Barnaby Part 2

"Julia!" he said, taken aback at her presence in this house. She acknowledged his amazement with a trickling laugh. Her voice had a note of melancholy importance.

"Is it so unnatural," she said reproachfully, "that you should find me here?"

The man bit his lip, looking at her. To him there was humour in her romantic pose.

They had once been so well acquainted--though lately she had affected short-sightedness when she saw him--that he imagined he understood her.

He rather admired an invincible vanity that had ignored disappointment and defied scoffing tongues by making this bid for public sympathy. It was a brilliant move, but he had never thought it would impose on Lady Henrietta, that worldly woman with a hot corner in her heart for anybody who could squeeze in, but an implacable spirit. She had held out stubbornly up to now.

"Well--I don't know," he said, hesitating, swallowing his amus.e.m.e.nt.

Julia lifted her tragic eyes to his. Perhaps she was not sorry he should witness her recognition in this house. The trailing black garments that she was wearing for Barnaby lent a majestic sweep to her full outlines, and there was a kind of bloom on her cheeks. She reminded one of a big purple pansy.

The butler, an old family servant, one of those that know too much, had closed the great door, shutting out the wind and the stormy sky, already night-ridden; and was now waiting discreetly in the background.

Rackham nodding to him, remarked a curious twinkle on his face, but when he looked again it was wooden.

"I knew she would send for me at last," crowed Julia. "People called her selfish and cruel, but I told everybody I understood. I told them to give her time. It must be so difficult for her to realise that someone else was closer to poor Barnaby than even she. How could she help feeling, at first, a little jealousy of my grief?"

"I was sent for, too," said Rackham bluntly. "She said she had something to show me."

"Poor dear!" said Julia. "How touching that she should think of it.

You were his cousin, and she wants you to witness her do me justice."

The man smiled to himself at her manner of glancing backwards at their fellowship in disgrace. Was it possible that his aunt had really made up her mind to forget and forgive, and fall upon Julia's neck? He felt a twinge of something like shame.

"We mustn't keep her waiting," said Julia. "Is she in the library, Macdonald? That is where she used to sit...."

Already she was a.s.suming her ancient intimacy with the ways of the house, and the servant made way for her as she pa.s.sed him, traversing the hall with a mournful swagger.

Lady Henrietta was knitting hard.

She sat in a deep sofa by the fire, turned so that it faced the hangings that screened off the outer hall. The library was so big that it seemed to reach at either end into darkness, and the lamps made little islands of brilliance here and there in the prevailing gloom.

Behind, with the books, there was another fireplace, a red and glimmering hearth where two or three dogs lay, warm and sleepy, dreaming of winter tramps and a man calling them to heel. One, a terrier with a bitten ear, had started half-awake on a run down the room, but she could not settle on the other rug, and came back restlessly to her post on the shabbier tiger-skin.

Barnaby's mother had a thin, hard, eager face, with a flick of colour high on her cheek-bones. Not an unkind woman, but one possessed by some pa.s.sion that had tempered a frivolous, careless nature to a mood of iron. Her rings glittered as she knitted, and the wires clicked faster and faster, as if it were impossible that her fingers could be for a minute still. She was knitting a man's grey-green shooting stocking.

Occasionally her eyes, with a strange spark in them, lit on a girl sitting opposite, gazing into the fire. The girl was young and quiet; her head shone dark in the ring of light; her cheek was pale, but her short upper lip showed courage. Lady Henrietta watched her with a fierce joy that was not yet liking.

"You're not at all what I expected," she said abruptly. "I was afraid of what I would see, and I didn't dare to look at you when you arrived last night;--but twenty times I turned the handle of your bedroom door.

At last, I poked my head in when you were asleep, just to know the worst.--I nearly dropped the candle when I saw your little head on the pillow."

"What did you expect?" the girl said faintly.

"A great, coa.r.s.e, fine woman, snoring," said Lady Henrietta.

All at once she bent forward, putting her knitting into the girl's hands. There was significance in the gesture.

"Pick up that st.i.tch for me," she said. "He never liked ladders in his stockings."

There was no shake in the hard jauntiness of her voice, but the girl, searching with bent head for the dropped st.i.tch, felt her fingers tremble as they touched the rough worsted--felt something pluck at her heart. Barnaby was dead, and she had never known him; but he was the one real person walking through a dream in which she had lost herself.

She was not strong yet. She still had a trick of putting out her hand to some steady object when she stood up alone. And at first she had not understood--too ill to question, not wondering. It was as if she had died one night and awakened to a consciousness of protection, a mystery of care and kindness, of strangers who took charge of her, treating her like a precious doll. When she at last knew the reason, she had felt like one who, falling from a precipice, found herself clinging, the dizzy horror stopped by a branch;--she could not let it go.

So they had found her, and brought her over the sea, and put her to bed in a great, comfortable room, in a house that was haunted. It was Barnaby's house, and it was for Barnaby's sake that people were kind to her. Somehow they were all shadows to her beside the thought of him.

His name had been invoked to shelter her; it had been enough to lift her out of despair. She had begun to feel safe in a confused a.s.surance that she belonged to him.

She remembered last night. She remembered the door sliding softly, and a rustle in the room, and how she had lain quite still, shutting her eyes, holding her breath, startled out of sleep. Someone was smoothing the bedclothes under her chin. She longed to cover her face, but could not. It was not a ghost, for mortal fingers had touched her cheek.

Soon the rustle had withdrawn from her bedside, and she had heard a little sound that might have been a sigh. Afterwards the door had closed, and the room was empty.

Seized by an unaccountable impulse, she had put her foot to the floor, and crossed the wide carpet to the fireplace, where the visitor had gone from her side. The fire had fallen in, flaring high in a quivering blaze, and by its light she had seen that over the chimney-piece hung the picture of a man. Instinct had told her who it was, and she stared at him, fascinated.

The other woman had left her the wrong photograph in her hurry. This was no weak boy with a foolish mouth, bundled over-seas by his people.

This was a man with a steady face that betrayed nothing of himself, and eyes that held her startled gaze. Blue eyes, audacious and understanding. Her heart beat strangely. For this must be Barnaby the reckless, who had married a wife and got himself killed ... and she, poor fool, was calling herself his widow.

She clung to the chimney-piece, shivering with excitement, a quaint, slight figure in her white night-dress.

"I'll hurt n.o.body.... I'll hurt n.o.body!" she was explaining to him in an imploring whisper; and it seemed to her that the man in the picture smiled.

"--There, give it back to me," said Lady Henrietta jealously, and her voice scattered mists of imagination. "You don't think I'm crazy, do you? You know why it is I can't stop knitting his stockings.--We'll not talk about him, Susan. You and I have each our own memories, and we can't share them.--I don't want yours. But we'll fight for him together; since he belongs to us."

Her manner took on a sudden fierceness.

"I've not told anybody about you yet," she said. "I've been hugging the secret for purposes of my own. I am a wicked woman, Susan. Upon my honour, if you hadn't existed, I'd have been obliged to invent you.

If you hadn't come to me, I'd have searched the world for an imitation, from end to end. How he would laugh at me!--But we'll not talk about him--we couldn't bear it. Only we'll fight for him, as I said. We'll not let his enemies triumph and pretend that they broke his heart."

Her voice was quicker, charged with a pa.s.sionate haste that hurried the words out before she could close her lips.

"You little pale thing," she said. "I am not a kissing woman ... but ... oh, you don't know what you are to me. Wait. I'll make you understand. There's a creature here who behaved shamefully to my boy ... to _him_. And now he is dead she goes about boasting, claiming him as her victim, hinting to all who will listen that he killed himself for love of her. It's not true.... You'll teach them it is not true!"

She stopped, controlling herself. In the hall outside there was the slight bustle of an arrival, and voices, m.u.f.fled by distance, came faintly through. As suddenly as she had spoken, she checked her outburst of confidence, and picked up her knitting with a terrible little smile.

"I know who it is that's coming," she said grimly. "A woman, Susan--a woman who dresses in black, and prates of a misunderstanding."

They came in together, the man blinking a little after his ride in the twilight, approaching with a stiff gait and clinking spurs; the woman swimming triumphantly up the room.

"Dear Lady Henrietta!" she murmured, a ready quiver in her emotional Irish voice.

"How do you do, Julia?" said Lady Henrietta. She had recovered an extraordinary calm. "Did you and Rackham meet on the doorstep? I am pleased to see you both."

Her ominous quietness struck the man, more observant. His instinct had not disappointed him, that was clear; he marked her att.i.tude with an inward chuckle. Something tremendous was toward.

"You are looking well, Aunt Henrietta," he said politely. "Do you mind my smoking? We had a tiring day, and I missed my only sandwich."

"Macdonald will look after you," she said. "Make him get you anything you want."

"Thanks," said Rackham. "I'll have something before I go. I meant to ask him for a whisky and soda, but he shot us in here.--I thought the old chap seemed a bit excited."

"Yes," said Lady Henrietta. "They were all so devoted to Barnaby.