BARBARA'S TUNE.
Harding fell asleep towards morning, and woke from his slumber with a
vague sense that the world had somehow expanded into a wide and pleasant
place, and that he had inherited a share of it. And though the facts
were not quite so splendid when he emerged from his drowsy reverie,
enough remained of possibilities, golden or rosy, to colour and brighten
that Saturday. It is something to wake to a conviction that one's feet
are set on the way to love and wealth.
While he dressed, he thought of the letter he had to write, and then of
its consequences. How long would it be before he would have the right
to come and say to Barbara, "I have begun the fortune you ordered. I am
not rich yet, but I have fairly started on the road to riches and
Mitchelhurst--will you wait for me there?" Or might he not say, "Will
you travel the rest of the way with me?" How long must it be before he
could say that? Two years? Surely in two years he might unclose his
lips; for he would work--it would be no wearisome task. A longing, new
and strange, to labour for his love flooded the inmost recesses of his
soul. The man's whole nature was suddenly broken up, and flowing forth
as a stream in a springtide thaw. It seemed to him that he could give
himself utterly to the most distasteful occupations; in fact, that he
would reject and scorn any remnant of himself that had not toiled for
Barbara.
The girl herself woke up, a room or two away, and lay with her eyes
fixed on the tester of the great shadowy bed. It was early, she need not
get up for a few minutes more. The pale autumn morning stole in between
the faded curtains, and lighted her vivid little face, a little face
which might have been framed in a couple of encircling hands. And yet,
small as it was, where it rested, with a cloud of dusky hair tossed
round it over the pillow, it was the centre and the soul of that
melancholy high-walled room. She had dreamed confusedly of Reynold
Harding, and hardly knew where her dream ended and her waking thought
began--perhaps because there was not much more reality in the one than
in the other.
Girls have an ideal which they call First Love. It is rather a
troublesome ideal, involving them in a thousand little perplexities,
self-deceits, half-conscious falsehoods; but they adore it through them
all. First Love is the treasure which must be given to the man they
promise to marry; the bloom would be off the fruit, the dewdrop dried
from the flower, if they could not assure him that the love they feel
for him was the earliest that ever stirred within their hearts. The
utmost fire of passion must have the freshness of shy spring blossoms.
Love, in his supreme triumphant flight from soul to soul, must swear he
never tried his wings before.
But, to be honest, how often can a girl speak confidently of her first
love? She reads poems and stories, and the young fellows who come about
her, while she is yet in her teens, are hardly more than incarnate
chapters of her novels. How did she begin? She loved Hector, it may be,
and King Arthur, and Roland, and the Cid. Then perhaps she had a tender
passion for Amyas Leigh, for the Heir of Redclyffe, or for Guy
Livingstone; and the curate, or the squire's son, just home with his
regiment from India, carries on the romance. This she assures herself
is the mystic first love; but the curate goes to another parish, or the
lieutenant's leave comes to an end, and the living novel is forgotten
with the others. She will order more books from Mudie's and take an
interest in them, and in the hero of some private theatricals at a
country house close by. She will meet the young man who lives on the
other side of the county, but who dances so perfectly and talks so well,
at the bachelors' ball. She will think a while first of one, then of the
other; and afterwards, when the time comes to make that assurance of
first love, she will, half unconsciously efface all these memories, and
vow, with innocent, smiling lips, that her very dreams have held no
shape till then.
Miss Strange was intent on the change in her little world of coloured
shadows. Adrian Scarlett and Reynold Harding rose before her eyes as
pictures, more life-like than she could find in her books, but pictures
nevertheless, figures seen only in one aspect. Adrian, a facile,
warmly-tinted sketch of a summer poet; Reynold, a sombre study in black
and grey--what _could_ the little girl by any possibility know of these
young men more than this? Reynold's romance, with its fuller
development, its melancholy background, its hints of passion and effort,
might well absorb the larger share of her thoughts. Her part was marked
out in it; she was startled to see how a word of hers had awakened a
dormant resolution. She was flattered, and, though she was frightened
too, she felt that she could not draw back; she had inspired young
Harding with ambition, and she must encourage him and believe in him in
his coming fight with fortune. Barbara found herself the heroine of a
drama, and for the sake of her new character she began to rearrange her
first impressions of the hero, to dwell on the pathos of his story, to
deepen the ditch into which he had slipped in her service, till it would
hardly have known itself from a precipice, to soften the chilly
repulsion which she had felt at their meeting into the simple effect of
his proud reserve. She lay gazing upward, with a smile on her lips,
picturing his final home-coming, grouping all the incidents of that
triumphant day about the tall, dark figure with the Rothwell features,
who was just the puppet of her pretty fancies. The vision of his future,
expanding like a soap-bubble, rose from the dull earth, and caught the
gay colours of Barbara's sunny hopes. Everything would go well,
everything must go well; he should make his fortune while he was yet
young, and come back to the flowery arches and clashing bells of
rejoicing Mitchelhurst. Beyond that day her fancy hardly went. Of course
he would have to take the name of Rothwell, the name which, for the
perfection of her romance, should have been his by right. At that
remembrance she paused dissatisfied--the pork-butcher was the one strong
touch of reality in the whole story. In fact the mere thought of him
brought her back to everyday life, and to the certainty that she must
waste no more time in dreams.
Reynold, consulting his uncle's letter, found with some surprise that he
had pushed silence to its utmost limit, and that another day's delay
would have overstepped the boundary which Mr. Harding had so imperiously
set. The discovery was a shock; it took away his breath for a moment,
and then sent the blood coursing through his veins with a tingling
exhilaration, the sense of a peril narrowly escaped. He was glad--glad
in a defiant, unreasonable fashion--that he had not yielded till the
last day, though at the same time he was uneasy till his answer should
be despatched. He went up to his room immediately after breakfast, and
sat down to his task at the writing-table which faced the great window.
After one or two unsatisfactory beginnings he ended with the simplest
possible note of acceptance, to which he added a postscript, informing
his uncle that he should remain two or three days longer at Mitchelhurst
Place, and hoped to receive his instructions there. He wrote a few lines
to end the question of the tutorship for which he had been waiting,
addressed the two envelopes, and leaned back in his chair to read his
letters over before folding them.
As he did so he looked out over the far-spreading landscape. The
sunshine broke through the veil of misty cloud and widened slowly over
the land, catching here the sails of a windmill, idle in the autumn
calm, there a church spire, or a bit of white road, or a group of
poplars, or the red wall of an old farmhouse. The silver grey gave place
to vaporous gold, and a pale brightness illumined the paper in his hand
on which those fateful lines were written. One would have said
Mitchelhurst was smiling broadly at his resolution. Reynold stretched
himself and returned the smile as if the landscape were an old friend
who greeted him, and tilting his chair backward he thrust his letter
into the directed cover.
"When I come back," he said to himself, "I will take this room for
mine."
Writing his acceptance of his uncle's offer had not been pleasant, yet
now that it was done he contemplated the superscription,
"_R. Harding, Esq._,"
with grave satisfaction. Finally, he took up the pen once more,
hesitated, balanced it between his fingers, and then let it fall. "Why
should I write to her?" said he, while a sullen shadow crossed his
face. "She will hear it soon enough. Since she is to have her own way
about my career for the rest of my life, she may well wait a day or two
to know it. Besides, I can't explain in a letter why I have given in.
No, I won't write to-day." He shut up his blotting-case with an
impatient gesture, and there was nothing for Mrs. Sidney Harding by that
afternoon's post.
He went down the great stone stairs with his letters, and laid them on
the hall table, as Barbara had told him to do. Then, pausing for a
moment to study the weather-glass, a note or two, uncertainly struck,
attracted his attention. The door of the yellow drawing-room was partly
open, and Mr. Hayes was presumably out, for Barbara was at the old
piano. When Harding turned his head he could see her from where he
stood. The light from the south window fell on the simple folds of her
soft woollen dress, and brightened them to a brownish gold. She sat
with her head slightly bent, touching the keys questioningly and
tentatively, till she found a little snatch of melody, which she played
more than once as if she were eagerly listening to it. The piano was
worn out, of that there could be no doubt, yet Reynold found enchantment
in the shallow tinkling sounds. He could not have uttered his feelings
in any words at his command, but that mattered the less since Mr. Adrian
Scarlett had enjoyed _his_ feelings in the summer time, and, touching
them up a little, had arranged them in verse. It was surely honour
enough for that poor little tune that its record was destined to appear
one day in the young fellow's volume of poems.
_AT HER PIANO._
_It chanced I loitered through a room,
Dusk with a shaded, sultry gloom,
And full of memories of old, times--
I lingered, shaping into rhymes
My visions of those earlier days
'Mid their neglected waifs and strays
A yellowing keyboard caught my gaze,
And straight I fancied, as I stood
Resting my hand on polished wood,
Letting my eyes, contented, trace
The daintiness of inlaid grace,
That Music's ghost, outworn and spent,
Dreamed, near her antique instrument._
_But when I broke its silence, fain
To call an echo back again
Of some old-fashioned, tender strain,
Played once by player long since dead--
I found my dream of music fled!
The chords I wakened could but speak
In jangled utterance, thin and weak,
In shallow discords, as when age
Reaches its last decrepit stage,
In feeble notes that seemed to chide--
This was the end! I stepped aside,
In my impatient weariness,
Into the window's draped recess.
Without, was all the joy of June;
Within, a piano out of tune!_
_But while, half hidden, thus I stayed,
There came in one who lightly laid
White hands upon the yellow keys
To seek their lingering harmonies.
I think she sighed--I know she smiled--
And straightway Music was beguiled,
And all the faded bygone years,
With all their bygone hopes and fears,
Their long-forgotten smiles and tears,
Their empty dreams that meant so much,
Began to sing beneath her touch._
_The notes that time had taught to fret,
Racked with a querulous regret,
Forsook their burden of complaint,
For melodies more sweetly faint
Than lovers ever dreamed in sleep--
Than rippling murmurs of the deep--
Than whispered hope of endless peace--
Ah, let her play or let her cease,
For still that sound is in the air,
And still I see her seated there!_
_Yet, even as her fingers ranged,
I knew those jangled notes unchanged,
My soul had heard, in ear's despite,
And Love had made the music right._
So had Master Adrian written, after a good deal of work with note-book
and pencil, during a long summer afternoon, and then had carried his
rhymes away to polish them at his leisure. Reynold Harding merely stood
listening in the hall, as motionless as if he were the ghost of some
tall young Rothwell, called back and held entranced by the sound of the
familiar instrument. Barbara knew no more of his silent presence than
she did of Adrian's verses. When she paused he stepped lightly away
without disturbing her. He was very ignorant of music; he had no idea
what it was that she had played; to him it was just Barbara's tune, and
he felt that, when he left Mitchelhurst, he should carry it in his
heart, to sing softly to him on his way.
He passed into the garden and loitered there, recalling the notes after
a tuneless fashion of his own. The neglected grounds, which had seemed
so sodden and sad when first he looked out upon them, had a pale,
shining beauty as he walked to and fro, keeping time to the memory of
Barbara's music. The eye did not dwell on their desolation, but passed
through the leafless boughs to bright misty distances of earth and
cloudland. Reynold halted at last by the old sun-dial. The softly
diffused radiance marked no passing hour upon it, but rather seemed to
tell of measureless rest and peace. There was a slight autumnal
fragrance in the air, but the young man perceived a sweeter breath, and
stooping to the black earth, he found two or three violets half hidden
in their clustering leaves. He hardly knew why they gave him the
pleasure they did; he was not accustomed to find such delicate pleasure
in such things. Perhaps if he had analysed his feelings he might have
seen that, for a man who had just pledged himself to a life of hurrying
toil, there was a subtle charm in the very stillness and decay and
indolent content of Mitchelhurst, breathing its odours of box and yew
into the damp, windless air. It was a curious little pause before the
final plunge. Reynold felt it even if he did not altogether understand,
as he stood by the sun-dial which recorded nothing, with the violets at
his feet, and the rooks sailing overhead across the faintly-tinted sky.
A clump of overgrown dock-leaves stirred suddenly, Barbara's cat pushed
its way through them and came to rub itself against him. He bent down
and caressed it. "I'll come again--I'll come home," he said softly, as
he stroked its arching back.