Phantom Fortune Part 26

One afternoon, when they had all three walked to Easedale Tarn, and were coming back by the side of the force, picking their way among the grey stones and the narrow threads of silvery water, it suddenly occurred to Hammond to ask Mary about that queer old man he had seen on the Fell nearly a fortnight before. He had often thought of making the inquiry when he was away from Mary, but had always forgotten the thing when he was with her. Indeed, Mary had a wonderful knack of making him forget everything but herself.

'You seem to know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. 'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, a very old man?'

'Old Sam Barlow,' exclaimed Mary; 'why, of course I know him.'

She said it as if he were a near relative, and the question palpably absurd.

'He is an old man, a hundred, at least, I should think,' said Hammond.

'Poor old Sam, not much on the wrong side of eighty. I go to see him every week, and take him his week's tobacco, poor old dear. It is his only comfort.'

'Is it?' asked Hammond. 'I should have doubted his having so humanising a taste as tobacco. He looks too evil a creature ever to have yielded to the softening influence of a pipe.'

'An evil creature! What, old Sam? Why he is the most genial old thing, and as cheery--loves to hear the newspaper read to him--the murders and railway accidents. He doesn't care for politics. Everybody likes old Sam Barlow.'

'I fancy the Grasmere idea of reverend and amiable age must be strictly local. I can only say that I never saw a more unholy countenance.'

'You must have been dreaming when you saw him,' said Mary. 'Where did you meet him?'

'On the Fell, about a quarter of a mile from the shrubbery gate.'

'_Did_ you? I shouldn't have thought he could have got so far. I've a good mind to take you to see him, this very afternoon, before we go home.'

'Do,' exclaimed Hammond, 'I should like it immensely. I thought him a hateful-looking old person; but there was something so thoroughly uncanny about him that he exercised an absolute fascination upon me: he magnetised me, I think, as the green-eyed cat magnetises the bird. I have been positively longing to see him again. He is a kind of human monster, and I hope some one will have a big bottle made ready for him and preserve him in spirits when he dies.'

'What a horrid idea! No, sir, dear old Barlow shall lie beside the Rotha, under the trees Wordsworth planted. He is such a man as Wordsworth would have loved.'

Mr. Hammond shrugged his shoulders, and said no more. Mary's little vehement ways, her enthusiasm, her love of that valley, which might be called her native place, albeit her eyes had opened upon heaven's light far away, her humility, were all very delightful in their way. She was not a perfect beauty, like Lesbia; but she was a fresh, pure-minded English girl, frank as the day, and if he had had a brother he would have recommended that brother to choose just such a girl for his wife.

Mr. Samuel Barlow occupied a little old cottage, which seemed to consist chiefly of a gable end and a chimney stack, in that cl.u.s.ter of dwellings behind St. Oswald's church, which was once known as the Kirk Town.

Visitors went downstairs to get to Mr. Barlow's ground-floor, for the influence of time and advancing civilisation had raised the pathway in front of Mr. Barlow's cottage until his parlour had become of a cellar-like aspect. Yet it was a very nice little parlour when one got down to it, and it enjoyed winter and summer a perpetual twilight, since the light that crept through the leaded cas.e.m.e.nt was tempered by a screen of flowerpots, which were old Barlow's particular care. There were no finer geraniums in all Grasmere than Barlow's, no bigger carnations or picotees, asters or arums.

It was about five o'clock in the March afternoon, when Mary ushered John Hammond into Mr. Barlow's dwelling, and, in the dim glow of a cheery little fire and the faint light that filtered through the screen of geranium leaves, the visitor looked for a moment or so doubtfully at the owner of the cottage. But only for a moment. Those bright blue eyes and apple cheeks, that benevolent expression, bore no likeness to the strange old man he had seen on the Fell. Mr. Barlow was toothless and nut-cracker like of outline; he was thin and shrunken, and bent with the burden of long years, but his healthy visage had none of those deep lines, those cross markings and hollows which made the pallid countenance of that other old man as ghastly as would be the abstract idea of life's last stage embodied by the bitter pencil of a Hogarth.

'I have brought a gentleman from London to see you, Sam,' said Mary. 'He fancied he met you on the Fell the other morning.'

Barlow rose and quavered a cheery welcome, but protested against the idea of his having got so far as the Fell.

'With my blessed rheumatics, you know it isn't in me, Lady Mary. I shall never get no further than the churchyard; but I likes to sit on the wall hard by Wordsworth's tomb in a warm afternoon, and to see the folks pa.s.s over the bridge; and I can potter about looking after my flowers, I can.

But it would be a dull life, now the poor old missus is gone and the bairns all out at service, if it wasn't for some one dropping in to have a chat, or read me a bit of the news sometimes. And there isn't anybody in Grasmere, gentle or simple, that's kinder to me than you, Lady Mary.

Lord bless you, I do look forward to my newspaper. Any more of them dreadful smashes?'

'No, Sam, thank Heaven, there have been no railway accidents.'

'Ah, we shall have 'em in August and September,' said the old man, cheerily. 'They're bound to come then. There's a time for all things, as Solomon says. When the season comes t'smashes all coom. And no more of these mysterious murders, I suppose, which baffle t'police and keep me awake o' nights thinking of 'em.'

'Surely you do not take delight in murder, Mr. Barlow?' said Hammond.

'No, sir, I do not wish my fellow-creatures to mak' awa' wi' each other; but if there is a murder going in the papers I like to get the benefit of it. I like to sit in front of my fire of an evening and wonder about it while I smoke my pipe, and fancy I can see the murderer hiding in a garret in an out-of-the-way alley, or as a stowaway on board a gert ship, or as a miner deep down in a coalpit, and never thinking that even there t'police can track him. Did you ever hear tell o' Mr. de Quincey, sir?'

'I believe I have read every line he ever wrote.'

'Ah, you should have heard him talk about murders. It would have made you dream queer dreams, just as he did. He lived for years in the white cottage that Wordsworth once lived in, just behind the street yonder--a nice, neat, lile gentleman, in a houseful of books. I've had many a talk with him when I was a young man.'

'And how old may you he now, Mr. Barlow?'

'Getting on for eighty four, sir.'

'But you are not the oldest man in Grasmere, I should say, by twenty years?'

'I don't think there's many much older than me, sir.'

'The man I saw on the Fell looked at least a hundred. I wish you could tell me who he is; I feel a morbid curiosity about him.'

He went on to describe the old man in the grey coat, as minutely as he could, dwelling on every characteristic of that singular-looking old person; but Samuel Barlow could not identify the description with any one in Grasmere. Yet a man of that age, seen walking on the hill-side at eight in the morning, could hardly have come from far afield.

CHAPTER XX.

LADY MAULEVRIER'S LETTER-BAG.

Although Maulevrier had a.s.sured his grandmother that John Hammond would take flight at the first warning of Lesbia's return, Lady Maulevrier's dread of any meeting between her granddaughter and that ineligible lover determined her in making such arrangements as should banish Lesbia from Fellside, so long as there seemed the slightest danger of such a meeting. She knew that Lesbia had loved her fortuneless suitor; and she did not know that the wound was cured, even by a season in the little-great world of Cannes. Now that she, the ruler of that household, was a helpless captive in her own apartments, she felt that Lesbia at Fellside would be her own mistress, and hemmed round with the dangers that beset richly-dowered beauty and inexperienced youth.

John Hammond might be playing a very deep game, perhaps a.s.sisted by Maulevrier. He might ostensibly leave Fellside before Lesbia's return, yet lurk in the neighbourhood, and contrive to meet her every day. If Maulevrier encouraged this folly, they might be married and over the border, before her ladyship--fettered, impotent as she was--could interfere.

Lady Maulevrier felt that Georgie Kirkbank was her strong rock. So long as Lesbia was under that astute veteran's wing there could be no danger.

In that embodied essence of worldliness and diplomacy, there was an ever-present defence from all temptations that spring from romance and youthful impulses. It was a bitter thing, perhaps, to steep a young and pure soul in such an atmosphere, to harden a fresh young nature in the fiery crucible of fashionable life; but Lady Maulevrier believed that the end would sanctify the means. Lesbia, once married to a worthy man, such a man as Lord Hartfield, for instance, would soon rise to a higher level than that Belgravian swamp over which the malarian vapours of falsehood, and slander, and self-seeking, and prurient imaginings hang dense and thick. She would rise to the loftier table-land of that really great world which governs and admonishes the ruck of mankind by examples of n.o.ble deeds and n.o.ble thoughts; the world of statesmen, and soldiers, and thinkers, and reformers; the salt wherewithal society is salted.

But while Lesbia was treading the tortuous mazes of fashion, it was well for her to be guided and guarded by such an old campaigner as Lady Kirkbank, a woman who, in the language of her friends, 'knew the ropes.'

Lesbia's last letter had been to the effect that she was to go back to London with the Kirkbanks directly after Easter, and that directly they arrived she would set off with her maid for Fellside, to spend a week or a fortnight with her dearest grandmother, before going back to Arlington Street for the May campaign.

'And then, dearest, I hope you will make up your mind to spend the season in London,' wrote Lesbia. 'I shall expect to hear that you have secured Lord Porlock's house. How dreadfully slow your poor dear hand is to recover! I am afraid Horton is not treating the case cleverly. Why do you not send for Mr. Erichsen? It is a shock to my nerves every time I receive a letter in Mary's masculine hand, instead of in your lovely Italian penmanship. Strange--isn't it?--how much better the women of your time write than the girls of the present day! Lady Kirkbank receives letters from stylish girls in a hand that would disgrace a housemaid.'

Lady Maulevrier allowed a post to go by before she answered this letter, while she deliberated upon the best and wisest manner of arranging her granddaughter's future. It was an agony to her not to be able to write with her own hand, to be obliged to so shape every sentence that Mary might learn nothing which she ought not to know. It was impossible with such an amanuensis to write confidentially to Lady Kirkbank. The letters to Lesbia were of less consequence; for Lesbia, albeit so intensely beloved, was not in her grandmother's confidence, least of all about those schemes and dreams which concerned her own fate.

However, the letters had to be written, so Mary was told to open her desk and begin.

The letter to Lesbia ran thus:--

'My dearest Child,

'This is a world in which our brightest day-dreams generally end in mere dreaming. For years past I have cherished the hope of presenting you to your sovereign, to whom I was presented six and forty years ago, when she was so fair and girlish a creature that she seemed to me more like a queen in a fairy tale than the actual ruler of a great country. I have beguiled my monotonous days with thoughts of the time when I should return to the great world, full of pride and delight in showing old friends what a sweet flower I had reared in my mountain home; but, alas, Lesbia, it may not be.

'Fate has willed otherwise. The maimed hand does not recover, although Horton is very clever, and thoroughly understands my case.

I am not ill, I am not in danger; so you need feel no anxiety about me; but I am a cripple; and I am likely to remain a cripple for months; so the idea of a London season this year is hopeless.