Harding had recoiled a step or two, andstood with a stony gaze of unspeakable scorn. "It's out of the question," he said, "I couldn't think of such a thing. It's utterly impossible. Besides, I shall be gone."
"Well, I'm very sorry," said the vicar, "I only thought perhaps you might." He turned to Barbara, "Your other friend was so very kind at our little harvest home. Mr.—I forget his name—but it was very good of him."
"Mr. Scarlett," said Barbara. She had her hand up, guarding her eyes from the flickering brightness of a log which had just burst into flame, and Reynold, looking down at her, questioned within himself whether there were not a faint reflection of the name upon her cheek. But it might be his jealous fancy.
"Yes, yes, Scarlett, so it was. A very amusing young man."
This soothed the sullen bystander a little, though he hardly knew why, unless itmight be that he fancied that Barbara would not like to hear Mr. Scarlett described as a very amusing young man. But when she answered "Very amusing," with a certain slight crispness of tone, it struck him that he would have preferred that she should be indifferent.
The vicar took his leave a little later, mentioning the duties of the next day as a reason for his early departure. "Must be prepared, you know," he said as he shook hands with the squire.
Mr. Hayes came back from the door, smiling his little contemptuous smile. "That means that he has to open a drawer, and take out an old sermon," he said, turning to Mr. Masters. "Well, as I was saying——"
"Does he always preach old sermons?" Reynold asked Barbara.
"I think so. They always look very yellow, and they always seem old."
"Always preaches old sermons, and has the same old penny readings—do you go?"
"Oh yes, we always go. Uncle thinks we ought to go, only he won't let me do anything."
"Do youwantto do anything?"
"No," said the girl. It was a truthful answer, but her consciousness of the intense scorn in Harding's voice made it doubly prompt.
"But do you like going?"
She hesitated. "Oh yes, sometimes. I liked going to the harvest home entertainment."
"Oh!" A pause. "Did Mr. Scarlett sing 'Simon the Cellarer'?"
"No, he did not." After a moment she went on. "They are not always penny readings; a little while ago we had a magic lantern and some sacred music. They were views of the Holy Land, you know, that was why we had sacred music."
"Oh!" said Reynold again. "And did you enjoy the views of the Holy Land?"
"Well, not so very much," she owned. "They didn't get the light right at first, and they were not very distinct, so he told us all about Bethlehem, and then found out that they had put in the wrong slide, and it was the woman at the well, so they had to change her, and then he told us all about Bethlehem over again. Joppa was the best; a fly got in somewhere and ran about over the roofs of the houses—it looked as big as a cat. I shall always remember about Joppa now. Poor Mr. Pryor began quite gravely—" Barbara paused, turned her head to see that her uncle was sufficiently absorbed, and then softly mimicked the clergyman's manner. "'Joppa, or Jaffa, may be considered the port of Jerusalem. It is built on a conical eminence overhanging the sea'—and then he saw us all whispering and laughing and the fly runningabout. He told us it wasn't reverent; he was dreadfully cross about it. He stopped while they took Joppa out, and, I suppose, they caught the fly. Anyhow it never got in any more. Oh yes, it was rather amusing altogether."
"Was it?"
She threw her head back and looked up at him. "You are laughing at me," she said in a low voice, "but it isn't always so very amusing at home."
His face softened instantly. "I oughtn't to have laughed," he said. "I ought to know—" He could picture Barbara shut up with her smiling, selfish, unsympathetic little uncle, in the black winter evenings that were coming, all the fancies and dreams of eighteen pent within those white-panelled walls, and exhaling sadly in little sighs of weariness over book or needlework.
But he saw another picture too, a dull London sitting-room whose drearinessseemed intensely concentrated on the face of a disappointed woman. Life had held little more for him than for Barbara, but he had rejected even its dreams, and had spent his musing hours in distilling the bitterness of scorn from its sordid realities. He would not have been cheered by a magnified fly. "You are wiser than I am, Miss Strange," he said abruptly.
"What do you mean?"
"You take what you can get."
She considered for a moment. "You mean that I go to Mr. Pryor's entertainments, and hear 'Simon the——'"
"Cyrenian! Yes, and see Joppa in a magic lantern. That is very wise when the real Joppa is out of reach."
"I don't know," said Barbara hesitatingly, "that I ever very particularly wanted to go to Joppa."
"Nor I," said Harding, "but being some way off it will serve for all the unattainableplaces where we do want to be. 'Joppa may be considered the port of Jerusalem'—wasn't that what Mr. Pryor said?" He repeated it slowly as if the words pleased him. "And where do you really want to go?"
"To Paris," said Barbara, with a world of longing in the word. "To Paris, and then to Italy. And then—oh, anywhere! But to Paris first."
"Paris!" Harding seemed to be recording her choice. "Well, that sounds possible enough. Surely you may count on Paris one of these days, Miss Strange; and meanwhile you can have a look at it with the help of the magic lantern."
She laughed. "Not Mr. Pryor's."
"Oh no, not Mr. Pryor's. I shouldn't fancy there were any Parisian slides in his. But I suspect you have a magic lantern of your own which shows it to you whenever you please."
"Pretty often," she confessed.
The dialogue was interrupted by a tardy request for some music from Mr. Masters. Barbara went obediently to the piano, and Reynold followed her. She would rather he had stayed by the fireside; his conscientious attempts to turn the leaf at the right time confused her dreadfully, and she dared not say to him, as she might have done to another man, "I like to turn the pages for myself, please." Suppose he should be hurt or vexed? She was learning to look upon him as a kind of thundercloud, out of which, without a moment's warning, came flashes of passion, of feeling, of resolution, of fury, of scorn. She did not know what drew them down. So she accepted his attentions, and smiled her gratitude. If only ("Yes, please!" in answer to an inquiring glance)—if only he would always be too soon, or always a little too late! Instead of which he arrived ata tolerable average by virtue of the variety of his failures. Worst of all was a terrible moment of uncertainty, when, having turned too soon, he thought of turning back. "No, no!" cried Barbara.
"I'm very stupid," said Harding, "I'm afraid I put you out." "No, no," again from Barbara, while her busy fingers worked unceasingly. "Couldn't you give me just a little nod when it's time?" A brief pause, during which his eyes are fixed with agonised intensity on her head, a fact of which she is painfully conscious, though her own are riveted on the page before her. She nods spasmodically, and Reynold turns the leaf so hurriedly that it comes sliding down upon the flying hands, and has to be caught and replaced. As usual, displeasure at his own clumsiness makes him sullen and silent, and he stands back without a word when the performance is over. Mr. Masters thanks, applauds, talks a littlein the style which for the last forty years or so he has considered appropriate to the young ladies of his acquaintance, and finally says good night, and bows himself out of the room.
Mr. Hayes stands on the rug, and hides a little yawn behind his little hand. "Is Masters trying to make himself agreeable?" he asks. "Let me know if I am to look out for another housekeeper, Barbara."
Barbara has no brilliant reply ready. The hackneyed joke displeases her. As her uncle speaks, she can actually see Littlemere, the village where the small squire lives; a three-cornered green, tufted with rushy grass, with a cow and half-a-dozen geese on it; a few cottages, with their week's wash hung out to dry; a round pond, green with duckweed; a small alehouse; a couple of white, treeless roads, leading away into the world, but apparently serving only for the labourers who plod outin the morning and home at night; an ugly little school-house of red brick and slate; and Littlemere Hall, square, white, and bare, set down like a large box in the middle of a dreary garden. She cannot help picturing herself there, with Mr. Masters, caught and prisoned; the idea is utterly absurd, but it is hideous, as hateful as if an actual hand were laid on her. She shrinks back and frowns. "You needn't get anybody just yet," she says.
"Very good," her uncle replies. "Give me a month's warning, that's all I ask." He yawns again, and looks at his watch. Reynold takes the hint, and his candle, and goes.
"Good riddance!" says the little man on the rug. "Of all the ill-mannered, cross-grained fellows I ever met, there goes the worst! A Rothwell! He's worse than any Rothwell, and not the genuine thing either! Can't he behave decently to my friends atmy own table? What does he mean by his confounded rudeness? Masters is a better man than ever he will be!"
Barbara shuts the piano, and lays her music straight. Poor little Barbara, trying with little soft speeches and judicious silences to steer her light-winged course among these angry men, is sorely perplexed sometimes. Now as Mr. Hayes mutters something about "an unlicked cub," she thinks it best to say, "Well, uncle, it isn't for very long. Mr. Harding will soon be going away."
"Yes, he'll soon be going away, and for good too! Never willheset foot inside Mitchelhurst Place again—I can tell him that! When he crosses the threshold he crosses it once for all. Never again—never again!"
This time Barbara, who is looking to the fastenings of the windows, is in no haste to speak. She feels as if she had beenconspiring with Harding, and, remembering their schemes for his return, her uncle's reiterated assurances ring oddly and mockingly in her ears. "When he crosses the threshold, he crosses it once for all." No, he does not! He is going away to work, he will come back and buy the Place of Mr. Croft, he will be living there for years and years when poor Uncle Hayes is dead and gone. And she, Barbara, has done it all. With a word and a look she has given a master to Mitchelhurst.
But, being a prudent girl, she merely says "Good night."
Mr. Pryor, aloft in his pulpit in Mitchelhurst church, with a sounding-board suspended above his head, was preaching about the Amalekites to a small afternoon congregation. The Amalekites had happened to come out of that drawer in his writing-table of which Mr. Hayes had spoken, and perhaps did as well as anything else he could have found there. He was getting over the ground at a tolerable pace, in spite of an occasional stumble, and was too much absorbed in his manuscript to be disturbed by an active trade in marbles which was going on in the front row of the Sunday scholars. Indeed, to Mr. Pryor's short-sighted eyes,his listeners were very nearly as remote as the Amalekites themselves.
Some of the straw-plaiting girls, whose fingers seemed restless during their Sunday idleness, were nudging and pulling each other, or turning the leaves of their hymnbooks, or smoothing their dresses. A labourer here and there sat staring straight before him with a vacant gaze. A farmer's wife devoted the leisure moments to thinking out one or two practical matters, over which she frowned a little. The clerk, in his desk, attended officially to the Amalekites, but that was all.
Barbara and Reynold were apart from all the rest in the square, red-lined pew which had always belonged to the Rothwells. When they stood up their heads and Reynold's shoulders were visible, but during the sermon no one could see the occupants of the little inclosure except the preacher.
Reynold had established himself in acorner, with his head slightly thrown back and his long legs stretched out. Barbara, a little way off, had her daintily-gloved hands folded on her lap, and sat with a demurely respectful expression while the voice above them sent a thin thread of denunciation through the drowsy atmosphere. Harding did not dislike it. Anything newer, more real, more living, would have seemed unsuited to the dusty marble figures which were the principal part of the congregation in that corner of the church. He had knelt down and stood up during the service, always with a sense of union between his own few years of life and the many years of which those monuments were memories; and the old prayers, the "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord," had fallen softly on his ears. Perils and dangers seemed so far from that sleepy little haven where he hoped to live his later days, and to come as a grey-hairedman, when all the storms and struggles were over, and hear those words Sunday after Sunday in that very pew. Barbara, from under her long lashes, stole a meditative, questioning glance at him while he was musing thus, and the glance lingered. The young fellow's head rested against the faded red baize, his eyes were half closed, his brows had relaxed, his mouth almost hinted a smile. He was not conscious of her scrutiny, and, seeing his face for the first time as a mere mask, she suddenly awoke to a perception of its beauty.
Overhead, it appeared that the Amalekites typified many evil things, and were by no means so utterly destroyed as they should have been. Mr. Pryor intended his warnings to be as emphatic as those of the fierce old prophet, and he drew a limp white finger down the faded page lest he should lose his place in the middle. Time had made the manuscript a little unfamiliar."My brethren," said the plaintive voice from beneath the sounding-board, "we must make terms—ahem!—we mustnevermake terms with these relentless enemies who lie in wait for us as for the Israelites of old. Remember"—he turned a leaf and felt the next to ascertain if it were the last. It was not, and he hurried his exhortation a little, finding it long, yet afraid to venture on leaving anything out. Meanwhile a weary Sunday-school teacher awoke to sudden energy, plunged into the midst of the boys, and captured more marbles than he could hold, so that two or three escaped him and rolled down the aisle, amid a general manifestation of interest. The luckless teacher was young and bashful, and the rolling marbles seemed to him to fill the universe with reverberating echoes.
The vicar reached the goal at last, and gave out a hymn. Then the young people in the red-lined pew appeared once more,Miss Strange singing, Reynold looking round to deepen and assure his recollection of that afternoon. When he found himself in the churchyard, passing under the black-boughed yews with Barbara, he broke the silence. "I shall be far enough away next Sunday."
It was so strange to think that by the next Sunday his work would have begun, the work which he so loathed and so desired. He had directed his letter to his uncle at his place a few miles out of town, where Mr. Harding always went from Saturday to Monday, and he remembered as he spoke that the old gentleman would have received it that morning. Reynold pictured a little triumph over his surrender, but he did not care. Something—it could hardly be Mr. Pryor's sermon—had sweetened his bitter soul, and he did not care. He felt as if that little corner of Mitchelhurst church had become an inalienable possession of his,and he could enter into it at any time wherever he might chance to be.
Barbara was sympathetic, but slightly pre-occupied. If young Harding had understood women a little better he would certainly have perceived the pre-occupation, but as it was he only saw the sympathy. When they got back to the Place she delayed him in the garden, as if she too felt the charm of that peaceful afternoon and regretted its departure. They loitered to and fro on the wide gravel path, where grass and weeds encroached creepingly from the borders, and paused from time to time watching the sun as it went down. At last, when there was only a band of sulphur-coloured light on the horizon, Barbara turned away with a sigh.
Reynold did not understand her reluctance to go in. In truth she was uneasy at the thought of the long evening which her uncle and he must spend in the same room. Mr. Hayes had come down in a dangerousmood that morning, not showing any special remembrance of Harding's offence of the night before, but seeming impartially displeased with everything and everybody. If ill-temper were actual fire, his conversation would have been all snaps and flashes like a fifth of November. Letters absorbed his attention at breakfast, but Barbara perceived that they only made him crosser than before. Happily, however, since a storm of rain hindered the morning's church-going, he went to his study to write his answers, and was seen no more till lunch-time, after which the weather cleared, and the young people walked off together to hear about the Amalekites. Reynold had no idea how anxiously Barbara had been sheltering him all day under her little wing, but now the sun was down, there was no help for it, they must go in and face the worst. She had paused and looked up at him as if she were about to say something before theyleft the garden, but nothing came except the little sigh which he had heard.
Even when they went in, fate seemed a little to postpone the evil moment. Harding, coming down-stairs, saw a light shining through the door of a small room—the book-room, as it was sometimes called. A glance as he passed showed Barbara, with an arm raised above her head, taking a volume from the shelf. "Can I help you?" he asked, pausing in the doorway.
"Oh, thank you, but I think this is right." She examined the title-page. The window shutters were closed, the room was dusky with its lining of old brown leather bindings, and Barbara's candle was just a glow-worm glimmer of brightness in it. "You might put those others back for me if you would. I can manage to take them down, but it isn't so easy to put them up again."
Tall Reynold rendered the required servicequickly enough, while she laid the book she had chosen with some others already on the table, and began to dust them. It was an old-fashioned writing-table, with a multitude of little brass-handled drawers. The young man took hold of one of these brass handles, and noticed its rather elaborate workmanship. "Look inside," said the girl, as she laid her duster down.
The drawer was full of yellowing papers, old bills, and miscellaneous scraps of various kinds. She pulled out a few, and they turned them over in the gleam of candle-light. "Butcher, Christmas, 1811," said Barbara, "and here is a glazier's bill. What have you got?"
"To sinking and bricking new well, 32 ft. deep," Reynold replied. "It is in 1816. To making new pump, 38 ft. long."
"Why, that must be the old pump by the stables," said Barbara. "Look at this receipt, 'for work Don accorden to Bill?'"
"There seem to be plenty of them. Are the other drawers full too?"
"Yes, I think so. You had better take one as a souvenir."
"No, thank you." He smiled as he thrust the bills he held down among the dusty bundles in the drawer, and brushed his finger tips fastidiously. "Souvenirs ought to be characteristic. A receipted bill would be a very respectable souvenir, but I'm afraid it would convey a false impression of the Rothwells."
She looked away, a little perplexed and dissatisfied. It seemed to her that the future master of Mitchelhurst should not talk in that fashion of his own people, and she did not understand that the slight bitterness of speech was merely the outcome of a life of discontent. He hardly knew how to speak otherwise. "I suppose they would have paid everybody if they hadn't had misfortunes," she said.
"No doubt. We would most of us pay our bills if we had nothing else to do with the money."
"Well," Barbara declared with a blush, "the next Rothwell will payhisbills, I know."
"We'll hope so." His smile apparently emboldened her, for she looked up at him. "Mr. Harding," she began.
"Well?"
She put her hand to her mouth with an irresolute gesture, softly touching her red lips. "Oh—nothing!" she said.
"Nothing?" he questioned. But at that moment there was a call. "Barbara! Barbara! are you stopping towritethose books?"
She turned swiftly, caught them up and was gone, sending an answering cry of "Coming, uncle—coming!" before her.
Reynold lingered a little before he followed her, to wonder what that something was that was nothing.
When he went in he found Mr. Hayes and Barbara both industriously occupied with their reading, after the fashion of a quiet Sunday in the country. He took up the first volume that came to hand, threw himself into a chair, and remained for a considerable time frowning and musing over the unread page. Mr. Hayes turned his pages with wearisome regularity, but after a while Barbara laid herGood Wordson her lap and gazed fixedly at the window, where little could be seen but the reflection of the lamp in the outer darkness. The silence of the room seeming to have become accustomed to this change of attitude, the slightest possible movement of her head brought Reynold within range. He moved, and she was looking at the window, from which she turned quite naturally, and met his glance. Her fingers were playing restlessly with her little gold cross, and Harding said, "Your talisman!"
No word had been spoken for so long that the brief utterance came with a kind of startling distinctness.
"My talisman still, thanks to you," Barbara replied.
The absurdity of his misfortune was a little forgotten, and the fact of his service remained, so Harding almost smiled as he rejoined—
"I say 'thanks to it' for my introduction."
Mr. Hayes knitted his brows, and looked from one to the other with bright, bead-like eyes. When, a minute later, a maid came to the door, and asked to speak to Miss Strange, he waited till his niece was gone, and then sharply demanded—
"What was that about a talisman?"
"That little cross Miss Strange wears. She calls that her talisman."
"Indeed! Why that particular cross?"
"It belonged to her godmother, I believe," said Harding.
The old gentleman stared, and then considered a little.
"Her godmother, eh? Why," he began to laugh, "her godmother—what does Barbara know about her?"
"I think she said she was named after her——"
"So she was."
"And that her mother told her she was the most beautiful woman she ever knew——"
"That's true enough. Shewasbeautiful, and clever, and accomplished, no doubt about that. One ought to speak kindly of the dead, they say. Well, she was beautiful, and if ever there was a selfish, heartless coquette——"
"Hey!" said Reynold, opening his eyes. "Is that speaking kindly of the dead?"
"Very kindly," with emphasis.
"But Miss Strange's mother——"
"Well, I should think she must have begun to find her friend out before she died.I don't know, though; Mrs. Strange isn't over wise, she may contrive to believe in her still. I wonder what Strange would say, if he ever said anything! So that is Barbara's talisman! Not muchvirtuein it, anyhow; but I dare say it will do just as well. There have been some queer folks canonised before now."
He ended with a chuckling little laugh. Evidently he knew enough of the earlier Barbara to see something irresistibly comic in the girl's tenderness for this little relic of the past.
Harding was grimly silent. Barbara's fancy might be foolish, but since she cherished it, he hated to hear this ugly little mockery of her treasure, and he had found a half-acknowledged satisfaction in the remembrance that the little cross was a link between himself and her. Now, when she came into the room again, and Mr. Hayes compressed his lips, and glanced from thelittle ornament to his visitor, and then to his book again, in stealthy enjoyment of his joke, the other felt as if there were something sinister in the token. He wished Barbara would not caress it as she stood by the fire. He would have liked to throw it down and tread it under foot.
There might have been some malignant influence in the air that day, for Barbara will wonder as long as she lives what made her two companions insist on talking politics at dinner. She did not like people to talk politics. She had never looked out the word in the dictionary, and perhaps she might not have objected to a lofty discussion of "the science of government, that part of ethics which consists in the regulation and government of a nation or state." She looked upon talking politics as a masculine diversion, which consisted in bandying violent assertions about Mr. Gladstone. It never led, of course, to any change ofopinion, but it generally made people raise their voices, and interrupt one another, and get red in the face. As far as her opportunities of observation went, Barbara had judged pretty correctly.
Her uncle held what he called his political creed solely as a means of enjoyable argument. He considered himself an advanced Liberal, but he had so many whims and hobbies that he was the most uncertain of supporters. No one held his views, and if, by some inconceivable chance, he had convinced an adversary, he would have been very uncomfortable. He would have felt himself crowded out of his position, and would have retired immediately to less accessible ground, and defied his disciple to climb up after him. When he had arranged his opinions he was obliged to find ingenious methods of escaping their consequences. For instance, with some whimsical recollection of the one passion of his life, he choseto hold advanced views about Woman's Rights, which disgusted his country neighbours. Woman was, in every respect but physical strength, the natural equal of man. She was to be emancipated, to vote, to take her place in Church and State—when Mr. Hayes was dead. At present she was evidently dwarfed and degraded by long ages of man's oppressive rule, and needed careful education, and a considerable lapse of time, to raise her to the position that was hers by right. Meanwhile she must be governed, not as an inferior, on that point he spoke very strongly indeed, but as a minor not yet qualified to enter into possession of her inheritance, and he exerted himself, in rather a high-handed fashion, to keep her in the proper path. The woman of the future was to do exactly what she pleased, but the woman of the present—Barbara—was to do as she was told, and not talk about what she did not understand.By this arrangement Mr. Hayes was able to rule his womankind, and to deny the superiority of his masculine acquaintances.
It was precisely this question that came up at dinner-time. Harding had no real views on political matters; he was simply a Conservative by nature. He had none of the daring energy which snatches chances in periods of change; his instinct was that of self-defence, to hold rather than to gain; to gather even the rags of the past about him, with the full consciousness that they were but rags, rather than to throw himself into the battle of the present. It was true that he was going to work for Mitchelhurst and Barbara, but the double impulse had been needed to conquer his shrinking pride. That a man should be hustled by a mixed and disorderly crowd was bad enough, but that a woman should step down into it, should demand work, should make speeches, and push her way to the polling-booth, wasin Harding's eyes something hideously degrading and indecent. As to the equality of the sexes, that was rubbish. Man was to rule, and woman to maintain an ideal of purity and sweetness. Education, beyond the simple old-fashioned limits, tended only to unsex her.
He would have opposed Mr. Hayes's theories at any time, but they cut him to the quick just then, when he had felt the grace of womanhood, when a woman had passed into his life and transformed it. The old man was airily disposing of the destinies of the race in centuries to come, the young man was fighting for his own little future. He could not rule the world. Let it roar and hurry as it would, but never dare to touch his wife and home. What did the man mean by uttering his hateful doctrines in Barbara's hearing? Her bright eyes came and went between the speakers, and Reynold longed to order her away,to shut her up in some safe place apart, where only he might approach her.
He need not have been anxious. There was no touch of ambition in the girl's tender feminine nature to respond to her uncle's arguments. She did not want to vote, and wondered why women should ever wish to be doctors or—or—anything. Her eager glances betokened uneasiness rather than interest. Indeed the inferior being, scenting danger, had tried to turn the conversation before the terrible question of Woman's Rights had been mentioned at all. She had endeavoured to talk about a lawn-tennis ground rather than the aspect of Irish affairs. Harding did not know much about lawn-tennis, but he was quite ready to talk about it, just as he would have talked about crewel-work, if she had seemed to wish it. Mr. Hayes, however, pooh-poohed the little attempt at peace.
"What is the good of planning theground now?" he said. "And who cares for lawn-tennis?"
"I do," said the girl. "It's much more amusing than talking about Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell."
"That's all you know about it," her uncle retorted. "Now if you had been educated—"
"Oh yes, of course," she replied, with desperate pertness. "You are always talking about the woman of the future—I dare say she willliketo see people make themselves hot and disagreeable, arguing about Ireland." She made a droll little face of disgust. "Well, she may, but I don't!"
"Perhaps the woman of the future will be hot and disagreeable too," Harding suggested.
"Youmight not find her agreeable," said Mr. Hayes drily. "She would be able to expose the fallacy of your views pretty clearly, I fancy."
"Well," Barbara struck in hurriedly, amazed at her own boldness, "we get hot enough over tennis sometimes, but nobody is ever so cross over that, as men are when they argue."
"Good heavens!" said Mr. Hayes. "To think that women, who rightfully should share man's most advanced attainments and aspirations—" and off he went at a canter over the beaten ground of many previous discussions.
Barbara looked from him to young Harding. His dark eyes were ominous, he was only waiting, breathlessly, till Mr. Hayes should be compelled to pause for breath. "I hope you don't mean to imply, sir—" he began, and Barbara perceived that not only had she failed to avert a collision, but that, by her thoughtless mention of the woman of the future, she had introduced the precise subject on which the two men were most furiously at variance. Thenceforwardshe merely glanced from one to the other as the noisy battle raged, watching in dumb suspense as one might watch the rising of a tide. Mr. Hayes had been thoroughly cross all day, and had not forgiven Reynold's rudeness of the evening before. Under cover of his argument he was saying all the irritating things he could think of, while Harding's harsher voice broke through his shrill-toned talk with rough contradictions.
After a time Barbara was obliged to leave them, and she went back to the drawing-room with a sinking heart. She had been uneasy the night before, but that was nothing to this. How earnestly she wished Mr. Pryor back again! She was pitiless, she would have flung the gentle flaccid little clergyman between the angry combatants without a moment's hesitation, if she could only have brought him there by the force of her desire. Happily for Mr. Pryor, however, he was safe in his study,putting away the Amalekites at the bottom of the drawer, till their turn should come again.
At last when Barbara was in despair at the lateness of the hour, she sent one of the maids to tell the gentlemen that coffee was ready, and crept into the hall behind her messenger to hear the result. At the opening of the door there was a stormy clamour, and then a sudden silence. It was closed again, and the maid returned. "Master says, Miss, will you send it in?" The last hope was gone, she could do nothing more but pour out the coffee, and wish with all her heart it were an opiate.
She was as firmly convinced as Reynold himself of the vast superiority of men, but these intellectual exercises of theirs upset her dreadfully. If only it had been Mr. Scarlett! He had a light laughing way of holding her uncle at arm's length, avowing himself a Conservative simply as a matter of taste, and fighting for the oldfashions which Mr. Hayes denounced, because he wanted something left that he could make verses about. Barbara, as she stood pensively on the rug, recalled one occasion when Adrian Scarlett put forward his plea. He was sitting on the sill of the open window, with the evening sky behind his head, and while he talked he drew down a long, blossomed spray of pale French honeysuckle. "Oh yes, I'm a Conservative," he said; "there are lots of things I want to conserve—all the picturesqueness, old streets, and signs, and manor-houses, old customs, village greens, fairs, thatched cottages, little courtesying maidens, old servants, and men with scythes and flails, instead of your new machines." She remembered how Mr. Hayes had interrupted him with a contemptuous inquiry whether there was not as much poetry to be found on one side as on the other. "Oh yes," he had assented, idly swinging his foot,"as fine on your side no doubt, or finer. You have the Marseillaise style of thing to quicken one's pulses. Yes, and I came across a bit the other day, declaring—
'Que la Liberté sainte est la seule déesse,Que l'on n'adore que debout.'"
The words, uttered in the sudden fulness of his clear, rounded tones, seemed to send a great wave of impulse through the quiet room. Barbara could recall the sharp "Well, then?" with which Mr. Hayes received it.
"Ah, but not for me," young Scarlett had answered. "You don't expect me to write that kind of thing? It isn't in me. No, I want to rhyme about some little picture in an old-fashioned setting—Pamela, or Dorothy, or—or Ursula, walking between clipped hedges, or looking at an old sun-dial, or stopping by a basin rimmed with mossy stone to feed the gold fish. Or dreaming—and she must not be a Girton youngwoman—I couldn't imagine a Girton young woman's dreams!"
And so the argument ended in laughter. If only it could have been Adrian Scarlett instead of Reynold Harding in the dining-room that night! Barbara's apprehensions would all have vanished in a moment. But Mr. Scarlett was gone, ("Hemighthave said good-bye," thought Barbara,) and the pleasant time was gone with him. The window was closed and shuttered, and the honeysuckle, a tangle of grey stalks, shivered in the wind outside.
She tried to amuse herself withGood Wordsagain, but failed. Then she went to the piano, but had no better success there. She was listening with such strained attention, that to her ears the music was only distracting and importunate noise. As a last resource she bethought her of a half-finished novel which she had left in her bed-room. She had not intended to go onwith it till Monday, but shewould, and she ran up-stairs with guilty eagerness to fetch it.
She was coming back along the passage with the book in her hand, when she heard the opening and shutting of doors below, and the quick fall of steps. In another moment Reynold Harding came springing up the wide stairs to where she stood. There was a lamp at the head of the staircase, and as he passed out of the dusk into its light, she could see his angry eyes, and she knew the veins which stood out upon his forehead, looking as if the blood in them were black.
He saw her just before he reached the top, and stopped short. For a moment neither spoke, then he drew a long breath, and laid his hand upon the balustrade.
"Miss Strange," he said, "I'm going away."
Barbara hardly knew what she had expected or feared, but this took her by surprise.
"Going? Not now?" she exclaimed in amazement.
"Not to-night—it is too late. Imuststop for the night. I can't help myself. But the first thing to-morrow morning."
"Oh, why?"
"I can't stay under the roof of a man who has insulted me as your uncle has done. It is impossible that we should meet again," said Reynold. His speech seemed to escape in fierce little jets of repressed wrath. "I'm not accustomed—I ought never to have come here!"
"Oh!" cried Barbara, in a tone of pained reproach.
He was silent, looking fixedly at her. The meaning of what he had said, and the fatal meaning of what he had done, came upon him, arresting him in the midst of his passion. All his fire seemed suddenlyto die down to grey ashes. What madness had possessed him?
They faced each other in the pale circle of lamplight, which trembled a little on the broad, white stairs. Reynold, stricken and dumb, grasped the balustrade with tightening fingers. Barbara leaned against the white-panelled wall. She was the first to speak.
"Oh!" she said in a low voice. "Thatyoushould be driven out of Mitchelhurst!"
"Don't!" cried he. "God! it was my own fault!"
"What was it? What did you quarrel about?"
"Do I know?" Reynold demanded. "Ask him! Perhaps he can remember some of the idiotic jangling. Why did we begin? Why did we go on? I don't believe hell itself could be more wearisome. I was sick to death of it, and yet something seemed to goad me on—I couldn't give in! It was my infernal temper, I suppose."
"Oh I am so sorry!" Barbara whispered.
"He shouldn't have spoken to me as he did, when I was his guest at his own table," young Harding continued. "But after all, he is an old man, I ought to have remembered that. Well, it's too late; it's all over now!"
"But is it too late? Can't anything be done?"
He almost smiled at the feminine failure to realise that the night's work was more than a tiff which might be made up and forgotten.
"Kiss and make friends—eh?" he said. "Will you run and fetch your uncle?"
The leaden little jest was uttered so miserably that Barbara only sighed in answer.
"No," said the young man, "it's all over. Even if I could apologise—and I can't—I couldn't sit at his table again. It wouldn't be possible. No, I must go!"
"And you are sorry you ever came!"
"Don't remind me of that! I'm just as sorry I came here as that I ever came into the world at all."
The old clock in the dusky hall below struck ten slow strokes.
"This will be good-night and good-bye," said Harding. "I shall be gone before you are down in the morning."
Even as he spoke he was thinking how completely his bitter folly had exiled him from her presence.
"You are going home?"
"Home? Well, yes, I suppose so. By the way, I don't know that I shall go home to-morrow. I may have to stay another day in Mitchelhurst. That depends—I shall see when the morning comes. Your uncle's jurisdiction doesn't extend beyond the grounds of the Place, I suppose. I won't trespass, he may be very sure of that, and I won't stay in the neighbourhood any longer than I can help. Only,you see, this is rather a sudden change of plans."
"I am so sorry," the girl repeated. "I hate to think of your going away like this. I'm ashamed!"
"No! no! I'm rightly served, though you needn't tell Mr. Hayes I said so. I was fool enough to let my temper get the upper hand, and I must pay the penalty. How Icouldbe such an inconceivable idiot—but that's neither here nor there. It was my own fault, and the less said about it the better."
Barbara shook her head.
"No, it was my fault."
This time Harding really smiled, drearily enough, but still it was a smile.
"Yours?" he said. "That never occurred to me. How do you make it out?"
"Well," she said, looking down, and tracing a joint of the stone with the tip of her little embroidered slipper, "it was partly my fault, anyhow."
This "partly" seemed to point to something definite.
"How do you mean?" he asked, looking curiously at her.
"I knew he was cross," she said. "I knew it this morning as soon as he came down, and he generally gets worse and worse all day. He isn't often out of temper like that—only now and then. I dare say he will be all right to-morrow, or perhaps the day after."
"That's a little late for me!" said Harding.
"So you see itwasmy fault. I ought to have told you."
"Well, perhaps if you had, I might have been a trifle more on my guard. I don't know, I'm sure. Yes, I wish you had happened to warn me! But you mustn't reproach yourself, Miss Strange, it wasn't your fault. You didn't know what I was, you couldn't be expected to think of it."
"But Ididthink of it!" Barbara cried remorsefully.
"You did?"
"Yes, I was thinking of it all day. Oh how IwishI had done it! But I wasn't sure you would like it—I didn't know. I thought perhaps it might seem"—she faltered—"might seem as if I thought that you——"
"I see!" Reynold answered in his harshest voice. "I needn't have told you just now that I had a devil of a temper!"
Barbara drew herself up against the wall with her head thrown back, and gazed blankly at him.
"Oh, don't be afraid!" he said with a laugh. "I'm not going tohityou!"
"Don't talk like that!" she cried. "Oh! there's uncle coming!" and turning she fled back to her own room. Harding heard the steps below, and he also went off, not quite so hurriedly, but with long strides,and vanished into the shadows. The innocent cause of this alarm crossed the hall, from the drawing-room to the study, banging the doors after him, and the lamplight fell on the deserted stairs.
Harding struck a light and flung himself into a chair. Barbara's words and his own mocking laughter seemed still to be in the air about him. The silence and loneliness bewildered him, he could not realisethathis chance of speech had escaped him, and that Barbara's entreaty must remain unanswered. Her timid self-reproach had stabbed him to the heart. That the poor little girl should have trembled and been silent, lest he should speak harshly, and then that she should blame herself so bitterly for her cowardice—it was a sudden revelation to Reynold of the ugliness of those black moods of his. One might have pictured the evil power broken by the shock of this discovery and leaving shame-strickenpatience in its place, or, at least, one might have imagined strenuous resolutions for the days to come. But Reynold's very tenderness was mixed with wrath; he cursed the something in himself, yet not himself, which had frightened Barbara, he could not feel thathewas answerable. That she, of all the world, should judge him so, filled his soul with a burning sense of wrong.
"Howcouldyou think it?" he pleaded with her in his thoughts, "my dear, howcouldyou think it?" And yet he did not blame her. Ah God! what a bitter, miserable wretch he had been his whole life through! Why had no woman ever taught him how to be gentle and good? He blamed neither Barbara nor himself, but a cruel fate.
It was not till late, when he had collected his things, and made all ready for his departure in the morning, that he remembered that he would not see her again, that heabsolutely could not so much as speak a word to make amends. He must cross the threshold of the old house as early as he possibly could, his angry pride would not allow him a moment's delay, and what chance was there that she would be up and dressed by then? It was maddening to think of the long slow hours which they would pass under the same roof, each hour gliding away with its many minutes. And in one minute he could say so much, if but one minute were granted him! "But it won't be," he said sullenly, as he lay down till the dawn should come, "it isn't likely." And he ground his teeth together at the remembrance of the many minutes spent in wrangling with Mr. Hayes, while Barbara waited alone.
END OF VOL. I.
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