death, but now she looked back on those hours with positive gratitude, for they had surely brought an experience nothing else could have given her.
At once, with a resistless, quiet determination which had constrained those about Barbara into acquiescence, Berwick had established his right to be with her. The putting on of the coal—that act of service on the first evening—had been, so Doctor McKirdy later told himself with a twist of his thin lips, symbolic of what was to be his attitude to the Queen's Room and its present inmate. Berwick soon came and went as freely as if he had been the invalid's twin brother, or he a father, and Barbara his sick child,—with, however, the one significant exception that both he and she refrained wholly from caress.
The old Scotchman won a deep and an abiding placein the hearts of the two over whom he threw, during these days, the ample mantle of his eccentricity and masterful disposition. He moved over to the Priory, occupying a room close to Berwick's, and in some odd fashion he made each member of the large household believe that it was by his order and wish that Berwick was so often with his patient, concerning the extent of whose injury many legends grew, for she was only tended by Scotch Jean, French Léonie, Doctor McKirdy, and—James Berwick. And so it was that, as often happens with regard to events which none could have foretold, and which would have been described before they occurred as clearly impossible, what went on excited, at any rate within the Priory, no comment.
The strange situation which had arisen did not pass wholly without outside remark. Lucy Kemp at first came daily—indeed, sometimes twice a day—to sit with Barbara and to read to her; and though at those times Berwick kept out of the Queen's Room, there came a moment in Barbara's illness when she perceived, with a sad feeling of humiliation, that Lucy's visits were being curtailed, also that she never came to the Priory unaccompanied.
To the girl herself her father's sudden stern objection to her daily visits to Mrs. Rebell had been inexplicable,—even more so her mother's refusal to discuss the question. Then a word said before her by Mrs. Boringdon, a question put to Oliver as to James Berwick's prolonged stay at Chancton, had partly opened Lucy's eyes.
"Do you dislike my going to see Mrs. Rebell because Mr. Berwick is there?"
With some hesitation Mrs. Kemp answered her: "Yes, my dear, that is the reason your father does not wish you to go to the Priory so often."
And then Lucy had turned and asked one of those questions, difficult to answer truthfully to one who, even if in her parents' eyes a child, was yet a woman grown: "Mother, I want to ask you something. Is it very wrong, always wrong, for a woman to like another man better than she likes her husband? How can she help it if the man to whom she is married is such a man as Mr. Pedro Rebell seems to be?"
But Mrs. Kemp answered with unwonted decision and sharpness: "There is a moment—there is always a moment—when the matter is in a woman's own hands and conscience. And in any case, Lucy, two wrongs don't make a right!"
And with this the girl had to be content, but the question made Mrs. Kemp more than ever determined to discontinue her daughter's growing intimacy with poor Barbara. First Oliver Boringdon, and then James Berwick,—this Mrs. Rebell must indeed be an unfit friend for her little Lucy!
To Madame Sampiero, who lay at the other end of the corridor out of which opened the Queen's Room, the doctor would sometimes declare, "I've little mind for the part I am playing." But when she answered, with perplexity and fear in her large blue eyes, "Why then do you play it?" he would content himself with shrugging his shoulders, and muttering between his teeth, "Because I'm a sentimental old fool!"
But, whatever the reason, so well had Doctor McKirdy managed the extraordinary situation, that not till Mrs. Rebell was promoted to getting up and coming downstairs, did the long hours spent by Berwick in her company provoke the kind of gossip which had finally reached the ears of Mrs. Boringdon. Even then what was repeated had been said in jest. Was it likely, so the humble gossips of Chancton would have declared,that such a gentleman as Mr. Berwick would fancy a lady who was by all accounts half burnt to a cinder!
When Madame Sampiero had suddenly made up her mind to be moved downstairs, Barbara knew that the old Scotchman and her god-mother had entered into a conspiracy to put an end to what she considered her innocent, if peculiar, intimacy with James Berwick. There took place in her heart a silent, but none the less strong, movement of passionate revolt,—she thought this attempt to check their friendship the more cruel inasmuch as Berwick had to be away a good deal and could only now and again snatch a day from London. Still, it was then, not perhaps till then, that Mrs. Rebell began to foresee the logical outcome of the situation into which she had allowed herself to drift.
Every day came his letters,—nearly always more than one together, by each of the two daily posts,—but he never asked her—significant omission—to answer them, for had she done so, all Chancton must have known of the correspondence. And yet all the world might have seen the letters Barbara cherished, and on which her heart lived from day to day; they were a diary of the writer's doings, a history of what was going on in the House, such brief, intimate notes as many a politician writes daily to his wife.
A woman is always quicker to perceive certain danger-signals than is a man. Barbara was aware of the change of attitude in Doctor McKirdy and in Madame Sampiero long before Berwick noticed it. That these two could threaten or destroy his intimacy with Mrs. Rebell had never occurred to him as being possible. On the other hand, he had resented deeply Boringdon's interference, and, as far as was possible, he put out of his mind what had been undoubtedly intendedas a threat. The reminder that Pedro Rebell lived had been an outrage; that Barbara's husband was mortal, nay, on the eve of death, a piece of information which Berwick could have well spared. For the present he was content, as was apparently Barbara, to let things drift on as they were.
But there came a day when, after a long afternoon spent by them both in Madame Sampiero's company, Berwick asked Barbara with sudden deep irritation, "Why is it that we never seem to be alone together? I have hardly spoken to you since I have been here! Is it impossible for you to leave Madame Sampiero? Is there no room in the whole of this great house where we can talk together in peace? I have a thousand things to say to you!"
They were on their way to the dining-room, there to be respectfully chaperoned by McGregor, and Barbara had no answer ready. Suddenly looking into her downcast face, he understood the unspoken answer to his imperious questioning, and his eyes flashed wroth. And yet what could he do? He could not, nay, he would not, ask her to stoop to any kind of deception, to make secret assignations outside the house. On the other hand, he no longer felt "on honour" as regarded the woman he loved; even less was he bound to consider the feelings of Madame Sampiero.
So it came to pass that Berwick was less often at the Priory; his letters to Barbara altered in tone, and became those of an ardent, of an impatient lover. Sometimes Barbara wondered whether he possessed secret means of his own for knowing all that went on at the Priory, and of obtaining news of its inmates. Occasionally she would be surprised, even amused, at his apparent knowledge of little incidents which occurredduring his absences. The source of his information, if it was as she suspected, must of course be Mrs. Turke! Mrs. Rebell felt a little afraid of the old woman, of her far-seeing, twinkling eyes, and of her sly hilarity of manner; she kept as much as possible out of the housekeeper's way.
To Boringdon, who came with pertinacious regularity, Barbara gave scarcely any thought, save perhaps to wonder why Lucy Kemp was so fond of him. In old days, when he had talked to her of politics, and of things in which she had begun to take a new and keen interest, she had liked to listen to him; but now he seemed tongue-tied when in her presence, and she perceived that he was no longer on good terms with James Berwick.
With Madame Sampiero, Barbara's relations also seemed to have become less affectionate, less intimate, than before the fire, and this troubled them both. Mrs. Rebell knew herself to be the subject of anxious thought on the part of her god-mother; for what other reason than that of protecting her from some imaginary danger had Madame Sampiero altered the habits of dignified seclusion to which she had remained rigidly faithful for so many years? She did not see—or was it that she saw only too well—the force of her own past example on such a nature as that of her god-daughter? But it was too late now to try and separate Barbara Rebell from the one human being who made life worth living, and sometimes the younger woman longed to tell her so.
At last there came a break in the monotony of a life which was beginning to tell on Barbara's health and nerves. At the end of one of Berwick's short, unsatisfactory visits, he mentioned that he would not be able to come down again for another two or three weeks.
And when he was gone, after a cold, estranged farewell, uttered perforce in the presence of Madame Sampiero, Barbara turned her face away to hide her tears.
Almost at once her god-mother asked her, "Would you not like to go away, with Léonie, to Paris for a few days?" She caught with feverish relief at the proposal; it was good, it was more than kind, of Marraine to suggest so delightful a plan! But she would prefer, honestly so, to go alone, not to take the old French servant whom in her heart she well knew the paralysed woman could ill spare. It would have been a great pleasure to Barbara to have had the company of Lucy Kemp, but she had not dared suggest it, being afraid of a refusal. If she could not have Lucy for a companion, she felt she would rather go alone. And Madame Sampiero had at last consented to this modification of her plan,—a plan which had not met with Doctor McKirdy's approval, but as to which his old friend, as was usually the case, got her own way.
And now had come the last night but one before Mrs. Rebell's departure. She felt excited and pleased at the thought of the little holiday. Berwick had evidently been told as soon as the household knew of her coming journey, and yet, when writing, he had only once alluded to it, and she had felt rather hurt, for to herself it was a matter of much moment. This journey would be, in a sense, a pilgrimage; Barbara meant to go to some of the places, within easy reach of Paris, where she and her parents had spent most of their exile. During the last few days she had passed much time in discussion with Doctor McKirdy as to what she was to see, and in helping him to draw up a little plan of the places she was to go to,—Versailles, St. Germains, Fontainebleau, with all of which she had cherished associations! The moments went by soquickly that, for the first time for many weeks, Barbara thought but little of Berwick, and of her own strange relation to him.
Now she was on her way to bed. She would have only two more nights in the Queen's Room, for she had herself insisted that a humbler apartment, but still one on the same floor as that of Madame Sampiero, should be found for her, and the change was to take place on her return. She looked round the beautiful room which had become to her a place of so many memories, and as she did so a shadow came over her face. Would she ever again be as happy as she had been in this room, so simply, childishly content as during those days when she had lain on the great canopied bed, while those about her ministered to her slightest wish—when she had been the spoiled darling of Doctor McKirdy, of the grim Scotch nurse, and last, not least, of James Berwick?
There came a knock at the door—a hesitating, low knock, very unlike that of Jean or Léonie. Barbara suddenly felt an odd pang of fear: "Come in," she cried loudly,—what, after all, had she to be afraid of?
There was a pause, and then Mrs. Turke, resplendent in the bright yellow gown in which Barbara Rebell had first seen her, advanced tip-toeing into the room. "Hush, Ma'am—I don't want anyone to hear us! Will you be pleased to come down at once to my parlour? There's someone there been waiting such a time, and most anxious to see you—!"
Barbara seemed in no hurry to follow the old woman; a look of suffering, of humiliation, came over her face. Must she and Berwick stoop to this?
But Mrs. Turke was in an agony of impatience. "He's got to go back this very night!" she whispered, and the jovial, sly look faded from her rubicund face. "He's walked all the way from Halnakeham, that hehas, in the pouring rain, and he's wet through, that he is! Am I to tell him that you won't come down then?" and she pretended to edge towards the still open door.
"No," said Barbara irresolutely, "of course I am coming down—"
Mrs. Turke's account of Berwick's long walk in the rain had done its work, and yet shame of a very keen quality almost blotted out Mrs. Rebell's joy at the thought of seeing him, and of seeing him—the first time for weeks—without fear of interruption.
As she went quickly down, following Mrs. Turke's ample person, and so through the stone corridors of what had been the mediæval monastery, Barbara's heart softened strangely. Had he not made this hurried journey to bid her good-bye, God-speed? And she had thought he did not care—
Mrs. Turke knew her place far too well to risk being present at the meeting in her parlour. She stopped at the foot of the short flight of stairs leading up to her own bedroom and Berwick's old nursery, but Barbara clung to the fat, ring-laden hand: "Do come, Mrs. Turke,—I am sure Mr. Berwick will want to see you——"
"Bless you,no, Ma'am, that he won't! Why, I declare your hand's burning! There's nothing to be afraid of, he's a most reasonable gentleman, he wouldn't hurt a hair of your pretty head!"
And then, rather to the old housekeeper's surprise, Mrs. Rebell suddenly let go her hand, and walked forward, alone, down the passage.
When she reached the door of the room to which she was bound, she stopped irresolutely. But Berwick had been listening; he flung open the door, and as she crossed the threshold he bent forward and took her hands in a tight grip.
Barbara said nothing, but she looked at him rather sadly, and as she did so she perceived that he was dressed in a rough shooting suit she had often seen him wear the autumn before. She understood, without a word, that it was worn to-night as a half disguise,—he wished no one to know of this secret visit to the Priory,—and again a feeling of shame, of humiliation, swept over her. And yet how glad she was to see him, how infinitely dear he had become to her!
Suddenly she felt herself being drawn,—nay driven,—into the shelter of his arms. His lips trembled on her closed eyelids, were pressed on the slight scar left by the burn on her forehead, and then swiftly sought and found her soft quivering mouth——. But even then Berwick was very gentle with her, taking care to bruise neither the soul nor the body of the creature who was now, at last, completely subject to his will.
Barbara tried to withdraw herself from his arms, but he still held her to him with a passion of mute feeling in his eyes; and then, while looking down at her strangely, as if wishing to see into her very heart, he suddenly exclaimed "Barbara, this can't go on! What is to happen to you and to me? As long as they left us alone I was content—ah no, not content, but submissive. But now? Do you think it is pleasant for me to do what I have had to do to-night,—to come here like a thief? While I was waiting for you, I told myself that doubtless you would refuse to come down. I had no right to ask you to come to me. It is I—I—who should always come to you——"
He had released her, and drawn himself away. Now he was speaking with a tired bitterness which frightened her, and in a moment the desire to soothe, to comfort him, drove out from her every thought of self. "Ofcourse I came down,—I will always come when you want me," she smiled at him with a look of shy, wistful tenderness.
"Will you? Always? Is that true? Oh! Barbara, if I could only believe you mean those words, I could find courage to ask you—to say to you——"
"What do you want to say to me?" Her voice sank to a whisper; then, seized with a sudden rush of love, of pity, of self-abnegation, she added, "Nay, I will tell you! You have come to ask of me what Lord Bosworth must once have come to ask of Madame Sampiero, and, like her, I will say, yes,—" she covered her face with her hands.
And then she listened, very quietly, while Berwick told her, with broken words of passionate gratitude and endearment, of the plan which he had scarcely dared to believe he would have courage to propose. She knew he had a house, an old hunting lodge built by Louis XIII., on the edge of the Forest of St. Germains. It was a curious solitary pavilion, bought by his father as a very young man, and dear to Berwick and his sister as having been the scene,—the speaker's accents became more deeply tender,—of their parents' honeymoon. Within a drive of this enchanting spot was the little town of Poissy, where the mail train could be made to stop and where, the day after to-morrow, he would be waiting—
Barbara sat listening. She had raised her head and was staring straight before her. Berwick looked at her with entreating eyes—"It is close to Paris! Besides, they know you will be moving about."
"It is not that," she spoke with difficulty, hardly knowing why she felt so torn by conflicting feelings of shame and pain. Perhaps it was only because the evocation of St. Germains brought the presence of her mother before her.
She tried to tell herself that she had known that this would—nay, must—happen. The battle had been fought and lost before to-night. During the long solitary days Barbara had just lived through, she had acknowledged that she could not give up Berwick,—rather than that they must inevitably come to do what Lord Bosworth and Madame Sampiero had done. And yet this discussion, the unfolding of this plan, filled her with humiliation and misery. "When I come back," she said, looking at him, for the first time straight in the eyes, "I shall have to tell my god-mother—and—and Doctor McKirdy the truth."
"You will do what you wish. We shall both do exactly what you think right, my dearest!" Berwick could hardly believe in his own amazing good fortune, and yet he also felt ill at ease. "Barbara," he said suddenly, "before I go—and I ought to be going now, for I shall cross to France to-morrow—I want to tell you something——"
"Something else?" there was a tone of appeal in her voice.
"Yes, it will not take long. Perhaps I ought to have begun by doing so. Some time ago Oliver Boringdon made me a curious confidence. He told me that, were you ever free to marry, he meant to make you an offer, and if you refused,—he was good enough to intimate that he thought this quite possible,—to go on doing so at intervals unless you became the wife of another man!"
Barbara looked at him, and then began to laugh helplessly, though the words had jarred on her horribly. "Oliver Boringdon? You can't have understood; how dared he say such a thing—about me?" and the tears ran down her cheeks.
"Nay, he was right, perhaps, to say what he did. Inany case I am sure you ought to know—it was my duty to tell you."
"But why?" cried Barbara. "Why?"
"A sop," he said with sudden sharpness, "to my own conscience."
But conscience proved an unappeased, upbraiding companion during James Berwick's four-mile walk to Halnakeham station.
"They have most power to hurt us whom we love;We lay our sleeping lives within their arms."
"They have most power to hurt us whom we love;We lay our sleeping lives within their arms."
Beaumont and Fletcher.
A shortavenue of chestnut trees, now in their scented glory of rose-pink blossom, hid the square red-brick hunting lodge, still known by its pre-Revolution name of Le Pavillon du Dauphin, from the broad solitary roadway skirting the Forest of St. Germains. Under this avenue James Berwick, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes bent on the ground, was walking up and down the morning of the day he was expecting Barbara to join him.
It was seven o'clock—not early, according to French hours, for now and again the heavy wheels of a market cart, the jingling of the tiny bells hung on to the blue worsted-covered harness, the neighing of the horses, would break on his ear, and serve to remind him that he was in France—in the land where, if long tradition speaks truly, the thing that he was about to do would find many more honest apologists than in his own; in France which had given, close to this very spot, so magnificent a hospitality to his own Stuart ancestors. All about him lay the deep, mysterious, unbroken calm of the great forest; every trace of last summer's merrymakers—if, indeed, such people ever made their way to this, the further edge of the wooded peninsula,—had been completely obliterated. What more enchanting spot could be found in the wide world to form thesetting of what he believed would be a life-long romance?
Like most men, he had always seen something offensive, almost grotesque, in the preliminaries now usual to conventional marriage. Heavens! what a lack of imagination had the modern bride and bridegroom! Especially in England—especially in his own class. Here the mating birds, amid awakening spring, would sing his own and Barbara's epithalamium.
And yet Berwick was not happy, as he had thought to be, to-day. Again and again during the long wakeful night he had just passed he had caught himself wondering whether his uncle, at the beginning of his long intimacy with Madame Sampiero, had felt such scruples as these which now tormented him. If so, they had soon vanished; Lord Bosworth, during many years, had been supremely content with life, and all that life brought him.
Perhaps he, Berwick, was made of more scrupulous stuff. To-day he had to face the fact that in his cup of honey there was a drop of exceeding bitterness. The knowledge that Boringdon might be mistaken,—that Barbara might, after all, never be free,—made the matter scarcely more tolerable. Oliver had so spoken that at the time his words had carried conviction. Berwick asked himself why he had not told her the whole truth, and then let her be the judge as to what they should do. He had always been aware that there were the two streaks in his character—the two Stuart streaks—that of extreme nobility, and that which makes a man capable of acts of inexplicable betrayal.
In vain he tried to persuade himself that now was too late to change. Human nature has its limits; in a few hours Barbara would be here, and with quickening pulses he tried to think only of the immediate future.Later on, there would—there must—come inevitable pain and difficulty; they would have to face the reproachful gaze of Madame Sampiero, the undoubted disapproval of Lord Bosworth, and yet whose example were he and Barbara now about to follow?
The present was his own, no one—no one, that is, but himself—could deprive him of to-day's completed joy; and yet he would have given much to hasten the march of the lagging hours, to sleep, to dream the time away. Perhaps, when he was in the actual presence of the woman he loved with a depth of feeling which, to a certain extent, purified and rendered selfless his longing for her, he would find courage to tell her the whole of what Boringdon had said—
This concession to his conscience lightened his heart, and he looked with leisurely and pleased gaze at the finely proportioned building—a miniature replica of what the central portion of the Palace of Versailles must have looked like in the days of Louis XIII. No wonder the curious, stately little pavilion had caught the fancy of his father—that whimsical, unfortunate Charles Berwick, whose son thought of him far oftener than he had ever done as a younger man. The Pavilion du Dauphin, put up for sale in one of France's many political convulsions, had only cost its English purchaser twenty thousand francs; and now each year Berwick received an offer from the French Government to buy the place back at five times that sum! He always refused this offer, and yet he came there but seldom, sometimes in the autumn for a few days, occasionally, perhaps once in two or three years, with Arabella. Since the death of his own mother, no woman save James Berwick's sister had enjoyed the rare charm of the old hunting lodge.
The building was not fitted for ordinary life. Itconsisted of two vast central rooms,—that above the central hall being little more than a loft,—out of which opened smaller apartments, each and all bearing traces of the prodigal wealth and luxurious fancy of that fermier général into whose acquisitive hands the place had drifted for a while during the last half of the eighteenth century. It was he, doubtless, who had added the painted ceilings, the panels which Berwick's father believed had been painted by Nattier, and which, if this were so, would have made the Pavilion du Dauphin a bargain even at the price which Berwick yearly refused for it.
When Arabella was there, the brother and sister managed very well without English servants, done for, and that most adequately, by an old garde de chasse, Jean Lecerf, and his wife, whom Berwick paid generously for looking after the property during the winter months of the year.
This old couple,—with the solitary exception of Lord Bosworth, who rarely alluded to his younger brother,—were the only people who ever spoke to Berwick and his sister of their parents. Those eccentric parents, whose marriage had been in itself a wilful, innocent romance, culminating in a runaway wedding, had spent five summers here, bringing with them, after the first year, their baby daughter. The stories the Lecerfs had to tell of that time lost nothing in the telling!
Mère Lecerf—a name generic of the soil in that part of Northern France—knew very little of her present employer, saving the agreeable fact that he must be very rich. She was quite unaware that he was a widower, and she had accepted with apparent satisfaction, and quaintly expressed felicitations, the story he had seen fit to tell her within an hour of his arrival theday before—namely that he was now married, and that his wife was coming to join him for a few days!
Berwick would have preferred to make no such explanation, but something had to be said, and, after all, would not he henceforth regard Barbara Rebell as in very truth his honoured, his cherished wife?
He walked from the outside air into the spacious room, into which the morning sun was streaming through the one immense window which gave on to a steep clearing, now carpeted with the vivid delicate green of lily-of-the-valley leaves. One of the qualities which had most delighted him in Barbara during the early days of their acquaintance had been her perception of, and delight in, natural beauty. How charmed she would be with this place! How the child which had awakened in her would revel in the strangeness of a dwelling-place which so little resembled the ordinary conventional house!
Groups of fair shepherdesses, each attended by her faithful swain, smiled down from the pale grisaille walls, but close to the deep chimney,—indeed, fixed inside, above the wooden seat—was a reminder of an age more austere, more creative than that of Nattier. This was a framed sheet of parchment—a contemporary copy of Plantin's curious sonnet, "Le Bonheur de ce Monde," whosenaifphilosophy of life has found echoes in many worthy hearts since it was first composed by the greatest of Flemish printers.
"Avoir une maison, commode, propre, et belle,Un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans,Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfants,Posséder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle."N'avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle,Ni de partage à faire avecque ses parens,Se contenter de peu, n'espérer rien des Grands,Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle.
"Avoir une maison, commode, propre, et belle,Un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans,Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfants,Posséder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle.
"N'avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle,Ni de partage à faire avecque ses parens,Se contenter de peu, n'espérer rien des Grands,Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle.
"Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,S'adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion,Domter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes."Conserver l'esprit libre et le jugement fort,Dire son Chapelet en cultivant ses entes,C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort."
"Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,S'adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion,Domter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes.
"Conserver l'esprit libre et le jugement fort,Dire son Chapelet en cultivant ses entes,C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort."
With the exception, perhaps, of three or four lines, Berwick now found himself in unexpected agreement with old Plantin's analysis of human happiness.
And Barbara? Ah! she undoubtedly would agree with almost every word of it; he caught himself wondering whether the position he had won, and which he owed in a measure,—perhaps in a very great measure,—to his wife's fortune, would be really forfeited, were he to become again a comparatively poor man. Berwick had by no means forgotten what it was to be straitened in means; and he realised that want of substantial wealth had been a great bar even to Lord Bosworth. Still, oddly enough, the thought of giving up his wealth for the sake of Barbara was beginning to appeal to his imagination. He went so far as to tell himself that, had he come across her as a girl, he would of course have married her, and forfeited his large income without a regret.
So it was that, during the long solitary spring day, spent by him almost wholly in the forest, Berwick experienced many phases of acute and varying feeling, most of which tended to war with the course to which he was being inexorably driven by his sense of honour rather than by his conscience.
But for Boringdon's revelation as to Pedro Rebell's state, Berwick's conscience would have been at ease. So much he had the honesty to admit. Apart from that one point which so intimately involved his honour, he was without scruple, and that although he loved Barbarathe more for being, as he well knew she was, scrupulous, and, as he thought, conscience-ridden. Nothing, so he told himself again and again during those hours of fierce battle, could alter the fact that she belonged to him in that special sense which is, as concerns a man and a woman, the outcome of certain emotional experiences only possible between two natures which are drawn to one another by an over-mastering instinct.
In the days that followed the fire at Chancton Priory, there had arisen, between Berwick and Barbara, a deep, wordless intimacy and communion, which at the time had had the effect of making him divine what was in her mind, with a clearness which had struck those about them as being actually uncanny. And yet it was then, during those days, that Berwick had sworn to himself that his love was pure and selfless in its essence. As she had lain there, her hand quivering when it felt his touch, every gross element of his nature had become fused and refined in the clear flame of his passion. It had been during these exquisite, to him sacred moments, that he had told himself that on these terms of spiritual closeness and fusion he would be content to remain.
But alas! that mood had quickly changed; and the interview with Boringdon had reawakened the violent primeval instinct which had slumbered,—only slumbered,—during the illness of Barbara. The knowledge that another man loved her, with an ordinary, natural love by no means free from that element of physical attraction which Berwick himself had been striving, not unsuccessfully, to control in his own heart, had had a curious effect upon him. His soul, ay, and something much less spiritual and more tangible than his soul, rushed down from Heaven to earth, and he began to allow himself, when in the company of the woman he loved, certain experiments, slight, almost gossamer intexture, but which he would afterwards recall with a strange mingling of shame and rapture, for they proved him master of that most delicate and sensitive of human instruments, a pure and passionate heart.
The wide solitary glades carpeted with flowers, the chestnut groves, skirting the great avenue of firs, which is one of the glories of the Forest,—everything to-day seemed to minister to his passion, to bring Barbara Rebell vividly before him. Coming on a bank from whose mossy surface sprang high, delicately tinted windflowers, Berwick was suddenly haunted by a physical memory—that of Barbara's movement of surrender two days before. Again he felt her soft quivering mouth yielding itself to his lips, and, still so feeling, he suddenly bent down and put these lips, now sanctified, to the cool petals of a windflower. Was it a sure instinct which warned him that Barbara's love for him, even if it contained every element the natural man seeks to find in his mate, was so far governed by conscience that she would never be really content and unashamed so long as they were outside the law? More, if Boringdon were right, if Pedro Rebell were indeed dying, and Barbara became in time James Berwick's wife, would she ever forget, would she ever cease to feel a pang of pain and remorse in, the fact of this episode, and of the confession which would—which must—follow after? He had to ask himself whether he was prepared to cast so dark a shadow over the picture of these days, these hours, which her mind would carry into all the future years of their lives.
More difficult, because far more subtle and unanswerable, was the knowledge that Boringdon might after all have been wrong, and that Barbara might never be free. In that case, so Berwick with fierce determination told himself, he would be fool indeed to retard the decisivestep which would resolve what had already become, both to him and to Barbara, if the truth were to be faced honestly, an intolerable situation.
But in his heart Berwick knew well that Oliver Boringdon had spoken the truth. Even now, to-day, release might have come, and Barbara might be a free woman. Slowly, painfully, as he fought and debated the question with himself, he became aware that only one course was compatible with his own self-respect.
A secret misgiving, a hidden, unmentionable dread, which would have troubled, perhaps with reason, many a man in Berwick's position, was spared this man. He knew that he need have no fear that Barbara would misunderstand, or question, even in her heart of hearts, his sacrifice. It would not be now, but later, that she would suffer,—when they went back to their old humiliating position at Chancton, as lovers unacknowledged, separated, watched.
And so, at last, the outcome of the struggle which saw him go through so many different moments of revolt and sharp temptation, was that Berwick brought himself to envisage that immediate renunciation, which seemed so much more difficult to face than did the further, if less poignant, sacrifice which still lay in the distant future, when, to make Barbara his wife, he would give up so much that had hitherto, or so he had thought, made life worth living.
Slowly he made his way back to the Pavilion du Dauphin, there to set himself grimly to do all that was possible to make his decision, if not irrevocable, then most difficult of revocation. Mère Lecerf was abruptly told that as her master must leave the hunting lodge that night she must arrange to come and sleep there, in order that "Madame" should not be alone in the solitary building. But that, as Berwick well knew,was by no means enough, for Mère Lecerf would acquiesce in any change of plan with joyful alacrity.
So it was that six o'clock saw him passing into the Pavilion Henri IV., the famous hostelry which terminates the long Terrace of St. Germains. There he was well known, and could, in his present mood, have well spared the delight with which his orders were received, as also the few sentences in which the landlady's young daughter aired her English. "But how so! Of course! The most beautiful of our rooms shall be ready for Monsieur's occupation. Perhaps for three nights? La, la! What a short sojourn! A carriage now, at once? Another one to be at the Pavilion du Dauphin this evening? But yes, certainly!"
Barbara, stepping down from the high French railway carriage, looked about her with a strange shrinking and fear in her dark eyes. From the moment she had left the boat she had been reminded, and that intolerably, of another journey taken, not alone,—on the day of her marriage to Pedro Rebell. The last few months seemed obliterated, and Berwick for the moment forgotten. She was haunted by two very different presences,—that of her mother, and that of the West Indian planter, whose physical nearness, which had ever, from their marriage day onward, filled her with agonised revolt and terror, she seemed now to feel as she had not felt it for years, for he had soon tired of his victim. Had it not been that thoughts of Madame Sampiero, and of the duty she owed to the paralysed woman, restrained her, she would have been tempted to open the railway carriage door and step out into the rushing wind, and so end, for ever, the conflict in her mind.
There are women, more women than men, who are born to follow the straight way,—to whom crookedpaths are full of unknown terrors. Such a woman was Barbara Rebell. And yet the sight of Berwick,—Berwick, pale indeed, but quiet, self-possessed and smiling, as they advanced towards each other across the primitive little station,—brought comfort, and even security, to her heart. It was so clearly impossible that he would wish to work her any ill—
No other passenger had got out at Poissy, and the station-master, who knew the owner of the Pavillon du Dauphin, looked with curiosity at the man and woman now going towards one another. The information given to Mère Lecerf had already reached him, "Cold types, these English!" but he cheered up when he saw Berwick suddenly bend down and kiss each of the traveller's pale cheeks, in French husbandly fashion. "Salut Monsieur! Salut Madame!" the familiar accents fell sweetly on Barbara's ear as she walked through to the town square, where a victoria was waiting to take them to the Pavillon du Dauphin.
As she sat, silent by his side, Berwick took her hand in his. Again and again he opened his lips to speak, to tell her of his decision. But something seemed to hold him back from doing so now. Later, when they were alone, would be time enough.
And Barbara? Still full of vague, unsubstantial fears, she yet felt free—absolutely free—from the presence which had journeyed by her side. Berwick now stood between herself and Pedro Rebell, but, during the long silent drive up the steep road leading from the valley to the forest plateau, Barbara's mother seemed to stand sentinel between herself and Berwick.
At last they were alone,—alone in the shadow-filled hall where the beams of the May moon, slanting in through the wide, curtainless window, warred with thelight thrown by the lamp still standing on the table where they had sat at supper half an hour before.
As she heard the door shut behind Madame Lecerf, Barbara had risen and gone over to the friendly glow of the fire. She was now sitting, rather rigidly upright, on the wooden bench which formed a kind of inglenook within the stone fireplace. Just above her head hung the faded gilt frame containing Plantin's sonnet; her hands were clasped loosely over her knees, and she was looking straight into the heart of the burning peat.
Berwick, himself in shadow, watched her in tense silence; there was something enigmatical, and to him rather fearful, in her stillness,—in some ways he felt her more remote from himself than he had ever felt her to be since the night they had first met.
When driving from Poissy, he had taken her hand, and she had let it rest in his; but only for one brief moment, during the last two hours, had the woman he loved shown any sign of emotion. This was when, as they sat at table, the old French woman serving them had said, in answer to some question: "Mais oui, Madame Berwick!" and Barbara's face had suddenly become flooded with colour.
At last she looked round from the fire, and sought to see where her companion was sitting. Berwick thought the gesture beckoned; he leapt up and came forward with a certain eagerness, and, standing before her, smiled down into her serious eyes.
Suddenly she put out her hand and touched his sleeve. "Won't you sit down," she said, "here, by me?"
He obeyed, and she felt his arm slowly gathering her to him, while he, on his side, became aware that she first shrank back, and then gradually yielded to his embrace. Nay more, she suddenly laid her cheek against his lips with a curious childish abandonment, but he knew therewas something wanting,—something which had been there during the moment that their souls, as well as their bodies, had rushed together the last,—the only time, till now,—that he had held her in his arms.
She made a slight, an ineffectual effort to disengage herself as she asked in a low voice: "Why did your servant call me that? Call me, I mean, by your name?"
"Because," he answered, rather huskily, "because I told her that you were my wife. I hope that name is what all will call you some day."
Barbara's lips trembled. "No," she said very slowly, "I do not think that will ever happen. God will not let me be so happy. I have not deserved it." Yet even as she said the words, he felt, with quick, overmastering emotion, that she was surrendering herself, in spirit as well as in body, and that she came willingly.
He turned and caught her more closely to him.
"Listen," he said hoarsely, "listen while I say something to you that perhaps I ought to have said before, earlier, to-night."
Then, rather suddenly, he withdrew his arms from about the slight rounded figure enfolded in them. The utterance of what he had made up his mind must now be said had become immeasurably more difficult during the last few moments. He asked himself, with rough self-reproach and self-contempt, why he had so delayed, why he had allowed her to come here to be so wholly at his mercy, and he—yes, he—at hers? He got up and walked slowly to the other side of the great room, and came back, even more slowly, to where Barbara was sitting.
There he knelt down by her.
"Barbara," he said, "be kind to me! Help me! My pure angel, what does your heart tell you would be to-night the greatest proof of my love—of my adoration of you?"
And then the most amazing, and, to the man looking up at her with burning eyes the most moving, change came over the face bent down to his. Barbara had understood. But she said nothing,—only slipped down and put her arms, a wholly voluntary movement of caress, round him, in a strange speechless passion of gratitude and tenderness.
"Ah, Barbara," he said, "you have made me know you too well. You have allowed me to see too clearly into your heart not to know that I was a brute to ask you to do this thing,—to do that which I knew you believed to be wrong." And, as she pressed more closely to him, her tears wetting his face, he went on: "But I promise,—I swear,—I will never ask it of you again. We will go on as we did,—as we found ourselves able to do,—after the fire."
"But will not that make you unhappy?" Her lips scarcely moved as she whispered the words, looking into his strained face with sad, beseeching eyes.
"Yes," he said, rather shortly, "if I thought it impossible, or even improbable, that you would become my wife, it would make me very unhappy, but that, or so I believe, is not impossible, not even improbable. Ah, Barbara, must I tell you,—do you wish me to tell you,—everything?"
She looked up at him with a sudden fear and perplexity. What did he mean, what was it he had heard and wished to keep from her? But she would trust him, trust him to the end, and so, "No," she whispered, "tell me nothing you would ever regret having told me. I am quite content, nay, more than content, with your goodness to your poor Barbara."
An hour later Berwick was driving away from the Pavillon du Dauphin, not to the station as Mère Lecerfbelieved, but to St. Germains, within easy, tantalising distance of the woman he had just left,—a very tearful, a very radiant, a most adoring, and alas! a most adorable Barbara.
Looking out with absent eyes across the great moonlit plain to his left, Berwick thought over the strange little scene which had taken place. He hardly knew what he had said,—in any case far less than he had meant. Not a word, for instance, of what Boringdon had told him,—how could he have spoilt, with the image of death, such an evening as had just been theirs? Heavens! how strangely Barbara had altered, even before that whispered assurance that he would never, never ask her to do that which she thought wrong.
When he had first brought her into the Pavilion, there had been something tragic, as well as touching, in her still submissiveness of manner. But afterwards—ah, afterwards!—he had been privileged to see a side of her nature—ardent, yet spiritual, passionate, yet pure,—which he felt that he alone had the power to awaken, which had manifested itself only for him. How happy each had been in the feeling of nearness to the other, in the knowledge that they were at last free from watching, even if kindly, eyes, and listening ears,—what happiness they promised each other for the morrow! They would give themselves, so Berwick told Barbara, three days in this sylvan fairy land, and then he would take her to Paris, and go himself back to England.
Barbara Rebell never knew that those three days, of to her unalloyed bliss, held dark hours for her companion—hours when he cursed himself for a quixotic fool. But, even in the midst of that strange experience, Berwick was able to write in all honesty to his sister,the only human being to whom he confided the fact that he was in France,—might she not already have learnt it from some less trustworthy source?—certain cryptic words, to which she could then attach no meaning: "One word more. I wish to remind you that appearances are deceitful, and also to tell you that I have at last found that it is possible to be good, to be happy, and also to have a good time."