THE NEW YEAR FEAST
Barbara did not die. On the contrary, Barbara got quite well again, but
her recovery was so slow that Anthony only saw her once before he was
obliged to return to college. This was on New Year’s Day, when Mr.
Walrond asked him to dinner to meet Barbara, who was coming down for
the first time. Needless to say he went, taking with him a large bunch
of violets which he had grown in a frame at the Hall especially for
Barbara. Indeed, she had already received many of those violets through
the agency of her numerous younger sisters.
The Rectory dinner was at one o’clock, and the feast could not be
called sumptuous. It consisted of a piece of beef, that known as the
“aitch-bone,” which is perhaps the cheapest that the butcher
supplies when the amount of eating is taken into consideration; one
roast duck, a large Pekin, the New Year offering of the farmer
Stevens; and a plum pudding somewhat pallid in appearance. These
dainties with late apples and plenty of cold water made up the best
dinner that the Walrond family had eaten for many a day.
The Rectory dining-room was a long, narrow chamber of dilapidated
appearance, since between meals it served as a schoolroom also. A deal
bookcase in the corner held some tattered educational works and the
walls that once had been painted blue, but now were faded in patches to
a sickly green, were adorned only with four texts illuminated by
Barbara. These texts had evidently served as targets for moistened
paper pellets, some of which still stuck upon their surface.
Anthony arrived a little late, since the picking of the violets had
taken longer than he anticipated, and as there was no one to open the
front door, walked straight into the dining-room. In the doorway he
collided with the little maid-of-all-work, a red-elbowed girl of
singularly plain appearance, who having deposited the beef upon the
table, was rushing back for the duck, accompanied by two of the young
Walronds who were assisting with the vegetables. The maid, recoiling,
sat down with a bump on one of the wooden chairs, and the Walrond
girls, a merry, good-looking, unkempt crew (no boy had put in an
appearance in all that family), burst into screams of laughter. Anthony
apologised profusely; the maid, ejaculating that she didn’t mind, not
she, jumped up and ran for the duck; and the Reverend Septimus, a very
different Septimus to him whom we met a month or so before, seizing his
hand, shook it warmly, calling out:
“Julia, my dear, never mind that beef. I haven’t said grace yet.
Here’s Anthony.”
“Glad to see him, I am sure,” said Mrs. Walrond, her eyes still
fixed upon the beef, which was obviously burnt at one corner. Then with
a shrug, for she was accustomed to such accidents, she rose to greet
him.
Mrs. Walrond was a tall and extremely good-looking lady of about
fifty-five, dark-eyed and bright complexioned, whose chestnut hair was
scarcely touched with grey. Notwithstanding all the troubles and
hardships that she had endured, her countenance was serene and even
happy, for she was blessed with a good heart, a lively faith in
Providence, and a well-regulated mind. Looking at her, it was easy to
see whence Barbara and her other daughters inherited their beauty and
air of breeding.
“How are you, Anthony?” she went on, one eye still fixed upon the
burnt beef. “It is good of you to come, though you are late, which I
suppose is why the girl has burnt the meat.”
“Not a bit,” called out one of the children, it was Janey,
“it is very good of us to have him when there’s only one duck.
Anthony, you mustn’t eat duck, as we don’t often get one and you
have hundreds.”
“Not I, dear, I hate ducks,” he relied automatically, for his eyes
were seeking the face of Barbara.
Barbara was seated in the wooden armchair with a cushion on it, near the
fire of driftwood, advantages that were accorded to her in honour of
her still being an invalid. Even to a stranger she would have looked
extraordinarily sweet with her large and rather plaintive violet eyes
over which the long black lashes curved, her waving chestnut hair
parted in the middle and growing somewhat low upon her forehead, her
tall figure, very thin just now, and her lovely shell-like complexion
heightened by a blush.
To Anthony she seemed a very angel, an angel returned from the shores of
death for his adoration and delight. Oh! if things had gone the other
way—if there had been no sweet Barbara seated in that wooden chair!
The thought gripped his heart with a hand of ice; he felt as he had
felt when he looked at the window-place from the crest of Gunter’s
Hill. But she _had_ come back, and he was sure that they were each
other’s for life. And yet, and yet, life must end one day and then,
what? Once more that hand of ice dragged at his heart strings.
In a moment it was all over and Mr. Walrond was speaking.
“Why don’t you bid Barbara good-day, Anthony?” he asked.
“Don’t you think she looks well, considering? We do, better than
you, in fact,” he added, glancing at his face, which had suddenly
grown pale, almost grey.
“He’s going to give Barbara the violets and doesn’t know how
to do it,” piped the irrepressible Janey. “Anthony, why
don’t you ever bring _us_ violets, even when we have the whooping
cough?”
“Because the smell of them is bad for delicate throats,” he
answered, and without a word handed the sweet-scented flowers to
Barbara.
She took them, also without a word, but not without a look, pinned a few
to her dress, and reaching a cracked vase from the mantelpiece,
disposed of the rest of them there till she could remove them to her
own room. Then Mr. Walrond began to say grace and the difficulties of
that meeting were over.
Anthony sat by Barbara. His chair was rickety, one of the legs being
much in need of repair; the driftwood fire that burned brightly about
two feet away grilled his spine, for no screen was available, and he
nearly choked himself with a piece of very hot and hard potato. Yet to
tell the truth never before did he share in such a delightful meal. For
soon, when the clamour of “the girls” swelled loud and long, and
the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Walrond was entirely occupied with the
burnt beef and the large duck that absolutely refused to part with its
limbs, he found himself almost as much alone with Barbara as though
they had been together on the wide seashore.
“You are really getting quite well?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so.” Then, after a pause and with a glance from the
violet eyes, “Are you glad?”
“You know I am glad. You know that if you had—died, I should have
died too.”
“Nonsense,” said the curved lips, but they trembled and the violet
eyes were a-swim with tears. Then a little catch of the throat, and,
almost in a whisper, “Anthony, father told me about you and the
window-blind and—oh! I don’t know how to thank you. But I want to
say something, if you won’t laugh. Just at that time I seemed to come
up out of some blackness and began to dream of you. I dreamed that I
was sinking back into the blackness, but you caught me by the hand and
lifted me quite out of it. Then we floated away together for ever and
for ever and for ever, for though sometimes I lost you we always met
again. Then I woke up and knew that I wasn’t going to die, that’s
all.”
“What a beautiful dream,” began Anthony, but at that moment,
pausing from her labours at the beef, Mrs. Walrond said:
“Barbara, eat your duck before it grows cold. You know the doctor said
you must take plenty of nourishment.”
“I am going to, mother,” answered Barbara, “I feel dreadfully
hungry,” and really she did; her gentle heart having fed full, of a
sudden her body seemed to need nourishment.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Walrond, pausing from his labours and viewing
the remains of the duck disconsolately, for he did not see what portion
of its gaunt skeleton was going to furnish him with dinner, and duck
was one of his weaknesses, “dear me, there’s a dreadful smell of
burning in this room. Do you think it can be the beef, my love?”
“Of course it is not the beef,” replied Mrs. Walrond rather
sharply. “The beef is beautifully done.”
“Oh!” ejaculated one of the girls who had got the calcined bit,
“why, mother, you said it was burnt yourself.”
“Never mind what I said,” replied Mrs. Walrond severely,
“especially as I was mistaken. It is very rude of your father to make
remarks about the meat.”
“Well, something _is_ burning, my love.”
Janey, who was sitting next to Anthony, paused from her meal to sniff,
then exclaimed in a voice of delight:
“Oh! it is Anthony’s coat tails. Just look, they are turning quite
brown. Why, Anthony, you must be as beautifully done as the beef. If you
can sit there and say nothing, you are a Christian martyr wasted,
that’s all.”
Anthony sprang up, murmuring that he thought there was something wrong
behind, which on examination there proved to be. The end of it was that
the chairs were all pushed downwards, with the result that for the rest
of that meal there was a fiery gulf fixed between him and Barbara which
made further confidences impossible. So he had to talk of other
matters. Of these, as it chanced, he had something to say.
A letter had arrived that morning from his elder brother George, who was
an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches
before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian
period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had
been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital,
whither George had been conveyed, suffering from “fever and severe
chill,” which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, though
doubtless they were in fact compatible enough. Still he wrote a very
interesting letter, which, after the pudding had been consumed to the
last spoonful, Anthony read aloud while the girls ate apples and
cracked nuts with their teeth.
“Dear me! George seems to be very unwell,” said Mrs. Walrond.
“Yes,” answered Anthony, “I am afraid he is. One of the
medical officers whom my father knows, who is working in that hospital,
says they mean to send him home as soon as he can bear the journey,
though he doesn’t think it will be just at present.”
This sounded depressing, but Mr. Walrond found that it had a bright
side.
“At any rate, he won’t be shot like so many poor fellows; also he
has been in several of the big battles and will be promoted. I look upon
him as a made man. He’ll soon shake off his cold in his native
air——”
“And we shall have a real wounded hero in the village,” said one of
the girls.
“He isn’t a wounded hero,” answered Janey, “he’s
only got a chill.”
“Well, that’s as bad as wounded, dear, and I am sure he would have
been wounded if he could.” And so on.
“When are you going back to Cambridge, Anthony?” asked Mrs. Walrond
presently.
“To-morrow morning, I am sorry to say,” he answered, and
Barbara’s face fell at his words. “You see, I go up for my degree
this summer term, and my father is very anxious that I should take high
honours in mathematics. He says that it will give me a better standing
in the Bar. So I must begin work at once with a tutor before term, for
there’s no one near here who can help me.”
“No,” said Mr. Walrond. “If it had been classics now, with a
little refurbishing perhaps I might. But mathematics are beyond me.”
“Barbara should teach him,” suggested one of the little girls
slyly. “She’s splendid at Rule of Three.”
“Which is more than you are,” said Mrs. Walrond in severe tones,
“who always make thirteen out of five and seven. Barbara, love, you
are looking very tired. All this noise is too much for you, you must go
and lie down at once in your own room. No, not on the sofa, in your own
room. Now say good-bye to Anthony and go.”
So Barbara, who was really tired, though with a happy weariness, did as
she was bid. Her hand met Anthony’s and lingered there for a little,
her violet eyes met his brown eyes and lingered there a little; her
lips spoke some few words of commonplace farewell. Then staying a
moment to take the violets from the cracked vase, and another moment to
kiss her father as she passed him, she walked, or rather glided from
the room with the graceful movement that was peculiar to her, and lo!
at once for Anthony it became a very emptiness. Moreover, he grew aware
of the hardness of his wooden seat and that the noise of the girls was
making his head ache. So presently he too rose and departed.