JANUARY, 1883.
"_A train of human memories,
Crying: The past must never pass away._"
"_They depart and come no more,
Or come as phantoms and as ghosts._"
"When we are married," Adrian had said on that blissful day in Nutfield
Lane, "before we go abroad, before we go _anywhere_, we will run down to
Mitchelhurst for a day, won't we?"
Barbara had agreed to this, as she would have agreed to anything he had
suggested, and the plan had been discussed during the summer months,
till it seemed to have acquired a kind of separate existence, as if
Adrian's light whim had been transformed into Destiny. The bleak little
English village stood in the foreground of their radiant honeymoon
picture of Paris and the south. The straggling rows of cottages, the
cabbage plots, the churchyard where the damp earth, heavy with its
burden of death, rose high against the buttressed wall, the blacksmith's
forge with its fierce rush of sparks, the _Rothwell Arms_ with the sign
that swung above the door--were all strangely distinct against a bright
confusion of far-off stir and gaiety, white foreign streets, and skies
and waters of deepest blue. All their lives, if they pleased, for that
world beyond, but the one day, first, for Mitchelhurst.
Thus it happened that the careless fancy of April was fulfilled in
January. January is a month which exhibits most English scenery to
small advantage; and Mitchelhurst wore its dreariest aspect when a fly
from the county town drew up beneath the swaying sign. The little
holiday couple, stepping out of it into the midst of the universal
melancholy, looked somewhat out of place. Adrian and Barbara had that
radiant consciousness of having done something very remarkable indeed
which characterises newly-married pairs. They had the usual conviction
that an exceptional perfection in their union made it the very flower of
all love in all time. They had plucked this supremely delicate felicity,
and here they were, alighting with it from the shabby conveyance, and
standing in the prosaic dirt of Mitchelhurst Street. The sign gave a
long, discordant creak by way of greeting, and they started and looked
up.
"It wouldn't be worse for a little grease," the landlord allowed, in a
voice which was not much more melodious than the creaking sign.
Scarlett laughed, but he realised the whole scene with an amusement
which had a slight flavour of dismay. Was this the place which was to
give his honeymoon an added touch of poetry? How poor and ignoble the
houses were! How bare and bleak the outlines of the landscape! How low
the dull, grey roof of sky! How raw the January wind upon his cheek!
There was only a momentary pause. Barbara was looking down the
well-known road, the bullet-headed landlord scratched his unshaven chin,
and the disconsolate chickens came nearer and nearer, pecking aimlessly
among the puddles.
"I suppose you can give us some luncheon?" said the young man, and in
the interest of that important question it hardly seemed as if there had
been a pause at all.
The landlady arrived in a flurry, asking what they would please to
order, and Adrian and she kept up a brisk dialogue for the next five
minutes. Finally, it was decided that they should have chops. Perhaps
the discussion satisfied some traditional sense of what was the right
thing to do on arriving at an inn. There was nothing to have _but_ the
chops which Adrian had chosen, and he murmured something of "fixed fate,
free-will" under his moustache, as he crossed the road in the direction
of the church.
"In an hour," he said. "That will give us time to see the church and the
village. Then, after luncheon, we will go to the old Place, and the fly
shall call for us there, and take us back the short way. Will that do,
Barbara?"
Of course it would do; and when they reached the churchyard she bade him
wait a moment and she would get the key. The stony path to Mrs.
Spearman's cottage was curiously familiar--the broken palings, the pump,
the leafless alder-bush. The only difference was that it was Barbara
Scarlett--a different person--who was stepping over the rough pebbles.
She returned to Adrian, who was leaning against the gate-post.
"Mitchelhurst isn't very beautiful," he said, with an air of conviction.
"I thought I remembered it, but it has come upon me rather as a shock.
Somehow, I fancied--Barbara, is it possible that I have taken all the
beauty out of it--that it belongs to _me_ now, instead of to
Mitchelhurst? Can that be?"
She smiled her answer to the question, and then--
"I think it looks very much as usual," she said, gazing dispassionately
round. "Of course, it is prettier in the spring--or in the summer. It
was summer when you came, you know."
She had a vague recollection of having pleaded the cause of Mitchelhurst
at some other time in the same way, which troubled her a little.
"Yes, I know it was summer," said Adrian. "But still----"
"You mustn't say anything against Mitchelhurst," cried Barbara, swinging
her great key. "It isn't beautiful, but I feel as if I belonged to it,
somehow. It changed me, I can't tell why or how, but it did. After I
had been six months with Uncle Hayes, I went home for a fortnight in the
spring, and everything seemed so different. It was all so bright and
busy there, everybody talked so fast about little everyday things, and
the rooms were so small and crowded. I suppose it was because I had been
living with echoes and old pictures in that great house. Louisa and
Hetty were always having little secrets and jokes, there wasn't any harm
in them, you know, but I felt as if I could not care about them or laugh
at them, and yet some of them had been my jokes, before I went to
Mitchelhurst. And I could not make them understand why I cared about the
Rothwells and their pictures, when I had never known any of them."
"Louisa is a very nice girl," said Scarlett; "but if Mitchelhurst is all
the difference between you two, I am bound to say that I have a high
opinion of the place."
"Well, I don't know any other difference."
"Don't you?" and he smiled as he followed her along the churchyard path.
"No other difference? None?" He smiled, and yet he knew that the old
house had given a charm to Barbara when he saw her first. She had been
like a little damask rose, breathing and glowing against its grim walls.
He took the key from her hand, and turned it in the grating lock.
It seemed as if the very air were unchanged within, so heavy and still
it was. Barbara went forward, and her little footfalls were hardly
audible on the matting. Adrian, with his head high, sniffed in search of
a certain remembered perfume, as of mildewed hymn-books, found it, and
was content. It brought back to him, as only an odour could, his first
afternoon in the church, when he stood with one of those books in his
hand, and watched the Rothwell pew which held Barbara.
Having enjoyed his memory he faced round and inspected St. Michael, who
was as new, and neat, and radiant as ever. Adrian speculated how long it
would take to make him look a little less of a parvenu. "Would a couple
of centuries do him any good, I wonder?" he mused, half-aloud. "Not
much, I fear." The archangel returned his gaze with a permanent serenity
which seemed to imply that a century more or less was a matter of
indifference to his dragon and him.
Barbara had gone straight to the Rothwell monuments, where Scarlett
presently joined her. She did not take her eyes from the tombs, but she
stole a warm little hand under his arm. "I wish he could have been
buried here," she said in a low voice.
Reynold had said that he bequeathed her his memory, but now, in her
happiness, it seemed to be receding, fading, melting away. She gazed
helplessly in remorseful pain; he was only a chilly phantom; the very
fierceness of his passion was but a dying spark of fire. She could
recall his words, but they were dull and faint, like echoes nearly
spent. She could not recall their meaning--that was gone. The
declaration of love which had burst upon her like a great wave, filling
her with pity and wonder and fear, had ebbed to some unapproachable
distance, leaving her perplexed and half incredulous. Adrian, in flesh
and blood, was at her side, and she thrilled and glowed at his touch;
but when she thought of Reynold Harding she met only a vague emptiness.
He was not with the Rothwells in this quiet corner; he was not where she
had left him, lying back in his leathern chair. That room was swept and
garnished and cold, as he had said. No doubt they had put him in some
suburban cemetery, some wilderness of graves which to her was only a
name of dreariness. Standing where he had once stood in Mitchelhurst
Church, she only felt his absence, and she thought that she could have
recalled him better if he had been at rest beneath the dimly-lettered
pavement on which her eyes were fixed.
She was wrong. Memories cannot bear the outer air, or be laid away in
the cold earth; they can only live when they are hidden in our hearts,
and quickened by our pulses. Barbara could not keep the remembrance of
Reynold's love alive, with no love of her own to warm it. But in her
ignorance she said, wistfully--
"I wish he could have been buried here!" and then added in a quicker
tone, "I suppose you'll say it makes no difference where he lies."
"Indeed I sha'n't," said Adrian. "There may be beauty or ugliness,
fitness or unfitness, in one's last home as well as any other. Yes, I
wish he were here. But he was an unlucky fellow; it seemed as if he were
never to have anything he wanted, didn't it?"
"How do you mean--not anything?"
"Well, I think he would have liked Mitchelhurst Place."
"Yes," said Barbara, "he would, I know."
"And I am sure he would have liked the name of Rothwell. He was ashamed
of his father's people. That pork-butcher rankled."
"Oh!" said Barbara, still looking at the tombs, "did you know about
that? Did everybody know?" She spoke very softly, as if she thought the
dusty Rothwell, peering out of his marble curls, might overhear. "No, I
suppose he didn't like him."
"I know he didn't. Well, he hadn't the name he liked: he was saddled
with the pork-butcher's name. And then, worst of all, he couldn't have
you, Barbara!"
She turned upon him with parted lips and a startled face.
"Well," said Scarlett, "he couldn't, you know."
"Adrian! how did you know he cared for me? He did, but how did you know
it? I thought I ought not to tell anybody."
"I saw him once," said Scarlett, "and I found it out. I saw him
again--just passed him in the road, and we did not say a word. But I was
doubly sure, if that were possible. Poor devil! If he could have had his
way we should not have met in the lane that day, Barbara."
"I never dreamed of it," she said. "I thought he hated me."
"If a girl thinks a man hates her," said Adrian, "I suppose the chances
are he does one thing or the other."
"I never dreamed of it," she repeated, "never, till he told me at the
end. It could not be my fault, could it, as I did not know? But it
seemed so cruel--so hard! He had cared for me all the time, he said, and
nobody had ever cared for him."
"You mustn't be unhappy about that," said Scarlett, gently.
"But that's just it!" Barbara exclaimed, plaintively. "I ought to be
unhappy, and I can't be. Adrian! I've got all the happiness--a whole
world full of it--and he had none. I must be a heartless wretch to stand
here, and think of him, and be so glad because----"
Because her hand was on Adrian's arm.
"My darling," he said, in a tone half tenderly jesting, half earnest,
"you mustn't blame yourself for this. What had you to do with it? Do you
think you could have made that poor fellow happy?"
She looked at him perplexed.
"He loved me," she said.
"I know he did. You might have given him a momentary rapture if you had
loved him. But make him happy--not you! Not anybody, Barbara! How could
you look at his face, and not see that he carried his unhappiness about
with him? I verily believe that there was no place on the earth's
surface where he could have been at peace. Underneath it--perhaps!"
Barbara sighed, looking down at the stones.
"You people with consciences blame yourselves for things foredoomed,"
said Scarlett. "Harding's destiny was written before you were born, my
dear child. Besides," he added, in a lighter tone, "what would you do
with the pair of us?"
"That's true," she said, thoughtfully.
"Take my word for it," he went on, "if you want to do any good you
should give happiness to the people who are fit for it. You can brighten
my life--oh, my darling, you don't know how much! But his--never! If you
were an artist you might as well spend your best work in painting
angels and roses on the walls of the family vault down here as try it."
"Yes," said Barbara. Then, after a pause, she spoke with a kind of sob
in her voice, "But if one had thrown in just a flower before the door
was shut! I couldn't, you know, I hadn't anything to give him!"
Scarlett, by way of answer, laid his hand on hers. When you come face to
face with such an undoubted fact as the attraction a man's lonely
suffering has for a woman, argument is useless. It is an ache for which
self-devotion is the only relief. He perfectly understood the remorseful
workings of Barbara's tender heart.
"I couldn't do without you, my dear," he said.
"Oh, Adrian!--no!" she exclaimed. "That day when I said good-bye to
him, he fancied I was crying for him once, and even that was for you. I
was just thinking, if it had been you sitting there!"
"Foolish child! I'm not to be got rid of so easily."
"Don't talk of it!" said Barbara.
Her hand tightened on his arm, and she looked up at him, with a glance
that said plainly that the sun would drop out of her sky if any
mischance befell him.
"Well," she said, after a minute, more in her ordinary voice, as if she
were dismissing Reynold Harding from the conversation, "I'm glad you
know. I wanted you to know, but of course I could not tell you."
"It's wonderful with women," said Adrian, gliding easily into
generalities, "the things they _don't_ think it necessary to tell us,
taking it for granted that we know them, and we _can't_ know them and
_don't_ know them to our dying day--and the things they _do_ think it
necessary to tell us, with elaborate precautions and explanations--which
we knew perfectly well from the first."
"Oh, is that it?" Barbara replied, smartly. "Then I shall tell you
everything, and you can be surprised or not as you please."
"I sha'n't be much surprised," said Adrian, "unless, perhaps, you tell
me something when you think you are not telling anything at all."
And with this they went off together to look at the seat in which he sat
when Barbara saw him first, and then she stood in her old place in the
Rothwells' red-lined pew, and looked across at him, recalling that
summer Sunday. It would have been a delightful amusement if the church
had been a few degrees warmer, but Barbara could not help shivering a
little, and Adrian frankly avowed that he found it impossible to
maintain his feelings at the proper pitch.
"I'm blue," he said, "and I'm iced, and I can't be sentimental. And you
wore a thin cream-coloured dress that day, which is terrible to think
of. Might write something afterwards, perhaps," he continued, musingly.
"Not while my feet are like two stones, but I feel as if I might thaw
into a sonnet, or something of the kind."
Barbara looked up at him reverentially, and Adrian began to laugh.
"Let's go and eat those chops," he said.
Later, as they walked along the street towards Mitchelhurst Place,
Scarlett was silent for a time, glancing right and left at the dull
cottages. Here and there one might catch a glimpse of firelight through
the panes, but most of them were drearily blank, with grey windows and
closed doors. It was too cold for the straw-plaiters to stand on their
thresholds and gossip while they worked. There was a foreshadowing of
snow in the low-hanging clouds.
"What are you thinking of?" Barbara asked him.
"Don't let us ever come here again!" he answered. "It's all very well
for this once; we are young enough, we have our happiness before us. But
never again! Suppose we were old and sad when we came back, or
suppose----" He stopped short. "Suppose one came back alone," should
have been the ending of that sentence.
"Very well," she agreed hastily, as if to thrust aside the unspoken
words.
"We say our good-bye to Mitchelhurst to-day, then?" Adrian insisted.
"Yes. There won't be any temptation to come again, if what they told us
is true--will there?"
She referred to a rumour which they had heard at the _Rothwell Arms_,
that as Mr. Croft could not find a tenant for the Place he meant to pull
it down.
"No," said Scarlett. "It seems a shame, though," he added.
Presently they came in sight of the entrance--black bars, and beyond
them a stirring of black boughs in the January wind, over the straight,
bleak roadway to the house. The young man pushed the gate. "Some one has
been here to-day," he said, noting a curve already traced on the damp
earth.
"Some one to take the house, perhaps," Barbara suggested. "Look, there's
a carriage waiting out to the right of the door. I wish they hadn't
happened to choose this very day. I would rather have had the old Place
to ourselves, wouldn't you?"
"Much," said Adrian.
These young people were still in that ecstatic mood in which, could they
have had the whole planet to themselves, it would never have occurred to
them that it was lonely. Their eyes met as they answered, and if at that
moment the wind-swept avenue had been transformed into sunlit boughs of
blossoming orange, they might not have remarked any accession of warmth
and sweetness.
The old woman who was in charge recognised Barbara, and made no
difficulty about allowing them to wander through the rooms at their
leisure. In fact, she was only too glad not to leave her handful of fire
on such a chilly errand.
"Is it true," Mrs. Scarlett asked eagerly, "that Mr. Croft is going to
pull the house down?"
"So they tell me, ma'am. There's to be a sale here, come Midsummer, and
after that they say the old Place comes down. There's nobody to take it
now poor Mr. Hayes is gone."
Adrian's glance quickened at the mention of a sale, and then he recalled
his expressed intention never to come to Mitchelhurst again. "Perhaps
he'll find a tenant before then," he said. "You've got somebody here
to-day, haven't you?"
The woman started in sudden remembrance. "Oh, there's a lady," she said,
"I most forgot her. She said she was one of the old family, and used to
live here. My orders are to go round with 'em when they come to look at
the house, but the lady didn't want nobody, she said, she knew her way,
and she walked right off.
"I hope it ain't nothing wrong, but she's been gone some time."
"I should think it was quite right," said Scarlett. "Come, Barbara."
They went from room to room. All were silent, empty, and cold, with
shutters partly unclosed, letting in slanting gleams of grey light. The
painted eyes of the portraits on the wall looked askance at them as they
stood gazing about. All the little modern additions which Mr. Hayes had
made to the furniture for comfort's sake had been taken away, and the
Rothwells had come into possession of their own again.
Scarlett opened the old piano as he passed. "Do you remember?" he said,
glancing brightly, and with a smile curving his red lips, as he began,
with one hand, to touch a familiar tune. But Barbara cried "Hush!" and
the tinkling, jangling notes died suddenly into the stillness. "Suppose
she were to hear!"
"I wonder where she is," he rejoined, with a glance round. "She must
have come to say good-bye to her old home, too."
There was no sign of her as they crossed the hall (where Barbara's great
clock had long ago run down) and went up the wide, white stairs. But it
was curious how they felt her unseen presence, and how the knowledge
that at any moment they might turn a corner and encounter that living
woman, made the place more truly haunted than if it had held a legion of
ghosts. They walked in silence, like a couple of half-frightened
children, along the passages, and the remembrance that the old house
was doomed was with them all the time. It was strange to lay their warm
light hands on those strong walls, which had outlasted so many lives, so
much hope, and so much hopelessness, and to think that they, in their
fragile, happy existence might well remain when Mitchelhurst Place was
forgotten. It seemed hardly more than a phantom house already.
"I almost think she must have gone," Barbara whispered, as they came
down-stairs again.
"No," said Adrian, with an oblique glance which her eyes followed.
Kate Harding was standing by one of the windows in the entrance hall, a
stately figure in heavy draperies of black. Hearing the steps of the
intruders she turned slightly, and partially confronted them, and the
light fell on her face, pale and proud, close-lipped, full of mute and
dreary defiance. Only she herself knew the passionate eagerness with
which, as a girl, she had renounced her old home--only she knew the
strange power with which Mitchelhurst had drawn her back once more. Fate
had been too strong for her, and she had returned to her own place,
perhaps to the thought of the son who had belonged more to it than to
her. Her presence there that day was a confession of defeat too bitter
to be spoken, a last homage of farewell to the old house which she was
not rich enough to save.
Her eyes, resting indifferently on the girl's face, widened in sudden
recognition, and she looked from Barbara to Adrian. Her glance
enveloped the young couple in its swift intensity, and then fell coldly
to the pavement as she bent her head. Barbara blushed and drooped,
Scarlett bowed, as they passed the motionless woman, drawn back a little
against the wall, with the faded map of the great Mitchelhurst estate
hanging just behind her.
Their fly was waiting at the door, and in less than a minute they were
rolling quickly down the avenue. Adrian, stooping to tuck a rug about
his wife's feet, only raised himself in time to catch a last glimpse of
the white house front, and to cry, "Good-bye, Mitchelhurst!" Barbara
echoed his good-bye. Mitchelhurst was only an episode in her life; she
cared for the place, yet she was not sorry to escape from its shadows of
loves and hates, too deep and dark for her, and its unconquerable
melancholy. She left it, but a touch of its sadness would cling to her
in after years, giving her the tenderness which comes from a sense--dim,
perhaps, but all-pervading--of the underlying suffering of the world.
She looked back and saw her happiness tossed lightly and miraculously
from crest to crest of the black waves which might have engulfed it in a
moment; and even as she leaned in the warm shelter of Adrian's arm, she
was sorry for the lives that were wrecked, and broken, and forgotten.
"Look!" he said quickly, as the road wound along the hill-side, and a
steep bank, crowned with leafless thorns and brown stunted oaks, rose on
the right, "this is where I said good-bye to you, Barbara, and you never
knew it!"
"Never!" she cried. "No, I thought you had gone away, and hadn't cared
to say good-bye."
"Well, you were kinder to me than you knew. You left me a bunch of red
berries lying in the road."
"Ah, but if I had known you were there!"
"Why," said Adrian, "you wouldn't have left me anything at all. You
would have died first! You know you would! It was better as it was."
"Perhaps," she allowed.
"Anyhow, it is best as it is," said he conclusively, and to that she
agreed; but her smile was followed by a quick little sigh.
"What does that mean?" he demanded, tenderly.
"Nothing," she said, "nothing, _really_."
It was nothing. Only, absorbed in picturing Adrian's mute farewell, she
had passed the place where she first saw Reynold Harding, and had not
spared him one thought as she went by. And she was never coming to
Mitchelhurst again.
THE END.
_Clay and Taylor, Printers, Bungay, Suffolk._
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
Spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been standardised.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).
End of Project Gutenberg's Mitchelhurst Place, Vol. II, by Margaret Veley