There & Back Part 36

"You shall to-morrow," said Barbara.

"No; I must now, please! I must tell you about Richard!"

"Have you known him a long time?"

"I call him Richard," said Alice, "because my brother does. They were at school together. But it is only of late--not a year ago, that I began to know him. He came to see Arthur once, and then I went with Arthur to see him and his people. But his mother behaved very strangely to me, and asked me a great many questions that I thought she had no business to ask me. Before that, I had noticed that she kept looking from Arthur to Richard, and from Richard to Arthur, in the oddest way; I couldn't make it out. Then she asked me to go to her bedroom with her, and there she told me. She was very rough to me, I thought, but I must say the tears were in her own eyes! She said she could _not_ have Richard keeping company with us, for she knew what my mother was, and who my father was, and we were not respectable people, and it would never do. If she heard of Richard going to our house once again, she would have to do something we shouldn't like. Then she cried quite, and said she was sorry to hurt me, for I seemed a good girl, and it wasn't my fault, but she couldn't help it; the thing would be a mischief. And there she stopped as if she had said too much already. You may be sure I thought myself ill-used, and Arthur worse; for we both liked Richard, though my mother didn't think him at all our equal, or fit to be a companion to Arthur; for Arthur was a clerk, while Richard worked with his hands. Arthur said he worked with his hands too, and turned out far poorer work than Richard--stupid figures instead of beautiful books; and I said I worked with my needle quite as hard as Richard with his tools; but it had no effect on my mother: her ways of looking at things are not the same as ours, because she was born a lady. Why don't a lady _have_ ladies, Barbara?"

"Never you mind, Alice! Every good woman will be a lady one day--I am sure of that! It was cruel to treat you so! How anybody belonging to Richard could do it, I can't think; he's so gentle and good himself!"

"He's the kindest and best of--of men, and I love him," said Alice earnestly. "But I must tell you, Barbara--I must make you understand that I have a right to love him. When I told poor Arthur, as we went home that night, that he wasn't to see any more of Richard, he could not help crying. I saw it, though he tried to hide it. Of course I didn't let him know I saw him cry. Men are ashamed of crying. I ain't a bit.

For Richard was the only schoolfellow ever was a friend to Artie. He once fought a big fellow that used to torment him! By the time we got home, I was boiling over with rage, and told mamma all about it. Angry as I was, her anger frightened mine out of me. 'The insolent woman!' she cried. 'But I'll soon have a rod in pickle for her! I'll have my revenge of her--that you shall soon see! My children weren't good enough for her tradesman-fellow, weren't they! She said that, did she? She ain't the only one has got eyes in her head! Didn't you see me look at him as sharp as she did at you? If ever face told tale without meaning to tell it, that's the face of the young man you call Richard! He's a Lestrange, as sure's there's a G.o.d in heaven! He's got the mark as plain as sir Wilton himself!--not a feature the same, I grant, but Lestrange is writ in every one of them! I'll take my oath who was _his_ father!--And there she goes as mim and as prim--!' 'No, mamma,' I said, 'that she does not.

She looks as fierce as a lioness!' I said. 'What's her name?' asked my mother. 'Tuke,' I answered. 'Was there ever such a name!' she cried.

'It's fitter for a dog than a human being! But it's good enough for her anyway. What was her maiden name? Who was she? There's the point!' 'But if what you suspect be true, mamma,' I said, 'then she had good reason for wishing us parted!' 'She ought to have come to me about it!' said my mother. 'She ought to have left it to me to say what should be done! I'm not married to a dirty tradesman!' I'm not telling you exactly what she said, miss, because when she loses her temper, poor mamma don't always speak quite like a lady, though of course she _is_ one, all the same! I said no more, but I thought how kindly Richard always looked at me, and my heart grew big inside me to think that Artie and I had him for our own brother. n.o.body could touch that! He had notions I didn't like--for, do you know, Barbara, he believes we just go out like a candle that can never again be lighted any more. He thinks there's no life after this one! He can't have loved anybody much, I fear, to be able to think that!

You don't agree with him, I'm certain, miss! But I thought, if he was my brother, I might be able to help change his mind about it. I thought I would be so good to him that he wouldn't like me to die for ever and ever, and would come to see things differently. I had no friend, not one, you see, miss--Barbara, I mean--except Arthur, and he never has much to say about anything, though he's as true as steel; and I thought it would be bliss to have a man-friend--I mean a good man for a real friend, and I knew Richard would be that, though he was a brother! Most brothers are not friends to poor girls. I know three whose brothers get all they can out of them, and don't care how they have to slave for it, and then spend it on treats to other girls! But I was sure Richard was good, though he wasn't religious! So I said to mamma that, now we knew all about it, there could be no reason why we shouldn't see as much of each other as ever we liked, seeing Richard was our brother. But she paid no heed to me; she sat thinking and thinking; and I read in her face that she was not in a brown study, but trying to get at something.

It was many minutes before she spoke, but she did at last, and what she told us is my secret, Barbara! But I'm not bound to keep it from you, for I know you would not hurt Richard, and you have a right to know whatever I know, for you found my life and wrapped it up in love and gave it back to me, _dear_ Barbara!--It was not a pretty story for a mother to tell her children--and it's a sore grief not to be able to think _every_thing that's good of your mother; but it's all past now;--and it ain't our fault--is it, Barbara?"

"Your fault!" cried Barbara. "What do you mean?"

"People treat us as if it were."

"Never you mind. You've got a Father in heaven to see to that!"

"Thank you, Barbara! You make me so happy! Now I can tell you all!--'I've got it!' cried my mother. 'Bless my soul, what an a.s.s I was not to see through it at once! Now you just listen to me: sir Wilton was married before he married his present wife. He never thought of getting rid of me for the first one, you understand, for she wasn't a lady--though they do say she _was_ a handsome creature! She was that low, you wouldn't believe!--just n.o.body at all! Her father was--what do you think?--a country blacksmith! And though he had me, he _would_ marry her! Oh the men! the men! they are incomprehensible! It made me mad! To think he wouldn't marry me, and he would marry her, and I might have had him myself if I'd only been as hard-hearted and stood out as long! But the fact was, I was in love with your father! No one could help it, when he laid himself out to make you! I couldn't anyhow, though I tried hard.

But _she_ could! For all her beauty, she was that cold! ice was nothing to her! He told me so himself!--Well, when her time came, she died--never more than just saw the child, and died. I believe myself she died of fright; for sir Wilton told me he was the ugliest child ever came into this world! He must, said his father, have come straight from the devil, for no one else could have made him so ugly! Well, what must your father go and do next, but marry an earl's daughter!--n.o.body too good for him after the blacksmith's!--and within a month or so, what should his nurse do but walk off with the child! From that day to this, so far as ever I've heard, there's been no news of him. It's years and years that all the world has given him up for lost. Now, mark what I say: I feel morally certain that this Richard, as you call him, is that same child, and heir to all the Lestrange property! That woman, Tuke--what a name!--she's the nurse that carried him off; and who knows but the man married her for the chance of what the child's succession might bring them! They mean to tell the fellow, when the proper time comes, how they saved him from being murdered by his stepmother, and carried him off at the risk of their lives! Well they knew him for a pot of money! You may be certain they've got all the proofs safe! I hate the ugly devil! What right has he to come to an estate, and have my children looked down upon by Mrs. Bookbinder! I'll put a spoke in her wheel, though! I'll have one little finger in their pie! They shan't burn their mouths with it--no, not they!' I treasured every word my mother said--I was so glad all the while to think of Richard as the head of the family.

I could not help the feeling that I belonged to the family, for was not the same blood in Richard and in us? 'Alice,' my mother said, 'mark my words! That Richard, as you call him, is heir to the t.i.tle and estate!

But if you speak one word on the subject until I give you leave, to your Richard or to any live soul, I'll tear your tongue out--I will!--And you know well that what I say, I do!' I knew well that poor mamma very seldom did what she said, and I was not afraid of her; but I grew more and more afraid of doing anything to interfere with Richard's prospects.

I met him one night in Regent-street, a terrible, stormy night, and was so fluttered at seeing him, and so frightened lest I should let something out that might injure him, that I nearly killed myself by running against a lamp-post in my hurry to get away from him. But to be quite honest with you, Barbara, what I was most afraid of was, that he would go on falling in love with me; and that, when he found out what we were to each other, it would break his heart: I have heard of such a thing! For you see I durst not tell him! And besides, it mightn't be so, after all! So I had to be cruel to him! He must have thought me a brute!

And now for him to appear, far away from everywhere, just in time to save me from dying of cold and hunger--ain't it wonderful?"

But Barbara sat silent. It was her turn to sit thinking and thinking.

Why had the strange story come to her ears? There must be something for her to do in the next chapter of it!

"How much do you think Richard may know about the thing?" she asked.

"I don't believe he has a suspicion that he is anything but the son of the bookbinder," Alice answered. "If Mrs. Tuke did take him, I wonder why it really was. What do you think, Barbara? To me she does not look at all a designing woman. She may be a daring one: I could fancy her sticking at nothing she saw reason for! If she did it she _must_ have done it for the sake of the child!"

"It was much too great a risk to run for any advantage to herself,"

a.s.sented Barbara "Then they have had to provide for him all the time!

Have they any children of their own?"

"I don't think any."

"Then it is possible she took such a fancy to the child she was nursing, that she could not bear to part with him. I have heard of women like that, out with us.--But what are we to do, Alice? Is it right to leave the thing so? Ought we not to do anything?"

"I don't know; I can't tell a bit!" answered Alice. "I have thought and thought, lying alone in the night, but never could make up my mind. Supposing you were sure it was so, there is yet the danger of interfering with those who know all about him, and can do the best for him; and there's the danger of what my mother might be tempted to do the moment any one moved in the matter. To hasten the thing might spoil all!--Isn't it strange, Barbara, how much your love for your mother seems independent of her--her character?"

"I don't know;--yes, I think you are right. There is my mother, who has no guile in her, but is ready to burn you to ashes before you know what she is angry about! When you trust her, and go to her for help, she is ready to die for you. I love her with all my heart, but I can't say she's an exemplary woman. I don't think Mr. Wingfold--that's our clergyman--would say so either, though he professes quite an admiration of her."

Thereupon Barbara told Alice the story of her mother's behaviour in church, and how the parson had caught her.

"But n.o.body knows to this day," she concluded, "whether he intended so to catch her, or was only teaching his people by a parable, and she caught herself in its meshes. Caught she was, anyhow, and has never entered the church since! But she speaks very differently of the clergyman now."

"I feel greatly tempted sometimes," resumed Alice, "to let Richard know; for, surely, whatever be the projects of other people concerning him, a man has the right to know where he came from!"

"Yes," answered Barbara, "a man must have the right to know what other people know about him! And yet it would be a pity to ruin the plans of good people who had all the time been working and caring for him.

I wonder if he was in danger from lady Ann? I have heard out there of terrible things done to get one's way! She _is_ a death-like woman! His nurse might well be afraid of what his stepmother might do! I can quite fancy her making off with him in an agony of terror lost he should be poisoned, or smothered, or buried alive! But what if they sent him away, with a hint to the nurse that his absence might as well be permanent?

What if any search they made for him was nothing but a farce? I wish we knew what ground there is for inquiring whether he may not be the child that was lost--if indeed there was a child lost! I have not heard at the house any allusion to such an occurrence."

Much more talk ensued. The girls came to the conclusion that, for the present, they must do nothing that might let the secret out of their keeping. They must wait and watch: when the right thing grew plain, they would do it!

CHAPTER x.x.x. _BARBARA THINKS_.

Barbara rode home with strange things in her mind. Here was a romance brought to her very door! She was nowise hungry after romance, being of the essence of romance her own lovely self, in the simplicity which carried her direct to the heart of things. She was life in such relation to life, that her very existence was natural romance. How should there be any romance to equal that of pure being, of existence regarded and encountered face to face, of the voyage forth from the heart of life, and the toilsome journey, peril-beset, back to the home of that same heart of hearts! Here was one wrapt in a strange cloud: why should she not pa.s.s through the cloud, and join her fellow-traveller within?

Naturally then, from this time, the thoughts of Barbara rested not a little upon the person and undeveloped history of the man with whose being she was before linked by a greater indebtedness than any but herself could understand. Any enlargement of relation to the unseen world--the world, I mean, of thought and reality, region of recognizable relation, or force--is an immeasurably more precious gift than any costliest thing that a mortal may call his own until death, but must then pa.s.s on to another; and Richard had thrown open to Barbara the wealthiest regions of the literature of her race! She, on her part, had so much influenced him, that he had at least become far less overbearing in the presentment of his unbelief. For Barbara's idea, call it, if you will, her imagination of a G.o.d, was one with which none of those things for the hate's sake of which he had become the champion of a negation, held fellowship; and he carried himself toward it with so much courtesy that she had begun to hope he was slowly following her out of the desert places, where, little as she yet knew about G.o.d, she felt life impossible. The strongest bonds were thus in process of binding them; and Barbara's feeling toward Richard might very naturally develop into one or other of the million forms to which we give the common name of love.

As for Richard, he was already aware that his feeling toward Barbara could be no other than love; but he knew love as only the few know it who _give_ themselves, who cherish no hope, look for no response, dream of no claim. To expect any return of his devotion would have seemed to Richard the simplest absurdity. He did not even say to himself that the thing could not be. Not therefore, however, was he to escape suffering; the seeds of it were already sown in him plentifully, though its first leaves are not to be distinguished from those of other plants, and it sometimes takes long for the flower to appear. Barbara was lovely to Richard as the Luna of a heavenly sky, descending and talking with him, the Diana of a lower world, bound by her destiny, and without a choice, to return to her heaven, and be once more the far, unapproachable Luna.

She shone in his eyes like a lovely mysterious gem which he might wear for an hour, but which must presently, with its hundred-fold shadow and shine, pa.s.s from his keeping. He knew that love was his, but he did not know that he was Love's. He knew he loved Barbara, but he did not know that her exquisiteness was permeating his whole being with an endless possession. In truth no man good and free could have kept her soul out of his. She was so delicate, yet so strong; so steady, yet so ready; so original, yet so infinitely responsive--what could he do but throw his doors wide to her! what could he do but love her!

And now that Barbara believed she knew more about him than he did himself; now that the road appeared to lie open between them, would she escape falling in love with such a man whose hands of labour were mastered with a head full of understanding, and whose head was quickened by a heart in which dwelt an imagination at once receptive and productive? Could any true woman despise the love of such a workman?

From this time, for some weeks, they saw less of each other. Without knowing it, Barbara had, since the revelation of Alice, grown a little shy of Richard. It came of her truthfulness, mainly. As Dante felt ashamed of the discourteous advantage of alone possessing eyesight in the presence of the poor souls upon the second cornice of the purgatorial mountain, just so Barbara, without altogether defining to herself her feeling, regarded it as unfair to Richard, as indeed taking an advantage of him, to seek his company knowing about him more than she seemed to know. She felt even deceitful in appearing to know of him only what he chose to tell her, while in truth she more than suspected she knew of him what he did not know himself. She not only knew more than she seemed to know, but she knew more than Richard himself knew! At the same time she felt that she had no right to tell him what she almost believed; she ought first to be certain of it! If the conjecture were untrue, what harm might it not, believed by him, occasion both to him and his parents! Supposing it true, if those who had cherished him all his life did not tell him the fact, could it be right in her, coming by accident upon it, to acquaint him with it? Whether true or not, it must, if believed by him, change the whole tenor of his way--might perhaps, seeing he had no faith in G.o.d, destroy the very tone of his life; certainly, if untrue, it would cause endless grief to the parents whom to believe it would be to repudiate! Richard was indeed, she allowed, in less danger of being injured by the suggestion than any other young man she had known; but the risk, a great one, was there.

She did not now, therefore, go so often to Mortgrange. Every day she went out for her gallop--unattended, for, accustomed to the freedom of hundreds of leagues of wild country, the very notion of a groom behind her was hateful--and would often find herself making for some point whence she could see the chimneys of the house when the resolve of the day was one of abstinence, but that resolve she never broke. If it was not the drawing-room and Theodora, but the library and Richard; not the hideous flowers that happily never came alive from lady Ann's needle, but the old books reviving to autumnal beauty under the patient, healing touch of the craftsman, that ever drew her all the way, who can wonder!

Or who will blame her but such as lady Ann, whose kind, though slowly, yet surely vanishes--melting, like the grimy snow of our streets, before the sun of righteousness, and the coming kingdom.

Lady Ann and she were now on the same footing as before their misunderstanding, if indeed their whole relation was anything better than a misunderstanding; for what lady Ann knew of Barbara she misunderstood, and what she did not know of Barbara was the best of her; while what Barbara knew of lady Ann, she also misunderstood, and what she did not know of lady Ann was the worse of her. But Barbara had told lady Ann that she was sorry she had spoken to her as she had, and lady Ann had received the statement as an expected apology. Their quarrel had indeed given lady Ann no uneasiness. Daughter of one ancient house, and mother in another, a pillar of society, a live dignity with matronly back flat as any coffin-lid, she was of course in the right, and could afford to await the acknowledgment of wrong due and certain from an ill bred and ill educated chit of the colonies! For how could any one continue indifferent to the favour of lady Ann! She was incapable of perceiving the merit of Barbara's apology, or appreciating the sweetness from which it came. For the genial Barbara could not bear dissension.

She had seen enough of it to hate it. In just defence of a friend she would fight to the last, but in any matter of her own, she was ready to see, or even imagine herself in the wrong. Anger in its reaction always made her feel ill, which feeling she was apt to take for a reminder from conscience, when she would make haste to apologize.

Lady Ann's relations with Barbara were therefore not so much restored as unchanged. The elder lady neither sought nor avoided the younger, gave her always the same cold welcome and farewell, yet was as much pleased to see her as ever to see anybody. She regarded her as the merest of b.u.t.terflies, with pretty flutter and no stay--a creature of wings and nonsense, carried hither and thither by slightest puff of inclination: it was the judgment of a caterpillar upon a humming bird. There was more stuff in Barbara, with all her seeming volatility, than in a wilderness of lady Anns. The friendship between such a twain could hardly consist in more than the absence of active disapproval.

When Barbara went into the library, she would always greet Richard as if she had seen him but the day before, asking what piece of work he was at now, and showing an interest in it as genuine as her interest in himself. If there was anything in it she did not quite understand, he must there and then explain it. So eager was she to know, that he had not seldom to remind her that his minutes were not his own. But now and then he would lay aside his work for a time, never forgetting to make up for the interval afterward, and show her some process from beginning to end. For Barbara, finding now more time on her hands, had begun to try her repairing faculty on some of the old books in the house, hoping one day to surprise Richard with what she had done, and this led to her asking many and far-reaching questions in the art.

But Richard continued to give her his more important aid: he was still her master in literature, directing her what to read and what to meditate, and instructing her how to get her mind to rest on things. He was the most capable of teachers, for he followed simply the results of his own experience. Having prepared for her, with his father's help, a ma.n.u.script-book of hand-made paper, bound in levant morocco, the edges gilded in the rough, he made her copy certain poems into it, attending carefully to every point, and each minutest formality. He would not have her copy whatever she might choose; she could not yet, he said, choose to advantage; for she was of such a "keen clear joyance," that, happy over what was not the best, she would waste her love. But neither would he altogether choose for her: from among the poems he had already brought before her, she must take those she liked best! This, he said, would make her choice a real one, for it would take place between poems already known to her, with regard to which therefore she was in a position to determine her own preference. Then the unavoidable brooding over it caused in the copying of the one chosen, would make it grow in her mind, and a.s.sume something of the shape it had in the author's.

To Arthur Lestrange, who, notwithstanding the unlikeness between him and Barbara, and notwithstanding the frequent shocks his conventional propriety received from her divine liberty, had been for some time falling in love with her, these interviews, which he never hesitated to interrupt the moment he pleased, could hardly be agreeable. He never supposed that in them anything pa.s.sed of which he could have complained had he been the girl's affianced lover; but he did not relish the thought that she looked to the workman and not his employer for help in her studies. Nor was it consolation to him to be aware that he could no more give her what the workman gave her, than he could teach her his bookbinding--at which also the eager Barbara grasped.

At Wylder Hall no questions were ever asked as to how she had spent the day. Her mother, although now that her twin was gone, she loved her best in the world, never troubled her head about what she did with herself.

Although Barbara was now a little more at home than formerly, she and her mother were scarcely together an hour in a week except at meals. She thought Arthur Lestrange would make a good enough husband for Bab, and, having chanced on some sign that her husband cherished hopes of a loftier alliance, grew rather favourable to a match between them.

There was, however, a little betterment in Mrs. Wylder, and her ceasing to go to church was only one of the indications of it. She had in her a foundation of genuine simplicity, and was in essence a generous soul.

Any one who wondered at the combination of strange wild charm and honest strength in the daughter, would have wondered much less had he gained the least insight into what, beneath the ruin of earthquake and tornado, lay buried in the soul of her mother. The best of changes is slow in most natures, and the main question is, perhaps, whether it goes slowly because of feebleness and instability, and consequent frequency of relapse, or because of the root-nature, the thoroughness, and the magnitude of what has been initiated. But Mrs. Wylder was tropical: any real change in her would soon reach a point where it must become swift as well as comprehensive.

Since returning to the trammels of a more civilized life, Mr. Wylder had grown self-absorbed, and from a loud, lawless man had become a sombre, sometimes morose person. One great cause of the change, however, was, that the remaining twin, his favourite, had for some time shown signs of a failing const.i.tution. His increasing feebleness weighed heavily on his father. He had had a tutor ever since they came to England, but now they did little or no work together, spending their hours mostly in wandering about the grounds, and in fitful reading of books of any sort in which the boy could be led to take a pa.s.sing interest. Barbara's heart yearned after him, but he was greatly attached to his nurse, and did not care for Barbara.