Into the Highways and Hedges Part 28

"Barnabas does not say much about it. I have his letter here," she said: and, putting her hand in her pocket, drew out the wrong one.

"No; that is my sister's. This is his," cried Meg; then stopped short, aware of something in the air--of two pairs of eyes fixed eagerly on her.

"Hallo! How's this?" said Tom. "Why did ye tell me that it was your sister's letter I burnt, eh? an' that ye'd had no others?"

"I thought it was hers, but it could not have been, since I still have it," said Meg. "Why! what _could_ you have burnt then? It wasn't mine at all. I suppose it must have belonged to some one else."

She got up quickly, and left the old man, who sat with his head on his hands quite unmoved by this stir and excitement.

"Why do you look at me so?" she cried, crossing over to where Tom sat, still but half understanding.

Tom put his hand before his eyes. Barnabas' wife had bewitched him into believing her once, in spite of evidence. He wouldn't be bewitched again. There was no other "Margaret" at the farm; she could not have "forgotten". It could not have belonged to some one else! Why did she say that? Why did she tell him lies? He had been so sure that she was true, even though that London gentleman might have been trying to "make hay" in her husband's absence. He had been too sure.

"It must have been the letter of some one else--not mine at all," she repeated. "It----"

"Doan't!" said Tom in an odd husky voice. "'Tain't worth while."

He looked so unhappy that Meg, still more perplexed, went on hastily: "After all, it doesn't much matter, does it? Perhaps when Barnabas comes home, he will be able to find----"

"Barnabas!" said Tom.

The indignation in his voice startled her this time, woke her up to a faint realisation of what he meant.

"He's over good for 'ee; and he swears by ye; but, an' ye tak' advice, ye'll not tell lies to him. He thought ye ower heavenly mind to warm to any man!" cried Tom, with a laugh that ended in something very like a groan. "Ye may break his heart times, an' he'll not hear aught against ye, or have ye fashed, cos he holds ye o' finer make than himself, or all of us. O' finer make! an' ye'll take a love-letter when he's away, fro' a black-faced Jew."

"_Tom!_" she cried, shuddering with disgust, "how can you, how dare you, say such things to me?" And at the warmth in her tone his cooled.

"Ye see I believed in 'ee too!" he said. "I thought ye weren't the soart to tell lies to save--I was going to say your skin; but it warn't even that, for ye couldn't ha' thought I'd harm ye."

"I told no lies. I never do!" said Meg.

"No! Happen ye call 'em some'ut else where ye come from; but it ain't my affair! Ye needn't be feared I want to interfere with 'ee. I never will again," said Tom. And Meg, too much offended at the time to attempt further vindication, yet recognised, with a sense of increased loneliness later, that he kept his word. She might be as late as she chose, she might eat or fast; Tom's kindly teasing had ceased. She missed it even while she resented his suspicions with an almost scornful wonder and disgust.

Meg had absolutely no instinct for flirtations, her love and hate were both deep; but when china vessels and iron pots journey together, we know which gets the worst of a collision; and her moral rect.i.tude wasn't all the support it should have been.

"I think," she said one day to Tom, "that, if you think bad things of me, I ought not to stay here and eat your bread."

"You eat your husband's," said Tom. "He pays for it--an' where would 'ee go to, eh?" Then his own words shamed him. Where could she go, poor la.s.s, if they were hard on her?

"I doan't want to be unfriendly," he said; "seeing that, happen, ye didn't mean much harm, an', arter all----"

"Thank you; but, if you can't believe me, I don't want _that_ kind of friendship--I must do without," said the preacher's wife. Her gesture forbade his completing his sentence, and actually made Tom feel rather small, though her voice was gentle enough. Yet, in spite of those brave-sounding words, she was _not_ the woman to "do without". She was by no means cast in a self-sufficing mould; whatever heroism she might be capable of would always have its roots in the strength of her affections, and his "where would 'ee go?" made her feel very helpless.

The preacher came back a few days later. Meg, coming down early one morning, found him asleep on the wooden settle, with his head on the table.

Meg shut the door softly, and stood considering him--this man who had been her prophet, and was, alas, her husband!

He had tramped a long way, and he slept heavily.

Should she tell him the whole inexplicable story when he woke, or not?

There was a force of character, an uncompromising arbitrariness about all the Thorpes that she rather shrank from; but Barnabas was always good to her.

She had declared to George Sauls that she trusted the preacher absolutely; and so she did--so she _must_--for what would happen if she didn't? As the question rose in her mind, Meg's heart answered it with startling clearness. She could not afford to lose one t.i.ttle of her carefully nourished respect for Barnabas. She was afraid, not of him, but of herself. She couldn't risk this thing; if he, like Tom, were to tell her she lied, she knew she should hate him; for she was too much in his power.

The sun was beginning to pour into the room. With the tenderness for a man's physical comfort that is ingrained in most women, Meg drew down the blind to prevent the light waking him, and left him to have his sleep out.

"Are ye surprised to see me?" he asked her later; and longed to add "Are ye glad?" but forbore.

He knew, before he had been many minutes with her, that his la.s.s was more constrained than she had been. He had a horror of pressing her with questions, lest she should feel bound to answer them; but the unspoken inquiry that was always in his mind, and that she met in his eyes whenever she looked at him, oppressed her. Meg longed to escape from the whole family of Thorpes!

Barnabas waited all that day and the next in the hope that she would tell him what was amiss. On the third day something happened. A letter came for Margaret. She gave a cry of dismay, her colour fading, and her eyes dilating while she read it.

"What is it? Who has made ye look so?" said Barnabas. But his wife did not hear him: the hot kitchen, and the three men all staring at her, and the hum of bees through the open door, all which she had been conscious of the moment before, grew dim and very far off. The letter dropped from her fingers.

"She's going to faint," said Tom.

She pulled herself together. "No--I'm not," she said, in rather an unsteady voice. "I have had bad news. My father is ill; I must go to him. He is at Lupcombe parsonage. Oh, Barnabas, did you know that? You never told me! Mr. Sauls writes from Lupcombe. How soon can I get there?"

"Ay, I knew!" said the preacher slowly. "Ye can't go, Margaret. Ye might get the fever. Besides,--are ye sure he wants ye? Has he asked for ye?"

"No; but I want _him_!" she cried. "It is so long, so long since I have seen my father, and I have so longed for him! Let me go, Barnabas, let me go. What does it matter about the fever, if I see him first? I must go to my father. Let me go!"

The insistent, reiterated cry rang through the room.

It roused Mr. Thorpe, who had paid little attention to any one or anything of late; it filled Tom with illogical compunction. The woman who cared so for her father couldn't be "light" after all, he said to himself. But Barnabas drew his fair eyebrows together, frowning as if in pain.

"_She's pining after her own people, an' she'll go back to 'em, an'

leave you to whistle for her._" It had come.

"No, no; ye are mine, not theirs!" he cried. "I'll not let ye go." And there was in his voice the defiance of a man who strives against a closing fate.

"Shame on ye, Barnabas!" said Mr. Thorpe; and with that he put his arm round Margaret. "She's in th' right. If her father's ill, it's a sin to keep her back. Ye'll have to let her go."

"I'll not have any man," said Barnabas, "interfere atwixt me an' her.

Not you or any man. Do 'ee think my maid needs you to stand up for her?

Margaret!"

Meg drew herself up and put her hands to her eyes, as if their vision were still a little misty.

"I am sorry I made such a fuss," she said. "I--I was taken by surprise--I didn't know that father was ill. I should like to think over the news by myself. No, don't come, please!" And she went out of the room, shutting the door softly after her.

"Well! we all seem to ha' got very put about!" Tom said ruefully; but Mr. Thorpe looked at his younger son with a fiery indignation that, somehow, brought out an odd likeness between the two men who were usually so dissimilar.

"Ye are just mad wi' jealousy o' the poor little lady's own father," he said. "Ye did her a cruel wrong by marrying her, an' now ye add to it!

Ye were wrong-headed an' obstinate from a lad, Barnabas! I pity the la.s.s wi' all my heart. She's like a caged bird here, wi' never a chance o' being set free."

"There's only one thing 'ud do that," said Barnabas. "The fever might ha' led to it--but it didn't; it wasn't my fault it didn't. A man hasn't leave to open that door himsel', but I ha' never ta'en over much care o'

my life." He turned away heavily; his anger, which, after all, was made up of pain and love, had died as suddenly as it had risen; but he went out with a sore heart.