"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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 d.u.c.h.ess; 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 trespa.s.s, 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 G.o.d, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a mammon-wors.h.i.+pper 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 n.o.ble 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 surpa.s.sing 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 ladys.h.i.+p 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 ladys.h.i.+p might find almost too much for her! But for many years he had indulged in no allusion to the possible improbable, allowing her ladys.h.i.+p 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 amus.e.m.e.nt was the nearest to suns.h.i.+ne 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tle 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d! A man might, in the rage of disappointment, cry out that there could be no G.o.d where baffle met the holiest instinct--that blundering chance must rule; he might, illogical with grief, declare that as G.o.d could treat him so, he would believe in him no longer; or he might a.s.sert that an evil being, not a good, was at the heart of life--a devil and not a G.o.d, for he was one who created and forgot, or who remembered and did not care--who quickened exposure but gave no s.h.i.+eld! 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 G.o.d was not, or that he was not good, but with pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+p him no longer! She had been brought up to believe there was a G.o.d, and had never doubted his existence: with her whole will and pa.s.sion she opposed that which she called G.o.d. She had never learned to yield when wrong, and now she was sure she was right. Though hopeless she resisted. She cried out against G.o.d, 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 wors.h.i.+p him?

Why should she pay court to one who neither would nor could give her what she wanted? What was he G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and defy him! But do none of us, who say also we believe in G.o.d, and who are far from defying him, ever behave like Mrs. Wylder? It is one thing to believe in a G.o.d; it is quite another to believe in G.o.d! 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 fas.h.i.+on, and that a real one, she must have believed in the G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d," and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed.

"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 a.s.sailant; 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 G.o.d 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."