LOVE'S MESSENGER.
The first week of December had not gone by, and already the winter had
set in. Mr. Pryor, as he walked from the vicarage up the lonely road to
Mitchelhurst Place, said to himself that it was a most unpleasant
afternoon. Of his own free will he would not have left his fireside, but
Destiny had turned him out, and he went feebly and heavily along the
iron road, feeling as if Nature were in a mood of freezing malice and
took pleasure in his sufferings. The air was still, yet it came very
keenly to his pallid face, his feet were cold, the hand that held his
umbrella was remarkably cold, a red-edged manual of prayers and
devotional readings, tucked under his left arm, showed a tendency to
slip, and altogether Mr. Pryor had a half-numbed sense that it was not
fair that any one should want him in such weather.
The sky was grey, a chilly fog narrowed the horizon, and all the hedges
and boughs in the little frozen landscape were covered with hoarfrost.
It was like a dream of a dead spring. Every little clump of trees was an
orchard, white with sterile blossoming, spectral flowers which would
vanish as suddenly as they had come. Every sound was deadened, till it
was almost startling to come upon a man at work by the wayside, lopping
hoary branches from the hedge, and flinging them down, with all their
delicate tangle of white sprays, upon the frosted grass. It was a grim
task to be the only sign of energy in that ghostlike world; such a task
as in an old picture Death himself might have undertaken. Happily,
however, for good Mr. Pryor's nerves, it was the face of an ordinary
flesh and blood labourer, with the breath steaming from his gaping
mouth, that was lifted as he went by.
The vicar crept, shivering, up the avenue to the house, which was more
than ever like a great white tomb. He asked the servant who admitted him
how Mr. Hayes was that afternoon.
"Much the same, thank you, sir," said the woman, showing him into the
yellow drawing-room, and putting a piece of wood on the fire, "I'll tell
Miss Strange you are here."
He stood miserably on the rug, looking down into the fender, and
squeezing his red-edged book under his arm, till at the sound of the
opening door he turned and saw Barbara. The girl came forward quickly,
and touched the fumbling fingers which he held out, as she uttered a
word of greeting.
"Mr. Hayes is much the same, they tell me," said the clergyman in a
melancholy voice.
"Yes," said Barbara, "I suppose there isn't any difference. But I think
anyhow he isn't any worse. Mamma is with him, and he was taking some
beef-tea just now"--Mr. Pryor nodded grave approval of the
beef-tea--"but he'll be very glad to see you in a few minutes. Won't you
sit down?"
He sat down, nursing the book, which had a narrow ribbon hanging out of
it.
"I hope Mrs. Strange is pretty well--as well as can be expected?" he
said, after a pause. "Not over-fatigued, I trust?"
"Oh, no; I don't think so," the girl replied. "Mamma seems very well."
"Ah, quite so. She bears up, she bears up. Well, that is what we must
all try to do--to bear up. It is the only thing."
"Yes," said Barbara. She was not quite sure that she ought to have said
that her mother seemed very well. "Of course it is a trying time," she
added, by way of softening the possibly indiscreet admission.
"Certainly, certainly--very trying for you both," Mr. Pryor agreed. Yet
even to his dull eyes it was apparent that this very trying time had not
dimmed the bright face opposite. There was a peculiar radiance and
warmth of youth about Barbara that afternoon, a glow of life which
forced itself on his perception. She did not smile, she was very quiet,
and yet it seemed as if some new delight, some unspoken hope, had
awakened within her, quickening and kindling her to the very
finger-tips. She sat demurely in her low chair, with her face turned
towards the window, but there was a soft flame of colour on her cheek,
and a light in her eyes when she lifted her drooping lashes. In that
great, cold house, through which the shadow of death was creeping, she
was the incarnation of life and promise, a curious contrast to her
surroundings. It would hardly have seemed stranger if suddenly, in the
desolate world without, one had come on a burning bush of pomegranate
flowers among the cold frost-blossoms of the Mitchelhurst hedges.
Mr. Pryor felt something of all this. He did not quite like it. Of
course he did not want to see the girl haggard and weary, but he was so
chilly, as he sat there by the fireside with his book on his knee, that
it seemed to him as if the swift, light pulsations of youth were hardly
proper. He would have been more at his ease with Barbara if she had had
a slight toothache, or a cold in her head. He felt it his duty to
depress her a little, quietly, as she sat there.
"The hour of Death's approach is a very solemn one, even for the
bystanders," Mr. Pryor began, after a moment's consideration.
Barbara said, "Yes it was," with an almost disconcerting readiness.
"Yes, yes, and we should endeavour to profit by it. We should spend it,
not only in regrets for those who are about to be taken from us, but in
thoughts of the future."
Barbara's red lips parted in another "Yes." The future--she was thinking
of it. It was easier to think of it than of the old man who was dying.
"Of the future," Mr. Pryor continued, caressing the smooth leather of
his book with his ungloved hand, and softly pulling the pendent ribbon,
"of the time when we shall be lying--yes, yes, each one of us--as our
friend is now." He glanced up at the ceiling, to indicate that he meant
Mr. Hayes, taking his beef-tea in the bed-room on the first floor.
The girl said nothing, but looked meditatively at the folds of her
dress, as if she were in church. It would have been pleasanter if Mr.
Pryor had brought a funeral sermon out of his table drawer, and could
have gone on without these embarrassing pauses.
"When our hour is at hand," he said at last, "as--as it must be one of
these days. How shall we feel then, Miss Strange?"
Barbara didn't know.
"No," said the vicar, "we don't know. But we must think--we must think.
Try to picture yourself in your uncle's position--what would your life
look to you if you were lying there now?"
She looked up with a sudden startled flash. "I haven't had my life--it
would only look like a beginning," she said with a vision as of a
rose-garlanded doorway to a vault. "If I were going to die directly I
couldn't feel like Uncle Hayes."
The passionate speech awoke the clergyman's instinct of assent. "No,
no," he said, "certainly not. Certainly not." At that moment a message
came: "Would Mr. Pryor kindly step up-stairs?" and he went, not
altogether sorry to bring his little discourse to a close.
Barbara, left to herself, sat gazing at the window, till at last the
hinted smile, which had troubled her companion, betrayed itself in a
tender, changeful curve. "Adrian!" she said softly, under her breath.
"Oh, how could I? How could I? Adrian! and I thought you didn't care!"
She was restless with happiness. She sprang up, and walked to and fro,
too glad at heart to complain of the walls that held her, and yet
feeling that she needed air and freedom for her joy. She leaned against
the window, and looked out at the wintry world, murmuring Adrian's name
against the chilly pane. There was no voice to give her back her tender
speech, yet she hardly missed it. No praise is so sweet to a woman as
the reproaches she heaps upon herself for an unjust suspicion of her
lover. To defend him to others is a mixture of joy and pain, but to feel
that she has wronged him, and that to trust him is safer than to trust
her doubts, is a passionate delight.
This joy had come to Barbara that very morning. She had been sitting in
her uncle's room, reading a novel by the fireside, while the old man
slept, as she thought. She softly turned page after page till a feeble
voice broke the silence. "Where's your mamma?" said Mr. Hayes.
"Down-stairs, writing letters. Do you want her?" And Barbara stood ready
to go.
"No, I don't want her. Writing her daily bulletins, eh? Well, well.
What's the time? You haven't given me my medicine."
"It's very nearly time," said Barbara, with a glance at the clock.
There was a little clinking of bottle and glass, and then she came to
the bedside, and stood looking down at the wrinkled, fallen face among
the pillows. "Can I help you?" she asked.
"Wait a bit, can't you?" said the old man.
She waited, looking aside, yet watching for the slightest movement on
his part. Her soft young fingers closed round the half-filled glass, and
his dim eyes rested on them. Presently he raised himself with an effort,
and the girl put another pillow behind him. He stretched out a
trembling, dingy-white hand, carried the glass to his lips a little
uncertainly, and emptied it.
She set it down. "Shall I take away that pillow?" she asked.
"No--wait."
Barbara, after a minute, shifted her position, and stood by the carved
post at the foot of the bed, while her thoughts went back to her novel.
She was not heartless, she was only young. Her uncle had never been very
much to her, and she found it as difficult to concentrate her mind on
this melancholy business of sickness and dissolution as if it were a
sermon. And yet she did sincerely desire to behave properly, and to feel
properly, too, if it could be managed.
The little old man rested awhile, sitting up in his bed. He perceived
that the girl's thoughts were far away. He could keep her standing there
as long as he pleased, a motionless figure against the faded green
curtains, but he could not narrow her world to his sick-room. Perhaps
for that very reason he felt a desire to awaken her from her reverie.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Nineteen."
The answer was given with a lifting of her long lashes. She had not
expected any question about herself.
"Nineteen?"
"Yes. At least I shall be nineteen next month."
A month more or less made little difference to Barbara.
"As much as that?" he said. "Barbara, perhaps I ought to say something
before I go."
Her attention was effectually aroused, and her brilliant gaze rested on
the dull, waxen mask before her. But after a moment his eyes fell away
from hers.
"I thought I did right," he said.
"Yes?" Barbara questioned.
"That young man who came here--what was his name?"
"Mr. Harding."
"No, no, no!" he cried irritably. "No! What made you think of him? The
first one?"
"Mr. Scarlett?"
He nodded.
"But it doesn't matter," he said. "If you were thinking of the other one
it doesn't matter about Scarlett."
"What about him?"
"He wanted to speak to you before he went away, and I told him to wait.
Better to wait--you were so young, you know."
"He _did_ want to speak to me!" the girl exclaimed under her breath.
"Plenty of time," said Mr. Hayes. "He's young too. I told him he could
come again to Mitchelhurst if he felt the same. I thought it was best--I
thought it was best," he repeated, trying to drown a faint
consciousness that to have parted with Barbara would have upset all his
arrangements.
"I'm sure you did," she answered soothingly.
"I know your mother would say it was best--wouldn't she? Besides, I
didn't do any harm, since you were thinking of the other one."
"He was here last," said Barbara.
"So he was," the sick man answered, with a flash of his old briskness.
"And girls soon forget."
Barbara said nothing. What was the good of protestations? She would
never utter a word against Reynold Harding--never. And what could she
say about Adrian Scarlett? She had not owned to herself that she cared
for him. If she did--and she was conscious of strong pulsations, which
flushed her face, and filled her veins with tingling warmth--the more
reason for silence. She laid a hand on the carved foliage of the post,
and faced the dim figure propped in the bed. There was something
grotesquely feeble about the little man's attitude. His face,
discoloured and pale, drooped in the greenish shadow of the hangings,
his unshaven chin rested on his breast, his parchment hands lay in a
little nerveless heap on the counterpane before him. One would have said
that he was set up in sport, as children set up dolls and nine-pins, on
purpose to be knocked over.
"Hadn't you better lie down?" said Barbara, after considering him for a
while. She wanted to speak tenderly, for the sake of the strange new
gladness which was throbbing at her heart; yet the facts of sickness and
hopeless decay had never seemed so distasteful. When he assented, she
put her arm about him with the utmost care, but she could hardly help
shrinking from the clutch of his chilly fingers on her wrist.
"Rothwells are a bad lot," he said, "bad and poor. Scarlett would be a
better match. Some of his people have money."
The habit of deference to her Uncle Hayes prevented her from resenting
this speech.
"Never mind about that, please, uncle," she said gently.
"Good family, too," said Mr. Hayes, indistinctly to himself. "I did it
for the best, as your mamma would see."
"Never mind about mamma, Uncle Hayes," said the girl again. "I'm sure
you had better rest a little."
And when he acquiesced she went back to her novel, which was all about
Adrian Scarlett. After all, he had not gone off without a thought of
her--he had _not_ slighted her. Perhaps she was too young, and at any
rate she could not be angry with her uncle since he had told her of
Adrian's love. She had a right to think of him as Adrian, surely, if he
loved her. So he had been sent away--where? Perhaps he would see
somebody else, somebody better and more beautiful, and she would be
forgotten. Well!--Barbara's eyes were fixed intently on the page--even
if he did forget her, it might break her heart, but she need not be
ashamed that she had thought of him, since she held the happy certainty
that he had thought of her. Happen what might in his after life, he had
loved her once--he had!--he had! And she had feared that he had only
laughed at her, she had thought that he might be heartless--Oh how was
it possible that she could have been so wickedly unjust! She deserved
that he should never come back to her.
It was an incongruous business altogether. It was as if a breath from a
burial vault had quickened the faint flame in Barbara's heart to sudden
splendour, for if old Hayes had actually been the mummy he very much
resembled, he could not have been more remote from any comprehension of
the message which he had delivered. His lips had relaxed in utter
feebleness, and the secret had escaped. He did not see the look which
flashed into the girl's eyes, and when Mrs. Strange, who might have been
more observant, came to take her place by the bedside, Barbara stole
softly away, hanging her head in the consciousness of those flushed
cheeks, which seemed too like holiday wear for such a melancholy time.
Her mother might have been surprised, for she had been a little uneasy,
fancying that the girl looked sad. Barbara was but a young thing, and
had been left too long shut up with but dismal company.
And, if Mrs. Strange had only known it, the poor little girl had been
her own most dismal company. From the time that Reynold Harding went
away she had been restless, frightened, and miserable. When the
exaltation of that evening had passed, a sudden terror at the thought of
her own daring overtook her. She was not only afraid of her uncle's
anger, but doubtful whether she had not really committed an unpardonable
sin against the social law. When she hurried to Harding with the
letters, she had somehow vaguely believed that he would shelter her,
that he would stand by her if she were blamed. And when he had played
with her, refused to trust her, and vanished into the night with a
mocking smile, leaving her utterly alone, she had felt absurdly
desolate. At first she had waited, in sickening apprehension, for her
uncle to hear of her visit to Mr. Harding. Fate, however, seemed
whimsically inclined to protect her. First there was the storm of rain
which prevented a meeting with all the gossips of Mitchelhurst at the
Penny Reading. Then, a day or two later, came Mr. Hayes' accident--a
mere slip on the stairs, it was supposed, till the doctor hinted at
something in the nature of a fit. Barbara saw that detection was
postponed, but still she felt that the sword hung over her head, and
night after night she tossed in an agony of doubt. Had she really done
anything very dreadful? She recalled Mr. Harding's ambiguous words and
glances--did they mean that he thought lightly of a girl who would go to
him as she had done? Over and over again she asked the useless
questions--Did they mean that?--Did they not?--- What _did_ they mean?
And leaving his meaning out of the matter, what would other people say?
Suppose she went and told them--ah! but how and what would she tell
them? She might say, "I found I hadn't posted Mr. Harding's letters, so
I took them to him at once: wasn't that the best thing to do?" How right
and reasonable it sounded! But if she said, "I went secretly to a man's
lodgings at night----" at the mere thought a blush passed over her like
a scorching wave of fire. What would her mother say?
Even in her misery she was childish enough to wince at the thought of
her sisters at home. She had been proud to be mistress of a house while
they were still in the school-room, and the idea that she had been
wanting in dignity, perhaps even in modesty, and that she might be
ostentatiously controlled and watched, by way of punishment, was
intolerable to her. To be humiliated before Louisa and Hetty--how could
she endure it? They were not ill-natured, but they had a little resented
her advancement, and Barbara, as she lay in her great over-shadowing
bed, could fancy all the out-spoken comments and questionings in the
roomy attic where the three used to sleep. She did not want to go back
to the Devonshire vicarage, and yet Mitchelhurst was fast becoming
hateful to her. The pictures on the walls gazed at her with Reynold's
eyes, his presence haunted the house from which he had been banished.
What was the wrong that she had done him? She did not know, and the
uncertainty seemed to mock her as he had mocked her that night. The poor
child said to herself quite seriously that he had taken away all her
youth and happiness. She fancied that she felt old and weary as the days
went by, fretting her simple heart with unacknowledged fear.
And now suddenly came the message of Adrian's love, and lifted her above
all her dreary little troubles. What did it matter that it was uttered
by those dry, bloodless lips, which stumbled over the blissful words?
What did anything matter since Adrian cared for her, and life was all to
come? Why had she tormented herself about Reynold Harding! _Reynold
Harding!_ He was utterly insignificant, he was nobody! She could tell
Adrian about that expedition of hers, it was so unimportant, so
trivial, that he could not be jealous; he could not mind. Adrian's
jealousy! There was something delightful, even in that terrible
possibility. But he would not be jealous, everything was warm, and glad,
and full of sunshine when Adrian was there.
She resented Mr. Pryor's professional allusions to the uncertainty of
life. There are moments so perfect that they ought not to be degraded by
thoughts of disease and death, ought not to be measured or weighed in
any way whatever. Barbara felt this, and she thrust aside the
clergyman's lecture as soon as he left the room. Let him talk of such
things to Uncle Hayes. As for her, she lingered at the window, thinking
of her newly-found happiness, while she gazed at the hoary fields, with
their black boundaries of railing or leafless hedge, till a faint pink
flush crept over the pale sky, as if it were softly suffused with her
overflowing joy. Mitchelhurst Place, of which Harding had dreamed so
tenderly a few months earlier, as a home for himself and his love, was
to the eager girl at that moment only a charnel-house, full of death and
clinging memories, from which she panted to escape. It was true that she
had first met Adrian Scarlett there, but she had the whole world in
which to meet him again. "And he will always know where to find me," she
said to herself with a touch of practical common sense in the midst of
her rapture. "He can look out papa's name in the Clergy List, any day."