Barbara Frietchie

“ In 1894 she married Robert Taber, an actor, with whom she played until their divorce in 1900. Subsequently she had great success as Barbara Frietchie in Clyde Fitch’s play of that name, and other dramas ”

“ And 'mongst them Count de Lorge, with one he hoped to make his bride.
The weary to sleep and the wounded to die.
When preparing to read a selection, it is of great importance to make the leading thoughts stand out clearly in the mind so that we may be able to present them one by one. The poem Barbara Frietchie (p. 113.) could be divided into paragraphs with some such titles as the following: (1) the town of Frederick and its surroundings, (2) the approach of the army, (3) the tearing down of the flags, (4) the raising of Barbara Frietchie's flag, (5) Stonewall Jackson and his men, and so on. ”

“ On my honor as a man there died within me during those few moments of torturing reflection all the love I had borne for Barbara. I awoke to the fact that it was not true love, but animal passion for her beauty, that had led me into this pit of shame and despair.
Some men arrive, by slow and devious roads, at a belief that shakes their faith to its foundations. Not so I. As surely as I knew that I lived and moved did I know that I was wedded to a drunkard, and that there was no civilized law that could divorce me from her. I was Barbara's shield and protector, her lord, her master, her victim. ”

“ Thus they lived on till her husband’s absence had stretched to years, and there could be no longer any doubt of his death. A passionless manner of renewing his addresses seemed no longer out of place in Lord Uplandtowers. Barbara did not love him, but hers was essentially one of those sweet-pea or with-wind natures which require a twig of stouter fibre than its own to hang upon and bloom. ”

“ Barbara's death has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.
Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pass that, in the late populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.
The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when they are over, and he is gone. ”

“ I will only say now that you should not have engaged this woman without consulting me."
"Indeed, I shall not consult you," returned Barbara, "upon my domestic arrangements, and I am astonished at your interference. It is I who have to attend to them, and I will not be thwarted and ordered to do this or that. You think a wife is a slave; I will show you that she is not." She paused a moment, and then shrugged her shoulders. "What you have to say had best be said at once, perhaps. In heaven's name let us get it over." She stepped to Annette's side, and whispered a word or two in her ear ”

“ The evening wore on, and the horns and clarionets tootled merrily. Barbara evinced towards her lover neither distinct preference nor aversion; but old eyes would have seen that she pondered something. However, after supper she pleaded a headache, and disappeared. To pass the time of her absence, Lord Uplandtowers went into a little room adjoining the long gallery, where some elderly ones were sitting by the fire—for he had a phlegmatic dislike of dancing for its own sake,—and, lifting the window-curtains, he looked out of the window into the park and wood, dark now as a cavern. ”

“ Barbara, however, said she could not eat, and Maxwell cried boisterously:
"What are you thinking of, brother-in-law? A newborn bride sitting down to eat at an hotel on her wedding day. She would sink to the ground in shame, wouldn't she, Barbara? But I accept your invitation with pleasure, my boy. I am famished, and you must be. I insist upon you fortifying yourself; it is a duty you owe to Barbara and to society at large. With what is before you, it is absolutely necessary that you should keep up your strength. ”

“ I am going to eat you bit by bit.'" I thought this speech very clever when I first heard it, and I became immediately a worshiper of impulsiveness. That Barbara should strike up a sudden friendship with the new chambermaid did not, therefore, surprise me. Together they proceeded with the unpacking of Barbara's wardrobe, Barbara darting in upon me now and then to give me a kiss, "on the sly," she whispered, "for she mustn't see." Then she would return to Annette, and they would laugh and talk. My letters written, I lit a cigar and took up a French newspaper. ”

“ A pretty dance we can lead him at the end of our own rope, and we’ll have but to twitch a finger to show him that we’ll transfer the end to the proper authority if he dares to interfere with our pleasures!”
“But, Barbara!” The man was, indeed, as shaken as his voice. He had found it hard enough to credit the evidence of ears and eyes that proved to him that Lord Farquhart was the Black Devil of the London highways, but harder yet was it to believe that Barbara, the unsophisticated country girl, was versed in all the knowledge and diplomacy of a London mondaine. ”

“ Often I have been nervous about the boys; out in the world, exposed to a hundred dangers and rough accidents, but about Barbara—never, hardly more than about myself, safely at home, scarcely within reach of any probable peril. And now the boys are all alive and safe, and Barbara is going. One would think that she had cared nothing for us, she is in such a hurry to be gone; and yet we all know that she has loved us well—that she loves us still—none better.
Alas! we have no long and tedious nursing of her. She has never given any trouble in her life, and she gives none now. ”

“ During the drive home we none of us hardly speak. Roger and I are gloomily silent, Barbara sympathetically so. Barbara has the happiest knack of being in tune with every mood; she never jostles with untimely mirth against any sadness. I think she sees that my wounds are yet too fresh and raw to bear the gentlest handling, so she only pours upon them the balm of her tender silence. There is none of the recognized and allowed selfishness of a betrothed pair about Barbara. Sometimes I almost forget that she is engaged, so little does she ever bring herself into the foreground ”

“ She was conscious that more eyes were watching her from the inn-windows than met her own gaze. Barbara had decided to get home by hiring whatever kind of conveyance the tavern afforded, when, straining her eyes for the last time over the now darkening highway, she perceived yet another dust-cloud drawing near. She paused; a chariot ascended to the inn, and would have passed had not its occupant caught sight of her standing expectantly. The horses were checked on the instant.
‘You here—and alone, my dear Mrs. Willowes?’ said Lord Uplandtowers, whose carriage it was. ”

“ In fancy she saw herself, as in that case she would have been by now, a woman perhaps in years—for Barbara, brought up entirely on the Continent, thought girlhood ended at twenty—but a joyous single-hearted creature, her only past a not unhappy girlhood, and six long peaceful years spent in this beautiful place, well spent too in tending the stricken woman to whom she already felt so close a tie of inherited love and duty. ”

“ But human hearts are as prone to change as the leaves of the creeper on the wall, and in the course of time, hearing nothing of her husband, Barbara could sit unmoved whilst her mother and friends said in her hearing, ‘Well, what has happened is for the best.’ She began to think so herself ”

“ During the progress of repairs at this bower Barbara frequently visited it. Though so secluded by the dense growth, it was near the high road, and one day while looking over the fence she saw Lord Uplandtowers riding past. He saluted her courteously, yet with mechanical stiffness, and did not halt. Barbara went home, and continued to pray that she might never cease to love her husband. ”

“ Twice he spoke to Barbara of Lord Bosworth, each time with strange bitterness and dislike. "No doubt his lordship was after seeing Madam?" and, as Barbara hesitated: "Fine I knew it!—but he might just as well go and kill her outright. I've had to tell him so again and again"—
Barbara kept her own counsel, but she could not resist the question, "Then he comes often?"
"Often?—that he does not! He's never been one to put himself out, he's far too high! He just sends for me over to Fletchings, and I just go, though I've felt more than once minded to tell him that I'm not his servant. ”

“ Some six weeks passed, during which time Barbara’s parents, though they keenly felt her loss, held no communication with the truant, either for reproach or condonation. They continued to think of the disgrace she had brought upon herself; for, though the young man was an honest fellow, and the son of an honest father, the latter had died so early, and his widow had had such struggles to maintain herself ”

“ A letter sent by special messenger from Barbara, on the evening of that day, briefly informed them that her lover and herself were on the way to London, and before this communication reached her home they would be united as husband and wife. She had taken this extreme step because she loved her dear Edmond as she could love no other man, and because she had seen closing round her the doom of marriage with Lord Uplandtowers, unless she put that threatened fate out of possibility by doing as she had done. ”

“ Daniel O'Flaherty was an Irishman, a lonely man, and a Roman Catholic—thus traditionally interested in romance. And so, during these days at Fletchings, he had become aware, almost in spite of himself, of Berwick's evident attraction to Mrs. Rebell—to the gentle, intelligent woman whom he, O'Flaherty, naturally regarded as Arabella's widowed friend. It amused him to see the course of true love running smooth. ”

“ More than once the rough old fellow was strongly tempted to say to her: "If you wish to make yourself ill, you are just going the way to do it!" but Mrs. Rebell's determination to go on as usual, to allow no one to divine the state of her mind, aroused his unwilling admiration, nay more, his sympathy. He had known, so he told himself, what it was to feel as Barbara felt now, but in his case jealousy, an agony of jealousy, had been added to his other torments, and shame too for the futility of it all.
Nine days after Barbara had left Fletchings she [pg 290] received a letter from Berwick. ”

“ And now James Berwick had come to be the only link between Fletchings and the Priory. It had been Madame Sampiero's will, ruthlessly carried out, that all relationship between herself and Lord Bosworth should cease—that they should no longer meet, even to mourn together their child Julia. She wished to be remembered as she had been, not as she now was, a living corpse, an object of repulsion—so she told herself with grim frankness—to any sanely constituted man. ”

“ By degrees the episode with Edmond Willowes seemed but a fevered dream, and as the months grew to years Lord Uplandtowers’ friendship with the people at Chene—which had somewhat cooled after Barbara’s elopement—revived considerably, and he again became a frequent visitor there. He could not make the most trivial alteration or improvement at Knollingwood Hall, where he lived, without riding off to consult with his friend Sir John at Chene; and thus putting himself frequently under her eyes, Barbara grew accustomed to him, and talked to him as freely as to a brother. ”

“ Do you mean to tell me, Barbara, that all these years you have never once been found out, that all these years you have come and gone from the house without being seen."
"Yes, sir, as fur as I know. If I aint clever in nothink else I've been clever in that. Oh, but the way I've had to dodge, and the tricks I've played! They'd fill a book if they wos took down. Allus coming 'ome late at night, looking about me, and turning another way if anybody wos near; allus very careful when I went out agin, peeping round corners, and 'iding quick if I 'eerd a step. Eyes, sir! I can see a mile off. ”

“ Was it a sure instinct which warned him that Barbara's love for him, even if it contained every element the natural man seeks to find in his mate, was so far governed by conscience that she would never be really content and unashamed so long as they were outside the law? More, if Boringdon were right, if Pedro Rebell were indeed dying, and Barbara became in time James Berwick's wife, would she ever forget, would she ever cease to feel a pang of pain and remorse in, the fact of this episode, and of the confession which would—which must—follow after? ”

“ Rebell never made the slightest allusion to her husband, and yet for six long years—those formative years between nineteen and five-and-twenty—Pedro Rebell must have been, and in a sense rarely allowed to civilised man, the master of this delicate, sensitive woman, and, when he so pleased, her lover. Who else save the half-Spanish West Indian planter could have brought that shadow of fear into Barbara's eyes, and have made her regard the passion of love, as Berwick had very soon divined she did regard it, as something which shames rather than exalts human nature? ”

“ The statue was a full-length figure, in the purest Carrara marble, representing Edmond Willowes in all his original beauty, as he had stood at parting from her when about to set out on his travels; a specimen of manhood almost perfect in every line and contour. The work had been carried out with absolute fidelity.
‘Phœbus-Apollo, sure,’ said the Earl of Uplandtowers, who had never seen Willowes, real or represented, till now.
Barbara did not hear him. She was standing in a sort of trance before the first husband, as if she had no consciousness of the other husband at her side. ”