CHAPTER XX.
_BARBARA AND HER CRITICS._
While the two talked in the same pulverous fashion, the words came very
differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more
than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of
the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error--a
rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the
daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not
without a certain unconscious dignity; her lawlessness was the freedom of
the bird that cannot trespass, not that of the quadruped forcing its way.
Her almost baby-like cheeks, her musical voice clear of any strain of
sorrow, her quick relations with the whole world of things, her grace,
more child-like than womanly, whether she stood or sat or moved about,
all indicated a simple, fearless, true and trusting nature. Everybody at
Mortgrange liked her; nearly everybody at Mortgrange had some different
fault to find with her; all agreed that she wanted taming--except sir
Wilton, who allowed the wildness, but would not hear of the taming. The
hour of the morning or the night at which she would not go wandering
alone about the park, or even outside it, had not yet been discovered.
"Why don't you look better after your friend, Theo?" said her father one
day when Barbara's chair was empty at dinner--with his cold incisive
voice, a little rasping now that the clutch of age's hand was beginning
to close on his throat.
"She doesn't mind me, papa," Theodora answered. "Do say something to her,
mamma!"
"'Tis not my business to reform other people's children," lady Ann
returned.
"I find her exceedingly original!" remarked the baronet.
"In her manners, certainly," responded his lady.
"I find them perfect. Their very audacity renders them faultless. And the
charm is that she does not even suspect herself audacious."
"That is her charm, I confess," responded Arthur; "but it is a dangerous
one, and may one day cause her to be sadly misunderstood."
"A London drawing-room is your high court of parliament, Arthur!" said
his father.
"Miss Wylder, with all her sweetness," remarked Miss Malliver, "has not
an idea of social distinction. She cannot understand why she should not
talk to any farmer's man or dairymaid she happens to meet! It is not her
talking to them I mind so much as the familiar way she does it. If they
take liberties, it will be her own fault. Any groom might be pardoned for
fancying she thought him as good as herself!"
"But she does," answered Theodora. "Yesterday, I found her talking to the
bookbinder as familiarly as if he had been Arthur!"
This was hardly correct, for Barbara talked to the bookbinder with a
deference she never showed Lestrange.
"She lacks self-respect!" said lady Ann. "But we must deal with her
gently, and try to do her good. I think myself there is not much amiss
with her beyond love of her own way. Her dislike of restraint certainly
does not befit a communicant!"
Lady Ann was an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering
what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a
mammon-worshipper as any in the land.
"But I so far agree with sir Wilton," she went on, "as to grant that her
manners have in them the germ of possible distinction; and I _think_ they
will come to be all, or nearly all, that could be desired. We ought at
least to give her the advantage of any doubt, and do what we can to lead
her in the right direction."
"It's a fine thing to go to church and have your wits sharpened!" said
the baronet, with an ungenial laugh.
Sir Wilton regarded lady Ann as the coldest-blooded and most selfish
woman in creation, and certainly she was not less selfish and was
colder-blooded than he. Full of his own importance as any Pharisee--as
full as he could be without making himself ridiculous, he resented the
slight regard she showed to that importance. He believed himself wise in
human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay
within the limited range of his own consciousness. Of the noble in
humanity he knew next to nothing. To him all men were only selfish. The
cause, though by no means the logical ground of this his belief, was his
own ingrained selfishness. With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick
to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he
pardoned in himself. He had some power over himself, for he very seldom
went into a rage; but he kept his temper like a devil, and was coldly
cruel. His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming
him. He would have hated her quite, but for the sort of respect she
roused in him by surpassing him in his own kind. He cringed to her with a
sneer. It was long since he had learned from her society to remember,
with the nearest approach to compunction of which his moth-eaten heart
was capable, the woman who had forsaken her own rank to brave the perils
of his, and had sunk frozen to death by the cold of his contact. For some
years he felt far more friendly to the offspring of the high-born lady
than to that of the blacksmith's daughter; but as time went on, and the
memory of the more plebeian infant's ugliness faded, he began to think
how jolly it would be--how it would serve out her ladyship and her brood
of icicles, if after all the blacksmith's grandson turned up to oust the
earl's. He grinned as he lay awake in the night, picturing to himself how
the woman in the next room would take it. Him and his son together her
ladyship might find almost too much for her! But for many years he had
indulged in no allusion to the possible improbable, allowing her ladyship
to refer to Arthur as the heir without hinting at the uncertainty of his
position.
Lady Ann, from dwelling on what she counted the shame of his origin,
had got so far toward persuading herself that the vanished child was
base-born, that she scarcely doubted the possibility, were he to appear,
of proving his claim false, and originated by conspiracy. Unable to learn
from her husband when and where the baby was baptized, she concluded that
he had never been baptized, and that there was no record of his birth. As
the years went by, and nothing was heard of him, she grew more and more
confident. Now and then a fear would cross her, but she always succeeded
in stifling it--without, however, arriving at such a degree of certainty,
that the thought of the child had no share in her regard for the wealthy
Barbara, her encouragement of her general relations with the family, and
her connivance at her frequent and prolonged visits during the absence of
herself and sir Wilton.
She was now returned, and had found everything as she left it, with the
insignificant difference that the bay-window of the library was occupied
by a man at work repairing the books. She had resumed the reins of the
family-coach, and now went on to play the part of a good providence, and
drive the said coach to the top of the hill.
Sir Wilton, I have said, liked Barbara. She amused him, and amusement was
the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching. All his weather
else was gray, with a touch of the lurid on the western horizon--of which
he was not weather-wise enough to take heed. He had been at school with
Barbara's father, but did not like her any better for that. In youth they
had not been friends, except in a way that brought their _interests_ too
much in collision for their friendship to last. It had ended in a quiet
hate, each knowing too well how much the other knew to dare an open
quarrel. But all that was many years away, and Tom Wylder had been long
abroad and almost forgotten. Sir Wilton, notwithstanding, admired the
forgivingness of his own disposition when he found himself wondering how
Tom Wylder would regard an alliance with his old rival. Doubtless he
would like his daughter to be _my lady_, but he might be looking for a
loftier title than his son could give her!
Sir Wilton was incapable, however, of taking any active interest in the
matter. The well-being of his family, when he himself should be out of
the way, did not much affect him. Nothing but his lower nature had ever
roused him to action of any kind. How far the idea of betterment had ever
shown itself to him, God only knows. Apparently, he was a child of the
evil one, whom nothing but the furnace could cleanse. Almost the only
thing he could now imagine giving him vivid pleasure, was to see his wife
thoroughly annoyed.
All he had ever had of the manners of a gentleman, remained with him. He
was courteous to ladies, never swore in their presence--except sometimes
in a mutter at his wife, and could upon occasion show a kindness that
cost him nothing. Humanity was not all dead out of him; neither was there
a purely human thought in him. On Barbara he smiled his sweetest smile:
it owed most of its sweetness to the dentist.
