The windows darkened momentarily with the coming of the tempest. Through the dim diamond panes the masses of the yew-trees were seen, and their movement was like the stirring of vast black wings. The effigies of the dead men frowned in the deepening gloom, and their young descendant folded his arms, and leaned against the high pew, with a slant gleam of light on his pale Rothwell face. Barbara went restlessly and yet cautiously up and down the central aisle, and paused by the reading-desk to turn the leaves of the great old-fashioned prayer-book which lay there. When its cover was lifted it exhaled a faint odour, as of the dead Sundays of a century and more. While she lingered, lightly conscious of the lapse of vague years, reading petitions for the welfare of "Thy servant GEORGE, our most gracious King and Governour," "her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, and all the Royal Family," the page grew indistinct in the threatening twilight, as if it would withdraw itself from her idle curiosity. She looked up with a shiver, as overhead and around burst the multitudinous noises of the storm, the rain gushing on the leaden roof, the water streaming drearily from the gutters to beat on the earth below, and, in a few moments, the quick, monotonous fall of drops through a leak close by. This lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Then the sky grew lighter, the downpour slackened, a sense of overshadowing oppression seemed to pass away, and St. Michael and his dragon brightened cheerfully. Barbara went to the door and threw it open, and a breath of fresh air came in with a chilly smell of rain.
As she stood in the low archway she heard Harding's step on the pavement behind her. It was more alert and decided than usual, and when she turned he met her glance with a smile.
"Well?" she said. "I didn't like to disturb you, you looked so serious."
"I was thinking," he admitted. "And it was a rather serious occasion. My people are not very cheerful company."
"And now you have thought?"
"Yes," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I have thought—seriously, with my serious friends yonder."
Barbara, as she stood, with her fingers closed on the heavy handle of the door, and her face turned towards Harding, fixed her eyes intently on his.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have made up your mind to come back to Mitchelhurst."
"Who knows?" said he. "I'm not sanguine, but we'll see what time and fortune have to say to it. At any rate my people are patient enough—they'll wait for me!"
To the girl, longing for a romance, the idea of the young man's resolution was delightful. She looked at him with a little quivering thrill of impatience, as if she would have had him do something towards the great end that very moment. Her small, uplifted face was flushed, and her eyes were like stars. The brightening light outside shone on the soft brown velvet of her dress, and something in her eager, lightly-poised attitude gave Reynold the impression of a dainty brown-plumaged, bright-eyed bird, ready for instant flight. He almost stretched an instinctive hand to grasp and detain her, lest she should loose her hold of the iron ring and be gone.
"I know you will succeed—you will come back!" she exclaimed. "How long first, I wonder?"
"Shall I succeed?" said Reynold, half to himself, but half-questioning her to win the sweet, unconscious assurance, which meant so little, yet mocked so deep a meaning.
"Yes!" she replied. "You will! You must be master here."
Master! She might have put it in a dozen different ways, and found no word to waken the swift, meaning flash in his eyes which that word did. Her pulses did not quicken, she perfectly understood that he was thinking of Mitchelhurst. She could not understand what mere dead earth and stone Mitchelhurst was to the man at her side.
"You will have to restore the church one of these days," she said.
Harding nodded.
"Certainly. But it will be very ugly, anyhow."
"Well, at least you must have the roof mended. And now, please, will you get the key? It is on the ledge of that pew just across the aisle. I think we had better be going—it has almost left off raining."
She stepped outside and put up her umbrella, while he locked up his ancestors, smiling grimly. It seemed rather unnecessary to turn the key on the family party in that dusty little corner. They were quiet folks, and, as he had said, they would wait for him and his fortune not impatiently. If he could have shut in the brightness of youth, the warmth and life and sweetness which alone could make the fortune worth having, if he could have come back in the hour of success to unfasten the door and find all there—then indeed his big key would have been a priceless talisman. Unfortunately one can shut nothing safely away that is not dead. The old Rothwells were secure enough, but the rest was at the mercy of time and change, and all the winds that blow.
The pair were silent as they turned into Mitchelhurst Street. Reynold looked at the small, shabby houses, and noted the swinging sign of the "Rothwell Arms," though his deeper thoughts were full of other things. But about half way through the village he awoke to a sudden consciousness of eyes. Eyes peered through small-paned windows, stared boldly from open doorways, met him inquisitively in the faces of loiterers on the path, or were lifted from the dull task of mending the road as he walked by with Barbara. He looked over his shoulder and found that other people were looking over their shoulders, after which he felt himself completely encompassed.
"People here seem interested," he remarked to Miss Strange, while a pale-faced, slatternly girl, with swiftly-plaiting fingers, leaned forward to get a better view.
"Why, of course they are interested. You are a stranger, you know. It is quite an excitement for them."
"You call that an excitement?" said he.
"Yes. If you spent your life straw-plaiting in one of these cottages you would be excited if a stranger went by. It would be kinder of you if you did not walk so fast."
"No, no," said Harding, quickening his steps. "I don't profess philanthropy."
"Besides, you are not altogether a stranger," she went on. "I dare say they think you are one of the old family come to buy up the property."
"Why should they think anything of the kind?" he demanded incredulously.
"Well, they know you are staying at the Place. Every child in the street knows that. And, you see, Mr. Harding, nobody comes to Mitchelhurst without some special reason, so perhaps they have a right to be curious. I remember how they stared a few months ago—it was at a gentleman who was just walking down the road——"
"Indeed," said Harding. "And what was his special reason for coming? I suppose," he added quickly, "I've as good a right to be curious as other Mitchelhurst people."
"Oh, I don't know. He was a friend of Uncle Herbert's—he came to see him."
"And did he walk slowly from motives of pure kindness?" the young man persisted.
"Yes," said Barbara defiantly. "He stood stock still and looked at the straw plaiting. I don't know about the kindness; perhaps he liked it."
"Well, I don't like it."
"But you needn't take such very long steps: these three cottages are the last. Do you know I'm very nearly running?"
Of course he slackened his pace and begged her pardon; but in so doing he relapsed into the uneasy self-consciousness of their first interview. When they reached the gate of the avenue he held it open for her to pass, murmuring something about walking a bit further. Barbara looked at him in surprise, and then, with a little smiling nod, went away under the trees, wondering what was amiss. "I can't have offended him—how could I?" she said to herself, and she made up her mind that her new friend was certainly queer. It was the Rothwell temper, no doubt, and yet his awkward muttering had been more like the manner of a sullen schoolboy. A Rothwell should have been loftily superior, even if he were disagreeable. It was true, as Barbara reflected, almost in spite of herself, that Mr. Harding had no such hereditary obligation on the pork-butcher side of his pedigree.
Reynold had spoken out of the bitterness of his heart, and a bitter frankness is the frankest of all. But perhaps he had not shown his wisdom when he so quickly confided his grandfather to Miss Strange. Because we may have tact enough to choose the mood in which our friend shall listen to our secret, we are a little too apt to forget that the secret, once uttered, remains with him in all his moods. In this case the girl had been a sympathetic listener, but young Harding scarcely intended that the elder Reynold should be so vividly realised.
Later, when all outside the windows was growing blank and black, Barbara went up to dress for dinner. She was nearly ready when there came a knock at her door, and she hurried, candle in hand, to open it. In the gloom of the passage stood the red-armed village girl who waited on her.
"Please, miss, the gentleman told me to give you this," said the messenger, awkwardly offering something which was only a formless mass in the darkness.
"What?" said Miss Strange, and turned the light upon it. The wavering little illumination fell on a confusion of autumn leaves, rich with their dying colours, and shining with rain. Among them, indistinctly, were berries of various kinds, hips and haws, and poison clusters of a deeper red, vanishing for a moment as the draught blew the candle flame aside, and then reappearing. One might have fancied them blood drops newly shed on the wet foliage.
"Oh!" Barbara exclaimed in surprise, and after a moment's pause, "give them to me." She gathered them up, despite some thorny stems, with her disengaged hand, and went back into her room. So that was the meaning of Mr. Harding's solitary walk! She stood by the table, delicately picking out the most vivid clusters, and trying their effect against the soft cloud of her hair, cloudier than ever in the dusk of her mirror. "I hope he hasn't been slipping into any more ditches!" she said to herself.
With that she sighed, for the thought recalled to her the melancholy of an autumnal landscape. She remembered an earlier gift, roses and myrtle, a summer gift, the giver of which had gone when the summer waned. She had seen him last on a hot September day. "We never said good-bye," Barbara thought, and let her hand hang with the berries in it. "He said he should not go till the beginning of October. When he came that afternoon and I was out, and he only saw uncle, I was sure he would come again. Well, I suppose he didn't care to. He could if he liked—a girl can't; there are lots of things a girl can't do; but a man can call if he pleases. Well, he must have gone away before now. And he didn't even write a line, he only sent a message by uncle, his kind regards—Who wants his kind regards?—and he was sorry not to see me. Very well, my kind regards, and I'm sure I don't want to see him!"
She ended her meditations with an emphatic little nod, but the girl in the mirror who returned it had such a defiantly pouting face that she quite took Barbara by surprise.
"I'm not angry," Miss Strange declared to herself after a pause. "Not the least in the world. The idea is perfectly absurd. It was just a bit of the summer, and now the summer is gone." And so saying she put Mr. Harding's autumn berries in her hair, and fastened them at her throat, and, with her candle flickering dimly through the long dark passages, swept down to the yellow drawing-room to thank him for his gift.
When Kate Rothwell promised to be Sidney Harding's wife she was very honestly in love with the handsome young fellow. But this happy frame of mind had been preceded by a period of revolt and disgust when she did not know him, and had resolved vaguely on a marriage—any marriage—which should fulfil certain conditions. And that she should be in love with the man she married was not one of them. In fact, the conditions were almost all negative ones. She had decreed that her husband should not be a conspicuous fool, should not be vicious, should not be repulsively vulgar, and should not be an unendurable bore. On the other hand he should be fairly well off. She did not demand a large fortune, she was inclined to rate the gift and prospect of making money as something more than the possession of a certain sum which its owner could do nothing but guard. Given a fairly cultivated man, and she felt that she would absolutely prefer that he should be engaged in some business which might grow and expand, stimulating the hopes and energies of all connected with it. The sterility and narrowness of life at Mitchelhurst had sickened her very soul. She was conscious of a fund of rebellious strength, and she demanded liberty to develop herself, liberty to live. She knew very well how women fared among the Rothwells. She had seen two of her father's sisters, faded spinsters, worshipping the family pride which had blighted them. Nobody wanted them, their one duty was to cost as little as possible. That they would not disgrace the Rothwell name was taken for granted. Kate used to look at their pinched and dreary faces, and recognise some remnants of beauty akin to her own. She listened to their talk, which was full of details of the pettiest economy, and remembered that these women had been intent on shillings and half-pence all their lives, that neither of them had ever had a five-pound note which she could spend as it pleased her. And their penurious saving had been for—what? Had it been for husband or child it would have been different, the half-pence would have been glorified. But they paid this life-long penalty for the privilege of being the Misses Rothwell of Mitchelhurst. Life with them was simply a careful picking of their way along a downward slope to the family vault, and it was almost a comfort to think that the poor ladies were safely housed there, with their dignity intact, while Kate was yet in her teens.
Later came the little episode of Minnie Newton and her admirer. Kate perceived her brother's indifference to the girl's welfare, and the brutality of his revenge on the man whose crime was his habit of chinking the gold in his waistcoat pocket. Probably, with her finer instincts, she perceived all this more clearly than did John Rothwell himself. She did not actively intervene, because, in her contemptuous strength, she felt very little pity for a couple whose fate was ostensibly in their own hands. Minnie was not even in love with Hayes, and Kate did not care to oppose her brother in order to force a pliant fool to accept a fortunate chance. She let events take their course, but she drew from them the lesson that her future depended on herself. And, miserably as life at Mitchelhurst was maintained, she was, perhaps, the first of the family to see that the time drew near when it would not be possible to maintain it at all, partly from the natural tendency of all embarrassments to increase, and partly from John Rothwell's character. He could not be extravagant, but he had a dull impatience of his father's minute supervision. Kate made up her mind that the crash would come in her brother's reign.
She had already looked round the neighbourhood of her home and found no deliverer there. Had there been any one otherwise suitable the Rothwell pride was so notorious that he would never have dreamed of approaching her. An invitation from a girl who had been a school friend offered a possible chance, and Kate coaxed the necessary funds from the old squire, defied her brother's grudging glances, and went, with a secret, passionate resolve to escape from Mitchelhurst for ever. She saw no other way. She was not conscious of any special talent, and she said frankly to herself that she was not sufficiently well educated to be a governess. Moreover, the independence which achieves a scanty living was not her ideal. She was cramped, she was half-starved, she wanted to stretch herself in the warmth of the world, and take its good things while she was young.
Fate might have decreed that she should meet Mr. Robert Harding, a successful man of business in the city, twenty years older than herself, slightly bald, rather stout, keen in his narrow range, but with very little perception of anything which lay right or left of the road by which he was travelling to fortune. The beautiful Miss Rothwell would have thanked Fate and set to work to win him. But it is not only our good resolutions that are the sport of warring chances. Our unworthy schemes do not always ripen into fact. Kate did not meet Mr. Robert Harding, she met his brother Sidney, a tall, bright-eyed, red-lipped young fellow, with the world before him, and the pair fell in love as simply and freshly as if the croquet ground at Balaclava Lodge were the Garden of Eden, or a glade in Arcady. In a week they were engaged to be married, and were both honestly ready to swear that no other marriage had ever been possible for either. To her he appeared with the golden light of the future about his head; to him she came with all the charm and shadowy romance of long descent, and of a poverty far statelier than newly-won wealth. Friends reminded Sidney that with his liberal allowance from his brother, and his prospect of a partnership at twenty-five, he might have married a girl with money had he chosen. Friends also mentioned to Kate, with bated breath, that the Hardings' father, dead twenty years earlier, had been a pork-butcher. Sidney laughed, and Kate turned away in scorn. She was absolutely glad that she could make what the world considered a sacrifice for her darling.
At Mitchelhurst her engagement, though not welcomed, was not strongly opposed. John Rothwell sneered as much as he dared, but he knew his sister's temper, and it was too like his own for him to care to trifle with it. So he stood aside, very wisely, for there was a touch of the lioness about Kate with this new love of hers, and he saw mischief in the eyes that were so sweet while she was thinking about Sidney. It was at that time that she spoke her word of half-scornful sympathy to Herbert Hayes.
And in a year her married life, with all its tender and softening influences, was over. An accident had killed Sidney Harding before he was twenty-five, before his child was born, and Kate was left alone in comparatively straitened circumstances. For her child's sake she endured her sorrow, demanding almost fiercely of God that He would give her a son to grow up like his dead father, and when the boy was born she called him Reynold. Sidney was too sacred a name; there could be but one Sidney Harding for her, but she remembered that he had once said that he wished he had been called Reynold, after his father.
It was pathetic to see her dark eyes fixed upon the baby features, trying to trace something of Sidney in them, trying hard not to realise that it was her own likeness that was stamped upon her child. "He is darker, of course," she used to say, "but—" He could not be utterly unlike his father, this child of her heart's desire! It was not possible—it must not be—it would be too monstrous a cruelty. But month by month, and year by year, the little one grew into her remembrance of her brother's solitary boyhood, and faced her with a moody temper that mocked her own. No one knew how long she waited for a tone or a glance which should remind her of her dead love, remind her of anything but the old days that she hated. None ever came. The boy grew tall and slim, handsome after the Rothwell type, with a curious instinctive avidity for any details connected with Mitchelhurst and his mother's people. He would not confess his interest, but she divined it and disliked it. And Reynold, on his side, unconsciously resented her eternal unspoken demand for something which he could not give. He would scowl at her over his shoulder, irritated by his certainty that her unsatisfied eyes were upon him. Mother and son were so fatally alike that they chafed each other continually. Every outbreak of temper was a pitched battle, the combatants knew the ground on which they fought, and every barbed speech was scientifically planted where it would rankle most.
A crisis came when it was decided that Reynold should leave school and go into his uncle's office. The boy did not oppose it by so much as a word; but as he stood, erect and silent, while Mr. Harding enlarged on his prospects, he looked aside for a moment, and Kate's keener eyes caught his contemptuous glance. To her it was an oblique ray, revealing his soul. He despised the Hardings; he was ashamed of his father's name. She did not speak, but in that moment with a pang of furious anguish she chose once and for ever between her husband and her son, and sealed up all her tenderness in Sidney's grave.
Reynold's stay in Robert Harding's office was short, but it was not unsatisfactory while it lasted. He never professed to like his work, but he went resignedly through the daily routine. He was not bright or interested, but he was intelligent. What was explained to him he understood, what was told him he remembered, as a mere matter of course. He acquiesced in his life in a city counting-house, as his grandfather at Mitchelhurst had acquiesced in his narrow existence there. It seemed as if the men of the family were apathetic and weary by nature, and only Kate had had energy enough to revolt.
An unexpected chance, the freak of a rich old man who had business relations with Robert Harding, and who remembered Sidney, made Reynold the possessor of a small legacy a few months after he had entered his uncle's service. He at once announced his intention of going to Oxford. Of course, as he said, without his mother's consent he could not go till he was of age, and if she chose to refuse it he must wait. Kate hesitated, but Mr. Harding, who was full of schemes for the advancement of his own son, did not care for an unwilling recruit, and the young fellow was coldly permitted to have his way. His mother, in spite of her disapproval, watched his course with an interest which she would never acknowledge. Was he really going to achieve success in his own fashion, perhaps to make the name she loved illustrious?
Nothing was ever more commonplace and unnoticeable than Reynold's university career. He spent his legacy, and came back as little changed as possible. It seemed as if he had felt that he owed himself the education of a gentleman, and had paid the debt, as a mere matter of course, as soon as he had the means. "What do you propose to do now?" Kate inquired. He answered listlessly that he had secured a situation as under-master in a school. And for three or four years he had maintained himself thus, making use of his mother's house in holiday time, or in any interval between two engagements, but never taking anything in the shape of actual coin from her. She suspected that he hated his drudgery, but he never spoke of it.
Thus matters might have remained if it had not been for Robert Harding's son. The old man, whose dream had been to found a great house of business which should bear his name when he was gone, was unlucky enough to have an idle fool for his heir. Reynold's record was not brilliant, but it showed blamelessly by the side of his cousin's folly and extravagance. Mr. Harding hinted more than once that his nephew might come back if he would, but his hints did not seem to be understood. Little by little it became a fixed idea with him that Reynold alone could save the name of Harding, and keep his cousin from utter ruin. He recognised a kind of scornful probity in his nephew, which would secure Gerald's safety in his hands, and perhaps he exaggerated the promise of Reynold's boyhood. At last he stooped to actual solicitation. Kate gave the letter to her son, silently, but with a breathless question in her eyes.
The old man offered terms which were almost absurdly liberal, but he tried to mask his humiliation by clothing the proposal in dictatorial speech. He gave Reynold a clear week in which to consider his reply, and almost commanded him to take that week. But Mr. Harding wrote, if in ten days he had not signified his acceptance, the situation would be filled up. He should give it, with the promise of the partnership, to a distant connection of his wife's. "Understand," said the final sentence, "that I speak of this matter for the first and last time."
"I think," said Reynold, looking round for writing materials, "that I had better answer this at once."
"Not to say 'No!'" cried Kate. "You shall not!" She stood before him, darkly imperious, with outstretched hand. It seemed to her as if the whole house of Harding appealed to her son for help. He was asked to do the work that Sidney would have done if he had lived. "You shall not insult him by refusing his offer without a moment's thought—I forbid it!" she exclaimed.
"Very well," said Reynold. "I will wait." He turned aside to the fire-place, and stood gazing at the dull red coals.
His mother followed him with her glance, and after a moment's silence she made an effort to speak more gently. "He is your father's brother," she said.
"Yes," Reynold replied, in an absent tone. "Such an offer couldn't come from the other side."
The words were a simple statement of fact, the utterance was absolutely expressionless, but a sudden flame leapt into Kate's eyes. "Answer when and as you please!" she cried. Her son said nothing.
He was waiting at the time to hear about a tutorship which had been mentioned to him. The matter was not likely to be settled immediately, and the next morning he appeared with his bag in his hand, and announced that he was going into the country for a few days, and would send his address. In due time the letter came with "Mitchelhurst" stamped boldly on it, like a defiance.
When Barbara Strange bade young Harding go and make his fortune, she did not know the curious potency of her advice. The words fell, like a gleam of summer sunshine, across a world of stony antagonisms and smouldering fires. And, with all the bright unconsciousness of sunshine, they transformed it into a place of life and hope. She had called her little cross her talisman, but Harding's talisman—for there are such things—was the folded letter in his pocketbook. As she stood beside him, flushed, eager, radiant, pleading with him, "Could not you care for Mitchelhurst, if—" she awakened a sudden craving for action, a sudden desire of possession in his ice-bound heart. To any other woman he could have been only Reynold Harding, a penniless tutor, recognised, perhaps, as a kind of degenerate offshoot of the Rothwell tree. But to Barbara he was the one remaining hope of the old family of which she had thought so much; he was the king who was to enjoy his own again, and her shining glances bade him go and conquer his kingdom without delay. And in Mitchelhurst Church, as he stood among his dead people, with the rain beating heavily on—
"The lichen-crusted leads above,"
he had made up his mind. He would cast in his lot with the Hardings till he should have earned the right to come back to the Rothwells' inheritance. He would do it, but not for the Rothwells' sake—for a sweeter sake—breathing and moving beside him in that place of tombs. He looked up at the marble countenance of his wigged ancestor, considering it thoughtfully, yet not asking himself if that dignified personage would have approved of his resolution. Reynold, as he stared at the aquiline features, wondered idly whether the lean-faced gentleman had ever known and loved a Barbara Strange, and whether he had kissed her with those thin, curved lips of his. Of course they were not as grimy and pale in real life as in their sculptured likeness. And yet it was difficult to picture him alive, with blood in his veins, stooping to anything as warm and sweet as Barbara's damask-rose mouth. It seemed to Reynold that only he and Barbara, in all the world, were truly alive, and he only since he had known her.
When he went back into the lanes alone, after leaving her at the gate, the full meaning of the decision which had swiftly and strangely reversed the whole drift of his life rushed upon him and bewildered him. He hastened away like one in a dream. It was as if he had broken through an encircling wall into light and air. Ever since his boyhood he had held his fancy tightly curbed, he had reminded himself by night and day that he had nothing, was nothing, would be nothing; in his fierce rejection of empty dreams he had chosen always to turn his eyes from the wonderful labyrinthine world about him, and to fix them on the dull grey thread of his hopeless life. Now for the first time in his remembrance he relaxed his grasp, and his fancy, freed from all control, flashed forward to visions of love and wealth. He let it go—why should he hinder it, since he had resolved to follow where it led? In this sudden exaltation his resolution seemed half realised in its very conception, and as he gathered the berries from the darkening hedgerows he felt as if they were his own, the first-fruits of his inheritance. He hurried from briar to briar under the pale evening sky, tearing the rain-washed sprays from their stems, hardly recognising himself in the man who was so defiantly exultant in his self-abandonment. Nothing seemed out of reach, nothing seemed impossible. When the darkness overtook him he went back with a triumphant rhythm in his swinging stride, feeling as if he could have gathered the very stars out of the sky for Barbara.
This towering mood did not last. It was in the nature of things that such loftiness should be insecure, and indeed Reynold could hardly have made a successful man of business had it been permanent. It would not do to add up Barbara and the stars in every column of figures. But the very fact of passing from the open heavens to the shelter of a roof had a sobering effect, the process of dressing for dinner recalled all the commonplace necessities of life, and in his haste he had a difficulty with his white necktie, which was distinctly a disenchantment. The shyness and reserve which were the growth of years could not be shaken off in a moment of passion. They closed round him more oppressively than ever when he found himself in the yellow drawing-room, face to face with Mr. Hayes, and, being questioned about his walk, he answered stiffly and coldly, and then was silent. Yet enough of the exaltation remained to kindle his eyes, though his lips were speechless, when he caught sight of Barbara standing by the fireside, with a cluster of blood-red berries in her hair, and another nestling in the dusky folds of lace close to her white throat. The vivid points of colour held his fascinated gaze, and seemed to him like glowing kisses.
He had a game of chess with his host after dinner. As a rule he was a slow and meditative player, scanning the pieces doubtfully, and suspecting a snare in every promising chance. But that evening he played as if by instinct, without hesitation. Everything was clear to him, and he pressed his adversary closely. Mr. Hayes frowned over his calculations, apprehending defeat, though the game as yet had taken no decisive turn. Presently Barbara came softly sweeping towards them in her black draperies, set down her uncle's coffee-cup at his elbow, and paused by Harding's side to watch the contest. Her presence sent a thrill through him which disturbed his clear perception of the game. It made a bright confusion in his mind, such as a ripple makes in lucid waters. He put out his hand mechanically towards the pawn which he had previously determined to move.
"Dear me!" said Barbara, strong in the traditional superiority of the looker-on, "why don't you move your bishop?"
Reynold moved his bishop.
Quick as lightning Mr. Hayes made his answering move, and, when it was an accomplished fact, he said—
"Thank you, Barbara."
Reynold and Barbara looked at each other. The aspect of affairs was entirely changed. A white knight occupied a previously guarded square, and simply offered a ruinous choice of calamities.
"Oh, what have I done?" the girl exclaimed.
Reynold laughed his little rough-edged laugh.
"Nothing," he said. "Don't blame yourself, Miss Strange. You only asked me why I didn't move my bishop. I ought to have explained why I didn't. Instead of which—I did. It certainly wasn't your fault."
Barbara lingered and bit her under-lip as she gazed at the board.
"I've spoilt your game," she said remorsefully. "I think I'd better go now I've done the mischief."
"No, don't go!" Harding exclaimed, and Mr. Hayes, rubbing his hands, chimed in with a mocking—
"No, don't go, Barbara!"
The girl looked down with an angry spark in her eyes.
"Well, I'll give you some coffee," she said to the young man; "you haven't had any yet."
"And then come back, Barbara!" her uncle persisted.
She did come back, flushed and defiant, determined to fight the battle to the last. But for her obstinacy Mr. Hayes would have had an easy triumph, for young Harding's defence collapsed utterly. Apparently he could not play a losing game, and a single knock-down blow discouraged him once for all. Barbara, taking her place by his side, showed twice his spirit, and at one time seemed almost as if she were about to retrieve his fallen fortunes. Mr. Hayes ceased to taunt her, and sat with a puckered forehead considering his moves. He kept his advantage, however, in spite of all she could do, and presently unclosed his lips to say "Check!" at intervals. But it was not till he had uttered the fatal "Mate!" that his face relaxed. Then he got up, and made his niece a little bow.
"Thank you, Barbara!" he said, and walked away to the fire-place.
The young people remained where he had left them. Barbara trifled with the chessmen, moving them capriciously here and there. Reynold, with his head on his hand, did not lift his eyes above the level of the board, but watched her slim fingers as they slipped from piece to piece, or lingered on the red-stained ivory. She brought back all their slain combatants, and set them up upon the battle-field.
"I wish I hadn't meddled!" she said suddenly. "I spoilt your game."
She spoke in a low voice, and Reynold answered in the same tone,
"What did it matter?"
"No, but I hate to be beaten. I wanted you to win."
"Well," said he, still with his head down, "you set me to play a bigger game to-day."
"Ah!" said Barbara, decidedly. "I won't meddle with that!"
"No?" he said, looking up with a half-hinted smile. Her cheeks were still burning with the excitement of her long struggle, and her bright eyes met his questioning glance.
"Perhaps you think I can't help meddling?" she suggested.
"Perhaps you can't. You are superstitious, aren't you? You believe in amulets and that kind of thing—or half believe. Perhaps you are foredoomed to meddle, and destiny won't let you set me down to the game and go quietly away."
Barbara was holding the king between her fingers. She replaced it on its square so absently, while she looked at Reynold, that it fell. His words seemed to trouble her.
"Well, if this game is an omen, you had better not let me meddle," she said at last.
"How am I to help it?"
"Thank you!" she exclaimed resentfully; "I'm not so eager to interfere in your affairs as you seem to take for granted!"
"Indeed I thought nothing of the kind. I thought we were talking of destiny. And, you see, you were good enough to take a little interest this afternoon."
She uttered a half-reluctant "Yes." She had a dim feeling that she was, in some inexplicable way, becoming involved in young Harding's fortunes.
The notion half-frightened, half-fascinated her. When they began their low-voiced talk she had unconsciously leaned a little towards him. Now she did not precisely withdraw, but she lifted her face, and there was a touch of shy defiance in the poise of her head.
Mr. Hayes, as he stood by the fire, was warming first one little polished shoe, and then the other, and contemplating the blazing logs.
"Barbara," he said suddenly, "did we have this wood from Jackson? It burns much better than the last."
Barbara was the little housekeeper again in a moment. She crossed the room, and explained that it was not Jackson's wood, but some of a load which Mr. Green had asked them to take. "You said I could do as I pleased," she added, "and I thought they looked very nice logs when they came."
"Green—ah! Jacob Green knows what he's about. Made you pay, I dare say. No, no matter." The girl's eyes had gone to a little table, where an account-book peeped out from under a bit of coloured embroidery. "I'm not complaining; I don't care about a few extra shillings, if things are good. Get Green to send you some more when this is burnt out."
Reynold had risen when Barbara left him, and after lingering for a moment, a tall black and white figure, in the lamplight by the chessboard, he followed her, and took up his position on the rug. The interruption to their talk had been unwelcome, but it was not, in itself, unpleasant. He liked to see Barbara playing the part of the lady of the Place. It was a sweet foreshadowing of the home, the dear home, that should one day be. There should be logs enough on the hearths of Mitchelhurst in October nights to come, and, though the fields and copses round might be wet and chill, the old house should be filled to overflowing with brightness and warmth and love. Some wayfarer, plodding along the dark road, would pause and look up the avenue, and see the lights shining in the windows beyond the leafless trees. Reynold pictured this, and pictured the man's feelings as he gazed. It was curious how, by a kind of instinct, he put himself in the outsider's place. He did not know that he always did so, but in truth he had never dreamed anything for himself till Barbara taught him, and his old way of looking at life was not to be unlearnt in a day. Still he was happy enough as he stood there, staring at the fire, and thinking of those illuminated windows.
He could not sleep when he went to bed that night. The head which he laid on the chilly softness of his pillow was full of a joyous riot of waking visions, and he closed his eyes on the shadows only to see a girl's shining glances and rose-flushed cheeks.
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.
It was fortunate that young Harding demanded little in the way of gaiety from Mitchelhurst. Such as it could give, however, it gave that evening, when the vicar, and a country squire who had a small place five or six miles away, came to dinner. The clergyman was a pallid, undersized man, who blinked, and twitched his lips when he was not speaking, and had a nervous trick of assenting to every proposition with an emphatic "Yes, yes." After the utterance of this formula his conscience usually awoke, and compelled him to protest, for he considered most things that were said or done in the world as at any rate slightly reprehensible. This might happen ten times in one conversation, but the assent did not fail to come as readily the tenth time as the first. It would only have been necessary to say, with a sufficient air of conviction, "You see, don't you, Mr. Pryor, that under these circumstances I was perfectly justified in cutting my grandmother's throat with a blunt knife?" to secure a fervent "Yes, yes!" in reply.
The squire was not half an inch taller, a little beardless man with withered red cheeks, and brown hair which was curiously like a wig. Barbara had doubted through two or three interviews whether it was a wig or not, and she had been pleased when he talked to her, because it gave her an excuse for looking fixedly in the direction of his head. At last he arrived one day with his hair very badly cut, and a bit of plaster on his ear, where the village barber had snipped it, after which she took no further interest in him. Happily her previous attention had given him a very high opinion of her intelligence and good taste, and Mr. Masters remained her loyal admirer. "A very sensible girl, Miss Strange," he would say, and Mr. Pryor would reply "Yes, yes," and then add doubtfully that he feared she was rather flighty, and that her indifference to serious questions was much to be regretted. This meant that Barbara would not take a class in the Sunday-school, and cared nothing about old books and tombstones.
The dinner was not a conversational success. Mr. Masters, on being introduced to Reynold Harding, was amazed at the likeness to the old family, and repeatedly exclaimed, "God bless my soul! How very remarkable!" Harding looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, and the vicar said "Yes, exactly so." The little squire's eyes kept wandering from the young man's face to the wall and back again, as if he were referring him to all the family portraits. By the time they had finished their fish the resemblance was singularly heightened. Reynold was scowling blackly, and answering in the fewest possible words, which seemed to grate against each other as he uttered them. Mr. Hayes, who did not care twopence for his young guest's feelings, looked on with indifferent eyes, and would not interfere, while Barbara made a gallant little attempt to divert attention from Reynold's ill-temper by talking with incoherent liveliness to the clergyman. As ill-luck would have it, Mr. Masters, who had more than once addressed his new acquaintance as "Mr. Rothwell," suddenly grasped the fact that he was not Rothwell at all, but Harding, and began to take an unnecessary interest in the Harding pedigree. He was so eager in his investigation that he did not see the young man's silent fury, but went on recalling different Hardings he had known or heard of. "That might be about your grandfather's time," he reckoned.
"You never knew my Hardings!" said Reynold abruptly, in so unmistakable a tone that Mr. Masters stopped short, and looked wonderingly at him, while Barbara faltered in the middle of a sentence. At that moment the remembrance of his grandfather was an intolerable humiliation to the poor fellow, tenfold worse because Barbara would understand. The dark blood had risen to his face and swollen the veins on his forehead, and his glance met hers. She coloured, and he took it as a confession that he had divined her thoughts. In truth she was startled and frightened at her hero of romance under his new aspect.
"Pryor," said Mr. Hayes sharply, "you are all wrong about that inscription in the church. Masters and I have been talking it over—eh, Masters?—and we have made up our minds that your theory won't do."
"Yes," said the vicar, and Mr. Masters chimed in, following his host's lead almost mechanically. The worthy little squire concluded that he must have said something dreadful, and wondered, as he talked, what these Hardings could have done. "I suppose some of 'em were hanged," he said to himself, and stole a glance of commiseration at Reynold, who was gloomily intent upon his plate. "People ought to let one know beforehand when there's anything disagreeable like that—why, one might talk about ropes! I shall speak to Hayes, though perhaps he doesn't know. A deucedly unpleasant young fellow, but so was John Rothwell, and it must be uncommonly uncomfortable to have anything of that kind in one's family. God bless my soul! he looked as if he were going to murder me!"
Barbara breathed again when the inscription was mentioned, recognising a safe and familiar topic, warranted to wear well. They had not ended the discussion when she left them to their wine. Mr. Masters was quicker than Reynold, and held the door open for her to pass, with a little old-fashioned bow, but he exclaimed over his shoulder as he closed it, "No, no, Pryor, you are begging the question of the date," and she went away with those encouraging words in her ears. Mr. Masters and Mr. Pryor might disagree as much as they pleased. They would never come to any harm.
Still, as she waited alone till the gentlemen should come, she could not help feeling depressed. The yellow drawing-room was more brilliantly lighted than usual, and the portrait of Anthony Rothwell chanced to be especially illuminated. Barbara sat down on a low chair, and took a book, but she turned the leaves idly, and whenever she lifted her eyes she met the painted gaze of the face that was so like Reynold. By nature she was happy enough, but her lonely life in the desolate old place, the lack of sympathy, which threw her back entirely on her own thoughts, the desires and dreams which she did not herself understand, but which sprang up and budded in the twilight of her innocent soul, had all combined to make her unnaturally imaginative. A little careless irresponsibility, a little healthy fun and excitement, would have cured her directly. But, meanwhile, the silence and decay of the great hollow house impressed her as it would not have impressed a heavier nature. She was like a butterfly in that wilderness of stone, brightening the spot on which she alighted, but failing to find the sunlight that she sought. Her moods would vary from one moment to the next, answering the subtle influences which a breath of wholesome air from the outer world would have blown away. As she sat there that evening she wished she could escape from Mitchelhurst and Mr. Harding. His angry glance had printed itself upon her memory, and it haunted her. She had been playing with his hopes, trying to awaken his ambition, thinking lightly of the Rothwell temper as a mere item in the romantic likeness, and suddenly she had caught sight of something menacing and cruel, beyond all strength of hers. She lifted her head, and Anthony Rothwell looked as if he were smiling in malicious enjoyment at her trouble. The very effort she made to keep her eyes from the picture drew them to it more certainly, till the firelit room seemed to contract about the portrait and herself, leaving no chance of escape from the ghostly tête-à-tête.
The sound of steps broke the spell. She threw down her book as the door opened, and could scarcely help laughing at the queer little company, the three small elderly men, and the tall young fellow who towered over them. A covert glance told her that Reynold was as pale, or paler, than usual, and she noticed that he answered in a constrained but studiously polite manner when the good-natured little squire made some remark on the chilliness of the autumn evenings. After a moment he came across to her, and stood with his elbow on the chimney-piece, looking at the blazing logs, while Anthony Rothwell smiled over his shoulder.
Barbara wondered what she should say to the pair of them, and she tormented her little lace-edged handkerchief in her embarrassment. Finally she let it fall. Young Harding stooped for it, and as he gave it back their eyes met, and he smiled.
"Are you going to play to us?" he asked.
"I wish Miss Strange would play for me at my entertainment at the schools next week," said Mr. Pryor plaintively. "Won't you be persuaded, Miss Strange?"
"I'll play for you now if you like," she answered, "but you know my uncle won't let me play at the penny readings. And really it is no loss, I am nothing of a musician."
The vicar sighed and looked across at Mr. Hayes. "I wish he would!" he said. "Couldn't you persuade him? I can't get the programme arranged properly."
"Why, haven't you got the usual people?"
"Yes, yes, I have got the usual people. But perhaps," said Mr. Pryor, not unreasonably, "it would be as well to have something a little different—a little new, you know. It is extremely kind of them, but the audience, the back benches, don't you know?—Well, I suppose they like variety."
Barbara looked gravely sympathetic.
"And it's rather awkward," Mr. Pryor continued, "young Dickson at the mill has some engagement that evening, and won't be able to sing 'Simon the Cellarer,' unless I put it the first thing."
"Why, he sings nothing else!" Miss Strange exclaimed.
"Yes, he does know two other songs, I believe, but they are, in my opinion, too broadly comic for such an entertainment as this. He hummed a little bit of one in my study one evening, in a very subdued manner, of course, just to give me an idea. I saw at once that it would never do. I stopped him directly, but I found myself singing the very objectionable words about the parish for days. Not aloud, you know, not aloud!"
Mr. Pryor looked sternly over the top of Miss Strange's head, and pressed his lips so tightly together that she was quite sure he was singing Mr. Harry Dickson's objectionable song to himself at that very moment.
"But why shouldn't he sing 'Simon the Cellarer' at the beginning just as well as at the end?" she questioned.
"Yes," said the vicar, "but there is my little reading, of course that must come in early—my position as the clergyman of the parish, you see. And I thought of something a little improving, a short reading out of a volume of selections I happen to have, 'Simon the Cyrenian'."
"Why, you read that before," Barbara began, and then stopped and coloured.
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Pryor, "I did, but I don't think they paid much attention, the back benches were rather noisy that evening, and it is a nice length, and seems very suitable. But the difficulty is how to keep 'Simon the Cellarer' and 'Simon the Cyrenian' apart on the programme. I don't know how it is to be managed, I'm sure. I thought perhaps you would play us something appropriate between the song and the reading. I'm afraid some of the audience may smile."
Reynold took his arm from the chimney-piece. "Appropriate to both Simons?" he inquired.
"Yes, just so, to both Simons. At least, not exactly that, but something by way of a transition, I suppose."
"I wonder what that would be like," Barbara speculated. "I'm really very sorry I can't help you, Mr. Pryor."
"Oh never mind," said the clergyman. "I did tell Dickson he might change the name in his song, but he wouldn't, in fact he answered rather flippantly. Well, I suppose I must find another reading, but it's a pity, when I knew of this one. Such a suitable length! Unless," he looked at Reynold, "unless your friend—"
Reynold's "No!" was charged with intense astonishment and horror. "I can't play a note," he added.
"But you could recite something," Mr. Pryor persisted. "Now that would really be very kind. Something like the 'Charge of the Light Brigade'—'Into the valley of death,' don't you know, 'Rode the six hundred'—that pleases an audience. We had a young man from Manchester once who did that very well, a little too much action, perhaps, but remarkably well. Or something American—American humour. If it isn't flippant I see no objection to it; one should not be too particular, I think. And it is very popular. Not flippant, and not too broad—but I needn't say that—I feel very safe with you. I'm sure you would not select anything broad."