Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: _Leaning over the edge of the porch she dropped the
bundle soundlessly into a bed of marigolds_. (_Page_ 13)]
BARBARA LADD
BY
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
AUTHOR OF
THE KINDRED OF THE WILD, THE HEART OF THE
ANCIENT WOOD, A SISTER TO EVANGELINE,
POEMS, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK VERBECK
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1902,
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(Incorporated).
All Rights Reserved.
Published October, 1902
Eighth Impression, April, 1908.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"LEANING OVER THE EDGE OF THE PORCH SHE DROPPED THE BUNDLE
SOUNDLESSLY INTO A BED OF MARIGOLDS" (_See page 13_) . . . _Frontispiece_
"'WHAT A NICE-LOOKING BOY YOU ARE!' SHE SAID"
"'O MEHITABLE--DEMORALISED--BY BARBARA!' VOWED DOCTOR JOHN"
"HE SANK OFF AGAIN, FALLING BACK INTO BARBARA'S SUPPORTING ARMS"
BARBARA LADD
CHAPTER I.
She knew very well that she should have started earlier; but if there
was one thing that could daunt her wayward and daring little spirit, it
was the dark. Now, as she stood, wide-eyed and breathless with
suspense, beside her open window, the face of the dark began to change.
A gray pallor came over it, and on a sudden she was aware of a black
horizon line, ghostly, lonely beyond words, far to the eastward over
the yet invisible tree-tops. With this pallor came a chill which
Barbara felt on her little, trembling hands, on her eyes, and in her
heart: as if the night, in going, had laid aside its benignity and
touched the world in farewell with a cold hand of warning and menace.
Then, here and there a leaf stood out, palely distinct, upon the thick
frondage of the apple-tree whose nearest branches crowded the roof of
the porch below her window. There was a faint chirping from the heart
of the syringa thicket; and Barbara's ears were so attentive that she
caught the drowsy, awakening flutter of small wings down below in the
dewy gloom. With the sound came a cool and delicate pungency from the
wet currant bushes, puffed upward to her as if the garden world beneath
the leaves had drawn a long breath in getting ready to awake. This
tonic scent, which nostrils less keen than Barbara's would scarcely
have discerned, came to the child as a signal for action. Peculiarly
sensitive to the message and influence of odours, she felt this sudden
fragrance in her nerves as a summons, a promise, and a challenge, all
in one. Noiselessly she pushed the two diamond-paned leaves of her
window open to their widest. How the grayness was spreading! A pang
of apprehension seized her, lest she had delayed too long. She turned
impulsively, and stepped into the darkness of her room.
In a moment her slim little figure reappeared at the window, this time
heavily encumbered. In one hand was a round, soft bundle, in the other
a square wicker basket with a white cloth tied over the top. The white
cloth glimmered conspicuously, but the light was not yet strong enough
to reveal the colour of the bundle. Setting both the burdens out upon
the roof of the porch, she turned, glanced in at the window, and said,
softly:
"Good-bye, little room! I haven't been happy with you. But I hope you
won't be lonely when I'm gone!"
Leaning over the edge of the porch, she dropped the bundle soundlessly
into a bed of marigolds. The basket, on the other hand, she took up
with care. Thrusting her left arm through the handle, she swung
herself nimbly into the apple-tree, and thence to the ground; while the
basket tipped and slewed as if it were alive.
"Be still, my babies!" she whispered; and then, picking up the bundle
from the crushed marigolds, and never turning her head to look up at
the stately old house which she was leaving, she fled down the walk
between the currant and gooseberry bushes, the thyme, the sage, and
summer savoury beds,--through a narrow wicket gate half-hidden in
larkspur and honeysuckle,--along the foot-path through the rank and
dripping burdocks back of the barn, where she felt a little qualm of
homesickness at the sound of her dear horses breathing deeply and
contentedly in the stalls,--and thence, letting down one of the bars
and crawling through with her burdens, out into the graying, hillocky
open of the cow-pasture.
By this time a cool and luminous wave of pink, changing to pale saffron
at its northeastern edges, had crept up over the far-off hilltops.
Faint tinges of colour, of a strange and unusual transparency, began to
reveal themselves all over the expanse of pasture. As the miracle of
dawn thus overtook her, a sense of unreality came upon Barbara's soul.
She felt as if this were not she, this little girl so adventurously
running away--but rather some impossible child in a story-book, who had
so engaged her sympathies for the moment that she could not be sure
which was make-believe and which herself. With a chill of lonesome
dread she slipped a hand under the cloth and into the basket. The
touch of warm, live, cuddling fur reassured her, and brought her back
to her own identity. But stranger and stranger grew the mystical
transparency, only made the more startling by a fleece of vapour here
and there curling up from between the hillocks. Stumps, weed-tops,
patches of juniper, tufts of blueberry bush, wisps of coarse grass left
uncropped, seemed to detach themselves, lift, and float in the solvent
clarity of that new-born air, that new-born light. Surely, this was
not her old, familiar world! Barbara stood still, her great eyes
dilating, her lips parted in a kind of ecstasy, as sense and spirit
alike drank in the marvel of the dawn. It seemed to her as if she
discovered, in that moment, that the world was made anew with every
morning,--and with the discovery she became aware, dimly but securely,
that she was herself a part of the imperishable, ever-renewing life.
She was brought back to more instant considerations by the sudden
appearance of a red-and-white cow, which got up with a great, windy,
grunting breath, and came toward her out of a misty hollow. With all
the cows of the herd Barbara was in high favour, but just now the sight
alarmed her.
"Gracious!" she exclaimed to herself, "Abby will be out to milk in
another minute!"--and she broke into a run at the best speed that her
burdens would permit, making for the maple woods which lay to the north
of the pasture. The cow looked and mooed after her wistfully,
wondering at her flight, and aching for the relief of the milker's
hand. But Barbara paid no heed to her, nor to the others of the herd,
who now came into view from corners of the pasture as the enchanted
light grew and spread. She darted on, vanishing in the hollows,
flitting over the hillocks, fleetly threading the crooked and slender
path,--a wisp-like, dark little figure. Her bundle, now seen to be
tied up in a silk shawl of flamelike scarlet, and the snow-white
covering of her basket, flickered across the mystical transparency of
the landscape like bubbles of intense light blown far in advance of the
morning.
Not till she came to the other side of the pasture and plunged into the
obscurity of the woods did Barbara check her speed. Here the dawn was
but beginning to penetrate, thrusting thin shafts of pink-amber light
here and there through the leafage, and touching the eastward sides of
trunk and branch with elusive glories. Breathing quickly, Barbara set
down the bundle and the precious basket; but she snatched them up again
as she caught a sound of panting and running behind her. On the
instant, however, the alarm faded from her face.
"Down, Keep!" she commanded, sharply, as the gaunt gray form of a
mastiff leaped upon her, almost carrying her off her feet. Fawning,
and giving little yelps of joy, the huge animal crouched before her,
pounding the sward with ecstatic tail, and implored to lick her hands.
She threw both arms about the dog's head, murmuring to him, poignantly
impetuous, her voice tearful with self-reproach:
"Was his best friend going away, without ever saying good-bye to him?
Well, she was bad, she was very, very bad!" And she wiped away several
large, surreptitious tears upon the furry folds of his neck. Then she
sprang up and renewed her journey resolutely; while the mastiff,
bounding in front of her, showed his plain conviction that some fine,
audacious adventure was afoot, and that it would be his great luck to
have a part in it.
For more than a mile Barbara followed the wood-path, the fresh, wet
gloom lightening about her as she went. Where the maples thinned away,
and the slenderer ash and birch took their place, she got glimpses of a
pale sky overhead, dappled with streamers of a fiery violet. Here and
there a dripping leaf had caught the colours from above and flashed
elusive jewels upon her vision. Here and there the dewy thickets of
witch-hazel and viburnum crowded so close about the path that her
skirts and shoulders were drenched with their scented largess. Here
and there in her path rose suddenly a cluster of night-born
toadstools--squat, yellow, and fat-fleshed, or tall, shadowy-hooded,
and whitely venomous--over which she stepped with wary aversion. And
once, eager as was her haste, she stopped to pick a great, lucent,
yellow orchid, which seemed to beam like a sacred lamp in its dark
green shrine beneath the alders.
At length the path dipped sharply between rocks overgrown with poison
ivy. Then the trees thinned away before her, and the day grew at once
full of light; and the mirror-surface of a little lake, shining with
palest crocus-tint and violet and silvery rose, obscured with patches
of dissolving mist, flashed upon her eyes. She ran down to the very
edge, where the water seemed to breathe among its fringing pebbles, and
there set down the bundle and the basket; while the dog, yelping
joyously, bounded and splashed in the shallows.
When, however, Barbara stepped up the bank to a thicket of Indian
willow, and proceeded, by dint of carefully calculated lifting and
pulling, to drag forth from its hiding-place a ruddy canoe of
birch-bark, the dog's spirits and his flaunting tail fell together. If
Barbara's venture was to be in the canoe, he knew he should have no
part in it; and his big, doggish heart was dejected. With his tongue
hanging from his jaws, he sat up on his brindled haunches and looked
on, while slowly and laboriously Barbara worked the frail craft down to
the water. When it was afloat, and the resined prow pulled up into a
tuft of weeds to keep it from drifting away, Barbara fetched two
paddles from the same hiding-place. In the bow of the canoe she stowed
her bundle and her basket. In the stern she arranged a pile of ferns
as a cushion for her knees. Once more she flung her arms around Keep's
massive neck, kissed his silky ears, wept violently for the smallest
fraction of a minute; and then, stepping into the canoe with the light
precision of one skilled with the birch-bark, she pushed off, and with
quick, vigorous strokes headed straight across the lake. The dog ran
uneasily up and down the water's edge, whining and fretting after her.
When she was a little way out he made a sudden resolution, plunged into
the water, and swam eagerly after the fugitive. But Barbara heard the
splash, and understood. She realised that he would surely upset the
canoe in trying to get into it, and this was the time when she must
seem hard, however her heart was melting. She looked back over her
shoulder.
"Go home, Keep! Go home!" she commanded.
The dog turned obediently and made for shore. And Barbara, her lips
set and the big tears rolling down her cheeks, continued her journey
out across the lake.