CHAPTER XXX.
_BARBARA THINKS_.
Barbara rode home with strange things in her mind. Here was a romance
brought to her very door! She was nowise hungry after romance, being of
the essence of romance her own lovely self, in the simplicity which
carried her direct to the heart of things. She was life in such relation
to life, that her very existence was natural romance. How should there be
any romance to equal that of pure being, of existence regarded and
encountered face to face, of the voyage forth from the heart of life, and
the toilsome journey, peril-beset, back to the home of that same heart of
hearts! Here was one wrapt in a strange cloud: why should she not pass
through the cloud, and join her fellow-traveller within?
Naturally then, from this time, the thoughts of Barbara rested not a
little upon the person and undeveloped history of the man with whose
being she was before linked by a greater indebtedness than any but
herself could understand. Any enlargement of relation to the unseen
world--the world, I mean, of thought and reality, region of recognizable
relation, or force--is an immeasurably more precious gift than any
costliest thing that a mortal may call his own until death, but must then
pass on to another; and Richard had thrown open to Barbara the wealthiest
regions of the literature of her race! She, on her part, had so much
influenced him, that he had at least become far less overbearing in the
presentment of his unbelief. For Barbara's idea, call it, if you will,
her imagination of a God, was one with which none of those things for the
hate's sake of which he had become the champion of a negation, held
fellowship; and he carried himself toward it with so much courtesy that
she had begun to hope he was slowly following her out of the desert
places, where, little as she yet knew about God, she felt life
impossible. The strongest bonds were thus in process of binding them; and
Barbara's feeling toward Richard might very naturally develop into one or
other of the million forms to which we give the common name of love.
As for Richard, he was already aware that his feeling toward Barbara
could be no other than love; but he knew love as only the few know it who
_give_ themselves, who cherish no hope, look for no response, dream of no
claim. To expect any return of his devotion would have seemed to Richard
the simplest absurdity. He did not even say to himself that the thing
could not be. Not therefore, however, was he to escape suffering; the
seeds of it were already sown in him plentifully, though its first leaves
are not to be distinguished from those of other plants, and it sometimes
takes long for the flower to appear. Barbara was lovely to Richard as the
Luna of a heavenly sky, descending and talking with him, the Diana of a
lower world, bound by her destiny, and without a choice, to return to her
heaven, and be once more the far, unapproachable Luna. She shone in his
eyes like a lovely mysterious gem which he might wear for an hour, but
which must presently, with its hundred-fold shadow and shine, pass from
his keeping. He knew that love was his, but he did not know that he was
Love's. He knew he loved Barbara, but he did not know that her
exquisiteness was permeating his whole being with an endless possession.
In truth no man good and free could have kept her soul out of his. She
was so delicate, yet so strong; so steady, yet so ready; so original, yet
so infinitely responsive--what could he do but throw his doors wide to
her! what could he do but love her!
And now that Barbara believed she knew more about him than he did
himself; now that the road appeared to lie open between them, would she
escape falling in love with such a man whose hands of labour were
mastered with a head full of understanding, and whose head was quickened
by a heart in which dwelt an imagination at once receptive and
productive? Could any true woman despise the love of such a workman?
From this time, for some weeks, they saw less of each other. Without
knowing it, Barbara had, since the revelation of Alice, grown a little
shy of Richard. It came of her truthfulness, mainly. As Dante felt
ashamed of the discourteous advantage of alone possessing eyesight in the
presence of the poor souls upon the second cornice of the purgatorial
mountain, just so Barbara, without altogether defining to herself her
feeling, regarded it as unfair to Richard, as indeed taking an advantage
of him, to seek his company knowing about him more than she seemed to
know. She felt even deceitful in appearing to know of him only what he
chose to tell her, while in truth she more than suspected she knew of him
what he did not know himself. She not only knew more than she seemed to
know, but she knew more than Richard himself knew! At the same time she
felt that she had no right to tell him what she almost believed; she
ought first to be certain of it! If the conjecture were untrue, what harm
might it not, believed by him, occasion both to him and his parents!
Supposing it true, if those who had cherished him all his life did not
tell him the fact, could it be right in her, coming by accident upon it,
to acquaint him with it? Whether true or not, it must, if believed by
him, change the whole tenor of his way--might perhaps, seeing he had no
faith in God, destroy the very tone of his life; certainly, if untrue, it
would cause endless grief to the parents whom to believe it would be to
repudiate! Richard was indeed, she allowed, in less danger of being
injured by the suggestion than any other young man she had known; but the
risk, a great one, was there.
She did not now, therefore, go so often to Mortgrange. Every day she went
out for her gallop--unattended, for, accustomed to the freedom of
hundreds of leagues of wild country, the very notion of a groom behind
her was hateful--and would often find herself making for some point
whence she could see the chimneys of the house when the resolve of the
day was one of abstinence, but that resolve she never broke. If it was
not the drawing-room and Theodora, but the library and Richard; not the
hideous flowers that happily never came alive from lady Ann's needle, but
the old books reviving to autumnal beauty under the patient, healing
touch of the craftsman, that ever drew her all the way, who can wonder!
Or who will blame her but such as lady Ann, whose kind, though slowly,
yet surely vanishes--melting, like the grimy snow of our streets, before
the sun of righteousness, and the coming kingdom.
Lady Ann and she were now on the same footing as before their
misunderstanding, if indeed their whole relation was anything better than
a misunderstanding; for what lady Ann knew of Barbara she misunderstood,
and what she did not know of Barbara was the best of her; while what
Barbara knew of lady Ann, she also misunderstood, and what she did not
know of lady Ann was the worse of her. But Barbara had told lady Ann that
she was sorry she had spoken to her as she had, and lady Ann had received
the statement as an expected apology. Their quarrel had indeed given lady
Ann no uneasiness. Daughter of one ancient house, and mother in another,
a pillar of society, a live dignity with matronly back flat as any
coffin-lid, she was of course in the right, and could afford to await the
acknowledgment of wrong due and certain from an ill bred and ill educated
chit of the colonies! For how could any one continue indifferent to the
favour of lady Ann! She was incapable of perceiving the merit of
Barbara's apology, or appreciating the sweetness from which it came. For
the genial Barbara could not bear dissension. She had seen enough of it
to hate it. In just defence of a friend she would fight to the last, but
in any matter of her own, she was ready to see, or even imagine herself
in the wrong. Anger in its reaction always made her feel ill, which
feeling she was apt to take for a reminder from conscience, when she
would make haste to apologize.
Lady Ann's relations with Barbara were therefore not so much restored as
unchanged. The elder lady neither sought nor avoided the younger, gave
her always the same cold welcome and farewell, yet was as much pleased to
see her as ever to see anybody. She regarded her as the merest of
butterflies, with pretty flutter and no stay--a creature of wings and
nonsense, carried hither and thither by slightest puff of inclination: it
was the judgment of a caterpillar upon a humming bird. There was more
stuff in Barbara, with all her seeming volatility, than in a wilderness
of lady Anns. The friendship between such a twain could hardly consist in
more than the absence of active disapproval.
When Barbara went into the library, she would always greet Richard as if
she had seen him but the day before, asking what piece of work he was at
now, and showing an interest in it as genuine as her interest in himself.
If there was anything in it she did not quite understand, he must there
and then explain it. So eager was she to know, that he had not seldom to
remind her that his minutes were not his own. But now and then he would
lay aside his work for a time, never forgetting to make up for the
interval afterward, and show her some process from beginning to end. For
Barbara, finding now more time on her hands, had begun to try her
repairing faculty on some of the old books in the house, hoping one day
to surprise Richard with what she had done, and this led to her asking
many and far-reaching questions in the art.
But Richard continued to give her his more important aid: he was still
her master in literature, directing her what to read and what to
meditate, and instructing her how to get her mind to rest on things. He
was the most capable of teachers, for he followed simply the results of
his own experience. Having prepared for her, with his father's help, a
manuscript-book of hand-made paper, bound in levant morocco, the edges
gilded in the rough, he made her copy certain poems into it, attending
carefully to every point, and each minutest formality. He would not have
her copy whatever she might choose; she could not yet, he said, choose to
advantage; for she was of such a "keen clear joyance," that, happy over
what was not the best, she would waste her love. But neither would he
altogether choose for her: from among the poems he had already brought
before her, she must take those she liked best! This, he said, would make
her choice a real one, for it would take place between poems already
known to her, with regard to which therefore she was in a position to
determine her own preference. Then the unavoidable brooding over it
caused in the copying of the one chosen, would make it grow in her mind,
and assume something of the shape it had in the author's.
To Arthur Lestrange, who, notwithstanding the unlikeness between him and
Barbara, and notwithstanding the frequent shocks his conventional
propriety received from her divine liberty, had been for some time
falling in love with her, these interviews, which he never hesitated to
interrupt the moment he pleased, could hardly be agreeable. He never
supposed that in them anything passed of which he could have complained
had he been the girl's affianced lover; but he did not relish the thought
that she looked to the workman and not his employer for help in her
studies. Nor was it consolation to him to be aware that he could no more
give her what the workman gave her, than he could teach her his
bookbinding--at which also the eager Barbara grasped.
At Wylder Hall no questions were ever asked as to how she had spent the
day. Her mother, although now that her twin was gone, she loved her best
in the world, never troubled her head about what she did with herself.
Although Barbara was now a little more at home than formerly, she and her
mother were scarcely together an hour in a week except at meals. She
thought Arthur Lestrange would make a good enough husband for Bab, and,
having chanced on some sign that her husband cherished hopes of a loftier
alliance, grew rather favourable to a match between them.
There was, however, a little betterment in Mrs. Wylder, and her ceasing
to go to church was only one of the indications of it. She had in her a
foundation of genuine simplicity, and was in essence a generous soul. Any
one who wondered at the combination of strange wild charm and honest
strength in the daughter, would have wondered much less had he gained the
least insight into what, beneath the ruin of earthquake and tornado, lay
buried in the soul of her mother. The best of changes is slow in most
natures, and the main question is, perhaps, whether it goes slowly
because of feebleness and instability, and consequent frequency of
relapse, or because of the root-nature, the thoroughness, and the
magnitude of what has been initiated. But Mrs. Wylder was tropical: any
real change in her would soon reach a point where it must become swift as
well as comprehensive.
Since returning to the trammels of a more civilized life, Mr. Wylder had
grown self-absorbed, and from a loud, lawless man had become a sombre,
sometimes morose person. One great cause of the change, however, was,
that the remaining twin, his favourite, had for some time shown signs of
a failing constitution. His increasing feebleness weighed heavily on his
father. He had had a tutor ever since they came to England, but now they
did little or no work together, spending their hours mostly in wandering
about the grounds, and in fitful reading of books of any sort in which
the boy could be led to take a passing interest. Barbara's heart yearned
after him, but he was greatly attached to his nurse, and did not care for
Barbara.
The dissension between husband and wife about the twins, had its origin
mainly with the mother, but sprang from the generosity of her nature: the
twin she favoured was sickly from infancy. A woman such as Mrs. Wylder
might have been expected to shrink from the puny, suffering creature, and
give her affection and approbation to the other, as did her husband; but
it was just here that the true in her, the pure womanly, came to the
surface and then to the front: the child had an appealing look, which,
when first she saw him, went straight to the heart of the strong mother,
and afterward roused, if not enough of the protective, yet all the
defensive in her. From herself she did not, and from death she could not
save him. He died rather suddenly, and now the strong one seemed slowly
sinking. The mother did not heed him, and the father, for very misery,
could scarcely look at him: he was to him like one dead already, only not
dead enough to be buried.
