Barbara Ladd

Turning into the long lean-to of a shed which stretched behind the cabin, she brought out two stumpy oars. These under her left arm, her stalwart stick in her right hand, she limped with massive alertness down to the waterside, shoved off the punt, climbed into it with a nicety of balance remarkable in one of her weight, clicked the oars into the rowlocks, and pulled up-stream toward the lake whence Barbara had come.

CHAPTER III

The child who set forth so fearlessly, on so audacious and ill-regulated a venture, that midsummer morning of the year 1769, – in a time when audacity on the part of small girls was apt to meet the discouragement of a peculiarly strenuous discipline, – was an accident in her period, an irreconcilable alien to her environment. In her intense individuality, and in the confident freedom with which she claimed the right to express that individuality, she belonged to an earlier or a later day, but not to a New England of the eighteenth century. Two years before, at the age of twelve, an age when other children's personalities were colourless to the eyes of their elders, she had been projected into the tranquil routine of the little world of Second Westings. It was an established, crystallised, unchanging life there in the back country of Connecticut, where hours, seasons, actions, habits, revolved in so orderly a fashion as to have worn themselves grooves out of which they could hardly even look, still less achieve to deviate. Into this rigid placidity the dark child came like a grain of ferment; and presently, no one could tell just how, the mass began to work. Barbara was everywhere discussed. She was rather unanimously disapproved of. And, nevertheless, as it were in the teeth of all probability, she won to herself here and there a friend.

At the time of Barbara's transplanting from the cordial soil of Maryland to the austere uplands of Connecticut, her father, the Reverend Winthrop Hopkins Ladd, clergyman of the Established Church, had been dead over two years, and the child's hurt, as such things will, had outwardly healed; though the hidden wounds would agonise in her heart at unexpected times, set vibrating to some poignant touch of scent or sound or colour. The child had adored her father with a tempestuous and jealous devotion, which, however, had not prevented her waywardness from diversifying his repose with many a wakeful night. Her mother, who had died when Barbara was scarce out of arms, had been a bewildering birth from the kiss of North Wales on the warm south of Spanish passion. The son of an old Welsh family, adventuring to the New World to capture himself a fortune, had captured himself also a wife to beggar envy. Where or how he got the fortune, no man knew and few presumed to wonder; but where and how he got the wife was matter of noonday knowledge. He saw her at church in New Orleans. There were looks that burn and live. Through that emotional spring Glenowen sniffed the incense of more masses than he had thought to attend in a lifetime. Once there was a stolen word behind a pillar, eyes warily averted. Twice notes passed from hand to hand. Then a girl, the daughter of one of the haughtiest houses of Colonial Spain, was audaciously carried off by night from a convent school in the safe heart of the city. When next seen of the world, she was Glenowen's wife, most radiantly and graciously dispensing an accepted hospitality in Baltimore.

The result that in particular pertains to this history was a small, flame-like, imperious girl, one Mistress Mercedes Glenowen, who, from the night of ceremony when she first made her bow to the governor and joyously turned her disastrous eyes upon the society of Baltimore, for the space of some three years dispersed vain heartache throughout the colony. Into the remotest plantations went the name of her and the fame of her – and too often, also, the sickness of a hopeless desire of her. There were duels, too, discreetly laid to other cause; and old friendships changed to hate; and wild oaths made perjury. But the heart of Mistress Mercedes went free. A quiet young clergyman, a kinsman to the governor, came to Baltimore from Boston, on his way to a country parish on the Pawtuxet, to which he had just been appointed. Dining at Government House, he met Mistress Mercedes, but his eyes, being at that moment immersed in dreams, looked not upon but through and beyond her. Mercedes could not rest an instant until those far-wandering, Northern eyes were ensnared, imprisoned, and denied a range beyond the boundaries of her heart. But the capture was not a quick one, and in the interest of it she had the accident to become herself entangled, to such a degree that she had no longer any use for freedom. And so it came about, to the wrathful amaze of her retinue, but the unspeakable content of the Reverend Winthrop Ladd, that the dark rose of Maryland was on a sudden removed from Baltimore to bloom on a churchly plantation by the pale waters of the Pawtuxet.

Mr. Ladd, though a dreamer so far as consisted with outdoor life and sanity of brain and muscle, was a strong man, one of those who have the force to rule when they must, and the gentleness to yield when they may. In the passionate completeness of her love, Mercedes sloughed the caprices that would have pained and puzzled him, forgot the very echoes of the acclamations of her court, and lived in the sanctuary of her husband's devotion. For nearly three years the strangely assorted lovers dwelt in their dream, while the world passed by them like a pageant viewed through a glory of coloured glass. Then a sudden sickness tore them apart; and when the dazed man came slowly back to the realisation that he had been left to live, all his love, with all the illusion of it, centred itself fixedly upon the little one, Barbara, whom Mercedes had left to him.

As Barbara grew more and more like her mother, her ascendency over her father grew more and more complete. Tenderly but firmly he ruled his parish and his plantation. But he gradually forgot to rule Barbara. Too nearly did she represent to him all that he had lost in his worshipped Mercedes; and he could not bring himself to see anything but freshness of character and vigour of personality in the child's very faults. Hence he evolved, to suit her particular case, a theory very much out of harmony with his time, to the effect that a child – or rather, perhaps, such a child as this of Mercedes – should not be governed or disciplined, but guided merely, and fostered in the finding of her own untrammelled individuality. This plan worked, for the time, to Barbara's unqualified approval, but she was destined to pay for it, in later years, a heavy price in tears, and misunderstandings, and repentance. With the growth of her intense and confident personality there grew no balancing strength of self-control. Unacquainted with discipline, she was without the safeguard of self-discipline. Before she was eight years old she held sway over every one on the plantation but herself, – and her rule, though pretty and bewitching, was not invariably gentle. As for her father, though ostensively her comrade and mentor, he was by this time in reality her slave. He rode with her; he read with her; he taught her, – but such studies only as ensnared her wayward inclination, and with such regularity only as fell in with her variable mood. The hour for a lesson on the spinet would go by unheeded, if Barbara chanced to be interested in the more absorbing occupation of climbing a tree; and the time for reciting Latin syntax was lightly forgotten if berries were a-ripening in the pasture. Under such auspices, however, Barbara did assuredly grow straight-limbed and active, slight and small indeed, by heritage from her mother, but strong and of marvellous endurance, with the clear blood red under her dark skin, her great gray-green eyes luminous with health. Her father devoted to her every hour of the day that he could spare from the claims of his parish. In a sunny and sandy cove near the house he taught her to swim. Rowing and canoeing on the Pawtuxet were mysteries of outdoor craft into which he initiated her as soon as her little hands could pull an oar or swing a paddle. A certain strain of wildness in her temperament attuned her to a peculiar sympathy with the canoe, and won her a swift mastery of its furtive spirit. In the woods, and in the seclusion of remote creeks and backwaters, her waywardness would vanish till she became silent and elusive as the wild things whose confidence she was for ever striving to gain. Her advances being suspiciously repelled by the squirrels, the 'coons, and the chipmunks, her passion was fain to expend itself upon the domestic animals of the plantation. The horses, cattle, dogs, and cats, all loved her, and she understood them as she never understood the nearest and best-beloved of her own kind. With the animals her patience was untiring, her gentleness unfailing, while her thoughtless selfishness melted into a devotion for which no sacrifice seemed too great.

The negroes of the plantation, who seemed to Barbara akin to the animals, came next to these in her regard, and indeed were treated with an indulgence which made them almost literally lay their black necks in the dust for her little feet to step on. But with people of her own class she was apt to be hasty and ungracious. Their feelings were of small account in her eyes – certainly not to be weighed for a moment against those of a colt or a kitten. There was one sweet-eyed and lumbering half-grown puppy which Barbara's father – not for an instant, indeed, believing anything of the sort – used to declare was more precious to her than himself. But her old black "Mammy" 'Lize used to vow there was more truth than he guessed in "Marse Ladd's foolin'."

However, when a fever snatched the gentle priest away from the scene of his love and kindly ministrations, the child's true self emerged through its crust of whim and extravagance. Stricken beyond a child's usual capacity to feel or realise such a blow, she was herself seized with a serious illness, after which she fell into a dejection which lasted for the better part of a year. In her desolation she turned to her animals rather than to her human companions, and found the more of healing in their wordless sympathy.

At last, youth and health asserted themselves, and once more Barbara rode, paddled, swam, tyrannised, and ran wild over the plantation, while relatives from Maine to Maryland wrangled over her future.

There was one young uncle, her mother's only brother, whom Barbara decided to adopt as her sole guardian. But other guardians came to another decision. Uncle Bob Glenowen was an uncle after Barbara's own heart, but a little more disciplined and reasonable than herself. The two would have got on delightfully together – together careering over the country on high-mettled horses, together swimming and canoeing at the most irregular hours, together lauding and loving their four-foot kindred and laughing to scorn the general stupidity of mankind. But Uncle Glenowen had little of gold or gear, and his local habitation was mutable. He loved Barbara too well not to recognise that she should grow up under the guidance of steadier hands than his. It was finally settled – Barbara's fiery indignation being quite disregarded – that she should go to her father's younger sister, Mistress Mehitable Ladd, in Second Westings.

Mistress Ladd was a self-possessed, fair-faced, aristocratic little lady, with large blue eyes and a very firm, small mouth. She was conscientious to a point that was wont to bring her kindness, at times, into painful conflict with her sense of duty. The Puritan fibre ran in unimpaired vitality through the texture of her being, with the result that whenever her heart was so rash as to join issue with her conscience, then prompt and disastrous overthrow was the least her heart could expect for such presumption. In the matter of Barbara's future, however, Distress Mehitable felt that duty and inclination ran together. She had loved her brother Winthrop with unselfish and admiring devotion, and had grieved in secret for years over his defection from the austere fold of the Congregationalists to what she regarded as the perilously carnal form and ceremony of the Church of England. Her hampered spirit, her uncompleted womanhood, yearned toward Barbara, and she shuddered at the idea of Winthrop's child growing up untaught, unmothered, uncontrolled. She made up her mind that Barbara should come to Second Westings, become a daughter to her, and be reared in the purity of unsullied Congregationalism. With a sigh of concordant relief it was recognised by the other relatives that Mehitable was right. They washed their hands of the child, and forgot her, and were thankful – all but Uncle Bob. And so Barbara went to Second Westings.

CHAPTER IV

Little enough, indeed, would Second Westings ever have seen of the heartsore and rebellious child, but for this Uncle Bob. Searching his own spirit, he understood hers; and maintaining a discreet silence as to the chief points of his discovery, he set himself the duty of accompanying Barbara on the long, complicated journey to Connecticut. Not content with delivering his charge into the hands of Mistress Mehitable, – whom he liked despite her uneasy half-disapproval of himself, – he stayed long summer weeks at Second Westings, thus bridging over for Barbara the terrible chasm between the old life and the new, and by his tactful conciliation on every side making the new life look a little less hatefully alien to her. He took her riding all over the township; he took her canoeing on the lake, and down the outlet to its junction with the river; and so not only won her a freedom of movement hitherto unheard-of among the maidens of Second Westings, but also showed her that the solace of wild woods and sweet waters was to be found no less in Connecticut than in her longed-for Maryland. Moreover, Uncle Bob had "a presence." Second Westings scrutinised him severely, all ready to condemn the stranger folk to whom Winthrop Ladd had turned in his marrying. But Second Westings felt constrained to acknowledge at once that Winthrop Ladd had married within his class. To high and low alike – and the line between high and low was sharply drawn at Second Westings – it was obvious that the sister of Mr. Robert Glenowen must have been gently born. Those who would not let themselves be warmed by Uncle Bob's bright heartsomeness were unable to withhold acknowledgment of his good breeding. Mistress Mehitable, though antagonised by vague gossip as to his "wildness," nevertheless recognised with serious relief that no common blood had been suffered to obscure the clear blue stream whose purity the Ladds held precious. "Light, I fear – if not, in other surroundings, ungodly; but beyond all cavil a gentleman!" pronounced the Reverend Jonathan Sawyer, flicking snuff from his sleeve with white, scholarly fingers. He was not so innocent as to attach too much importance to Uncle Bob's devout attitude through those interminable services which made a weekly nightmare of the Connecticut Sabbath; but he had found a reserved satisfaction in the young man's company over a seemly glass and a pipe of bright Virginia. He had a feeling that the visitor's charm was more or less subversive of discipline, and that it would be, on the whole, for the spiritual welfare of Second Westings if the visit should be brief; but meanwhile he took what he could of Uncle Bob's society. Class against creed, and a fair field, and it's long odds on class.

But in the minds of Doctor John and Doctor Jim Pigeon – physicians, brothers, comrades, fierce professional rivals, justices of the peace, and divinely self-appointed guardians of the sanctity of caste for all the neighbourhood – there were no misgivings. Their instincts accepted Bob Glenowen at first glance. Their great, rugged faces and mighty shoulders towering over him, – and Uncle Bob himself was nowise scant of stature, – they looked at him and then into each other's eyes; and agreed, as they did on most subjects outside the theory and practice of medicine.

"You are right welcome to Second Westings, Mr. Glenowen!" exclaimed Doctor Jim, in a big, impetuous voice, grasping his hand heartily.

"And we trust that you may be slow to leave us, Mr. Glenowen!" added Doctor John, in a voice which any competent jury, blindfolded, would have pronounced identical.

Recognising the true fibre and the fineness of these two big, gentle autocrats, Uncle Bob made a special point of commending Barbara to their hearts – in which commending he so well sped, and indeed was so well seconded by Barbara herself, who loved them from the moment when her eyes first fell upon them, that they presently constituted themselves special guardians to the little maid, and indulgent mitigators of Mistress Mehitable's conscience. The manner in which they fulfilled the sometimes conflicting duties of these offices will appear pretty persistently in the sequel.

It was to Uncle Bob, also, that Barbara owed the somewhat disreputable friendship of old Debby. The very first day that he and Barbara went canoeing on the lake, they explored the outlet, discovered old Debby's cabin, paid an uninvited call, and captivated the old dame's crusty heart. Glenowen knew human nature. He had the knack of going straight to the quintessential core of it, and pinning his faith to that in spite of all unpromising externals. He decided at once that Debby would be a good diversion for Barbara after he was gone; and when, later in the day, he learned that the old woman was universally but vaguely reprobated by the prim folk of Second Westings, he was more than ever assured that she would be a comfort to Barbara through many a dark hour of strangerhood and virtuous misunderstanding.

But Uncle Bob's visit had to end. He went away with misgivings, leaving Barbara to pit her careless candour, her thoughtless self-absorption, her scorn of all opinions that differed from her own, her caprices, her passionate enthusiasms, her fierce intolerance of criticism or control, against the granitic conventions of an old New England village. The half guilty, half amused support of Doctor John and Doctor Jim gave importance to her revolt, and so lightened the rod of Aunt Kitty's discipline as to save Barbara from the more ignominious of the penalties which her impetuous wilfulness would otherwise have incurred. The complete, though forbidden, sympathy of old Debby, affording the one safe outlet to her tumultuous resentments and passionate despairs, saved the child from brain-sickness; and once, indeed, on a particularly black day of humiliation, from suicide. Barbara had shaken the very foundations of law, order, and religion, by riding at a wild gallop, one Sunday afternoon, down the wide main street of Second Westings just as the good folk were coming out of meeting. Her rebellious waves of dark hair streamed out behind her little head. Her white teeth flashed wickedly between her parted scarlet lips, her big eyes flamed with the intoxication of liberty and protest – to these good folk it seemed an unholy light. Barbara ought to have been at meeting, but had been left at home, reluctantly, by Aunt Hitty, because she had seemed too sick to get out of bed. In very truth she had been sick beyond all feigning. Then one of those violent reactions of recovery which sometimes cause the nervous temperament to be miserably misunderstood had seized her at an inauspicious moment. As the tide of young vitality surged back to brain and vein and nerve, she had felt that she must let herself loose in wild action, or die. All unrealising the enormity of the offence, she had flung down her mad defiance to the sanctified and iron-bound repose of the New England Sabbath.

Such a sacrilege could not be overlooked or condoned. The congregation was appalled. Long upper lips were drawn down ominously, as austere eyes followed the vision of the fleeing child on the great black horse. Could it be that she was possessed of a devil? Pitying eyes were turned upon Aunt Hitty; and triumphant eyes of gratified grudge, moreover, for Aunt Hitty was proud, and had virtuous ill-wishers in the village. But Mistress Mehitable Ladd was equal to the occasion. With a level stare of her blue eyes, a cold tranquillity upon her small, fine mouth, she froze comment and forestalled suggestion. The feeling went abroad, in a subtle way, that the case would be dealt with and the piety of Second Westings vindicated in the eyes of Heaven. Doctor John and Doctor Jim looked grave, and said not a word. This was a time when Mistress Mehitable, they well knew, would brook no interference.

Of course there could be no question of such correction as would have fallen to the lot of any ordinary offender. There could be no such thing as putting a Ladd in the stocks. The regular machinery of village law rested quiescent. Equally of course, Mistress Mehitable would do nothing in anger. She was humiliated before the whole village, in a manner that could never be forgotten or wiped out. But her first feeling and her last feeling were alike of sorrow only. She would do her duty because Winthrop's child must be saved. But she had no proud consciousness of virtue in doing it. First, she attempted to explain to Barbara the depth, quality, and significance of her sin, its possible influence upon the ethics of Second Westings if allowed to go unpunished, the special variety of inherited evil which it revealed in her nature, and her stupendous need of having this evil eradicated by devotedly merciless correction. After the first few words of this exhortation, Barbara heard no more. She was at all times fiercely impatient of criticism, and now, being determined not to fly into a fury and further complicate her predicament, she shut her eyes, inwardly closed her ears, and concentrated her imagination on memories of the longed-for plantation by the Pawtuxet. This concentration gave her vivid little face an air of quietude, subjection, and voiceless sorrow, which Aunt Hitty was glad to construe as repentance. But it earned no mitigation of punishment. For one whole week Barbara was a prisoner in her room, eating her heart out in hatred of the stupidity and injustice of life. Then came around, at last, another Sabbath. Barbara was taken to church. There her proud soul was affronted by a public rebuke from the pastor, who exhorted her from the pulpit, contented the congregation by a rehearsal of her punishment, and held her up as an example to the other children of the village. Barbara listened with shut eyes and white lips, her heart bursting with rage. She ached to kill him, to kill her aunt, to annihilate Second Westings – saving only the animals, old Debby, Mercy Chapman, Doctor John and Doctor Jim. But when the good divine went on to say that her discipline would be concluded with a wholesome chastisement on the morrow, in the privacy of the house to which her sinful conduct had brought grief, – then, indeed, her heart stood still. She felt a great calmness come over her. She made up her mind to escape by her window that very evening and drown herself in the lake. If life contained such horrors she would have done with it.

She did not go that night, however, because she feared the dark. It was gray dawn when she climbed from her window. Blind, resolved, swift-footed, she fled through the woods. Old Debby, resting in her punt by the lake's edge, not far from the Ladd landing-place, was pulling some sweet-rooted water-plants of a virtue known only to herself, when she was startled by a heavy splash and a little gasping cry which came from the other side of a steep point some four or five rods distant. Her vigorous old arms drove the punt through the water in mad haste – for there was something in the cry that wrenched at her heart. Rounding the point, she stood close in to the foot of a rock which jutted out into five or six feet of water. Peering down over the side of the punt, she saw lying on the bottom a slim, small body. A groan burst from her lips, for Barbara's face was half visible; and the old woman understood at once. She had heard the village gossip, and she had feared a tragedy. She knew that Barbara could swim, – but there was her long scarf of red silk twisted about the little arms lest resolution should falter in the face of the last great demand.

For a second old Debby was at fault. She could not swim. Then her brain worked. Reaching down with one of the oars, she twisted the blade tightly into the skirt of the child's gown, pulled her up, and snatched her into the boat. Experienced and ready in emergency, the old woman thrust ashore, laid the moveless little figure down upon a mossy hillock, and in a very few minutes succeeded in bringing it back to conscious life. She asked no questions, while Barbara clung to her, sobbing spasmodically at long intervals. She murmured pet names to her, caressed and soothed her, told her she was safe and no one should abuse her, and finally, lifting her into the punt and laying her gently on an armful of sweet bracken in the stern, rowed over the lake to her cabin. Throughout the journey Barbara lay with closed eyes, while the young life, slowly but obstinately reasserting itself, brought back the colour to cheeks and lips. Only once did she speak. Lifting her lids, she gazed fixedly at the hard-lined old face that bent over the swaying oars.