AN OLD LOVE STORY.
The next morning saw the three at breakfast in a little room adjoining
the drawing-room. The sky was overcast, and before the meal was over
Barbara turned her head quickly as the rain lashed the window in sudden
fury. She arched her brows, and looked at Mr. Harding with anxious
commiseration.
"It's going to be a wet day," she said.
He raised his eyes to the blurred prospect.
"It looks like it, certainly."
Her expression was comically aghast.
"I never thought of its being wet!"
"Yet such a thing does happen occasionally."
"Yes, but it needn't have happened to-day. I thought you would want to
go out. What _will_ you do?"
"Stay indoors, if you have no objection."
"But there is nothing to amuse you. You will be so dull."
"Less so than usual, I imagine," said Reynold. "Do you find it so
difficult to amuse yourself on a wet day?"
"No, but I have a great deal to do. Besides, it is different. Don't men
always want to be amused more than women?"
"Poor men!" said he.
Mr. Hayes read his letters and seemed to take no heed of his niece's
trouble. But it appeared, when breakfast was finished, that he had
arranged how the morning should be spent. He announced his intention of
taking young Harding over the Place, and he carried it out with a
thoroughness which would have done honour to a professional guide,
showing all the pictures, mentioning the size of the rooms, and relating
the few family traditions--none of which, by the way, reflected any
especial credit on the Rothwells. He stopped with bright-eyed
appreciation before a cracked and discoloured map, where the
Mitchelhurst estate was shown in its widest extent. Reynold looked
silently at it, and then stalked after his host through all the chilly
faded splendour of the house, shivering sometimes, sneering sometimes,
but taking it all in with eager eyes, and glancing over the little man's
white head at the sombre shelves of the library or the portraits on the
walls. Mr. Hayes was fluent, precise, and cold. Only once did he
hesitate. They had come to a small sitting-room on the ground floor,
which, in spite of long disuse, still somehow conveyed the impression
that it had belonged to a young man.
"This was John Rothwell's favourite room," he said. He looked round. "I
remember, yes, I remember, as if it were yesterday, how he used----"
Harding waited, but he stood staring at the rusty grate, and left the
sentence unfinished.
"And to think that now he should be living from hand to mouth on the
Continent!" he said at last, and compressed his lips significantly.
He took the young man to the servants' hall, across which the giggling
voices of two or three maids echoed shrilly, till they were suddenly
silenced by the master's approach. Reynold followed him down long stone
passages, and thought, as he went, how icy and desolate they must be on
a black winter night. He was oppressed by the size and dreariness of the
place, and bewildered by the multiplicity of turnings.
"I think," said Mr. Hayes suddenly, "that I have shown you all there is
to see indoors."
And, as Reynold replied that he was much obliged, he pushed a door, and
motioned to his guest to precede him. Reynold stepped forward, and
discovered that he was in the entrance hall, facing Barbara, who had
just come down the broad white stairs, and still had her hand upon the
balustrade. It seemed to him as if he had come through the windings of
that stony labyrinth, the hollow rooms and pale corridors, to find a
richly-coloured blossom at the heart of all.
"Oh, Barbara, I'll leave Mr. Harding to you now," said the old
gentleman. "I'm going to my study--I must write some letters."
He crossed the black and white pavement with brisk, short steps, and
vanished through a doorway.
"Has uncle shown you everything?" she asked.
"I should think so."
"It's a fine place, isn't it?"
"Very fine, and very big," said Harding slowly. "Very empty, and
ghostly, and dead."
"Oh, you don't like it! I thought it would be different to you. I
thought it would seem like home, since it belonged to your own people."
"Home, sweet home!" he answered with a queer smile. "Well, it is a fine
place, as you say. And what have you been doing all the morning?"
"Housekeeping," said Barbara. "And now"--she set down a small basket of
keys on the hall table, as if she were preparing for action--"now I am
going to set the clock right."
"I'll stay for that if you'll allow me," said Reynold. "I remember what
you told me last night. It is _the_ time, and the world stands still
when it stops."
"For me, not for you," the girl replied. "You have your watch--you don't
believe in the big clock."
"Yes, I do. Here, in Mitchelhurst, what does one want with any but
Mitchelhurst time? What have I to do with Greenwich? But as for
Mitchelhurst, your uncle has talked to me till I feel as if I were all
the Rothwells who ever lived here. Why, what's this? Sunshine!"
"Yes," said Barbara. "It's going to clear up."
It could hardly be called actual sunlight, but there certainly was a
touch of pale autumn gold growing brighter about them as they stood.
Harding was listening to the monotonous tick--tick--tick--tick.
"I remember a man in some book," he said, "who didn't like to hear a
clock going--always counting out time in small change."
"Oh, but that's a worrying idea! I should hate to think of my life doled
out to me like that!"
"I'm afraid you must," he answered, with his little rough-edged laugh.
"It would be very delightful to take one's life in a lump, but how are
you going to have more than a moment in a moment? There are plenty of us
always trying to do it. If you could find out the way----"
"How, trying?" said Barbara.
"Trying to keep the past and grasp the future," Harding replied.
"Working and waiting for some moment which is to hold at least half a
lifetime--when it comes! Oh, I quite agree with you; I should like a
feast, and I am fed by spoonfuls!"
She looked up at him a little doubtfully, and the clock went on
ticking. "I always thought it was like a heart beating," she said,
swerving from the idea he had presented as if it were distasteful.
"Now!"
There was silence in the empty hall, as if, in very truth, she had laid
her brown young hand upon Time's flying pulse, and stilled it.
"Talk of killing time!" said Harding.
"No," Barbara answered, without turning her head. "Time's asleep--that's
all--asleep and dreaming. He'll soon wake up again."
She had so played with the idle fancy that, quite unconsciously, she
spoke in a hushed voice, which deepened the impression of stillness.
Harding said no more, he simply watched her. His imagination had been
quickened by the sight of the Place; its traditional memories, its
pride, and its decay had touched him more deeply than he knew. Life,
with its hardness and its haste, its obscure and ugly miseries and
needs, had relaxed its grasp, and left him to himself for a little space
in the midst of that curious loneliness. He felt as if the wide, living,
wind-swept world beyond its walls were something altogether alien and
apart. Everything about him was pale and dim; the very sunlight was
faded, as if it were the faint reflection of a glory that was gone;
everything rested as if in the peace of something that was neither life
nor death. Everything was faded and dim, except the girl who stood,
softly breathing, a couple of steps away, and even she seemed to be held
by the enchantment of the place, and to wait in passive acquiescence.
Reynold's grey eyes dilated and deepened.
But as she stood there, unconscious of his gaze, Barbara smiled. It was
just the slightest possible smile, as if she answered some smiling
memory; a curve of the lip, hardly more than hinted, which might
betoken nothing deeper than the recollection of some melodious scrap of
rhyme or music. Yet Reynold drew back as if it stung him. "That's not
for me!" he said to himself.
The movement startled Barbara from her reverie. "Oh, how like you are to
that picture in the drawing-room!" she exclaimed, impulsively.
He knew what she meant, and the innocent utterance was a second sting.
But he laughed. "What, the good-looking one?"
It seemed to her that she could have found a light answer but for his
eyes upon her. As it was, he had the gratification of seeing her colour
and hesitate. "I--I wasn't thinking--I didn't mean--" she stammered,
shyly. "Oh, of course!" And then, angry with herself for her
unreadiness, she stepped forward, and, with a gesture of impatience,
set the pendulum swinging.
"Time is to go on again?" said he.
"Yes," Barbara replied, decidedly. "It would be tiresome if it stood
still long. It had better go on. Besides, I'm cold," and she turned away
with a pretty little shiver. "I want to go to the fire; I can't stay to
attend to it any longer."
Harding lingered, and after an instant of irresolution she left him to a
world which had resumed its ordinary course.
At luncheon there was the inevitable mention of the weather, and Mr.
Hayes, with his eyes fixed upon his plate, said, "Yes, it has cleared up
nicely. I suppose you are going into the village?"
The young people hesitated, not knowing to whom the question was
addressed. Miss Strange waited for Mr. Harding, and Mr. Harding for Miss
Strange. Then they said "Yes" at the same moment, and felt themselves
pledged to go together.
"I thought so," said Mr. Hayes, and began to remind his niece of this
thing and that which she was to be sure and show their visitor. "And the
sooner you go the better," he added when the meal was over. "The days
grow short."
Barbara looked questioningly at Mr. Harding. "If you like to go----"
"I shall be delighted, if you will allow me," said the young man, and a
few minutes later they went together down the avenue.
"The days grow short," Mr. Hayes had said, and everything about them
seemed set to that sad autumnal burden. The boughs above their heads,
the ground under foot, were heavy with moisture, the bracken was
withered and brown, there were no more butterflies, but at every breath
the yellowing leaves took their uncertain flight to the wet earth. The
young people, each with a neatly furled umbrella, walked with something
of ceremonious self-consciousness, making little remarks about the
scenery, and Mr. Hayes, from his window, followed them with his eyes.
"Rothwell, every inch of him," he said to himself, as Reynold turned and
looked backward at the Place. "I never knew one of the lot yet who
didn't think that particular family had a right to despise all the rest
of the world. The only difference I can see is that this fellow despises
the family too. Well, _let_ him! Why not? But, good Lord! what an end of
all his mother's hopes!" And Mr. Hayes went back to his fireside--_his_,
while John Rothwell was dodging his creditors on the Continent! There
was unutterable dreariness in the thought of such a destiny, but the
little old man regretted it with a complacent rubbing of his hands and a
remembrance of Rothwell's arrogance. There is a belief, engendered by
the moral stories of our childhood, that it is good for a man that his
unreasonable pride should be broken--a belief which takes no heed of the
chance that its downfall may hurl the whole fabric of life and conduct
into the foulness of the gutter. Mr. Hayes naturally took the moral
story view of a pride by which he had once been personally wounded; yet
he wore a deprecating air, as if Fate, in too amply avenging him, had
paid a compliment to his importance which was almost overpowering.
It was more than a quarter of a century since Rothwell and he had been
antagonists, though they had not avowed the fact in so many words, and
Rothwell, with no honour or profit to himself, had baffled him. Herbert
Hayes was then over forty and unmarried. The Mitchelhurst gossips had
made up their minds that he would live and die a bachelor. But one
November Sunday he came, dapper, bright-eyed, and self-satisfied, to
Mitchelhurst church, gazed with the utmost propriety into his glossy
hat, stood up when the parson's dreary voice broke the silence with
"When the wicked man----" and, looking across at the Rothwells' great
pew, met his fate in a moment.
The pew held its usual occupants--the old squire, grey, angular, and
scornful; young Rothwell, darker, taller, paler, less politely
contemptuous, and more lowering; Kate, erect and proud, sulkily
conscious of a beauty which the rustic congregation could not
understand. These three Hayes had often seen. But there was a fourth, a
frail, colourless girl, burdened rather than clothed with sombre
draperies of crape, pale to the very lips, and swaying languidly as she
stood, who unconsciously caught his glance and held it. She suffered her
head, with the little black bonnet set on the abundance of her pale
hair, to droop over her Prayer-book, and she slid downward when the
exhortation was ended as if she could stand no longer. The time seemed
interminable to him until she rose again.
His instantaneous certainty that there was no drop of Rothwell blood in
her veins was confirmed by later inquiry. He learnt that she was
distantly related to the squire's wife, and had recently lost her
parents. Though she had not been left absolutely penniless, her little
pittance was not enough to keep her in idleness, and she was staying at
Mitchelhurst while the question of her future was debated. It was
difficult to see what Minnie Newton was to do in a hardworking world.
She could sink into helplessly graceful attitudes, she could watch you
with a softly troubled gaze, anxious to learn what she ought to think or
say; she was delicate, gentle, and very slightly educated. She had not
a thought of her own, and she was pure with the kind of purity which
cannot grasp the idea of evil, and fails to recognise it, unless indeed
vice is going in rags and dirt to the police-station, and using shocking
language by the way. Her simplicity was touching. She thought nothing of
herself; she would cling to the first hand that happened to be held out
to her. She might be saved by good luck, but nature had obviously
designed her for a victim.
Miss Newton was polite to Mr. Hayes as to everybody else, but she was
the last person at Mitchelhurst Place to suspect the little gentleman's
passion. The very servants found it out, and wondered at her innocence.
John Rothwell laughed.
"What a fool she is!" he said to his sister, as he stood by the window
one day, and saw Hayes coming up the avenue.
"That's an undoubted fact," said the magnificent Kate.
"And what a fool he is!" John continued.
"Well, we won't quarrel about that either," she replied liberally. "They
will be all the better matched."
"Matched?" said Rothwell. "No."
She looked up hastily.
"Eh?" she said. "Not matched? And why not?"
Instead of answering, he deliberately lighted a cigarette and smoked,
gazing darkly at her.
Kate shrugged her shoulders.
"What difference can it possibly make to you?"
He took his cigarette from his lips and looked at it.
"It will make a difference to him," he said at last.
The bell rang, and the knocker added its emphatic summons. One of
Rothwell's dogs began to bark. Kate had risen, and stood with her eyes
fixed on her brother's face.
"It would be a very good thing for the girl," she remarked meditatively.
"I don't see what is to become of her, poor thing, unless she marries."
"Damn him!" said Rothwell.
The answer was not so irrelevant as it appeared. His gaze was as steady
as Kate's own, and seemed to prolong his words as a singer prolongs a
note. She drew her brows together, as if perplexed.
"Well," she said, turning away, "I must go and look after our lovers!"
"And I," he said.
The dapper, contented little man had done Rothwell no harm, but the
young fellow cherished a black hatred, born of the dulness of his vacant
life. Hayes, without being rich, was very comfortably off, and he was
apt to betray the fact with innocent ostentation. A sovereign was less
to him than a shilling to John Rothwell, and it seemed to the latter
that he could always hear the gold chinking when Hayes talked. One could
do so much with a sovereign, and so little with a shilling. Rothwell was
hungry, with a hunger which only just fell short of being a literal
fact, and he had to stand by, with his hands in his empty pockets, while
Hayes could have good dinners, good wine, good clothes, good horses,
whatever he liked in the way of pleasure--and was "such a contemptible
little cad with it all," the young man snarled. His own poverty would
have been more bearable had it not been for his neighbour's ease and
security. And now, heaven be praised!--heaven?--the prosperous man had
set his heart on this whitefaced, fair-haired, foolish girl who was
under the roof of Mitchelhurst Place, and for once he should be baffled.
Rothwell set to work with evil ingenuity--it seemed almost fiendish,
but, really, he had nothing else to do--to ruin Hayes's chance of
success. But for him it must have been almost a certainty. Kate was
inclined to favour the suitor. The old squire disliked him, perhaps with
a little of his son's feeling, but would have been very well satisfied
to see the girl provided for. And Minnie Newton was there for any man,
who had a will of his own, and was not absolutely repulsive, to take if
he pleased. The course of true love seemed about to run with perfect
smoothness till young Rothwell stepped in and troubled it.
Mockery, not slander, was his weapon. As Miss Newton idled over her
embroidery he would lounge near her and make little jests about Hayes's
age, size, and manners. She listened with a troubled face. Of course Mr.
Rothwell was talking very cleverly, and she tried not to remember that
she had found Mr. Hayes very kind and pleasant when he called the day
before. Of course it was absurd that a man of that age should want to be
taken for five-and-twenty--yes, and he had a _very_ ridiculous way of
putting his head on one side like a bird--when Mr. Rothwell had
insisted on having her opinion, she had said, "Yes, it was _very_
ridiculous"--and a gentleman, a real gentleman, would not talk so much
about his money, and what he could do with it--Mr. Rothwell said so, and
he certainly knew. And as she had agreed to it she supposed it was quite
right that he should repeat this at dinner-time, as if it were her own
remark, though she wished he wouldn't, because his father turned sharply
and looked at her. But, no doubt, Mr. Hayes did look absurdly small by
the side of John Rothwell, and there was something common in his
manners. Many people might think they were all very well, but a lady
would feel that there was something wanting. And so on, and so on, till
she began to ask herself what John Rothwell would say of her if, after
all this, she showed more than the coldest civility to Mr. Hayes.
Kate perfectly understood the position of affairs, but did not choose
openly to oppose her brother. If Hayes would have come and carried
Minnie off, young Lochinvar fashion, she would have been secretly
pleased. As it was, she was contemptuously kind to the girl, and if the
little suitor met the two young women in the village, Miss Rothwell
shook hands and looked away. Once she found herself some business to do
at the Mitchelhurst shop, and sent Minnie home, lest she should be out
too long in the December cold. She had spied Herbert Hayes coming along
the street, and had rightly guessed that he would see and pursue the
slim, black-clothed figure. And, indeed, he used his walk with Miss
Newton to such good purpose that he might have won her promise then and
there if a tall young man had not suddenly sprung over a stile and
confronted them. Minnie fairly cowered in embarrassment as she met
Rothwell's meaning glance, which assumed that she would be delighted to
be rid of a bore, and she suffered him to give her his arm and to take
her home, leaving poor Hayes to feel very small indeed as he stood in
the middle of the road. He tried a letter, but it only called forth a
little feebly-penned word of refusal as faint as an echo.
Hayes never suspected the young man's deliberate malice. He fancied the
old squire, if anybody, was his enemy; but he was more inclined to set
the difficulty down to the Rothwells' notorious pride than to any
special ill-will to himself.
"No one is good enough for them, curse them!" he said over the little
note. "They won't give me a chance of winning her. I'm not beaten yet
though!"
But he was. Early in January Minnie Newton took cold, drooped in the
chilly dreariness of the old house, and died before the spring came in.
One day Kate Rothwell came upon Hayes as he lingered, a melancholy
little figure, by the girl's grave.
"Ah, Miss Rothwell," he said, looking up at her, "I wanted to have had
the right to care for her and mourn her, but it was not to be!"
"No," said Kate. "I'm sorry," she added, after a moment. It was just at
the time when she herself was about to defy all the barren traditions of
the Rothwells to marry Sidney Harding with his brilliant prospects of
wealth. Harding's half-brother, who had made the great business, was
pleased with the match, and promised Sidney a partnership in a couple
of years. Everything was bright for Kate, and she could afford a
regretful thought to poor Hayes. "I'm sorry," she said.
Her voice was hard, but the slightest proffer of sympathy was enough.
"Ah! I knew you wished me well--God bless you!" said the little man,
"and help you as you would have helped me!"
Perhaps Kate Rothwell felt that at that rate Providence would not take
any very active interest in her affairs. She turned aside impatiently.
"Pray keep your thanks for some one who deserves them, Mr. Hayes. I
don't."
"You could not do anything, but I know you were good to _her_. She told
me, that afternoon----" He spoke in just the proper tone of emotion.
"Nonsense!" Kate answered, sharply. "How could she? there was nothing to
tell." Mr. Hayes might well say, even a quarter of a century later,
that Miss Rothwell had an unpleasant manner.
Nevertheless she held a place in that idealised picture of his love
which in his old age served him for a memory. In Sidney Harding's death,
within a year of the marriage, he saw a kindred stroke to that which had
robbed him of his own hope, and he never thought of Kate without a touch
of sentimental loyalty. When he met Kate's son that October afternoon,
with the familiar face and voice, on his way to Mitchelhurst, he had
felt that, Rothwell though he was, he must be welcomed for his mother's
sake. And yet it had almost seemed as if it were John Rothwell himself
come back to sneer in a new fashion.
How came he to be so evidently poor while old Harding was rolling in
wealth? Mr. Hayes, sitting over the fire, wondered at this failure of
Kate's hopes. People had called it a fair exchange, her old name for
the Hardings' abundance of newly-coined gold. But where was the gold?
Plainly not in this young Harding's pockets. What did he do for a
living? Why was he not in his uncle's office, a man of business with the
world before him? There was no stamp of success about this listless,
long-legged fellow, who had come, as hopeless as any Rothwell, to linger
about that scene of slow decay. "He'll do no good," said Mr. Hayes to
himself, stirring up a cheerful blaze.