Читать книгу Barbara Rebell - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 4

"Well, as I say, I was pleased and proud, for I thought even more ill of women than I think now; but Mrs. Richard—that's what we call her here, you know—was so beautiful, such a contrast to myself: just a pretty doll, I took her to be, and as thoughts are free, looking at her there walking along, I was glad to know that I had all the sweets of her company and none of the bitter!"

And still Barbara Rebell, staring at him, astonished at his words, felt no offence.

"At last," he went on, "we reached the edge of the first down. I'll take you there some day. And we heard suddenly a piteous squeal: it was a puppy, a miserable little beastie, caught in a rabbit trap. You've never seen such a thing? Ay, that's well, I hope you never will: since that day you run no risk of doing so in Chancton Woods! 'Twas a sickening sight, one of the doggie's paws nearly off, and I felt sick—wanted to get away, to fetch someone along from the village. But Mrs. Richard—she was the tenderest creature alive, remember—never flinched. Those were not the days of gun ladies, but there, with me standing by, foolish, helpless, she put an end to the poor beastie—she put it out of its misery—with my knife too. Now that deserved the Humane Society's medal, eh? I never go by there without thinking of it. It's a pity," he said, in abrupt irrelevant conclusion, "that you're not more like her. I mean, as regards the outer woman"—he added hastily—"you are dark, like your father. Well now, I'll be calling Mrs. Turke, and she shall show you your rooms. We thought you would like those Mrs. Richard used to have when she came here. She preferred them to those below, to those grander apartments on Madam's floor."

"And when shall I see my godmother?"

Doctor McKirdy looked at her consideringly:

"Time enough when you've had a rest and a good supper. Never fear, she's as eager to see you as you are to see her," then, as he watched her walking back into the hall, he muttered under his breath, "There's something of Mrs. Richard there after all!"

A few moments later Barbara was following the stout housekeeper up the small winding stair which occupied, opposite the porch and vestibule, one of the four corners of the great hall, for those who had designed and built the newer portion of Chancton Priory had had no wish to sacrifice any portion of the space at their disposal to the exigencies of a grand staircase.

Mrs. Turke, on the first landing, called a halt, and Barbara looked about her with languid curiosity. To the right stretched a dark recess, evidently the music gallery which overlooked the hall; to the left a broad well-lighted corridor led, as Mrs. Rebell at once divined, if only because of the sudden silence which had fallen on her companion, to the apartments of the paralysed mistress of the Priory, to those of her godmother, Madame Sampiero.

Then Mrs. Turke, her loquacity stilled, laboured on up more narrow winding stairs till they reached the third storey, and, groping her way down many winding turnings, she finally ushered Mrs. Rebell with some ceremony—for every incident connected with daily life was to Mrs. Turke a matter of ritual—into a suite of low-ceilinged, plainly furnished rooms, of which the windows opened on to the Tudor stone balcony which was so distinctive and so beautiful a feature of the great house, as seen from the spreading lawns below.

Till Barbara found herself left solitary—she had declared herself well able, nay, desirous to unpack and dress alone—all that had taken place during the last hour had seemed hardly real.

It is said that the first feeling of those who, after being buffeted in the storm, tossed to and fro by the waves, are finally cast up on dry land, is not always one of relief. Barbara was no longer struggling in deep water, but she still felt terribly bruised and sore, and the smart of the injuries which had befallen her was still with her. Standing there, in the peaceful rooms which had been those of her own mother, a keen, almost a physical, longing for that same dear tender mother came suddenly over her.

Slowly she put on her one evening dress, a white gown which had been hurriedly made during the hours which had elapsed between the arrival of the Johnstones' invitation to Government House, and the leaving by her of her husband's plantation. Then she looked at herself in the glass, rather pitifully anxious to make a good impression on her godmother—on this paralysed woman, who, if the London lawyer said truly, was yet mentally so intensely and vividly alive.

To give herself courage, Barbara tried to remember that her hostess was not only of her own blood, but that she had been the one dear, intimate, and loyal friend of her mother—the only human being whom Richard Rebell's wife had refused to give up at his bidding, and even after Madame Sampiero and her kinsman had broken off all epistolary relationship. Why had they done so? Out of the past came the memory of sharp bitter words uttered by Barbara's father concerning Madame Sampiero and a certain Lord Bosworth. Then, more recently, when she was perhaps about thirteen, had come news of a child's death—the child had been called Julia—and Barbara's mother had wept long and bitterly, though admitting, in answer to her young daughter's frightened questions, that she had not known the little Julia.

Mrs. Rebell wrapped a shawl, one of Grace Johnstone's many thoughtful gifts, round her white gown, and so stepped through her window on to the stone balcony. Standing there, looking down on the great dark spaces below, she suddenly felt, for the first time, a deep sense of peace and of protection from past sorrows and indignities. For the first time also she felt that she had been justified in coming, and in leaving the man who—alas! that it should be so, he being kinsman as well as husband—had treated her so ill.

During the long, solitary journey home—if, indeed, England was home—there had been time for deep misgiving, for that quick examination of conscience which, in a sensitive, over-wrought nature, leads to self-accusation, to a fear of duty neglected. Barbara Rebell was but now emerging from what had been, and that over years, the imprisonment of both body and soul. Physically she had become free, but mentally she still had often during the last five weeks felt herself to be a bondswoman. During the voyage—aye, even during the two days spent by her in London—she had seemed to suffer more sentiently than when actually crushed under the heel of Pedro Rebell, the half-Spanish planter whose name seemed the only English thing about him. Since she had escaped from him, Barbara had felt increasingly the degradation of her hasty marriage to one whose kinship to herself, distant though it was, had seemed to her girlish inexperience an ample guarantee. That she had once loved the man—if, indeed, the romantic, high-strung fancy which had swept over the newly-orphaned girl could be dignified by the name of love—served but to increase her feeling of shame.

To-night, leaning over the stone balcony of Chancton Priory, Barbara remembered an incident which had of late receded in her mind: once more she seemed to feel the thrill of indignation and impotent anger which had overwhelmed her when she had found out, a few weeks after her wedding day, that the sum of money paid yearly by Madame Sampiero to Richard Rebell's account, and untouched by him for some ten years before his death, had been discovered and appropriated by her bridegroom, with, if she remembered rightly, the scornful assent of Madame Sampiero.

Again she turned hot, as though the episode had happened but yesterday instead of six long years before; and she asked herself, with sudden misgiving, how she had ever found the courage to petition her godmother for the shelter of her roof. She could never have brought herself to do so but for the kindly letter, accompanied by a gift of a hundred pounds, which had reached her once a year ever since her ill-fated marriage. These letters seemed to tell her that the old link which had bound her mother and Barbara Sampiero so closely had not snapped with death, with absence, or even, on the part of the writer of them, with physical disablement.

At last Barbara turned back into the room, and, taking up a candle, made her way slowly and noiselessly down the old house.