The child who set forth so fearlessly, on so audacious and
ill-regulated a venture, that midsummer morning of the year 1769,--in a
time when audacity on the part of small girls was apt to meet the
discouragement of a peculiarly strenuous discipline,--was an accident
in her period, an irreconcilable alien to her environment. In her
intense individuality, and in the confident freedom with which she
claimed the right to express that individuality, she belonged to an
earlier or a later day, but not to a New England of the eighteenth
century. Two years before, at the age of twelve, an age when other
children's personalities were colourless to the eyes of their elders,
she had been projected into the tranquil routine of the little world of
Second Westings. It was an established, crystallised, unchanging life
there in the back country of Connecticut, where hours, seasons,
actions, habits, revolved in so orderly a fashion as to have worn
themselves grooves out of which they could hardly even look, still less
achieve to deviate. Into this rigid placidity the dark child came like
a grain of ferment; and presently, no one could tell just how, the mass
began to work. Barbara was everywhere discussed. She was rather
unanimously disapproved of. And, nevertheless, as it were in the teeth
of all probability, she won to herself here and there a friend.
At the time of Barbara's transplanting from the cordial soil of
Maryland to the austere uplands of Connecticut, her father, the
Reverend Winthrop Hopkins Ladd, clergyman of the Established Church,
had been dead over two years, and the child's hurt, as such things
will, had outwardly healed; though the hidden wounds would agonise in
her heart at unexpected times, set vibrating to some poignant touch of
scent or sound or colour. The child had adored her father with a
tempestuous and jealous devotion, which, however, had not prevented her
waywardness from diversifying his repose with many a wakeful night.
Her mother, who had died when Barbara was scarce out of arms, had been
a bewildering birth from the kiss of North Wales on the warm south of
Spanish passion. The son of an old Welsh family, adventuring to the
New World to capture himself a fortune, had captured himself also a
wife to beggar envy. Where or how he got the fortune, no man knew and
few presumed to wonder; but where and how he got the wife was matter of
noonday knowledge. He saw her at church in New Orleans. There were
looks that burn and live. Through that emotional spring Glenowen
sniffed the incense of more masses than he had thought to attend in a
lifetime. Once there was a stolen word behind a pillar, eyes warily
averted. Twice notes passed from hand to hand. Then a girl, the
daughter of one of the haughtiest houses of Colonial Spain, was
audaciously carried off by night from a convent school in the safe
heart of the city. When next seen of the world, she was Glenowen's
wife, most radiantly and graciously dispensing an accepted hospitality
in Baltimore.
The result that in particular pertains to this history was a small,
flame-like, imperious girl, one Mistress Mercedes Glenowen, who, from
the night of ceremony when she first made her bow to the governor and
joyously turned her disastrous eyes upon the society of Baltimore, for
the space of some three years dispersed vain heartache throughout the
colony. Into the remotest plantations went the name of her and the
fame of her--and too often, also, the sickness of a hopeless desire of
her. There were duels, too, discreetly laid to other cause; and old
friendships changed to hate; and wild oaths made perjury. But the
heart of Mistress Mercedes went free. A quiet young clergyman, a
kinsman to the governor, came to Baltimore from Boston, on his way to a
country parish on the Pawtuxet, to which he had just been appointed.
Dining at Government House, he met Mistress Mercedes, but his eyes,
being at that moment immersed in dreams, looked not upon but through
and beyond her. Mercedes could not rest an instant until those
far-wandering, Northern eyes were ensnared, imprisoned, and denied a
range beyond the boundaries of her heart. But the capture was not a
quick one, and in the interest of it she had the accident to become
herself entangled, to such a degree that she had no longer any use for
freedom. And so it came about, to the wrathful amaze of her retinue,
but the unspeakable content of the Reverend Winthrop Ladd, that the
dark rose of Maryland was on a sudden removed from Baltimore to bloom
on a churchly plantation by the pale waters of the Pawtuxet.
Mr. Ladd, though a dreamer so far as consisted with outdoor life and
sanity of brain and muscle, was a strong man, one of those who have the
force to rule when they must, and the gentleness to yield when they
may. In the passionate completeness of her love, Mercedes sloughed the
caprices that would have pained and puzzled him, forgot the very echoes
of the acclamations of her court, and lived in the sanctuary of her
husband's devotion. For nearly three years the strangely assorted
lovers dwelt in their dream, while the world passed by them like a
pageant viewed through a glory of coloured glass. Then a sudden
sickness tore them apart; and when the dazed man came slowly back to
the realisation that he had been left to live, all his love, with all
the illusion of it, centred itself fixedly upon the little one,
Barbara, whom Mercedes had left to him.
As Barbara grew more and more like her mother, her ascendency over her
father grew more and more complete. Tenderly but firmly he ruled his
parish and his plantation. But he gradually forgot to rule Barbara.
Too nearly did she represent to him all that he had lost in his
worshipped Mercedes; and he could not bring himself to see anything but
freshness of character and vigour of personality in the child's very
faults. Hence he evolved, to suit her particular case, a theory very
much out of harmony with his time, to the effect that a child--or
rather, perhaps, such a child as this of Mercedes--should not be
governed or disciplined, but guided merely, and fostered in the finding
of her own untrammelled individuality. This plan worked, for the time,
to Barbara's unqualified approval, but she was destined to pay for it,
in later years, a heavy price in tears, and misunderstandings, and
repentance. With the growth of her intense and confident personality
there grew no balancing strength of self-control. Unacquainted with
discipline, she was without the safeguard of self-discipline. Before
she was eight years old she held sway over every one on the plantation
but herself,--and her rule, though pretty and bewitching, was not
invariably gentle. As for her father, though ostensively her comrade
and mentor, he was by this time in reality her slave. He rode with
her; he read with her; he taught her,--but such studies only as
ensnared her wayward inclination, and with such regularity only as fell
in with her variable mood. The hour for a lesson on the spinet would
go by unheeded, if Barbara chanced to be interested in the more
absorbing occupation of climbing a tree; and the time for reciting
Latin syntax was lightly forgotten if berries were a-ripening in the
pasture. Under such auspices, however, Barbara did assuredly grow
straight-limbed and active, slight and small indeed, by heritage from
her mother, but strong and of marvellous endurance, with the clear
blood red under her dark skin, her great gray-green eyes luminous with
health. Her father devoted to her every hour of the day that he could
spare from the claims of his parish. In a sunny and sandy cove near
the house he taught her to swim. Rowing and canoeing on the Pawtuxet
were mysteries of outdoor craft into which he initiated her as soon as
her little hands could pull an oar or swing a paddle. A certain strain
of wildness in her temperament attuned her to a peculiar sympathy with
the canoe, and won her a swift mastery of its furtive spirit. In the
woods, and in the seclusion of remote creeks and backwaters, her
waywardness would vanish till she became silent and elusive as the wild
things whose confidence she was for ever striving to gain. Her
advances being suspiciously repelled by the squirrels, the 'coons, and
the chipmunks, her passion was fain to expend itself upon the domestic
animals of the plantation. The horses, cattle, dogs, and cats, all
loved her, and she understood them as she never understood the nearest
and best-beloved of her own kind. With the animals her patience was
untiring, her gentleness unfailing, while her thoughtless selfishness
melted into a devotion for which no sacrifice seemed too great.
The negroes of the plantation, who seemed to Barbara akin to the
animals, came next to these in her regard, and indeed were treated with
an indulgence which made them almost literally lay their black necks in
the dust for her little feet to step on. But with people of her own
class she was apt to be hasty and ungracious. _Their_ feelings were of
small account in her eyes--certainly not to be weighed for a moment
against those of a colt or a kitten. There was one sweet-eyed and
lumbering half-grown puppy which Barbara's father--not for an instant,
indeed, believing anything of the sort--used to declare was more
precious to her than himself. But her old black "Mammy" 'Lize used to
vow there was more truth than he guessed in "Marse Ladd's foolin'."
However, when a fever snatched the gentle priest away from the scene of
his love and kindly ministrations, the child's true self emerged
through its crust of whim and extravagance. Stricken beyond a child's
usual capacity to feel or realise such a blow, she was herself seized
with a serious illness, after which she fell into a dejection which
lasted for the better part of a year. In her desolation she turned to
her animals rather than to her human companions, and found the more of
healing in their wordless sympathy.
At last, youth and health asserted themselves, and once more Barbara
rode, paddled, swam, tyrannised, and ran wild over the plantation,
while relatives from Maine to Maryland wrangled over her future.
There was one young uncle, her mother's only brother, whom Barbara
decided to adopt as her sole guardian. But other guardians came to
another decision. Uncle Bob Glenowen was an uncle after Barbara's own
heart, but a little more disciplined and reasonable than herself. The
two would have got on delightfully together--together careering over
the country on high-mettled horses, together swimming and canoeing at
the most irregular hours, together lauding and loving their four-foot
kindred and laughing to scorn the general stupidity of mankind. But
Uncle Glenowen had little of gold or gear, and his local habitation was
mutable. He loved Barbara too well not to recognise that she should
grow up under the guidance of steadier hands than his. It was finally
settled--Barbara's fiery indignation being quite disregarded--that she
should go to her father's younger sister, Mistress Mehitable Ladd, in
Second Westings.
Mistress Ladd was a self-possessed, fair-faced, aristocratic little
lady, with large blue eyes and a very firm, small mouth. She was
conscientious to a point that was wont to bring her kindness, at times,
into painful conflict with her sense of duty. The Puritan fibre ran in
unimpaired vitality through the texture of her being, with the result
that whenever her heart was so rash as to join issue with her
conscience, then prompt and disastrous overthrow was the least her
heart could expect for such presumption. In the matter of Barbara's
future, however, Distress Mehitable felt that duty and inclination ran
together. She had loved her brother Winthrop with unselfish and
admiring devotion, and had grieved in secret for years over his
defection from the austere fold of the Congregationalists to what she
regarded as the perilously carnal form and ceremony of the Church of
England. Her hampered spirit, her uncompleted womanhood, yearned
toward Barbara, and she shuddered at the idea of Winthrop's child
growing up untaught, unmothered, uncontrolled. She made up her mind
that Barbara should come to Second Westings, become a daughter to her,
and be reared in the purity of unsullied Congregationalism. With a
sigh of concordant relief it was recognised by the other relatives that
Mehitable was right. They washed their hands of the child, and forgot
her, and were thankful--all but Uncle Bob. And so Barbara went to
Second Westings.