There & Back

“Why don’t you ring for a lamp?” said Lestrange.

“There is no occasion; I have just done,” answered Richard.

“You cannot surely see in this light!” said Arthur, who was short-sighted. “You certainly were not at your work when I came into the room!”

He thought Richard had caught up the piece of leather he was paring, in order to deceive him.

“Indeed, sir, I was.”

“You were not. You were reading!”

“I was not reading, sir. I was busy with the last of my day’s work.”

“Do not tell me you were not reading: I heard you!”

“You did hear me, sir; but you did not hear me reading,” rejoined Richard, growing angry with the tone of the young man, and with his unreadiness to believe him.

Many workmen, having told a lie, would have been more indignant at not being believed, than was Richard speaking the truth; still, he was growing angry.

“You must have a wonderful memory, then!” said Lestrange. “But, excuse me, we don’t care to hear your voice in the house.”

The same moment, he either discovered, or pretended to discover, Barbara’s presence.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Wylder!” he said. “I did not know he was amusing you! I did not see you were in the room!”

“I suppose,” returned Barbara—and it savoured of the savage Lestrange sometimes called her—“you will be ordering the nightingales not to sing in your apple-trees next!”

“I don’t understand you!”

“Neither do you understand Mr. Tuke, or you would not speak to him that way!”

She rose and walked to the door, but turned as she went, and added—

“He was repeating the loveliest poem I ever heard—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.—I didn’t know there could be such a poem!” she added simply.

“It is not one I care about. But you need not take it second-hand from Tuke: I will lend it you.”

“Thank you!” said Barbara, in a tone which was not of gratitude, and left the room.

Lestrange stood for a moment, but finding nothing suitable to say, turned and followed her, while Richard bit his lip to keep himself silent. He knew, if he spoke, there would be an end; and he did not want this to be his last sight of the wonderful creature!

Barbara went to the door with the intention of going to the stables for Miss Brown and galloping straight home. But she bethought herself that so she might seem to be ashamed. She was not Arthur’s guest! He had been insolent to her friend, who had done more for her already than ever Arthur was likely to do, but that was no reason why she should run away from him—just the contrary! She would like to punish him for it somehow!—not shoot him, for she would not kill a pigeon, and to kill a man would be worse, though he wasn’t so nice as a pigeon!—but she would like—yes, she would like to give him just three good cuts across the shoulders with her new riding-whip! What right had he to speak so to his superior! By being a true workman, Mr. Tuke was a gentleman! Could Arthur Lestrange have talked like that? Could he have spoken the poetry like that? The bookbinder was worth a hundred of him! Could Arthur shoe a horse? What if the working man were to turn out the real lord of the creation, and the gentleman have to black his boots! There was something like it in the gospel!

She did not know that in general the working man is as foolish and unfit as the rich man; that he only wants to be rich, and trample on his own past. The working man may perish like the two hundred of the crew, and the rich man may be saved like the Ancient Mariner!

It is the poor man that gives the rich man all the pull on him, by cherishing the same feelings as the rich man concerning riches, by fancying the rich man because of his riches the greater man, and longing to be rich like him. A man that can do things is greater than any man who only has things. True, a rich man can get mighty things done, but he does not do them. He may be much the greater for willing them to be done, but he is not the greater for the actual doing of them.

“At any rate,” said Barbara to herself, “I like this working man better than that gentleman!”

Richard stood for a while boiling with indignation. He would have cared less if he had been sure he had answered him properly, but he could not remember what he had said.

The clock struck the hour that ended his workday. Instead of sitting down to read, he set out for the smithy. It was not a week since he had seen his grandfather, but he wanted motion, and desired a human face that belonged to him. It was rather dark when he reached it, but the old man had not yet dropped work. The sparks were flying wild about his gray head as Richard drew near.

“Can I help you, grandfather?” he said.

“No, no, lad; your hands are too soft by this time—with your bits of brass wheels, and scraps of leather, and needles, and paste! No, no, lad;—thou cannot help the old man to-night.—But you’re not in earnest, are you?” he added, looking up suddenly. “You ‘ain’t left your place?”

“No, but my day’s work being over, why shouldn’t I help you to get yours over! When first I came you expected me to do so!”

“Look here, lad!—as a man gets older he comes to think more of fair play, and less of his rights: it seems to me that not your time only, but your strength as well belongs to the man who hires you; and if you weary yourself helping me, who have no claim, you cannot do so much or so good work for your master!—Do you see sense in that?”

“Indeed I do! I think you are quite right.”

“It is strange,” Simon went on, “how age makes you more particular! The thing I would have done without thinking when I was young, I think twice of now. Is that what we were sent here for—to grow honest, I wonder?—Depend upon it,” he resumed after a moment’s silence, “there’s a somewhere where the thing’s taken notice of! There’s a somebody as thinks about it!”

After more talk, and a cup of tea at the cottage, Richard set out for the lodgeless gate, already mentioned more than once, to which the housekeeper had lent him a key.

He had not got far into the park, when to his surprise he perceived, a little way off on the grass, a small figure gliding swiftly toward him through the dusk rather than the light of the moon, which, but just above the horizon, sent little of her radiance to the spot. It was Barbara.

“I have been watching for you ever so long!” she said. “They told me you had gone out, and I thought you might come home this way.”

“I wish I had known! I wouldn’t have kept you waiting,” returned Richard.

“I want the rest of the poem,” she said. “It was horrid to have Arthur interrupt us! He was abominably rude too.”

“He certainly had no right to speak to me as he did. And if he had confessed himself wrong, or merely said he had made a mistake, I should have thought no more about it. I hope it is not true you are going to marry him, miss!—because—”

“If I thought one of the family said so, I would sleep in the park to-night. I would not enter the house again. When I marry, it will be a gentleman; and Mr. Lestrange is not a gentleman—at least he did not behave like one to-day. Come, tell me the rest of the poem. We have plenty of time here.”

The young bookbinder was perplexed. He had not much knowledge of the world, but he could not bear the thought of the servants learning that they were in the park together. At the same time he saw that he must not even hint at imprudence. Her will was not by him to be scanned! She must be allowed to know best! A single tone of hesitation would be an insult! He must take care of her without seeming to do so! If they walked gently, they would finish the poem as they came near the house: there he would leave her, and return by the lodge-gate.

“Where did we leave off?” he said.

His brief silence had seemed to Barbara but a moment spent in recalling.

“We left off at the place where the bird fell from his neck—no, just after that, where he falls asleep, as well he might, after it was gone.”

The moon was now peeping, in little spots of light, through the higher foliage, and casting a doubtful, ghostly sediment of shine around them. The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara’s soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like another moon from a cloud, walked the earth with bare head. Her hands too were bare, and glimmered in the night-gleam. He saw the rings on the small fingers shimmer and shine: she was as fond of colour and flash as lord St. Albans! Higher and higher rose the moon. Her light on the grass-blades wove them into a carpet with its weft of faint moonbeams. The small dull mirrors of the evergreen leaves glinted in the thickets, as the two went by, like the bits of ill-polished glass in an Indian tapestry. The moon was everywhere, filling all the hollow over-world, and for ever alighting on their heads. Far away they saw the house, a remote something, scarce existent in the dreaming night, the gracious-ghastly poem, and the mingling, harmonizing moon. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer; but they were moving toward it all the time, and it was even growing a move insistent fact. Thus they walked at once in the two blended worlds of the moonlight and the tale, while Richard half-chanted the music-speech of the most musical of poets, telling of the roaring wind that the mariner did not feel, of the flags of electric light, of the dances of the wan stars, of the sighing of the sails, of the star-dogged moon, and the torrent-like falls of the lightning down the mountainous cloud—for so Barbara, who had seen two or three tropical thunder-storms, explained to Richard the lightning which

“fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide;”

—until that groan arose from the dead men, and the bodies heaved themselves up on their feet, and began to work the ropes, and worked on till sunrise, and the mariner knew that not the old souls but angels had entered into them, by their gathering about the mast, and sending such a strange lovely hymn through their dead throats up to the sun.

When Richard repeated the stanza—

“It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook