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CHAPTER XIX. MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA

To make all this quite credible to a doubting reader, it would be necessary to tell Mrs. Wylder’s history from girlhood. She had had a very defective education, and what there was of it was all for show. Then she was married far too young, and to a man unworthy of any good woman. She indeed was not a good woman, but she was capable of being made worse; and in the bush, where she passed years not a few, and in cities afterward, she met women and men more lawless yet than herself or her husband. Overbearing where her likings were concerned, and full of a certain generosity where but her interests were in question, the slackness of the social bonds in the colonies had favoured her abnormal development. It is difficult to say how much man or woman is the worse for doing, when freed from restraint, what he or she would have been glad to do before, but for the restraint. Many who go to the colonies, and there to the dogs, only show themselves such as they dared not appear at home: they step on a steeper slope, and arrive, not at the pit, for they were in that already, but at the bottom of it, so much the faster. There were, however, in Mrs. Wylder, lovely rudimentary remnants of a good breed. She inherited feelings which gave her a certain intermittent and fugitive dignity, of some service to others in her wilder times, and to herself when she came into contact with an older civilisation. She would occasionally do a right generous thing—not seldom give with a freedom and judge with a liberality which were mainly rooted in carelessness.

She had much confidence in her daughter; and it said well for the mother that, with all her experience, she yet had this confidence—and none the less that she had never taken pains to instruct her in what was becoming. The most she had done in this way was once to snatch from her hand and throw in the fire a novel she had herself, a moment before, finished with unquestioning acceptance. If she had found her behaving like some of her acquaintance to whose conduct she did not give a second thought, for her friends might do as they pleased so long as they did not offend her, she would certainly, in some of her moods at least, have killed her.

While compelled, from lack of service, to employ herself in house affairs, she neither ate nor drank more than seemed good for her; but as soon as she had but to live and be served, she began to counterbalance ennui with self-indulgence, and continued to do so until the death of her boy, ever after which she had sought refuge from grief in narcotics. Possibly she would not have behaved as she did in church, but that her nervous being was a very sponge for morphia. Born to be a strong woman, she was a slave to her impulses, and, one of the weakest of her kind, went into a rage at the least show of opposition.

Scarcely had Mr. Wingfold left the room, when in came Barbara in her riding-habit, with the glow of joyous motion upon her face, for she had just ridden from Mortgrange.

“How do you do, mamma?” she said, but did not come within a couple of yards of her. “I’ve had such a ride—as straight as any crow could fly, between the two stations! I never could hit the line before. But I got a country-fellow to point me out a landmark or two, and here I am in just half the time I should have taken by the road! Such jumps!”

“You’re a madcap!” said her mother. “You’ll be brought home on a shutter some day! Mark my words, Bab! You’ll see!—or at least I shall; you’ll be past seeing! But it don’t matter; it’s what we’re made for! Die or be killed, it’s all one! I don’t care!”

“I do though, mamma! I don’t want to be killed just yet—and I don’t mean to be! But I must have a second horse! I begin to suspect Miss Brown of treating me like a child. She takes care of me! I mean to let her see what I can do if she’s up to it!”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind! I’ll have her shot if you go after any of your old pranks! And, while I think of it, Bab—your father has set his heart on your marrying Mr. Lestrange: I can see it perfectly, and I won’t have it! If I hear of anything of that sort between you, I’ll set a heavy foot on it.—How long have you been there this time?”

“A week.—But why shouldn’t I marry Mr. Lestrange if I like?”

“Because your father has set his heart on it, I tell you! Isn’t that enough, you tiresome little wretch? I will not have it—not if you break your heart over it!—There!”

Barbara burst out in a laugh that rang like a bronze bell.

“Break my heart for Mr. Lestrange! There’s not a man in the world I would break my little finger for! But my heart! that is too funny! You needn’t be uneasy, mamma; I don’t like Arthur Lestrange one bit, and I wouldn’t marry him if you and papa too wanted me. Oh, such a proper young man! He doesn’t think me fit company for his sister!”

“He said so! and you didn’t give him a cut over the eyes with your whip? My God!”

“Gracious, no! He never says anything half so amusing! He’s scorchingly polite! I would sooner fall in love with the bookbinder!”

“The bookbinder? Who’s that? You mean the tutor, I suppose! I’m not up to the slang of this old brute of a country!”

“No, mamma; there is a man binding—or mending rather, the books in the library. He’s going to teach me to shoe Miss Brown! Papa wouldn’t like me to marry a blacksmith—I mean a bookbinder—would he?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you would, mamma?” said Bab demurely, with two catherine-wheels of fun in her downcast eyes.

“If you go to do anything mad now, I’ll—”

“Don’t strain your innocent invention, mammy! I think I’ll take Mr. Lestrange! Better anger one than both of you!”

“Tease me any more with your nonsense, and I’ll set your father on you! Be off with you!”

CHAPTER XX. BARBARA AND HER CRITICS

While the two talked in the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter’s tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without a certain unconscious dignity; her lawlessness was the freedom of the bird that cannot trespass, not that of the quadruped forcing its way. Her almost baby-like cheeks, her musical voice clear of any strain of sorrow, her quick relations with the whole world of things, her grace, more child-like than womanly, whether she stood or sat or moved about, all indicated a simple, fearless, true and trusting nature. Everybody at Mortgrange liked her; nearly everybody at Mortgrange had some different fault to find with her; all agreed that she wanted taming—except sir Wilton, who allowed the wildness, but would not hear of the taming. The hour of the morning or the night at which she would not go wandering alone about the park, or even outside it, had not yet been discovered.

“Why don’t you look better after your friend, Theo?” said her father one day when Barbara’s chair was empty at dinner—with his cold incisive voice, a little rasping now that the clutch of age’s hand was beginning to close on his throat.

“She doesn’t mind me, papa,” Theodora answered. “Do say something to her, mamma!”

“‘Tis not my business to reform other people’s children,” lady Ann returned.

“I find her exceedingly original!” remarked the baronet.

“In her manners, certainly,” responded his lady.

“I find them perfect. Their very audacity renders them faultless. And the charm is that she does not even suspect herself audacious.”

“That is her charm, I confess,” responded Arthur; “but it is a dangerous one, and may one day cause her to be sadly misunderstood.”

“A London drawing-room is your high court of parliament, Arthur!” said his father.

“Miss Wylder, with all her sweetness,” remarked Miss Malliver, “has not an idea of social distinction. She cannot understand why she should not talk to any farmer’s man or dairymaid she happens to meet! It is not her talking to them I mind so much as the familiar way she does it. If they take liberties, it will be her own fault. Any groom might be pardoned for fancying she thought him as good as herself!”

“But she does,” answered Theodora. “Yesterday, I found her talking to the bookbinder as familiarly as if he had been Arthur!”

This was hardly correct, for Barbara talked to the bookbinder with a deference she never showed Lestrange.

“She lacks self-respect!” said lady Ann. “But we must deal with her gently, and try to do her good. I think myself there is not much amiss with her beyond love of her own way. Her dislike of restraint certainly does not befit a communicant!”

Lady Ann was an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a mammon-worshipper as any in the land.

“But I so far agree with sir Wilton,” she went on, “as to grant that her manners have in them the germ of possible distinction; and I think they will come to be all, or nearly all, that could be desired. We ought at least to give her the advantage of any doubt, and do what we can to lead her in the right direction.”

“It’s a fine thing to go to church and have your wits sharpened!” said the baronet, with an ungenial laugh.

Sir Wilton regarded lady Ann as the coldest-blooded and most selfish woman in creation, and certainly she was not less selfish and was colder-blooded than he. Full of his own importance as any Pharisee—as full as he could be without making himself ridiculous, he resented the slight regard she showed to that importance. He believed himself wise in human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay within the limited range of his own consciousness. Of the noble in humanity he knew next to nothing. To him all men were only selfish. The cause, though by no means the logical ground of this his belief, was his own ingrained selfishness. With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he pardoned in himself. He had some power over himself, for he very seldom went into a rage; but he kept his temper like a devil, and was coldly cruel. His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming him. He would have hated her quite, but for the sort of respect she roused in him by surpassing him in his own kind. He cringed to her with a sneer. It was long since he had learned from her society to remember, with the nearest approach to compunction of which his moth-eaten heart was capable, the woman who had forsaken her own rank to brave the perils of his, and had sunk frozen to death by the cold of his contact. For some years he felt far more friendly to the offspring of the high-born lady than to that of the blacksmith’s daughter; but as time went on, and the memory of the more plebeian infant’s ugliness faded, he began to think how jolly it would be—how it would serve out her ladyship and her brood of icicles, if after all the blacksmith’s grandson turned up to oust the earl’s. He grinned as he lay awake in the night, picturing to himself how the woman in the next room would take it. Him and his son together her ladyship might find almost too much for her! But for many years he had indulged in no allusion to the possible improbable, allowing her ladyship to refer to Arthur as the heir without hinting at the uncertainty of his position.

Lady Ann, from dwelling on what she counted the shame of his origin, had got so far toward persuading herself that the vanished child was base-born, that she scarcely doubted the possibility, were he to appear, of proving his claim false, and originated by conspiracy. Unable to learn from her husband when and where the baby was baptized, she concluded that he had never been baptized, and that there was no record of his birth. As the years went by, and nothing was heard of him, she grew more and more confident. Now and then a fear would cross her, but she always succeeded in stifling it—without, however, arriving at such a degree of certainty, that the thought of the child had no share in her regard for the wealthy Barbara, her encouragement of her general relations with the family, and her connivance at her frequent and prolonged visits during the absence of herself and sir Wilton.

She was now returned, and had found everything as she left it, with the insignificant difference that the bay-window of the library was occupied by a man at work repairing the books. She had resumed the reins of the family-coach, and now went on to play the part of a good providence, and drive the said coach to the top of the hill.

Sir Wilton, I have said, liked Barbara. She amused him, and amusement was the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching. All his weather else was gray, with a touch of the lurid on the western horizon—of which he was not weather-wise enough to take heed. He had been at school with Barbara’s father, but did not like her any better for that. In youth they had not been friends, except in a way that brought their interests too much in collision for their friendship to last. It had ended in a quiet hate, each knowing too well how much the other knew to dare an open quarrel. But all that was many years away, and Tom Wylder had been long abroad and almost forgotten. Sir Wilton, notwithstanding, admired the forgivingness of his own disposition when he found himself wondering how Tom Wylder would regard an alliance with his old rival. Doubtless he would like his daughter to be my lady, but he might be looking for a loftier title than his son could give her!

Sir Wilton was incapable, however, of taking any active interest in the matter. The well-being of his family, when he himself should be out of the way, did not much affect him. Nothing but his lower nature had ever roused him to action of any kind. How far the idea of betterment had ever shown itself to him, God only knows. Apparently, he was a child of the evil one, whom nothing but the furnace could cleanse. Almost the only thing he could now imagine giving him vivid pleasure, was to see his wife thoroughly annoyed.

All he had ever had of the manners of a gentleman, remained with him. He was courteous to ladies, never swore in their presence—except sometimes in a mutter at his wife, and could upon occasion show a kindness that cost him nothing. Humanity was not all dead out of him; neither was there a purely human thought in him. On Barbara he smiled his sweetest smile: it owed most of its sweetness to the dentist.

CHAPTER XXI. THE PARSON’S PARABLE

Mr. Wingfold went as he had come, thoughtful even to trouble. What was to be done for the woman? What was his part, as parson of the parish, with regard to her behaviour in church? Was it or was it not his part to take public notice of what she intended, if not as a defiance to God, at least as an open expression of her bitter resentment of his dealing with her? The creator’s discipline did not suit his creature’s taste, and she would let him know it: whether it suited her necessities, she did not ask or care; she knew nothing of her necessities—only of her desires. Had she had a suspicion that she was an eternal creature, poor as well as miserable, blind and naked as well as bereaved and angry, she might have allowed some room for God to show himself right. But she was ignorant of herself as any savage. Was Wingfold to take her insolence in church as a thing done to himself, which he must endure with patience? or, putting himself out of the question, and regarding her conduct only as a protest against the ways of God with her, must he leave reproof as well as vengeance to the Lord? Was it his business, or was it not, to rebuke her, and make his rebuke as open as her offence? It troubled him almost beyond bearing to think that some of his flock might imagine that the great lady of the parish was allowed to behave herself unseemly, where another would be exposed to shame. But how abhorrent to him was a public contention in the church, and on the Lord’s day! Mrs. Wylder was just the woman to challenge forcible expulsion, and make the circumstances of it as flagrant as possible! She might even use both pistol and whip! What better opportunity could she find for giving point to her appeal against God! A man might, in the rage of disappointment, cry out that there could be no God where baffle met the holiest instinct—that blundering chance must rule; he might, illogical with grief, declare that as God could treat him so, he would believe in him no longer; or he might assert that an evil being, not a good, was at the heart of life—a devil and not a God, for he was one who created and forgot, or who remembered and did not care—who quickened exposure but gave no shield! called from the void a being filled with doorless avenues to pain, and abandoned him to incarnate cruelty, that he might make him sport with the wildness of his dismay! but here was a woman who did not say that God was not, or that he was not good, but with passionate self-party-spirit cried out, “He is against me! he sides with my husband! He is not my friend, but his: I will let him know how I resent his unfairness!” Whether God was good or bad she did not care—that was not a point she was concerned in; all she heeded was how he behaved to her—whether he took part with her husband or herself. He had torn from her the desire of her heart and left her desolate: she would worship him no longer! She had been brought up to believe there was a God, and had never doubted his existence: with her whole will and passion she opposed that which she called God. She had never learned to yield when wrong, and now she was sure she was right. Though hopeless she resisted. She cried out against God, but believed him by his own act helpless to deliver her, for what could he do against the grave? Powerless for her as unfriendly toward her, why should she worship him? Why should she pay court to one who neither would nor could give her what she wanted? What was he God for? Was she to go to his house, and carry herself courteously, as if he were her friend! She would not! And that there might be no mistake as to how she regarded him, she would sit in her pew and read her novel, while the friends of God said their prayers to him! If she annoyed them, so much the better, for the surer she might hope that he was annoyed!

It may seem to some incredibly terrible that one should believe in God and defy him! But do none of us, who say also we believe in God, and who are far from defying him, ever behave like Mrs. Wylder? It is one thing to believe in a God; it is quite another to believe in God! Every time we grumble at our fate, every time we are displeased, hurt, resentful at this or that which comes to us, every time we do not receive the suffering sent us, “with both hands,” as William Law says, we are of the same spirit with this half-crazy woman. In some fashion, and that a real one, she must have believed in the God against whom she urged her complaint; and it is rather to her praise that, like Job, she did it openly, and not with mere base grumblings in her heart at her fireside. It is mean to believe half-way, to believe in words, and in action deny. One of four gates stands open to us: to deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him; to acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good, and act as true men resisting a tyrant; to say, “I would there were a God,” and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a God, and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.

But what was parson Wingfold to do in the matter? Was he to allow the simple sheep of his flock to think him afraid of the squire’s lady? or was he to venture an uproar in the church on a Sunday morning? His wife and he had often talked the thing over, but had arrived at no conclusion. He went to her now, and told her all that had passed.

“Isn’t it time to do something?” she said.

“Indeed I think so—but what?” he answered. “I wish you would show me what I ought to do! Let me see it, and I will do it.” She was silent for a moment.

“Couldn’t you preach at her?” she said, with a laugh in which was an odd mingling of doubt and merriment.

“I have always thought that a mean thing, and have never done it—except by dwelling on broadest principles. That an evil principle has an advocate present, is no reason for sparing it: what am I there for? But to preach that the many may turn on the one—that I never could do!”

“This case is different from any other. The wrong is done continuously, in the very eyes of the congregation, and for the sake of its being seen,” Mrs. Wingfold answered. “Neither would you be the assailant; you would but accept, not give the challenge. For I don’t know how many Sundays, she has been pitting her position in the pew against yours in the pulpit! Believing it out of your power to do anything, she flaunts her French novel in your face; and those that can’t see her, see her yellow novel in your eyes, and think about her and you, instead of the things you are saying to them! For the sake of the work given you, for the sake of your influence with the people, you must do something!”

“It is God she defies, not me.”

“I think she defies you to say an honest word on his behalf. Your silence must seem to her an acknowledgment that she is right.”

“That cannot be, after what I have said to her more than once in her own house.”

“Then at least she must think that either you have no authority to drive from the little temple one of the cows of Bashan, or are afraid of her horns.”

“Quite right, Nelly!” cried the rector; “you are quite right. Only you don’t give me a hint what to do!”

“Am I not saying as plain as I can that you must preach at her?”

“H’m! I didn’t expect that of you!”

“No; for if you could have expected it of me, you would have thought of it yourself! But just think! A public scandal requires public treatment. You will not be dragging her before the people; she has put herself there! She is brazen, and must be treated as brazen—set in the full glare of opinion. And I think, if I were a clergyman, I should know how to do it!”

Wingfold was silent. She must be right! Something glimmered before him—something possible—he could not see plainly what.

“It is all very well to make such a clamour about her boy,” continued his wife, “but every one knows that she quarrelled with him dreadfully—that for days at a time they would be cat and dog with each other. Her animal instinct lasted it out, and she did not come to hate him; but I can’t help thinking it must have been in a great measure because her husband favoured the other that she took up this one with such passion. I have been told she would abuse him in language not fit to repeat, the little wretch answering her back, and choking with rage that he could not tear her.”

“Who told you?” asked the parson.

“I would rather not say.”

“Are you sure it is not mere gossip?”

“Quite sure. To be gossip, a thing must go through two mouths at least, and I had it first-mouth. I tell it you because I think it worth your knowing.”

The next Sunday morning, there lay the lady as usual, only her novel was a red one. When the parson went into the pulpit, he cast one glance on the gallery to his right, then spoke thus:—

“My friends, I will follow the example of our Lord, and speak to you to-day in a parable. The Lord said there are things better spoken in parables, because of the eyes that will not see, and the ears that will not hear.

“There was once a mother left alone with her little boy—the only creature in the world or out of it that she cared for. She was a good mother to him, as good a mother as you can think, never overbearing or unkind. She never thought of herself, but always of the desire of her heart, the apple of her eye, her son born of her own body. It was not because of any return he could make her that she loved him. It was not to make him feel how good she was, that she did everything for him. It was not to give him reasons for loving her, but because she loved him, and because he needed her. He was a delicate child, requiring every care she could lavish upon him, and she did lavish it. Oh, how she loved him! She would sit with the child on her lap from morning till night, gazing on him; she always went to sleep with him in her bosom—as close to her as ever he could lie. When she woke in the dark night, her first movement was to strain him closer, her next to listen if he was breathing—for he might have died and been lost! When he looked up at her with eyes of satisfaction, she felt all her care repaid.

“The years went on, and the child grew, and the mother loved him more and more. But he did not love her as she loved him. He soon began to care for the things she gave him, but he did not learn to love the mother who gave them. Now the whole good of things is to be the messengers of love—to carry love from the one heart to the other heart; and when these messengers are fetched instead of sent, grasped at, that is, by a greedy, ungiving hand, they never reach the heart, but block up the path of love, and divide heart from heart; so that the greedy heart forgets the love of the giving heart more and more, and all by the things it gives. That is the way generosity fares with the ungenerous. The boy would be very pleasant to his mother so long as he thought to get something from her; but when he had got what he wanted, he would forget her until he wanted something more.

“There came at last a day when she said to him, ‘Dear boy, I want you to go and fetch me some medicine, for I feel very poorly, and am afraid I am going to be ill!’ He mounted his pony, and rode away to get the medicine. Now his mother had told him to be very careful, because the medicine was dangerous, and he must not open the bottle that held it. But when he had it, he said to himself, ‘I dare say it is something very nice, and mother does not want me to have any of it!’ So he opened the bottle and tasted what was in it, and it burned him terribly. Then he was furious with his mother, and said she had told him not to open the bottle just to make him do it, and vowed he would not go back to her! He threw the bottle from him, and turned, and rode another way, until he found himself alone in a wild forest, where was nothing to eat, and nothing to shelter him from the cold night, and the wind that blew through the trees, and made strange noises. He dismounted, afraid to ride in the dark, and before he knew, his pony was gone. Then he began to be miserably frightened, and to wish he had not run away. But still he blamed his mother, who might have known, he said, that he would open the bottle.

“The mother got very uneasy about her boy, and went out to look for him. The neighbours too, though he was not a nice boy, and none but his mother liked him, went out also, for they would gladly find him and take him home to her; and they came at last to the wood, with their torches and lanterns.

“The boy was lying under a tree, and saw the lights, and heard the voices, and knew it was his mother come. Then the old wickedness rose up fresh in his heart, and he said to himself: ‘She shall have trouble yet before she finds me! Am I to come and go as she pleases!’ He lay very still; and when he saw them coming near, crept farther, and again lay still. Thus he went on doing, and so avoided his saviours. He heard one say there were wolves in the wood, for that was the sound of them; but he was just the kind of boy that will not believe, but thinks every one has a purpose of his own in saying this or that. So he slipped and slipped away until at length all despaired of finding him, and left the wood.

“Suddenly he knew that he was again alone. He gave a great shriek, but no one heard it. He stood quaking and listening. Presently his pony came rushing past him, with two or three wolves behind him. He started to his feet and began to run, wild to get out of the wood. But he could not find the way, and ran about this way and that until utter despair came down upon him, and all he could do was to lie still as a mouse lest the wolves should hear him.

“And as he lay he began at last to think that he was a wicked child; that his mother had done everything to make him good, and he would not be good; and now he was lost, and the wolves alone would find him! He sank at last into a stupor, and lay motionless, with death and the wolves after him.

“He came to himself in the arms of a strange woman, who had taken him up, and was carrying him home.

“The name of the woman was Sorrow—a wandering woman, a kind of gypsy, always going about the world, and picking up lost things. Nobody likes her, hardly anybody is civil to her; but when she has set anybody down and is gone, there is often a look of affection and wonder and gratitude sent after her. For all that, however, very few are glad to be found by her again.

“Sorrow carried him weeping home to his mother. His mother came out, and took him in her arms. Sorrow made her courtesy, and went away. The boy clung to his mother’s neck, and said he was sorry. In the midst of her joy his mother wept bitterly, for he had nearly broken her heart. She could not get the wolves out of her mind.

“But, alas! the boy forgot all, and was worse than ever. He grew more and more cruel to his mother, and mocked at every word she said to him; so that—”

There came a cry from the gallery. The congregation started in sudden terror to their feet. The rector stopped, and turning to the right, stood gazing. In the front of the squire’s pew stood Mrs. Wylder, white, and speechless with rage. For a moment she stood shaking her fist at the preacher. Then, in a hoarse broken voice, came the words—

“It’s a lie. My boy was never cruel to me. It’s a wicked lie.”

She could say no more, but stood and glared, hate in her fierce eyes, and torture in her colourless face.