Into the Highways and Hedges Part 41

She felt a little as if she were standing between fire and gunpowder, but that did not appear in her manner. She would have thought it "beneath" both herself and Barnabas to allow it to.

George took the hand, and held it a moment in his. He would have liked to kiss it, and all the more because that "canting brute" was looking on; but he did not: he reverenced Meg too much.

"Give my most humble respects to Mrs. Russelthorpe," he said; and then, with real kindliness: "I am glad you are going to your father. You will go soon? That's right! He is waiting for you. He told me to tell you to make haste. He will do his best to wait till you come."

"He will!" said Meg. "I think we shall see each other this once more, because we both want it so."

"A most illogical 'because,'" said George to himself. "But yet, G.o.d bless her, and give her her heart's desire!"

He looked back once, and saw the two still standing under the rick.

"And d----n the preacher!" he added. "By-the-bye, what had that fellow meant?" George grew angry in thinking of him.

But in Margaret's heart there was a great peace.

Her father had not cast her off; it was only she who had been faithless.

Oh! it was so much easier to cry, _Mea culpa_! than to allow that he had forgotten.

She had tried to offer G.o.d resignation, but He had given her joy. The level rays of the setting sun lit up her happy face, and made her short hair shine like a halo round her head. She put her hand before her eyes, and laughed a low, soft laugh like a contented child.

Mr. Sauls was not a very angelic messenger; but he had brought her peace and goodwill. With a radiant smile she watched him make his way over the shining, sun-tinged stubble. That smile, however, was not for him.

The preacher woke her from her golden reverie.

"What does he call himself?" he asked.

"My father?--oh, you mean Mr. Sauls?"

"Then he lies!" said Barnabas succinctly. "For his name's Cohen, and he's the man who ruined Lydia. His hand is not clean enough to touch you, Margaret. It were all I could do not to pull ye back; only," cried the preacher with sudden bitterness, "I minded he's a gentleman, who ye'd naturally trust, an' _I_ might ha' scared ye."

"I am not scared by you," said Meg. "I never am now."

She brought her thoughts back from London and her father with something of a jerk. How could this be? Surely it was a mistake. It was impossible to connect Mr. Sauls' familiar, and, to her, commonplace figure, with the villain of the preacher's tragedy. Mr. Sauls wasn't a villain, and he was never tragic.

Then she looked at Barnabas; and, at the sight of the strong indignation in his face, her sympathy suddenly turned to him. She had loved neither of these men; but the preacher's was the type she understood best. The man who sneered could never appeal to Meg, who was religious to her finger tips, as did the man who fought and agonised and prayed. Her loyalty and faith were on the preacher's side; and her loyalty and faith were strong allies. If the story was true, how durst Mr. Sauls have come and have met Barnabas unashamed?

"I don't understand," she said. "I don't want to think him wicked. He has been very good to me. Have you read my father's message? That was Mr. Sauls' doing; he told father how I had tried and failed. Oh, yes, and he brought back my locket too--though that is nothing in comparison to the message."

Barnabas turned the locket over in his hand. It was a curious possession to lie on his brown palm. It reminded him of a good many things.

"Ye canna keep it!" he said at last. "But ye shall go to your father.

We'll start by to-morrow's coach, an' ye like. I'll be taking you to a sink of iniquity, but I knew I'd go to London some day. No! doan't thank me, la.s.s. Do ye suppose I doan't see wi'out tellin' that that's what ye've wanted more nor ought else, an' that it's new life to 'ee? He pulls hardest. Ye'll go back to your own people!" He sighed heavily. A presentiment of parting was on him, and his dread of London amounted to an absolute and quite unreasoning horror.

"But for th' locket--I'll not hav' ye touch what that rascal's fingers ha' dirtied. I'll follow and tell him that."

"Not that, Barnabas! Promise me you won't quarrel with him! Take the locket, if you like--but promise."

"Are ye feared for him?"

"No. Though, if I were, I shouldn't be ashamed of it! I'm not afraid for him, but _you'll_ never forgive yourself, if you hurt him. Oh, Barnabas!" cried Meg, half laughing. "You repent more bitterly over your sins than he does. I don't want you to go in sackcloth and ashes all your days for Mr. Sauls, who has never in his life, I suppose, felt for any one what you have."

"G.o.d forgi'e me! I ha' hated him sorely," said Barnabas; "but, an' it's for _me_, Margaret--I'll promise."

CHAPTER XII.

"What had the fellow meant?" George puzzled over that point on his way back to N----town. It had been more than a mere ranting denunciation of the "rich man" as a "rich man". The indignation had been evidently personal to himself.

"If I'd been here, I'd not ha' let my wife sit at table wi' ye! It pa.s.ses me that ye are not ashamed to come to this county again." How did the man know that he had ever been before?

To tell the truth, Mr. Sauls had once or twice felt in Meg's presence a little ashamed of a certain old story, though he did not regard the sins of his youth with the loathing that filled Barnabas Thorpe's soul at the thought of past backsliding.

Very few men's lives could be laid entirely open to the inspection of a good woman, George supposed; and he had never professed to be one of the "unco guid".

He grew angrier still with the preacher, at the thought of his ferreting out and telling Meg that tale, and he pictured the horror with which she would hear it.

George used to notice long ago with some amus.e.m.e.nt (he had often been privately amused with Miss Deane) that she was apt to be rather sweeping in her condemnations; seeing, in her extremely youthful innocence, only black and white, with no shades of grey between; judging with the crude severity that has not known temptation. It did not "amuse" him now to think of that.

That hypocrite would paint his portrait as a profligate, and a seducer of innocence; and Meg, looking at it all from a woman's point of view, would feel as if her hand had touched pitch in touching his.

"For commend me to a preacher for hunting down a scandal, and to a good woman for a hard sentence," he thought bitterly. Yet, if she could only know, even then, even in his rowdy, unsatisfactory boyhood, he had not been so utterly bad.

"Innocence" had never been the worse for him--never once. It was not "innocence" that he had flirted with in the hotel in the market town of Clayton; he and all the rest of the rather fast set he had affected in those days. There are country girls as far from simplicity as any town maiden; as there are town maidens as freshly innocent as cowslips in a field. Lydia Tremnell, the pretty saucy school-friend of the hotel-keeper's daughter, certainly had not belonged to the latter genus; and, possibly, Mr. Sauls wouldn't have paid her attention if she had.

At one and twenty George had had no liking for bread-and-b.u.t.ter misses.

If he had met a girl of Meg's type _then_, he would have found her dull; but he followed the prevailing fashion and raved about Lydia, who, indeed, was pretty enough to charm most men's senses, and witty, too, in a rather pert fashion.

Now he came to think of it (but it was all so long ago!) he had a faint recollection of a very irate cousin of Lydia's who came to fetch her home, very much against her will; could _that_ have been Barnabas Thorpe?

He had kept up a half-joking correspondence with her afterwards; but no one could have been more astonished than he was when the young woman turned up at his rooms in London one day, and threw herself utterly and completely on his protection!

Looking back now across the years that separated his ambitious and successful manhood from his unpromising youth, Mr. Sauls said to himself, "what a young idiot he had been!" but it had been no case of betrayal.

He had never promised Lydia marriage; he had never lured her up to town; he would have sent her home, if she had chosen--only he was no Joseph.

Yes! what a fool he had been; Meg would call him by a harder name!

There had been a very curious end to the vulgar story. Lydia fell ill with a most malignant form of small-pox when she had been with him a week.

She clung desperately to him then, entreating him to hold by her, not to send her away to die in a hospital; she had an absolute unreasoning fear of hospitals. She hardly expected him to accede to her agonised prayers; she would not have stood by him or by any one else in a like case; and, what there was of good in George Sauls, she had never been the woman to find out; but he did accede to them, greatly to her wonder.

George was not in love with her, he had not a shred of respect for her; but, when she turned to him in direst need, the something not ign.o.ble in him responded and he _did_ not desert her. To say that that loathsome disease had no terrors for him would scarcely be true; but he had a const.i.tutional dislike to running away, and he faced the terrors; which, perhaps, on the whole, might be counted very much to his credit.

Lydia died after a week's illness. "I don't want to live with marks on my face," she had said. "What should I do, grown ugly? but you have been better than most men would have been." She had no qualms about her soul, and no longing for her mother. She had no violent affection for any one or anything, except, perhaps, her own beautiful body, which had been spoilt by the marks on it. If George Sauls had been a poor man, he would not have been troubled with her.