Barnaby Part 3

Naturally they share my feelings--" She paused significantly, and he could see that she was watching Julia. "My son has given me a legacy.... He has left me his wife."

"How sweet of you to put it like that!" said Julia.

She had established herself on the sofa without an instant's delay, taking figurative possession, too self-absorbed to appreciate any by-play. Her head was full of the tardy capitulation of her fellow-mourner, and she, in her own eyes, was the princ.i.p.al figure here. But Rackham, looking on, all but shouted.

"What?" he said. "Poor old Barnaby! Married? Good Lord! how did it come about?"

Julia turned round and stared at him.

"Lord Rackham!" she said. "Are you mad?"

Lady Henrietta made a motion with her hand towards the girl sitting in the background. She could not trust herself to speak to the woman whose outrageous complacency had survived her blow.

"My dear," she said, "this is your husband's cousin. He gets everything when I die--things are so wickedly entailed in this family--except a pittance I mean to sc.r.a.pe up for you. You know I don't chatter, Rackham. You can understand I didn't care to set the neighbourhood talking until I had Susan here."

There was no mistaking the triumphant note in her proclamation.

The girl coloured faintly. They were all looking at her now; the strange woman with a startled face, the man curiously. Some likeness in him to the picture that hung upstairs troubled her. So Barnaby might have looked, his dare-devil glance falling on her with a quizzical compa.s.sion.

Rackham's wits were not slow. He crossed over to her side, and took up his station on the hearthrug, so close to her that his splashed scarlet coat almost brushed her black sleeve. Barnaby had been dressed like him in the picture, gallant in hunting clothes. Would Barnaby have stood by her? For she understood the significance of his action. This man wanted to be her friend. She trembled a little, wondering why.

Lady Henrietta took no more notice of him than if he had been a vexing shadow put in his place. His strategic movement was lost on her.

Barnaby's mother, in her thirst to punish, her eagerness in striking for the sake of her son, had not time to consider that the sword in her hand was his wife. Her eyes were shining with the fire that had burnt up her tears, and they were fixed on the enchantress who had wrecked Barnaby's life, and was trading on his old infatuation, making a bid for public sympathy by flaunting her forfeited hold on him.

"I can't understand," said Julia, with a gasp. "Barnaby was not married...."

But she was shaken. Her blank amazement was turning visibly to dismay.

This stroke was so sharp, so inconceivable, that she lost her head, refusing to believe in the humbling revelation.

"It's a plot!" she cried all at once. "A plot against me. What have I done to be treated like this? Why should I be insulted?--Everybody knows that Barnaby and I----"

"Don't be an idiot, Julia," said Rackham softly, but it was not his interruption that stopped her pa.s.sionate surrender to the Irish-woman's instinct to have it out with the world.

Perhaps the actress was uppermost in Susan, or perhaps an odd impulse of loyalty to the dead man whose ring she wore carried her out of herself. Her heart was hot against the woman who had played fast and loose with him, and it taught her how one who belonged to Barnaby would have faced this moment. His wife would not be a coward, would not sit, a piteous listener, in the background; she had his memory to uphold.

And so she found herself standing up, confronting the stranger in a proud silence that was more eloquent than reproach. Slowly, without a word, she moved onwards to leave the room.

"Gad!" said Rackham, under his breath. He liked that.

Something like awe had smitten Julia. She remained a moment transfixed, staring after her, all exclamation hushed on her reckless lips. Then, all at once, she followed.

"Tell me who you are," she panted hysterically. "It's all nonsense, isn't it?--It's a sham?"

Lady Henrietta was watching the scene from her sofa, and so was Rackham, standing with his back to the fire. They were both far off.

It was a swift and dramatic minute.

"His mother hates me," said Julia, half to herself; her hold tightened on the girl's arm. "She's capable of anything. She--What colour were his eyes?"

The question was flung at her without warning. But a man's face stood out distinct in the girl's imagination, haunting her with a clearness none of these other faces had; smiling whimsically down from his picture all this while she was letting people proclaim her his....

Somehow she was defending him, covering his hurt.

Without thinking, without a pause--

"Blue," she said.

The other woman's hand dropped. She let her go.

Susan let the velvet hangings fall heavily behind her as she came through. A kind of wonder at herself possessed her, and her knees trembled. Mechanically she traversed the hall, and began to climb the wide staircase, leaning a little as she went, on the solid oak bal.u.s.trade.

On the first landing a window faced the stair, and right and left ran corridors, interminable, and equally mysterious to the stranger, who was, in a manner, lost in this unknown house. She sank down on the window-seat, set deep in the thickness of the wall.

Outside, the sky was dark with a strange red, as of furnaces under the horizon, glimmering in the west. She could just distinguish the jutting corner of the more antique part of the house, built as it was in different centuries, bit by bit. That side was strangely ornamented with mediaeval figures--the images of ancient warriors, all battered and weather-stained. And the land they had won was quiet, lying half asleep; only the trees still restless as night came on.

She turned her face. In front of her gleamed the shallow stair, running straight into the hall below, and all the way down hung pictures, men and women who had lived in this house, and trod the stairs, hurrying, lagging, or perhaps clinging, as she had in her weakness clung to the bal.u.s.trade. Some were ill-painted, some stared wickedly; but all of them were watching. There was history in their eyes.

The girl felt a queer fellowship with the still procession; she, whose only t.i.tle among them was make-believe. Perhaps, in forgotten times, her own people had fought and loved and ridden side by side with these, and their descendant had come back to a friend's house. How good it would be to let the world go on, to walk in a dream always, and not struggle any more.

She thought, with a remote disdain, of the scene downstairs. Her heart was still beating quickly; but that gripping sense of the theatre had left her. And she knew she had conquered. Barnaby's memory was safe from the woman his mother hated. One could imagine her claim collapsing, one could hear her voluble excuse, pleading bewilderment, accepting the situation--with perhaps a plaintive expression of her relief in knowing she was, after all, not as guilty as gossip said--had Lady Henrietta heard the dreadful rumours? And Barnaby's mother would smile at the thrust with victory in her soul, while the man, his cousin, would look on, smothering his chuckle, with his head on one side like a magpie, and a splash of mud that had dried on his cheek.

It was his step she heard first as they came out into the hall. He and Julia were leaving together, she talking fast. Her voice, charged with subdued excitement, rose and fell on a singing note. What she was saying did not reach up the stairs; only its contralto music. The sound of it awakened Susan in her mood of overwrought exaltation.

Reality came back to her with a shock. She remembered another voice as warm, as emotional, with the same theatrical tune of tears; and she remembered the dangerous charity that had mocked her opposition.

Stripped of its fantastic mist of adventure, she looked at her own story, and was ashamed. Her very scorn of the woman against whom she had been pitted turned on herself and scorched her, ranking her as low.

She and Julia--no, she could not bear to be judged with Julia. The romantic sophistry that had comforted her was gone, and nothing could stay her desperate longing to be honest.

They pa.s.sed underneath. Rackham was helping Julia into her furs, was hunting for her m.u.f.f, with his face to the stair. The girl above held her breath. His nearness affected her with a kind of panic.

She had an intuition that he was the kind of man who would--guess. She thought of his quick movement to her side, his presumptuous readiness to stand by her, unspoken but unmistakable, with an unexplained alarm.

Would they never go? Why did he loiter, looking upwards with that inexplicable smile?

As the great door shut, at last, on a silence, she sprang up and went downstairs. It was a pity she was not stronger. One should not go to be judged with a tottering step. And she would want all her courage.

Knowing the spirit in which Barnaby's mother had dealt with Julia, she did not look for mercy.

But Lady Henrietta was not sitting upright and watchful, with that look of ruthlessness stamped on her thin, hard, pretty face. She had thrown herself across the sofa, her fast-knitting fingers idle, the half-finished stocking that would never be worn fallen from her hand to the floor. She lay like a broken reed; deprived of the motive that had sustained her--and she was crying.

That sight stirred all the heart in Susan. She ran to her blindly, only conscious of a great compa.s.sion that shamed her selfish terror of the weight of a lie. She could not tell her ... now.

And Barnaby's mother looked up at her approach. Something of the old defiant jauntiness came back to her for a minute. She tried to laugh.

"Come here and kiss me," she called. There was a fierce tenderness in her cry--"you darling--!"

CHAPTER III

Susan had flung from her with both hands the imprudent longing to cry out her story.

Somehow she felt that if she spoke now she would be a traitor. It was too late to look back; for good or ill she had changed places with the other woman who would not come. To fail now would not be to clear her honour, it would be to desert her post.

When Lady Henrietta, having triumphed, had given way at last, and had clung to Susan, the girl, gathered in that fierce clasp, had known that Barnaby's mother took pa.s.sionate comfort in her only because the stranger was something that had belonged to him. To deny her that comfort would be to rob one who had nothing left. Could she, by a wistful life of devotion, justify herself, not in the sight of man, not to hard judges--but perhaps to this Barnaby who was dead, and who would surely understand? Keeping silent, she promised him that she would.