There & Back

“Yes; your duty to your neighbour is more important.”

“Not than your duty to yourself, Barbara!” said lady Ann, in such a gently severe tone of righteous reproof, that Barbara’s furnace of a heart made the little pot that held her temper nearly boil over.

“Lady Ann,” she said, unconsciously drawing herself up to her full little height, “I am sorry I gave you the trouble of sitting up to open the door for me. That at least shall not happen again. Good morning.”

“There is nothing to be annoyed at, Barbara. I am quite pleased with what you have told me. I say only it was unwise of you not to let me know.”

“It may not have been wise for my own sake, but it was for the woman’s.”

“There is no occasion to say more about the woman; I am quite satisfied with you, Barbara!” said lady Ann, looking up with an icy smile, her last Parthian arrow.

“But I am not satisfied with you, lady Ann,” rejoined Barbara. “I have submitted to be catechized because the thing took place while I was your guest; but if such a thing were to happen again, I should do just the same; therefore I have no right, understanding perfectly how much it would displease you, to remain your guest. I ought, perhaps, to have gone home instead of returning to you, but I thought that would be uncivil, and look as if I were ashamed. My mother would never have treated me as you have done! You may think her a strange woman, but her heart is as big as her head—much bigger when it is full!”

It was not right of Barbara to get so angry, and answer lady Ann so petulantly, for she knew her pretty well by this time, and yet was often her guest. That it was impossible for such a girl to feel respect for such a woman, if it accounts for her bearing to her, condemns the familiarity that gave occasion to that bearing. At the same time, but for lady Ann’s superiority in age, Barbara would have spoken her mind with yet greater freedom. Her rank made no halo about her in Barbara’s eyes.

Lady Ann took no more trouble to appease her: the foolish girl would, she judged, be ashamed of herself soon, and accept the favour she knew to be undeserved! Lady Ann understood Barbara no more than lady Ann understood the real woman underlying lady Ann. She was not afraid of losing Barbara, for she believed her parents could not but be strongly in favour of an alliance with her family. She knew nothing of the personal opposition between Mr. and Mrs. Wylder: she never opposed sir Wilton except it was worth her while to do so; and sir Wilton never opposed her at all—openly. It gave lady Ann no more pleasure to go against her husband, than to comply with his wishes; and she had anything but an adequate notion of the pleasure it gave sir Wilton to see any desire of hers frustrated.

Barbara went to the stable, where man and boy had always his service in his right hand ready for her—got Miss Brown saddled, and was away from Mortgrange before Richard, early as he had begun, was half-way through his morning’s work.

She went to see Alice almost every day from that afternoon; and as no one could resist Barbara, Alice’s reserve, buttressed and bastioned as it was with pain, soon began to yield before the live sympathy that assailed it. They became fast friends.

CHAPTER XXIX. ALICE AND BARBARA

It was weeks before Alice was able to leave her bed: she had been utterly exhausted.

On a lovely summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last, at last, the cool, washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. She lay in a neat little curtained bed, in a room with a sloping roof on both sides, covered, not with tiles or slates, but with warm thatch, thick and sound. Ivy was creeping through the chinks of the ill-fitting window-frame; but through the little dormer window itself the sun shone freely, and made shadows of shivering ivy-leaves upon the deal floor. It was a very humble room, and Alice had been used to much better furniture—but neither to room nor furniture so clean. There was a wholesomeness and purity everywhere about her, very welcome to the lady-eyes with which Alice was born; for it is God that makes ladies, not stupid society and its mawkish distinctions. One brief moment she felt as if she had gained the haven of her rest, for she lay at peace, and nothing gnawed. But suddenly a pang shot through her heart, and she knew that some harassing thought was at hand: pain was her portion, and had but to define itself to grow sharp. She rose on her elbow to receive the enemy. He came; she fell back with a fainting heart and a writhing will. She had left love and misery behind her to seek help, and she had not found it! she had but lost sight of those for whom she sought the help! She could not tell how long it was since she had seen her mother and Arthur: she lay covered with kindness by people she had never before seen; and how they were faring, she could but conjecture, and conjecture had in it no comfort!

Alice had little education beyond what life had given her; but life is the truest of all teachers, however little the results of her teaching may be valued by school-enthusiasts. She did not put the letter H in its place except occasionally, but she knew how to send a selfish thought back to its place. She did not know one creed from another, but she loved what she saw to be good. She knew nothing of the Norman conquest, but she knew much of self-conquest. She could make her breakfast off dry bread, that her mother might have hot coffee and the best of butter. She wore very shabby frocks, but she would not put bad work into the seams of a rich lady’s dress. She stooped as she walked, and there was a lack of accord between her big beautiful eyes and the way she put her feet down; but it was the same thing that made her eyes so large, and her feet so heavy; and if she could not trip lightly along the street, she could lay very tender hands on her mother’s head when it ached with drinking. She had suffered much at the hands of great ladies, yet she had but to see Barbara to love her.

As she lay with her heart warming in that sunshine in which every heart must one day flash like the truest of diamonds, she heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the road. Her angel came to Alice with no flapping of great wings, or lighting of soft-poised heavenly feet on wooden floor, but with the sounds of ringing iron shoes and snorting breath, to be followed by a girl’s feet on the stair, whose herald was the smell, now of rosiest roses, now of whitest lilies, in the chamber of her sad sister. Well might Alice have sung, “How beautiful are the feet!” At the music of those mounting feet, death and fear slunk from the room, and Alice knew there was salvation in the world. What evil can there be for which there is no help in another honest human soul! What sorrow is there from which a man may not be some covert, some shadow! Alas for the true soul which cannot itself save, when it has no notion where help is to be found!

“Well, how are you to-day, little one?” said Barbara, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Alice was older and taller than Barbara, but Barbara never thought about height or age: strong herself, she took the maternal relation to all weakness.

“Ever so much better, miss!” answered Alice.

“Now, none of that!” returned the little lady, “or I walk out of the room! My name is Barbara, and we are friends—except you think it cheeky of me to call you Alice!”

Alice stretched out her thin arms, folded them gently around Barbara, and burst into weeping, which was not all bitter.

“Will you let me tell you everything?” she cried.

“What am I here for?” returned Barbara, deep in her embrace. “Only don’t think I’m asking you to tell me anything. Tell me whatever you like—whatever will help me to know you—not a thing more.”

Alice lay silent for an instant, then said—

“I wish you would ask me some question! I don’t know how to begin!”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Barbara said in response—

“What do you do all day in London?”

“Sew, sew, sit and sew, from morning to night,” answered Alice. “No sooner one thing out of your hands, than another in them, so that you never feel, for all you do, that you’ve done anything! The world is just as greedy of your work as before. I sometimes wish,” she went on, with a laugh that had a touch of real merriment in it, “that ladies were made with hair like a cat, I am so tired of the everlasting bodice and skirt!—Only what would become of us then! It would only be more hunger for less weariness!—It’s a downright dreary life, miss!”

“Have a care!” said Barbara solemnly, and Alice laughed.

“You see,” she said, and paused a moment as if trying to say Barbara, “I’m used to think of ladies as if they were a different creation from us, and it seems rude to call you—Barbara!”

She spoke the name with such a lingering sweetness as made its owner thrill with a new pleasure.

“It seems,” she went on, “like presuming to—to—to stroke an angel’s feathers!”

“And much I’d give for the angel,” cried Barbara, “that wouldn’t like having his feathers stroked by a girl like you! He might fly for me, and go—where he’d have them singed!”

“Then I will call you Barbara; and I will answer any question you like to put to me!”

“And your mother, I daresay, is rather trying when you come home?” said Barbara, resuming her examination, and speaking from experience. “Mothers are—a good deal!”

“Well, you see, miss—Barbara, my mother wasn’t used to a hard life like us, and Artie—that’s my brother—and I have to do our best to keep her from feeling it; but we don’t succeed very well—not as we should like to, that is. Neither of us gets much for our day’s work, and we can’t do for her as we would. Poor mamma likes to have things nice; and now that the money she used to have is gone—I don’t know how it went: she had it in some bank, and somebody speculated with it, I suppose!—anyhow, it’s gone, and the thing can’t be done. Artie grows thinner and thinner, and it’s no use! Oh, miss, I know I shall lose him! and when I think of it, the whole world seems to die and leave me in a brick-field!”

She wept a moment, very quietly, but very bitterly.

“I know he does his very best,” she resumed, “but she won’t see it! She thinks he might do more for her! and I’m sure he’s dying!”

“Send him to me,” said Barbara; “I’ll make him well for you.”

“I wish I could, miss—I mean Barbara!—Oh, ain’t there a lot of nice things that can’t ever be done!”

“Does your mother do nothing to help?”

“She don’t know how; she ‘ain’t learned anything like us. She was brought up a lady. I remember her saying once she ought to ‘a’ been a real lady, a lady they say my lady to!”

“Indeed! How was it then that she is not?”

“I don’t know. There are things we don’t dare ask mamma about. If she had been proud of them, she would have told us without asking.”

“What was your father, Alice?”

The girl hesitated.

“He was a baronet, Barbara.—But perhaps you would rather I said miss again!”

“Don’t be foolish, child!” Barbara returned peremptorily.

“I suppose my mother meant that he promised to marry her, but never did. They say gentlemen think no harm of making such promises—without even meaning to keep them!—I don’t know!—I’ve got no time to think about such things,—only—”

“Only you’re forced!” supplemented Barbara. “I’ve been forced to think about them too—just once. They’re not nice to think about! but so long as there’s snakes, it’s better to know the sort of grass they lie in!—Did he take your mother’s money and spend it?”