CHAPTER IX.
A VERSE OF AN OLD SONG.
"Adrian!"
The name was uttered with just a hint of hesitating appeal.
"At your service," Scarlett answered promptly. He had a bit of paper before him, and was pencilling an initial letter to be embroidered on Barbara's handkerchiefs.
"Adrian, did you hear that Mr. Harding—you know whom I mean—was ill?"
"Yes, I did hear something about it." He put his head on one side and looked critically at his work. "Is it anything serious?"
"Yes," said Barbara. "I'm afraid it is."
"Poor fellow! I'm very sorry. How the days do shorten, don't they?"
"Yes," said Barbara again. "They spoke as if he were going to—die."
"Really? I'm sorry for that. It is strange," Adrian continued, putting in a stroke very delicately, "but one of the Wilton girls used always to say he looked like it. I think it was Molly."
Barbara sighed but did not speak.
"Let's see," said Adrian, "he left the Robinsons—what happened? Didn't the boy get drowned?"
"No!" scornfully, "he fell into the water, but somebody fished him out."
"Not Harding?"
"No, somebody else. Mr. Harding went in, but he couldn't swim, and he didn't reach Guy. But he got a chill—it seems that was the beginning of it all."
Scarlett leant back in his chair, twirling the pencil between his fingers and looking at Barbara, whose eyes were fixed upon the rug. They were alone in the drawing-room of a house in Kensington. Their wedding was to be in about six weeks' time, and Barbara was staying for a fortnight with an aunt who had undertaken to help her in her shopping—a delightful aunt who paid bills, and who liked a quiet nap in the afternoon. Adrian sometimes went out with them, and always showed great respect for the good lady's slumbers.
"Well," he said, after a pause, "and where is Mr. Harding now?"
"At his mother's. She lives at Westbourne Park."
"Westbourne Park," Scarlett repeated. "By Jove, that's a change from Mitchelhurst! A nice healthy neighbourhood, and convenient for Whiteley's, I suppose; but what a change! I say, Barbara, how do you happen to know so much about the Hardings?"
"Adrian!"
And again she seemed to appeal and hesitate in the mere utterance of his name. She crossed the room, and touched his shoulder with her left hand, which had a ring shining on it—a single emerald, a point of lucid colour on her slim finger.
"Adrian, I wanted to ask you, would there be any harm if——"
"No," said Adrian gravely, "no harm at all. Not the slightest. Certainly not."
He took her other hand in his.
She looked doubtfully at him.
"What do you mean?"
"What do you mean, Barbara?"
"I wanted to go to the door and ask how he is—that's all. I feel as if I shouldn't like to go away without a word. We didn't part quite good friends, you know. And last year he was making his plans, and now we are making ours, and he——Oh, Adrian, why is life so sad? And yet I never thought I could be as happy as I am now."
"It's rather mixed, isn't it?" he said, smiling up at her, and he drew her hand to his lips. Barbara's eyes were full of tears. To hide them, she stooped quickly and touched his hair with a fleeting kiss.
"By all means go and ask after your friend before you leave town," said Adrian. "Let us hope he isn't as bad as they think."
"He is," said the girl. Long before this she had told Adrian about her night adventure at Mitchelhurst. She had been perfectly frank about it, and yet she sometimes doubted her own confession. It seemed so little when she spoke of it to him, so unimportant, so empty of all meaning. Could it be that, and only that, which had troubled her so strangely? He had smiled as he listened, and had put it aside. "I don't suppose you did very much harm," he said, "but any one with half an eye could see that he wasn't the kind of fellow to take things easily. Poor Barbara!" She stood now with something of the same perplexity on her brow; the thought of Reynold Harding always perplexed her.
There was a brief silence, during which she abandoned her hands to Adrian's clasp, and felt his touch run through her, from sensitive finger tips to her very heart. Then she spoke quickly, yet half unwillingly, "Very well then, I shall go."
"You wish it?" Adrian exclaimed, swift to detect every shade of meaning in her voice. "Because, if not, there is no reason why you should. If you hadn't said just now you wanted to go——"
She drew one hand away and turned a little aside. "I know," she said, "I did say it. Really and truly I don't want to go; it makes me uncomfortable to think about him, but I want to have been."
"Get it over then. Ask, and come away as quickly as you can."
"To-morrow?" said Barbara. "I thought, perhaps, as aunt was not going with us about those photograph frames, that to-morrow might do. I couldn't go with aunt."
"You have thought of everything. Go on."
"You might put me into a cab after we leave the shop," she continued. "I think that would be best. I would go and just inquire, and then come straight on here. I don't want to explain to anybody, and if you say it is all right——"
"Why, it is all right, of course. That's settled then," said Adrian.
The next day was dreary even for late November. Adrian and Barbara passed through the frame-maker's door into an outer gloom, chilly and acrid with a touch of fog, and variegated with slowly-descending blacks. Everything was dirty and damp. There were gas-lights in the shop windows of a dim tawny yellow.
Scarlett looked right and left at the sodden street and then upward in the direction of the sky. "This isn't very nice," he said; "hadn't we better go straight home?"
"No—please!" Barbara entreated. "We have filled up to-morrow and the next day, and aunt has asked some people to afternoon tea on Saturday."
"All right; it may be better when we get to Westbourne Park. I'll go a bit of the way with you."
He looked for a cab. Barbara waited passively by his side, gazing straight before her. She had never looked prettier than she did at that moment, standing on the muddy step in the midst of the universal dinginess. Excitement had given tension and brilliancy to her face, she was flushed and warm in her wrappings of dark fur, and above the rose-red of her cheeks her eyes were shining like stars. "Here we are!" said Scarlett, as he hailed a loitering hansom.
They drove northward, passing rows of shops, all blurred and glistening in the foggy air, and wide, muddy crossings, where people started back at the driver's hoarse shout. Scarlett, with Barbara's hand in his, watched the long procession of figures on the pavement—dusky figures which looked like marionnettes, going mechanically and ceaselessly on their way. To the young man, driving by at his ease, their measured movements had an air of ineffectual toil; they were on the treadmill, they hurried for ever, and were always left behind. Looking at them he thought of the myriads in the rear, stepping onward, stepping continually. If they had really been marionnettes! But the droll thing was that each figure had a history; there was a world-picture in every one of those little, jogging heads.
Presently the shops became scarce, the procession on the pavement grew scattered and thin. They were driving up long, dim streets of stuccoed houses. They passed a square or two where trees, black and bare, rose above shadowy masses of evergreens all pent together within iron railings. One might have fancied that the poor things had strayed into the smoky wilderness, and been impounded in that melancholy place.
"We must be almost there," said Adrian at last, when they had turned into a cross street where the plastered fronts were lower and shabbier. He put the question to the cabman.
"Next turning but one, sir," was the answer.
"Then I'll get out here," said Scarlett.
Barbara murmured a word of farewell, but she felt that it was best. She always thought of Reynold Harding as the unhappiest man she knew, and she could not have driven up to his door to flaunt her great happiness before his eyes. She leant forward quickly, and caught a glimpse of that clear happiness of hers on the side walk, smiling and waving a farewell, the one bright and pleasant thing to look upon in the grey foulness of the afternoon.
A turning—then it was very near indeed! Another dull row of houses, each with its portico and little flight of steps. Here and there was a glimmer of gas-light in the basement windows. Then another corner and they were in the very street, and going more slowly as the driver tried to make out the numbers on the doors. At that moment it suddenly occurred to Miss Strange that her errand was altogether absurd and impossible. She was seized with an overpowering paroxysm of shyness. Her heart stood still, and then began to throb with labouring strokes. Why had she ever come?
Had it depended on herself alone she would certainly have turned round and gone home, but the cab stopped with a jerk opposite one of the stuccoed houses, and there was an evident expectation that she would get out and knock at the door. What would the cabman think of her if she refused, and what could she say to Adrian after all the fuss she had made? Well, perhaps she could face Adrian, who always understood. But the cabman! She alighted and went miserably up the steps.
A servant answered her knock, and stood waiting. Between the maid and the man Barbara plucked up a desperate courage, and asked if Mrs. Harding was at home. She was.
"How is Mr. Harding to-day?" inquired Barbara, hesitating on the threshold.
"Much as usual, thank you, miss," the girl replied. "Won't you step in?"
She obeyed. After all, as she reflected, she need only stay a few minutes, and to go away with merely the formal inquiry, made and answered at the door, would be unsatisfactory. Mr. Harding might never hear that she had called. She followed the maid into a vacant sitting-room, and gave her a card to take to her mistress. The colour rushed to her very forehead as she opened the case. Her Uncle Hayes had had her cards printed with Mitchelhurst Place in the corner, and though, on coming to Kensington, she had drawn her pen through it, and written her aunt's address instead, it was plain enough to see. How would a Rothwell like to read Mitchelhurst Place on a stranger's card? She felt that she was a miserable little upstart.
Mrs. Harding did not come immediately, and Barbara as she waited was reminded of the dentist's room at Ilfracombe. "It's just like it," she said to herself, "and I can't have gas, so it's worse, really. And she hasn't got as many books either." This brought back a memory, and her lips and eyes began to smile—
But the smile was soon followed by a sigh.
The door opened and Mrs. Harding came in. To Barbara, still in her teens, Reynold's mother was necessarily an old woman, but she recognised her beauty almost in spite of herself, and stood amazed. Mrs. Harding wore black, and it was rather shabby black, but she had the air of a great lady, and her visitor, in her presence, was a shy blushing child. She apologised for her delay, and the apology was a condescension.
"You don't know me," said the girl in timid haste, "but I know Mr. Harding a little, and I thought I would call."
"Oh, yes," said Kate, "I know you by name, Miss Strange. My son was indebted to Mr. Hayes for an invitation to Mitchelhurst Place last autumn."
"I'm sure we were very glad," Barbara began, and then stopped confusedly, remembering that they had turned Mr. Reynold Harding out of the house before his visit was over. The situation was embarrassing. "I wish we could have made it pleasanter for him," she said, and blushed more furiously than ever.
"Have made Mitchelhurst Place pleasanter?" Mrs. Harding repeated. "Thank you, you are very kind. I believe he had a great wish to see the Place."
"It's a fine old house," said Barbara, conversationally. "I have left it now."
"So I supposed. I was sorry to see in the paper that Mr. Hayes was dead. I remember him very well, five-and-twenty or thirty years ago."
"I am going abroad," the girl continued. "I—I don't exactly know how long we shall be away. I am going to be married. But they told me Mr. Harding was ill—I hope it is not serious? I thought, as I was near, that I should like to ask before I went."
Mrs. Harding considered her with suddenly awakened attention. "He is very ill," she said, briefly. "You know what is the matter with him?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"He was not very strong as a boy. At one time he seemed better, but it was only for a time."
"I'm very sorry," said Barbara, standing up. "Please tell him I came to ask how he was before I went."
Mrs. Harding rose too, and looked straight into her visitor's eyes. "Would you like to see him?"
"I don't know," the girl faltered. "I'm not sure he would care to see me. If he would—"
Mrs. Harding interrupted her, "Excuse me a moment," and vanished.
Barbara, left alone, stood confounded. She was taken by surprise, and yet she was conscious that to see Reynold Harding was what she had really been hoping and dreading from the first. Some one moved overhead. Perhaps he would say "No," in that harsh, sudden voice of his. Well, then, she would escape from this house, which was like a prison to her, and go back to Adrian, knowing that she had done all she could. Perhaps he would laugh, and say "Yes."
She listened with strained attention. A chair was moved, a fire was stirred, a door was closed. Then her hostess reappeared. "Will you come this way?" she said.
Barbara obeyed without a word. The matter was taken out of her hands, and nothing but submission was possible. The grey dusk was gathering on the stairs, and through a tall window, rimmed with squares of red and blue, rose a view of roofs and chimneys half drowned in fog. Barbara passed onward and upward, went mutely through a door which was opened for her, and saw Reynold Harding sitting by the fire. He lifted his face and looked at her. In an instant there flashed into her memory a verse of the old song of Barbara Allen, sung to her as a child for her name's sake:—
The words, which she had sung to herself many a time, taking pleasure in their grotesque simplicity, presented themselves now with such sudden and ghastly directness, that a cold damp broke out on her forehead. She set her teeth fast, fearing that Barbara's speech would force its way through her lips with an outburst of hysterical laughter. What could she say, what could anybody say, but, "Young man, I think you're dying?" The words were clamouring so loudly in her ears that she glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Harding to make sure that they had not been spoken.
Reynold's smile recalled her to herself, and told her that he was reading too much on her startled face. "Won't you sit down?" he said, pointing to a chair. Before she took it she instinctively put out her hand, and greeted him with a murmur of speech. What she said she did not exactly know, but not those hideous words, thank God!
Mrs. Harding paused for a moment by the fire, gazing curiously at her son, as if she were studying a problem. Then silently, in obedience to some sign of his, or to some divination of her own, she turned away and left the two together.
Barbara looked over her shoulder at the closing door, and her eyes in travelling back to Harding's face took in the general aspect of the room. It was fairly large and lofty. Folding doors, painted a dull drab, divided it from what she conjectured was the sick man's bed-room. It was dull, it was negative, not particularly shabby, not uncomfortable, not vulgar, but hopelessly dreary and commonplace. There was in it no single touch of beauty or individuality on which the eye could rest. Some years earlier an upholsterer had supplied the ordinary furniture, a paper-hanger had put up an ordinary paper, and, except that time had a little dulled and faded everything, it remained as they had left it. The drab was rather more drab, that was all.
"Well," said Reynold from his arm-chair, "so you have come to see me."
"I wanted to ask you how you were—I heard you were ill," Barbara explained, and it struck her that she was exactly like a little parrot, saying the same thing over and over again.
"Very kind of you," he replied. "Do you want me to answer?"
"If—if you could say you were getting a little better."
He smiled. "It looks like it, doesn't it?" he said, languidly.
Barbara's eyes met his for a moment, and then she hung her head.
No, it did not look like it. Two candles were burning on the chimney-piece, but the curtains had not been drawn. Between the two dim lights, yellow and grey, he sat, leaning a little sideways, with a face like the face of the dead, except for the great sombre eyes which looked out of it, and the smile which showed a glimpse of his teeth. His hand hung over the arm of his chair, the hot nerveless hand which Barbara had taken in her own a moment before.
"I am so sorry," she said. "I hoped I might have had some better news of you before I went away. Did you know I was going away—going to be married?"
She looked up, putting the question in a timid voice, and he answered "Yes," with a slight movement of his head and eyelids. "I wish you all happiness."
"Thank you," said Barbara gratefully.
"And where are you going?"
"To Paris for a time, and then we shall see. He"—this with a little hesitation—"he is very busy."
"Busy—what, more poems?" said the man who had done with being busy.
"Yes. Did you see his volume?"
Harding shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm a little past Mr. Scarlett's poetry."
"Oh!" said Barbara, "of course one can't read when one is ill. You ought to rest."
"Yes," he assented, "I don't seem able to manage that either, just at present, but I dare say I shall soon. Meanwhile I sit here and look at the fire."
"Yes," said the girl. "Some people see all sorts of things in the fire."
"So they say," he answered listlessly. "I see it eating its heart out slowly. And so you are going to Paris? That was your dream when you were at Mitchelhurst."
"Yes—you told me to wait, and it would come, and it is coming. Oh, but you had dreams at Mitchelhurst, too, Mr. Harding! I wanted them to come true as well as mine."
"Did you? That was very kind of you. Mitchelhurst was a great place for dreams, wasn't it? But I left mine there. Better there."
"I felt ashamed just now," said Barbara, "when your mother spoke about your staying with us at Mitchelhurst. She doesn't know, then? Oh, Mr. Harding, I hate to think how we treated you in your old home, and I know my poor uncle was sorry too!"
"What for? People who can't agree are better apart, and Mrs. Simmonds' lodgings were comfortable enough," said Reynold.
"Oh, but it wasn't right! If you and uncle had only met—"
"Well, if all they tell us is true, I suppose we shall before long. Let's hope we may both be better tempered."
"Don't!" cried Barbara, with a glance at the pale face opposite, and a remembrance of her Uncle Hayes propped up in the great bed at Mitchelhurst. Would those two spectres meet and bow, in some dim underworld of graves and skeletons? She could not picture them glorified in any way, could not fancy them otherwise than as she had known them. "Pray don't," she said again.
"Very well," said Reynold, "but why not? It makes no difference. Still, talk of what you please."
"Does it hurt you to talk?"
"Yes, I believe it does. Everything hurts me, and therefore nothing does. So if you like it any better, it doesn't."
"I won't keep you long," said Barbara. "Perhaps I ought not to have come, but I felt as if I could not leave England without a word. You see, there is no knowing how long I may be away—"
"You were wise," said Reynold. "A pleasant journey to you! But don't come here to look for me when you come back. The fire will be out, and the room will be swept and garnished. This is a very chilly room when it is swept and garnished."
To Barbara it was a dim and suffocating room at that moment. She hardly felt as if it were really she who sat there, face to face with that pale Rothwell shadow, and she put up her hand and loosened the fur at her throat.
"You do not mind my coming now?" she said, ignoring the latter half of his speech. "You remember that evening? You did not make me very welcome then." A tremulous little laugh ended the sentence.
He shifted his position in the big chair with a weary effort, and let his head fall back. "It's different," he said. "Everything is different. I was alive then—five-and-twenty—and I was afraid you might get yourself into some trouble on my account—you had told me how the Mitchelhurst people gossipped. I understood, but they wouldn't have. Did the old man hear of it?"
"No," said Barbara; "he was ill so soon."
Harding made a slight sign of comprehension. "Well, it wouldn't be my business to say anything now," he went on in his hoarse low voice. "Besides, there is nothing to say. If the Devil had a daughter, she couldn't make any scandal out of an afternoon call in my mother's house. She couldn't suspect you of a flirtation with a death's head. Visiting the sick—it is the very pink of propriety."
Barbara felt herself continually baffled. And yet she could not accept her repulse. There was something she wanted to say to Mr. Harding, or rather, there was a word she wanted him to say to her. If he would but say it she would go, very gladly, for the walls of the room, the heavy atmosphere, and Reynold's eyes, weighed upon her like a nightmare. He had likened her once in his thoughts to a little brown-plumaged bird, and she felt like a bird that afternoon, a bird which had flown into a gloomy cage, and sat, oppressed and fascinated, with a palpitating heart. It seemed to her that his eyes had been upon her ever since she came in, and she wanted a moment's respite.
It came almost as soon as the thought had crossed her mind. Reynold coughed painfully. She started to her feet, not knowing what she ought to do, but a thin hand, lifted in the air, signed to her to be still. Presently the paroxysm subsided.
"Don't you want anything?" she ventured to ask.
He shook his head. After a moment he opened a little box on the table at his elbow, and took out a lozenge. Barbara dared not speak again. She looked at the dull, smouldering fire. "Young man," she said to herself with great distinctness, "Young man, I think you're dying."
She had the saddest heartache as she thought of it. That for her there should be life, London, Paris, the South—who could tell what far-off cities and shores?—who could tell how many years with Adrian? Who could tell what beauty and sweetness and music, what laughter and tears, what dreams and wonders, what joys and sorrows in days to come? While for him, this man with whom she had built castles in the air at Mitchelhurst, there were only four drab walls, a slowly burning fire, and a square grey picture of roofs and chimneys, dim in the foggy air. That was his share of the wide earth! No ease, no love, no joy, no hope,—the mother-world which was to her so bountifully kind, kept nothing for him but a few dull wintry days. Why must this be? And he was so young! And there was so much life everywhere, the earth was full of it, full to overflowing, this busy London was a surging, tumultuous sea of life about them, where they sat in that dim hushed room. She raised her head and looked timidly at the figure opposite, pale as a spectre, half lying, half lolling in his leathern chair, while he sucked his lozenge, and gazed before him with downcast eyes. From him, at least, life had ebbed hopelessly.
"Young man, I think you're dying." Oh, it was cruel, cruel! Barbara's thoughts flashed from the sick room to her own happiness—flashed home. She saw the lawn at Sandmoor, and a certain tennis-player standing in the shade of the big tulip tree, as she had seen him often that summer. He was in his white flannels, he was flushed, smiling, his grey-blue eyes were shining, he swung his racquet in his hand as he talked. He was so handsome and glad and young——ah! but no younger than Reynold Harding! Suppose it had been Adrian, and not Reynold, in the chair yonder, and her happy dreams, instead of being carried forward on the full flood of prosperity, had been left stranded and wrecked, on the low, desolate shore of death. It might have been Adrian passing thus beyond recall, the sun might have been dying out of her heaven, and at the thought she turned away her head, to hide the hot tears which welled into her eyes.
"You are sorry for me," said Reynold.
It was true, though the tears had not been for him. "I'm sorry you are ill," she said. She got up as she spoke, and stood by the fire.
"Very kind, but very useless," he answered with a smile.
"Useless!" cried little Barbara. "I know it is useless! I know I can't do anything! But, Mr. Harding, we were friends once, weren't we?"
He was silent. "I thought we were?" she faltered.
"Friends—yes, if you like. We will say that we were—friends."
"I thought we were," she repeated humbly. "I don't mean to make too much of it, but I thought we were very good friends, as people say, till that unlucky evening—that evening when you and Uncle Hayes—you were angry with me then!"
"That's a long while ago."
"It was my fault," she continued. "I didn't mean any harm, but you had a right to be vexed. And afterwards, that other evening when I went to you—I don't know what harm I did by forgetting your letter—you would not tell me, but I know you were angry. Afterwards, when I thought of it, I could see that you had been keeping it down all the time, you wouldn't reproach me then and there," said Barbara, with cheeks of flame, "but I understood when I looked back. It was only natural that you should be angry. It was very good of you not to say more."
"I think it was," said Reynold, but so indistinctly that Barbara, though she looked questioningly at him, doubted whether she heard the words.
"It would be only natural if you hated me," she went on, panting and eager, now that she had once began to speak. "But you mustn't, please, I can't bear it! I have never quarrelled with any one, never in all my life. I don't like to go away and feel that I am leaving some one behind me with whom I am not friends. So, Mr. Harding, I want you just to say that you don't hate me."
"Oh, but you are making too much of all that," he replied, and then, with an invalid's abruptness, he asked, "Where's your talisman?"
She looked down at her watch chain. "I gave it to Mr. Scarlett, he liked it," she said, with a guilty remembrance of Reynold among the brambles. "But you haven't answered me, Mr. Harding."
Her pleading was persistent, like a child's. She was childishly intent on the very word she wanted. She remembered how her uncle had laughed as she walked home after that first encounter with young Harding. "And you saw him roll into the ditch—Barbara, the poor fellow must hate you like poison!" No, he must not! It was the word she could not bear, it was only the word she knew.
"Nonsense!" he said, moving his head uneasily, "Let bygones be bygones. We can't alter the past. We are going different ways—go yours, and let me go mine in peace."
It was a harsh answer, but the frown which accompanied it betrayed irresolution as well as anger.
"I can't go so," Barbara pleaded, emboldened by this sign of possible yielding. "I never meant to do any harm. Say you are not angry—only one word—and then I'll go."
"I know you will." He laid his lean hands on the arms of his chair, and drew himself up. "Well," he said, "have it your own way—why not? What is it that I am to say?"
"Say," she began eagerly, and then checked herself. She would not ask too much. "Say only that you don't hate me," she entreated, fixing her eyes intently on his face.
"I love you, Barbara."
The girl recoiled, scared at the sudden intensity of meaning in his eyes, and in every line of his wasted figure as he leaned towards her. His hoarse whisper sent a shock through the deadened air of the drab room. Those three words had broken through the frozen silence of a life of repression and self-restraint, in them was distilled all its hoarded fierceness of love and revenge. In uttering them Reynold had uttered himself at last.
To Barbara it was as if a flash of fire showed her his passion, such a passion as her gentle soul had never imagined, against the outer darkness of death and his despair. Something choked and frightened her, and seemed to encircle her heart in its coils. It was a revelation which came from within as well as without. She threw out her hands as if he approached her. "Adrian!" she cried.
Reynold, leaning feebly on the arms of his chair, laughed.
"Well," he said, "are you content? I have said it."
"Oh," said Barbara, still gazing at him, "I know now—I understand—you do hate me!"
"Love you," he repeated. "I think I loved you from the day I saw you first. I dreamed of you at Mitchelhurst—only of you! Mitchelhurst for you, if you would have it so—but you—you!"
"No!" she cried.
"And afterwards you were afraid of me! If it had been any one else! But you shrank from me—you were afraid of me—the only creature in the world I loved! And then that last night when you came to me—how clever of you to discover that I was fighting with something I wanted to keep down! So I was, Barbara!"
He paused, but she only looked helplessly into his eyes.
"You don't know how hard it was," he continued meaningly. "For if I had chosen——"
"No!" she cried again.
"Yes! Do you think I did not know? Yes! I might have had your promise then! I might have had——"
He checked himself, but she did not attempt a second denial.
"Well, enough of this," said Reynold, after a moment. "It need not trouble you long. Look in the Times and you will soon see the end of it. But you can remember, if you like, that one man loved you, at any rate."
"One man does," said Barbara, in a voice which she tried to keep steady.
"Ah, the other fellow. Well, you know about that."
"Yes, I know."
"And you know that in spite of all I don't hate you. No, I don't, though I dare say you hate me for what I have said. But I can't help that—you asked for it."
"Yes," said Barbara. "I wish I hadn't."
"Forget it, then," he replied, with a gleam of triumph in his glance.
"You know I can't do that," she said.
She was too young to know how much may be forgotten with the help of time, and it seemed to her that Reynold's eyes would follow her to her dying day, that wherever there were shadows and silence, she would meet that reproachful, unsatisfied gaze, and hear his voice.
"You are very cruel!" she exclaimed.
"Am I?" he said more gently. "Poor child! I never meant to speak of this. I never could have spoken if you had not come this afternoon. I could not have told it to anybody but you, and you were out of my reach. Why did you come? You were quite safe if you had stayed away. You should have left me to sting myself to death in a ring of fire, as the scorpions do—or don't! What made you come inside the ring? It's narrow enough, God knows—!" he looked round as he spoke. "And you had all the world to choose from. As far as I was concerned you might have been in another planet. I couldn't have reached you. What possessed you to come here, to me? Well, you did, and you are stung. Is it my fault?"
"No, mine!" said the girl, passionately. "I never meant to hurt you, and you know I didn't, but it has all gone wrong from first to last. Anyhow, you have revenged yourself now. I wish—I wish that you were well, and strong, and rich——"
"That you might have the luxury of hating me? No, no, Barbara. I'm dying, and no one in all the world will miss me. I leave my memory to you."
He smiled as he spoke, but his utterance almost failed him, and Barbara's answer was a sob.
"I take it, then," she said in a choked voice. "Perhaps I should have been too happy if I had not known—I might never have thought about other people. But I sha'n't forget."
Then she saw that he had sunk back into his chair, and his face, which had fallen on the dull red leather, was a picture of death. The marble bust in Mitchelhurst Church did not look more bloodless.
"Oh!" said Barbara, "you are tired!"
"Mortally," he replied, faintly unclosing his lips. "Good-bye."
She paused for an instant, looking at the dropped lids which hid those eyes that she had feared. She could do nothing for him but leave him. "Good-bye," she said, very softly, as if she feared to disturb his rest, and then she went away.
The window on the stairs was a dim grey shape. Barbara groped her way down, and stood hesitating in the passage. It was really only half a minute before the maid came up from the basement with matches to light the gas, but it was like an age of dreary perplexity.
"I've just left Mr. Harding," she said hurriedly to the girl, whose matter-of-fact face was suddenly illuminated by the jet of flame. "I'm afraid he's tired. I think somebody ought to go to him."
"Mind the step, miss," was the reply. "I'll tell missis. I dare say he'll have his cocoa, I think it's past the time."
"Oh, don't wait for me!" cried Barbara. "I'm all right."
She felt as if Reynold Harding might die by his fireside while she was being ceremoniously shown out. She reached the door first and shut it quickly after her, to cut all attentions short. She had hurried out at the gate, under the foggy outline of a little laburnum, when a shout from the pursuing cabman aroused her to the consciousness that she had started off to walk.
Thus arrested, she got into the hansom, covered with confusion, and not daring to look at the man as she gave her address. He must certainly think that she meant to cheat him, or that she was mad. She shrank back into the seat, feeling sure that he would look through the little hole in the roof, from time to time, to see what his eccentric fare might be doing, and she folded her hands and sat very still, to impress him with the idea that she had become quite sane and well-behaved. As if it mattered what the cabman thought! And yet she blushed over her blunder while Reynold Harding's "I love you," was still sounding in her ears, and while the hansom rolled southward through the lamp-lit, glimmering streets, to the tune of Barbara Allen.