There & Back, George MacDonald [early reader chapter books .TXT] 📗

of the sister and the dying brother rushed into each other. After this, they were seldom apart. A new life had waked in the very heart of death, and grew and spread through the being of the boy. His eye became brighter, not with fever only, but with love and content and hope; for Barbara made him feel that nothing could part them; that they had been born into the world for the hour when they should find one another-as now they had found one another, to have one another to all eternity: it was an end of their being! He would come creeping up to her as she worked or read, and sit on a stool at her feet, asking for nothing, wishing for nothing, content to be near her. But then Barbara's book or work was soon banished. He was bigger than she, but the muscles of the little maiden were as springs of steel, informed with the tenderest, strongest heart in all the county, and presently he would find himself lifted to her lap, his head on her shoulder, the sweetest voice in all the world whispering loveliest secrets in his willing ear, and her face bent over him with the stoop of heaven over the patient, weary earth. In her arms his poor wasting body forgot its restlessness; the fever that irritated every nerve, burning away the dust of the world, seemed to pause and let him grow a little cool; and the sleep that sometimes came to him there was sweet as death. The face that had so long looked peevish, wore now a waiting look: in heaven, every one sheltered the other, and the arms of God were round them all!

One day the mother peeped in, and saw them seated thus. Motherhood, strong in her, though hitherto, as regarded the boy, poisoned by her strife with her husband, moved and woke at the sight of her natural place occupied by her daughter.

"Let me take him, poor fellow!" she said.

Delighted that her mother should do something for him, Barbara rose with him in her arms. The mother sat down, and Barbara laid him in her lap. But the mother felt him lie listless and dead; no arm came creeping feebly up to encircle her neck. One of her babies died unborn, and she knew the moment the strange sad feeling of the time came back to her now; she felt through all her sensitive maternal body that her child did not care for her. Grown, through her late illness, at once weaker and tenderer, she burst into silent weeping. He looked up; the convulsion of her pain had roused him from a half-sleep. A tear dropped on his face.

"Don't rain, mamma! I will be good!" he said, and held his mouth to be kissed.

He was much too old for such baby-speech, but as he grew weaker, he had grown younger; and it seemed now as if, in his utter helplessness, he would go back to the bosom of his mother. She clasped him to her, and from that moment she and Barbara shared him between them.

So for a while, Barbara had not the same room to think about Richard; but when she did think of him, it was always in the some loving, trusting, hoping way.

When in London, she went to all the parties to which she was expected to go, and enjoyed them-after her own fashion. She loved her kind, and liked their company up to a point. But often would the crowd and the glitter, the motion and iridescence, vanish from her, and she sit there a live soul dreaming within closed doors. She would be pacing her weary pony through a pale land, under a globose moon, homeward; or, on the back of one of her father's fleet horses, sweeping eastward over the grassy land, in the level light of the setting sun, watching the strange herald-shadow of herself and her horse rushing away before them, ever more distort as it fled:-like some ghastly monster, in horror at itself, it hurried to the infinite, seeking blessed annihilation, and ever gathering speed as the sun of its being sank, till at last it gained the goal of its nirvana, not by its well run race, but in the darkness of its vanished creator. Then with a sigh would Barbara come to herself, the centre of many regards.

Arthur Lestrange found himself no nearer to her than before-farther off indeed; for here he was but one among many that sought her. But her behaviour to him was the same in a crowded room in London as in the garden at Mortgrange. She spoke to him kindly, turned friendly to him when he addressed her, and behaved so that the lying hint of lady Ann, that they had been for some time engaged, was easily believed. A certain self-satisfied, well-dressed idiot, said it was a pity a girl like that, a little Amazon, who, for as innocent as she looked, could ride backward and steer her steed straight, should marry a half-baked brick like Lestrange: Arthur, though he was not one of the worthiest, was worth ten of him, faultless as were his coats and neckties!

Her father had several times said to her that it was time she should marry, but had never got nearer anything definite; for there her eyes would flash, and her mouth close tight-compelling the reflection that her mother had been more than enough for him, and he had better not throw his daughter into the opposition as well. He could not, he saw clearly, prevail with her against her liking; but it would be an infernal pity, he thought, seeing poor Marcus must go, if she would not have Lestrange; for the properties would marry splendidly, and then who could tell what better title might not stand on the top of the baronetcy!

Lady Ann would not let her hope go. She grew daily more fearful of the cloud that hung in the future: out of it might at any moment step the child of her enemy, the low-born woman who had dared to be lady Lestrange before her! Then where would she and her children be! That her Arthur would not succeed him, would be a morsel to sweeten her husband's death for him! It would be life in death to him to spite the woman he had married! At one crisis in their history, he had placed in her hands a will that left everything to her son; but he might have made ten wills after that one! She knew she had done nothing to please him: she had in fact never spent a thought on making life a good thing to the man she had married. She wished she had endeavoured or might now endeavour to make herself agreeable to him. But it was too late! Sir Wilton would instantly imagine a rumour of the lost heir, and be on the alert for her discomfiture! If only he had not yet made a later will! He must die one day: why not in time to make his death of use when his life was of none! No one would wonder he had preferred the offspring of her noble person to the lost brat of the peasant woman!

How far over the line that separates guilt from greed, lady Ann might not have gone had she been sure of not being found out, she herself could not have told. The look of things is very different at night and in the morning; the bed-chamber can shelter what would be a horror in a court of justice; a conscience at peace in its own darkness will shudder in the gaslight of public opinion. It is marvellous that what we call the public , a mere imbecile as to judgment, should yet possess the Godlike power of awakening the individual conscience-and that with its own large dullness of conscience! Truly the relation of the world to its maker cannot primarily be an intellectual one; it must be a relation tremendously deeper! We do not, I mean, to speak after the manner of men, come of God's intellect, but of his imagination. He did not make us with his hands, but loved us out of his heart.

The same week in which sir Wilton gave that will into his lady's keeping, he executed a second, in which he made the virtue of the former depend on the non-appearance of the lost heir. Of this will he said nothing to his wife. Even from the grave he would hold a shadowy yet not impotent rod over her and her family! Lady Ann suspected something of the sort, and spent every moment safe from his possible appearance, in searching for some such hidden torpedo. But there was one thing of which sir Wilton took better care than of his honour-and that was his bunch of keys.

After the return of the Lestranges and the Wylders to their country-homes, lady Ann, having prevailed, on Mrs. Wylder to pay her a visit, initiated an attempt to gain her connivance in her project for the alliance of the houses. For this purpose she opened upon her with the same artillery she had employed against her husband. Mrs. Wylder sat for some time quietly listening, but looking so like her daughter, that lady Ann saw the mother's and not the father's was the alliance to seek. Thereupon she plucked the tompion out of the best gun in her battery, as she thought, and began to hint a fear that Miss Wylder had taken a fancy to a person unworthy of her.

"Girls who have not been much in society," she said, "are not unfrequently the sport of strange infatuations! I have myself known an earl's daughter marry a baker! I do not, of course, imagine your daughter guilty of the slightest impropriety,-"

Scarcely had the word left her lips, when a fury stood before her-towered above her, eyes flashing and mouth set, as if on the point of tearing her to pieces.

"Say the word and my Bab in the same breath again, and I'll throttle you, you vile woman!" cried Mrs. Wylder, and hung there like a thunder-cloud, lightening continuously.

Lady Ann was not of a breed familiar with fear, but, for the first time in her life, except in the presence of her mother, a far more formidable person than herself, she did feel afraid-of what, she would have found it hard to say, for to acknowledge the possibility of personal violence would be almost as undignified as to threaten it!

"I did not mean to offend you," she said, growing a little paler, but at the same time more rigid.

"What sort of mother do you take me for? Offended, indeed! Would you be all honey, I should like to know, if I had the assurance, to say such a thing of one of your girls?"

"I spoke as to a mother who knew what girls are like!"

"You don't know what my girl Bab is like!" cried Mrs. Wylder, with something that much resembled an imprecation: the word she used would shock thousands of mothers not comparable to her in motherhood. If propriety were righteousness, the kingdom of heaven would be already populous.

Lady Ann was offended, and seriously: was alliance with such a woman permissible or sufferable? But she was silent. For once in her life she did not know the proper thing to say. Was the woman mad, or only a savage?

Mrs. Wylder's eloquence required opposition. She turned away, and with a backward glance of blazing wrath, left the room and the house.

"Home like the devil!" she said to the footman as he closed the