CHAPTER LIV.
_BARBARA AT HOME_.
Barbara's brother, her father's twin, was fast following her mother's to
that somewhere each of us must learn for himself, no one can learn from
another. While they were in London, he was in the Isle of Wight with his
tutor. His mother and sister had several times gone to see him, but he
did not show much pleasure in their attentions, and was certainly happier
with his tutor than with any one else. Disease, however, was making
straight the path of Love. Now they were all at home at Wylder Hall, and
Death was on his way to join them. Love, however, was watching, ready to
wrest from him his sting--without which he is no more Death, but Sleep.
As the poor fellow grew weaker, his tutor became less able to console
him: and he could not look to his mother for the tenderness he had seen
her lavish on his brother. But the love of his sister had always leaned
toward him, ready, on the least opening of the door of his heart, to show
itself in the chink; and at last the opportunity of being to him and
doing for him what she could, arrived. One day, on the lawn, he tripped
and fell. The strong little Barbara took him in her arms, and carried him
to his room. When two drops of water touch, the mere contact is not of
long duration: the hearts of the sister and the dying brother rushed into
each other. After this, they were seldom apart. A new life had waked in
the very heart of death, and grew and spread through the being of the
boy. His eye became brighter, not with fever only, but with love and
content and hope; for Barbara made him feel that nothing could part them;
that they had been born into the world for the hour when they should find
one another--as now they had found one another, to have one another to
all eternity: it was an end of their being! He would come creeping up to
her as she worked or read, and sit on a stool at her feet, asking for
nothing, wishing for nothing, content to be near her. But then Barbara's
book or work was soon banished. He was bigger than she, but the muscles
of the little maiden were as springs of steel, informed with the
tenderest, strongest heart in all the county, and presently he would find
himself lifted to her lap, his head on her shoulder, the sweetest voice
in all the world whispering loveliest secrets in his willing ear, and her
face bent over him with the stoop of heaven over the patient, weary
earth. In her arms his poor wasting body forgot its restlessness; the
fever that irritated every nerve, burning away the dust of the world,
seemed to pause and let him grow a little cool; and the sleep that
sometimes came to him there was sweet as death. The face that had so long
looked peevish, wore now a waiting look: in heaven, every one sheltered
the other, and the arms of God were round them all!
One day the mother peeped in, and saw them seated thus. Motherhood,
strong in her, though hitherto, as regarded the boy, poisoned by her
strife with her husband, moved and woke at the sight of her natural place
occupied by her daughter.
"Let me take him, poor fellow!" she said.
Delighted that her mother should do something for him, Barbara rose with
him in her arms. The mother sat down, and Barbara laid him in her lap.
But the mother felt him lie listless and dead; no arm came creeping
feebly up to encircle her neck. One of her babies died unborn, and she
knew the moment the strange sad feeling of the time came back to her now;
she felt through all her sensitive maternal body that her child did not
care for her. Grown, through her late illness, at once weaker and
tenderer, she burst into silent weeping. He looked up; the convulsion of
her pain had roused him from a half-sleep. A tear dropped on his face.
"Don't rain, mamma! I will be good!" he said, and held his mouth to be
kissed.
He was much too old for such baby-speech, but as he grew weaker, he had
grown younger; and it seemed now as if, in his utter helplessness, he
would go back to the bosom of his mother. She clasped him to her, and
from that moment she and Barbara shared him between them.
So for a while, Barbara had not the same room to think about Richard; but
when she did think of him, it was always in the some loving, trusting,
hoping way.
When in London, she went to all the parties to which she was expected to
go, and enjoyed them--after her own fashion. She loved her kind, and
liked their company up to a point. But often would the crowd and the
glitter, the motion and iridescence, vanish from her, and she sit there
a live soul dreaming within closed doors. She would be pacing her weary
pony through a pale land, under a globose moon, homeward; or, on the
back of one of her father's fleet horses, sweeping eastward over the
grassy land, in the level light of the setting sun, watching the strange
herald-shadow of herself and her horse rushing away before them, ever
more distort as it fled:--like some ghastly monster, in horror at itself,
it hurried to the infinite, seeking blessed annihilation, and ever
gathering speed as the sun of its being sank, till at last it gained the
goal of its nirvana, not by its well run race, but in the darkness of its
vanished creator. Then with a sigh would Barbara come to herself, the
centre of many regards.
Arthur Lestrange found himself no nearer to her than before--farther off
indeed; for here he was but one among many that sought her. But her
behaviour to him was the same in a crowded room in London as in the
garden at Mortgrange. She spoke to him kindly, turned friendly to him
when he addressed her, and behaved so that the lying hint of lady Ann,
that they had been for some time engaged, was easily believed. A certain
self-satisfied, well-dressed idiot, said it was a pity a girl like that,
a little Amazon, who, for as innocent as she looked, could ride backward
and steer her steed straight, should marry a half-baked brick like
Lestrange: Arthur, though he was not one of the worthiest, was worth ten
of him, faultless as were his coats and neckties!
Her father had several times said to her that it was time she should
marry, but had never got nearer anything definite; for there her eyes
would flash, and her mouth close tight--compelling the reflection that
her mother had been more than enough for him, and he had better not throw
his daughter into the opposition as well. He could not, he saw clearly,
prevail with her against her liking; but it would be an infernal pity, he
thought, seeing poor Marcus must go, if she would not have Lestrange; for
the properties would marry splendidly, and then who could tell what
better title might not stand on the top of the baronetcy!
Lady Ann would not let her hope go. She grew daily more fearful of the
cloud that hung in the future: out of it might at any moment step the
child of her enemy, the low-born woman who had dared to be lady Lestrange
before her! Then where would she and her children be! That her Arthur
would not succeed him, would be a morsel to sweeten her husband's death
for him! It would be life in death to him to spite the woman he had
married! At one crisis in their history, he had placed in her hands a
will that left everything to her son; but he might have made ten wills
after that one! She knew she had done nothing to please him: she had in
fact never spent a thought on making life a good thing to the man she had
married. She wished she had endeavoured or might now endeavour to make
herself agreeable to him. But it was too late! Sir Wilton would instantly
imagine a rumour of the lost heir, and be on the alert for her
discomfiture! If only he had not yet made a later will! He must die one
day: why not in time to make his death of use when his life was of none!
No one would wonder he had preferred the offspring of her noble person to
the lost brat of the peasant woman!
How far over the line that separates guilt from greed, lady Ann might not
have gone had she been sure of not being found out, she herself could not
have told. The look of things is very different at night and in the
morning; the bed-chamber can shelter what would be a horror in a court of
justice; a conscience at peace in its own darkness will shudder in the
gaslight of public opinion. It is marvellous that what we call _the
public_, a mere imbecile as to judgment, should yet possess the Godlike
power of awakening the individual conscience--and that with its own large
dullness of conscience! Truly the relation of the world to its maker
cannot primarily be an intellectual one; it must be a relation
tremendously deeper! We do not, I mean, to speak after the manner of men,
come of God's intellect, but of his imagination. He did not make us with
his hands, but loved us out of his heart.
The same week in which sir Wilton gave that will into his lady's keeping,
he executed a second, in which he made the virtue of the former depend on
the non-appearance of the lost heir. Of this will he said nothing to his
wife. Even from the grave he would hold a shadowy yet not impotent rod
over her and her family! Lady Ann suspected something of the sort, and
spent every moment safe from his possible appearance, in searching for
some such hidden torpedo. But there was one thing of which sir Wilton
took better care than of his honour--and that was his bunch of keys.
After the return of the Lestranges and the Wylders to their
country-homes, lady Ann, having prevailed, on Mrs. Wylder to pay her a
visit, initiated an attempt to gain her connivance in her project for the
alliance of the houses. For this purpose she opened upon her with the
same artillery she had employed against her husband. Mrs. Wylder sat for
some time quietly listening, but looking so like her daughter, that lady
Ann saw the mother's and not the father's was the alliance to seek.
Thereupon she plucked the tompion out of the best gun in her battery, as
she thought, and began to hint a fear that Miss Wylder had taken a fancy
to a person unworthy of her.
"Girls who have not been much in society," she said, "are not
unfrequently the sport of strange infatuations! I have myself known an
earl's daughter marry a baker! I do not, of course, imagine _your_
daughter guilty of the slightest impropriety,--"
Scarcely had the word left her lips, when a fury stood before
her--towered above her, eyes flashing and mouth set, as if on the point
of tearing her to pieces.
"Say the word and my Bab in the same breath again, and I'll throttle you,
you vile woman!" cried Mrs. Wylder, and hung there like a thunder-cloud,
lightening continuously.
Lady Ann was not of a breed familiar with fear, but, for the first time
in her life, except in the presence of her mother, a far more formidable
person than herself, she did feel afraid--of what, she would have found
it hard to say, for to acknowledge the possibility of personal violence
would be almost as undignified as to threaten it!
"I did not mean to offend you," she said, growing a little paler, but at
the same time more rigid.
"What sort of mother do you take me for? Offended, indeed! Would you be
all honey, I should like to know, if I had the assurance, to say such a
thing of one of your girls?"
"I spoke as to a mother who knew what girls are like!"
"You don't know what my girl Bab is like!" cried Mrs. Wylder, with
something that much resembled an imprecation: the word she used would
shock thousands of mothers not comparable to her in motherhood. If
propriety were righteousness, the kingdom of heaven would be already
populous.
Lady Ann was offended, and seriously: was alliance with such a woman
permissible or sufferable? But she was silent. For once in her life she
did not know the proper thing to say. Was the woman mad, or only a
savage?
Mrs. Wylder's eloquence required opposition. She turned away, and with a
backward glance of blazing wrath, left the room and the house.
"Home like the devil!" she said to the footman as he closed the door of
the carriage--and she disappeared in a whirlwind.
From the library sir Wilton saw her stormy exit and departure. "By Jove!"
he said to himself, "that woman must be one of the right sort! She's what
my Ruby might have been by this time if she'd been spared! A hundred to
one, my lady was insolent to her!--said something cool about her mad-cap
girl, probably! _She's_ the right sort, by Jove, that little Bab! If only
my Richard now, leathery fellow, would glue on to her! There's nothing
left in this cursed world of the devil and all his angels that I should
like half so well! I'll put him up to it, I will! Arthur and she indeed!
As if a plate of porridge like Arthur would draw a fireflash like Bab!
I'd give the whole litter of 'em, and throw in the dam, to call that
plucky little robin my girl! I'd give my soul to have such a girl!"
It did not occur to him that his soul for Barbara would scarcely be fair
barter.
"Dick's well enough," he went on, "but he's a man, and you've got to
quarrel with him! I'm tired of quarrelling!"
The instant she reached home, Mrs. Wylder sent for her daughter, and
demanded, fury still blazing in her eyes, what she had been doing to give
that beast of a lady Ann a right to talk.
"Tell me first how she talked, mamma," returned Barbara, used to her
mother's ways, and nowise annoyed at being so addressed. "I can't have
been doing anything very bad, for she's been doing what she can to get me
and keep me."
"She has?--And you never told me!"
"I didn't think it worth telling you.--She's been setting papa on to me
too!"
"Oh! I see! And you wouldn't set him and me on each other! Dutiful child!
You reckoned you'd had enough of that! But I'll have no buying and
selling of my goods behind my back! If you speak one more civil word to
that young jackanapes Lestrange, you shall hear it again on both your
ears!"
"I will not speak an uncivil word to him, mamma; he has never given me
occasion; but I shan't break my heart if I never see him again. If you
like, I won't once go near the place. Theodora's the only one I care
about--and she's as dull as she is good!"
"What did the kangaroo mean by saying you were sweet on somebody not
worthy of you?"
"I know what she meant, mother; but the man is worthy of a far better
woman than me--and I hope he'll get her some day!"
Thereupon little Bab burst into tears, half of rage, half of dread lest
her good wish for Richard should be granted otherwise than she meant it.
For she did not at the moment desire very keenly that he should get all
he deserved, but thought she might herself just do, while she did hope to
be a better woman before the day arrived.
"Come, come, child! None of that! I don't like it. I don't want to cry on
the top of my rage. What is the man? Who is he? What does the woman know
about him?"
At once Barbara began, and told her mother the whole story of Richard and
herself. The mother listened. Old days and the memory of a lover, not
high in the social scale, whom she had to give up to marry Mr. Wylder,
came back upon her and her heart went with her daughter's before she
knew what it was about; her daughter's love and her own seemed to mingle
in one dusky shine, as if the daughter had inherited the mother's
experience. The heart of the mother would not have her child like herself
gather but weed-flowers of sorrow among the roses in the garden of love.
She had learned this much, that the things the world prizes are of little
good to still the hearts of women But when Barbara told her how lady Ann
would have it that this same Richard, the bookbinder, was a natural son
of sir Wilton, she started to her feet, crying,
"Then the natural bookbinder shall have her, and my lady's fool may go to
the devil! You shall have _my_ money, Bab, anyhow."
"But, mammy dear," said Barbara, "what will papa say?"
"Poof!" returned her mother. "I've known him too long to care what he
says!"
"I don't like offending him," returned Barbara.
"Don't mention him again, child, or I'll turn him loose on your
bookbinder. Am I to put my own ewe-lamb to the same torture I had to
suffer by marrying him! God forbid I When you're happy with your husband,
perhaps you'll think of me sometimes and say, 'My mother did it! She
wasn't a good woman, but she loved her Bab!'"
A passionate embrace followed. Barbara left the room with a happy heart,
and went--not to her own to brood on her love, but to her brother's,
whose feeble voice she heard calling her. Upon him her gladness
overflowed.
