Barbara

“ And now, to the ever-growing amazement of Mistress Mehitable, Doctor Jim took up the patting, while Doctor John, seating himself at the harpsichord, began a strange staccato picking of the keys. Then Barbara stopped singing, and gave herself up wholly to the dance. She danced with arms and hands and head and feet, and every slender curve of her young body. She moved like flames. Her eyes and lips and teeth were a radiance through the live, streaming darknesses of her hair. Light, swift, unerring, ecstatic, it was like the most impassioned of bird-songs translated into terms of pure motion. ”

“ Barbara was thinking over the events of the day. What Mr. Carlyle was thinking of was best known to himself; his eyes, covered with their drooping eyelids, were cast upon Barbara. There was a long silence, at length Barbara seemed to feel that his gaze was upon her, and she looked up at him.
“Will you marry me, Barbara?”
The words were spoken in the quietest, most matter-of-fact tone, just as if he had said, “Shall I give you a chair, Barbara?” But, oh! The change that passed over her countenance! The sudden light of joy! The scarlet flush of emotion and happiness. ”

“ Lucy went up the sheep-path. On the brow of the knoll she paused, looking back. Barbara was kindling a fire outside the cave, and the smoke, as it coiled upwards, hung between them like a blue veil. Her sister seemed to be moving among mysterious things, and there was symbolical meaning in the blue veil. For two worlds lie side by side, the material and the spiritual, and from either the view into the other seems hazy and unreal. But the greatest intellects try to reconcile them. Towards such a reconciliation Barbara, in her untutored mind, was striving. ”

“ Barbara picked it up, fondled it in her bosom, threw herself down on the bed with it, and burst into a passion of tears. She felt as if she had been long, long away. She was poignantly homesick for her old self, her old childishness. The burden of being grown-up suddenly arose, thrust itself upon her, and grew great and terrifying and not to be borne. She was oppressed, too, with self-reproach. Absorbed in vivid and novel sensations, during the past few eventful days she had not thought as much as usual about her old comrades,—the kittens, Keep, Black Prince, and Mercy Chapman. ”

“ So Barbara for a while bade farewell to those who loved her, bade farewell to Anthony, her heart’s heart. Once more—alone, utterly alone—she laid her on the couch in the great chamber with the translucent dome and was whirled back through nothingness to the hell of earth, there to be born again as the child of the evil woman—that she might save a soul alive. ”

“ And then it was very quiet once more in the forest.
"It is very cold," said Barbara. "My hands and feet are like ice."
Then the pine-tree and the fir shook down the snow from their broad boughs, and the snow fell upon Barbara and covered her like a white mantle.
"You will be warm now," said the vine, kissing Barbara's forehead. And Barbara smiled.
Then the snowdrop sang a lullaby about the moss that loved the violet. And Barbara said, "I am going to sleep; will you wake me when the prince comes through the forest?" ”

“ The sun sank low in the west as Barbara walked in the alley of yews, so low that the western arch of the cloister was a panel of ruddy gold. The long shafts of the decline came streaming through and through the criss-cross boughs, splashing the trunks with amber, and weaving a checker of light and shadow upon the path. There was no sound to break the silence save the occasional plash of oars upon the river and the faint voices from the tennis-court beyond the house. ”

“ Worn out by her long watch, Barbara fell into a light sleep. She slept as tranquilly as a child, and, for an hour or more, the deep breathing of Mistress Lynn and her great-granddaughter was the only sound of life in the room.
Shadows moved about with the flickering firelight, and, when the candle guttered to its socket, they came and stood round the bed, like noiseless spirits, watching the figure there, which lay so still, that it looked as if it had already sunk into the quiet composure of death. Towards morning, in that cold hour before the dawn, Barbara was wakened by a voice calling her. ”

“ But Barbara knew. Beneath the conventionalities of his class the girl felt the man a powerful character, with all the latent strength of his nation-building ancestors. She wanted him—as she put it to herself—to wake up. Would he? Would he learn the language of her Desert? She believed that he would, even as she believed in the reclamation of The King's Basin lands.
And she was glad—glad that the Seer and Abe and Tex and Pat and her father—the men who had brought her out of the Desert—were going now back into that land of death to save that land itself from itself. ”

“ Never, never shall I reach Barbara's clear child-faith; Barbara, to whom God was as real and certain as I; never shall I attain to the steady confidence of Roger. I can but grope dimly with outstretched hands; sometimes in the outer blackness of a moonless, starless night; sometimes, with strained eyes catching a glimpse of a glimmer in the east. I can but feel after God, as a plant in a dark place feels after the light. ”

“ Barbara hated to feel limited by her appearance. Not that she didn’t love pretty things, but because she felt them beyond her reach. She was obliged to build up some other real interest, and that had come to her as she naturally developed an aptitude for helping her father.
Bugs, germs, cultures, and the other symbols of bacteriology meant more to Barbara than frocks, hats, and articles of dainty apparel, dear to the heart of every normal girl. ”

“ Barbara, Barbara, we may not loose a breath —
Be at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,
Who loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.
"Barbara, the beautiful, stood up as a queen set free. ”

“ Above all, look up to Thundergay, to Barbara's rugged nurse, friend and teacher, who helped her to be strong when she might have been weak. If you go at night you will see the Northern Crown shine, and you will remember that she wore her crown and wore it royally, though it bowed her head to sorrow and to death.
But Barbara is not dead; the good and the great never die. As Timothy Hadwin said to Peter the last time that he came to Boar Dale:
"Her spirit is here, in the wind, in the song of the beck, in the blades of grass. ”

“ Then Barbara looked at John Gore and he at her.
“We have buried the past,” she said, turning to my lord.
Stephen Gore did not move.
“John and I are man and wife. We have put the past away from us. It is better for us—and for the dead.”
My lord raised his eyes slowly till they rested on Barbara’s face. He saw nothing there but a mist of tenderness and tears. ”

“ Barbara's keen eyes—keen as an eagle's to scan the broad fellside—noted the air of decay which had settled upon it, the thicket of brambles among the chimneys, and how a pine, growing out of the rocks, encroached upon the doorway. ”

“ Listen to me, Howard. I know that Barbara has never had one thought of this. Her mind is completely occupied with her study, the pleasures and the novelties that each day is bringing her. She does not conceal anything. She has no reason to do so. She and Bettina are no silly girls who think of a lover in every young man they meet. They are as sweet and fresh and free from all sentimentalities as when they were children. Barbara would be frightened could she hear you talk,—should she for a moment suspect how you feel. ”

“ THE HEART OF BARBARA The Ambassador, standing by the mantel, looked thoughtfully at his wife. She sat in a big wicker chair, in a soft dressing-gown, her hands clasped over one knee in a pose very pretty and girlish.
"Come!" he said good-humoredly. "You women are always imagining romances and broken hearts. Why, Barbara and Daunt haven't known each other long enough to fall in love." ”

“ He laid Barbara on the wet grass that grew in the old hall, and, kneeling at her head, took her two arms at the wrists and began to move them gently from the shoulders, spreading them wide, and then crossing them with slight pressure upon her bosom. Nor did man ever thank God more than did John Gore when she began to breathe feebly of her own sweet self, and the rise and fall of her bosom showed that the tide of life had turned. ”

“ Barbara, preparing for the event, suffered her hair to be brushed, choked with strange half-sweet, half-terrible suffocation that comes from anticipated glories: half-sweet because things will, at their worst, be wonderful; half-terrible because we know that they will not be so good as we hope.
Barbara, washed paler than ever, in a white frock with pink bows, was conducted by Miss Letts. She choked with terror in the strange hall, where she was received with great splendour by Mary. ”

“ Now and again her lips part as if to laugh—a laugh of pure pleasantness.
"As the man lives, so shall he die!" As Barbara has lived, so does she die—meekly, unselfishly—with a great patience, and an absolute peace. O wise man! O philosophers! who would take from us—who have all but taken from us—our Blessed Land, the land over whose borders our Barbara, at that smile, seems setting her feet—you may be right—I, for one, know not! ”

“ Thus Barbara argued to herself, but the truth was, she did not wish to go. Her dearest associations were in the churchyard yonder, the churchyard where she hoped ere long she would be laid. She hated life, she craved for death.
This was her sin.
Night by night she lay awake and thought of Anthony, her darling, her beloved. She remembered that dream of his about a home that awaited him in another world, and she loved to fancy him as dwelling in that place of peace and making ready for her coming. ”

“ For God’s sake, stop!” said Anthony, “I am a brute to have spoken like that, and I’m helpless; that’s the worst of it. Oh! my darling, don’t you understand? Don’t you understand?”
“No,” answered Barbara, shaking her head and beginning to cry.
“That I love you, that I have always loved you, and that I always shall love you until—until—the moon ceases to shine,” and he pointed to that orb which had appeared above the sea.
“They say it is dead already, and no doubt will come to an end in due course like everything else,” remarked Barbara, seeking to gain time. ”

“ Observation, Major, it is art of life. I see Miss Barbara’s eyes red like morning sky and I deduct. I see you shot out and gloomy like evening cloud, and I deduct. I listen at door of Mr. Haswell’s room, I hear him curse and swear like holy saint in Book, and you and Miss Barbara answer him not like saint, though what you speak I cannot hear, and I deduct. Jeekie deduct this—that you make love to Miss Barbara in proper gentlemanlike, ’nogamous, Christian fashion such as your late Reverend Uncle approve, and Miss Barbara, she make love to you with ten per cent. ”

“ She surveyed her world with an eye to this possible loving. There was her governess, who had been with her for a year now, tearful, bony, using Barbara as a means and never as an end. Barbara did not love her—how could she? Moreover, there were other physical things: the lean, shining marble of Miss Letts's long fingers, the dry thinness of her hair, the way that the tip of her nose would be suddenly red, and then, like a blown-out candle, dull white again. Fingers and noses are not the only agents in the human affections, but they have most certainly something to do with them. ”

“ One more fleeting glance behind and Barbara broke into a run again, though her breath came in gasps.
"They are seeing us from the Mont," panted Jean. "They have come out to watch the tide rise. Give me your hand. Do not stop! Do not stop!"
Barbara felt that, do as she would, her breath could hold out no longer, and she slackened her pace to a walk once more. Then a great shout went up from the people on the ramparts, and they began waving their hands and handkerchiefs wildly. ”

“ To sit on his knee, twining her small fingers in the black curls which fell unshorn upon his shoulders—to look in his great dark eyes as they gleamed with the enthusiasm of that half-poetic nature which is the inheritance of a high-hearted mountaineer—to feel herself nestling like a dove on his broad breast, and clinging to him half in terror, half in delight, as his strong words brought all those fearful shapes vividly before her eyes—these had been Barbara’s pleasures when a little child. ”

“ Barbara felt a pang of fear every time she saw him come down the street, and turn in by the rotten, mouldy wooden fence. She watched him like a bird that is afraid for her nest, and was sitting close to the wall in the darkest corner with the cradle behind her, when he opened the door. It was impossible for her to answer except by a sob. The tinsmith's wife did all the talking with: "Why, bless me, yes!" and "Bless me, no!" and "Just so, doctor!" in garrulous superabundance, while Barbara only sat and meditated on taking her baby on her back and departing. ”

“ How Barbara and she managed to entertain each other, I find it hard to think; but all forms of innocent humanity must have much in common. A contrast, nevertheless, the two must have presented to any power able to read them. Barbara was like a heath of thyme and wild roses and sudden winds; Theodora like a Dutch garden without its flowers. They never quarrelled. I suspect they did not come near enough to quarrel.
Barbara left Richard almost bewitched, and considerably perplexed. He had never seen anything like her. No more had most people that met her. ”