There & Back

I have been led into this digression through the desire to give an approximate idea of the good, rather vacant, unselfish, and yet self-contented, if not self-satisfied condition of Richard’s being.

He got out a manuscript-book in which he was in the habit of setting down whatever came to him, and wrote for some time, happily making more than one spot of ink on the toilet-cover, which served to open the eyes of Mrs. Locke to her mistake in thinking a workman would not want a writing-table; so that before the next evening he found in his chamber everything comfortable for writing, as well as for sleeping and dressing.

He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with the message that Mr. Lestrange was in the morning-room, and wished to see him.

He followed the man and found Lestrange at the breakfast-table, with a tall young woman, very ordinary-looking, except for her large, soft, dark eyes, and the little lady whose mare he had shod, and whose voice he had that morning heard from the tree-top.

He advanced half-way to the table, and stood.

“Ah, there you are!” said Lestrange, glancing up, and immediately reverting to his plate. “We’ve got to set to work, haven’t we?”

He had, I presume, found the ladies not uninterested in the restoration that was about to be initiated, and had therefore sent for Richard while breakfast was going on.

The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, and now spoke pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” answered Richard. “Shall I wait outside until you have done breakfast?”

He feared the servant might have made a mistake.

“I sent for you,” replied Lestrange curtly.

“Very well, sir. I have not yet learned whether the tools I sent on have been delivered, but there will be plenty to do in the way of preparation.—May I ask if you have settled where I am to work, sir?”

“Ah! I had not thought of that!”

“It seems to me, sir, that the library itself would suit best; that is, if I might have a good-sized kitchen-table in it, and roll up half the carpet. When I had to beat a book I could take it into the passage, or just outside the window. Nothing else would make any dust.”

Lestrange had been thinking how to have the binder under his eye, and yet not seem to watch a fellow so much above his notion of a working man; the family made very little use of the library, and Richard’s proposal seemed just the thing. He would be sure to stick to his work where some one might any moment be coming in!

“I don’t see any difficulty,” he answered.

“I should want a little fire for my glue-pot and polishing-iron. There will be gilding and lettering too, though I hope not much—title-pieces to replace, and a touch here and there to give to the tooling! No man with any reverence in him would meddle much with such delicate, lovely old things as many of these gildings! He would not dare more than just touch them!”

The little lady sat eating her toast, but losing no word that was said. She knew from his voice the young man was the same to whom she had called out of the beech-tree; but now she seemed to recognize him as the blacksmith whose hand she had bound up: what could a blacksmith do in a library? She was puzzled.

Richard noted that she was dressed in some green stuff, which perhaps was the cause of his having been unable to discover her in the tree! Her great eyes—they were bigger than those of the tall lady—every now and then looked up at him with a renewed question, to which they seemed to find no answer. They were big blue eyes—very dark for blue, and rather too round for perfection; but their roundness was at one with the prevailing expression of her face, which was innocent daring, inquiry, and confidence. The paleness of it was a healthy paleness, with just an inclination to freckle. Her dark, half-scorched-looking hair was so abundant and rebellious, that it had to be all over compelled with gold pins. Its manipulation had neither beginning, middle, nor end. She ate daintily enough, but as if she meant to have a breakfast that should last her till luncheon—when plainly the active little furnace of her life would want fresh fuel. But it was of another kind of fuel she was thinking now. In the man who stood there, so independent, yet so free from self-assertion, she saw a prospect of learning something. She was hungry after knowing, but, though fond of reading, was very ignorant of books. She thought like a poet, but had never read a real poem. She was full of imagination, but very imperfectly knew what the word meant. She had never in her life read a work of genuine imagination—not even Undine, not even The Ugly Duckling.

CHAPTER XIV. THE LIBRARY

After some talk, it was settled that Richard should work in the large oriel of the library. Mrs. Locke was called, and the necessary orders were given. Employer and workman were both anxious, the one to see, the other to make a commencement. In a few minutes Richard had looked out as many of the books in most need of attention as would keep him, turning from the one to the other, as each required time in the press or to dry, thoroughly employed.

“There is a volume here I should like to know your mind about, sir,” he said, after looking at one of them a moment or two, “—the first collected edition of Spenser’s works, actually bound up with Sir John Harrington’s translation of Ariosto! If it were a good, or even an old binding, I should have said nothing.”

“It don’t seem in a bad way.”

“No, but the one book is so unworthy of the other!”

“What would you propose?”

“I would separate them; put the Spenser in plain calf, and make the present cover, with a new back, do for Sir John; it is a good enough coat for him.”

“Very well. Do as you think best.”

“I should like to send them both to my father.”

“But you have undertaken everything!”

“I am quite ready, sir; but in that case these must wait. My faculty is best laid out on mending, and I must do some good work in that first. I don’t know that I’m quite up to my father in binding. I mentioned him because if he were to help me with those that must be bound, I should have the more time for what often takes longer. You may trust my father, sir; he does not want to make a fortune.”

“I will try him then,” answered the cautious heir. “At least I will send him the books, and learn what he would charge.”

He had more of the ordinary tradesman in him than Richard and his uncle put together.

“I will put the prices on them, and engage that my father will charge no more,” said Richard.

Lestrange was content on hearing them, and Richard set to work with the other volumes.

The bookbinder, always busy, soon began to be respected in the house, and before long had gained several indulgences—among the rest, to have a table for himself in the library, at which, when work-hours were over, he might read or write when he pleased. As his labours went on, the bookscape began to revive, and continued slowly putting on an autumnal radiance of light and colour. Dingy and broken backs gradually disappeared. Pamphlets and magazines, such as, from knowledge or inquiry, Richard thought worth the expense, were sent off to his father to be bound. But I must continue my narrative from a point long before his work began to make much of a show.

A few valuable books, much injured by time and rough usage,—among the rest a quarto of The Merry Wives—he had pulled apart, and was treating with certain solutions, in preparation for binding them, when Lestrange came in one morning, accompanied by the curate of the parish. His eyes fell on a loose title-page which he happened to know.

“What on earth are you doing?” he cried. “You will destroy that book! By Jove!—You little know what you’re about!”

“I do know what I am about, sir. I shall do the book nothing but good,” answered Richard. “It could not have lasted many years without what I am doing.”

“Leave it alone,” said Lestrange. “I must ask some one. The treatment is too dangerous.”

“Excuse me, sir; the treatment is by no means dangerous. After this bath, I shall take it through one of thin size, to help the paper to hold together. The book has suffered much, both from damp and insects.”

“No matter!” answered Lestrange imperiously. “I will not have you meddle further with that volume.—Would you believe it, Hardy,” he went on, turning to the curate, “it is that translation of Ovid he is experimenting upon!”

“I beg your pardon, I am not experimenting,” said Richard.

“I hardly think it is such a very rare book!” replied the curate. “I believe it could be replaced!”

“Ah, you don’t know, I see! I thought I had shown you!” returned Lestrange excitedly. “Look there!”

He pointed to the title-page, which was lying on the table.

“I see!” said Hardy. “It is a first edition—in black letter—of Arthur Golding’s Ovid!”

“But you don’t look! Why don’t you look? Have you no eyes for that faded ink just under the title?”

“Why! What’s this? Gul. Shaksper!—Is it possible!”

“You find it hard to believe your eyes, and well you may!—There, Tuke! I told you you didn’t know what you were doing!”

“I always examine the title-page of a book,” answered Richard. “You must allow me to do as I see fit, Mr. Lestrange, or I give up the job.”

“You undertook to work for a year, if required!”

“I did not undertake to receive orders as to my mode of working. I care for books far too much for that. Besides, I have my character to see to! I warn you that if I do not go on with that volume, it will be ruined.”

“You don’t consider the money you risk!—That name makes the book worth hundreds at least.”

“It is the greatest of names! Only that name was not written by him who owned it!”

“What do you know about it!” said Lestrange rudely.

“Are you an expert?” asked the curate.

“By no means,” answered Richard; “but I have been a good deal with old books, and my impression is you have got there one of the Ireland forgeries!”

“I believe it to be quite genuine!” said Lestrange.

“If it be, there is the more reason in what I am doing, sir.”

Lestrange turned abruptly to the curate, saying—“Come along, Hardy! I can’t bear to see the butchery!”

“Depend on it,” returned the curate laughing, “the surgeon knows his knife!—You know what you’re about, don’t you, Mr. Tuke?”

“If I did not, sir, I wouldn’t meddle with a book like that, forgery or no forgery! You should see the quantities of old print I’ve destroyed in learning how to save such books!—This is no vile body to experiment upon!”

“Mr. Lestrange, you may trust that man!” said the curate.

CHAPTER XV. BARBARA WYLDER

It was the height of the season, and sir Wilton and lady Ann were in London—I cannot say enjoying themselves, for I doubt if either of them ever enjoyed self, or anything else. Their daughters were at home, in the care of the governess. Theodora had been out a year or two, but preferred Mortgrange to London. She was one of the few girls—perhaps not very few—who imagine themselves uglier than they are. Miss Malliver, the governess, was a lady of uncertain age, for whom lady Ann had an uncertain liking. The younger girl, her pupil, was named Victoria, but commonly called Vic, and not uncommonly Vixen. The younger boy was at school, where they were constantly threatening to send him home. He had been already dismissed from Eton.

In their elder son, Arthur, his parents had as perfect a confidence as such parents could have in any son.

The little lady that rode the great mare, and sat in the beech-tree, was at present their guest—as she often was, in a fluctuating or intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more at Mortgrange than at home; one consequence of which was, that, as would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B. Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the little lady had bewildered, for she was indeed an importation from a new colony rather startling to sedate old England. Her father, a younger son, had unexpectedly succeeded to the family-property, a few miles from Mortgrange. He was supposed to have made a fortune in New Zealand, where Barbara was born and brought up. They had been home nearly two years, and she was almost eighteen. Absurd rumours were abroad concerning their wealth, but there were no great signs of wealth about the place. Wylder Hall was kept up, and its life went on in good style, it is true, but mainly because the old servants perpetuated the customs of the house.

The squire was said to have shared in some of the roughest phases of colonial life. Whether he was better or worse for falling in love with the money of an older colonist, and marrying his daughter, it is certain that, for a time at least, he grew a shade or two more respectable. Far from being a woman of refinement, she had more character and more strength than he, and brought him, not indeed into the highways of wisdom, but into certain by-paths of prudence.

Upon his return to his native country, they were everywhere received; but had it not been for their reported wealth, I doubt if the ladies of the county, after some experience of her manners and speech, which were at times very rough, would have continued to call on Mrs. Wylder.

But everybody liked Barbara; and nobody could think how such a flower should have come of two such plants. She seemed to regard every one as of her own family. People were her property—hers to love! And her brain was as active as her heart, and constantly with it. She wanted to know what people thought and felt and imagined; what everything was; how a thing was done, and how it ought to be done. She seemed to understand what the animals were thinking, and what the flowers were feeling. She had from infancy spent the greater part of her life, both night and day, in the open air; and, having no companion, had sought the acquaintance of every live thing she saw—often to the disgust of her mother, and occasionally to the annoyance of her father. She was a child of the whole world, as the naiad is the child of the river, and the oread of the mountain. She could sit a horse’s bare back even better than a saddle, could guide him almost as well with a halter as with a bridle, and in general control him without either, though she had ridden more than one horse with terrible bit and spurs. She did not remember the time when she could not swim, and she tried her own running against every new horse, to find what he could do. Some highland girl might perhaps have beaten her, up hill, but I doubt it. She was so small that she looked fragile, but she had nerves such as few men can boast, and muscles like steel. It never occurred to her not to say what she thought, believed, or felt; she would show favour or dislike with equal readiness; and give the reason for anything she did as willingly as do the thing. She was a special favourite at Mortgrange. Not only did she bewitch the blasé man of the world, sir Wilton, but the cold eye of his lady would gleam a faint gleam at the thought of her dowry. Her father “prospected” a little for something higher than a mere baronetcy, but he had in no way interfered. Of herself, divine little savage, she would never have thought of love until she fell in love: a flower cannot know its own blossom until it comes. It did not yet interest her, and until it did, certainly marriage never would. Thus was she healthier-minded than any one born of society-parents, and brought up under the influences of nurse-morality, can well be. When she came to England, it was hard to teach her the ways of the so-called civilized. Servants would sometimes be out searching for her after midnight, perhaps to find her strayed beyond the park, out upon the solitary heath. She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names indeed, but by names she had herself given them. She had tales of her own, fashioned in part from the wild myths of the aborigines, to account for the special relations of such as made a group. She would weave the travels of the planets into the steady history of the motionless stars. Waning and waxing moons had a special and strange influence upon her. She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old nurse, who had come with her—a strange creature, of what mingled blood no one knew—told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night. No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth’s Lucy, and made her a lady of her own.

As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius—the faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara’s questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing.

Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style, Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled men; real, she charmed alike men and fools.

She had read few books worth reading—had read a few which one would not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing, therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She imagined them all attractive—but at the first assay turned from the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it seemed to them, set her down as stupid.

As to religion, she had never been taught any. But from before her earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this feeling she never thought of attempting to account, neither would have recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought it; a sweep of the earth away from her feet would bring it; any horizon far or near called it up, perhaps most keenly of all. In England she often sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling, she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them. Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from her the Presence? When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. She had no idea of ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm, a moonlit night, a sweet wind—anything that woke the sense of the old freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it a presence.

Neither did she know that there was a place where the very essence, of that whose loss made her sad was always waiting her—a place called in a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the one horizon—infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of loss and need.

Her father’s desire was to see her so married as to raise his influence in the county. He was proud of her—selfishly proud. Was she not his? Was he not “the author of her being”? If he did not quite imagine he had created her, he certainly never thought of any one but himself as having to do with her existence. All the credit in it was his! He forgot even what share her mother might claim; not to mention what in her might belong to the Sum of Things, the insensate Pan. A self-glorious man is the biggest fool in the world.

Her mother, too, was proud of her—loved her indeed after a careless fashion—was even in a sort obliged to her for having come to her. But she did not care for her enough to interfere with her. Notwithstanding the mother’s coarseness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she loved far more, and the other far less.

Barbara had no pride. She spoke in the same tone to lord and tradesman. She had been the champion of the blacks in her own country, and in England looked lovingly on the gypsies in their little tents on the windy downs.

CHAPTER XVI. BARBARA AND RICHARD

Hardly had Lestrange left the room, when Barbara entered, noiseless as a moth, which creature she somehow resembled at times: one observant friend came to see that she resembled all swift, gay, and gentle creatures in turn. She was in the same green dress which had favoured her concealment in the beech, and in which Richard had seen her afterward at the breakfast-table, but of which he had not since caught a glimmer. Her blue eyes—at times they seemed black, but they were blue—settled upon Richard the moment she entered, and resting on him seemed to lead her up to the table where he was at work.

“What have you done to make Arthur so angry?” she said, her manner as if they had known each other all their lives.

“What I am doing now, miss—making this book last a hundred years longer.”

“Why should you, if he doesn’t want you to do it? The book is his!”

“He will be pleased enough by and by. It’s only that he thinks I can’t, and is afraid I shall ruin it.”

“Hadn’t you better leave it then?”

“That would be to ruin it. I have gone too far for that.”

“Why should you want to make it last so long? They are always printing books over again, and a new book is much nicer than an old one.”

“So some people think; but others would much rather read a book in its first shape. And then books get so changed by printers and editors, that it is absolutely necessary to have copies of them as they were at first. You see this little book, miss? It don’t look much, does it?”

“It looks miserable—and so dirty!”

“By the time I have done with it, it will be worth fifty, perhaps a hundred pounds—I don’t know exactly. It is a play of Shakespeare’s us published in his lifetime.”

“But they print better and more correctly now, don’t they?”

“Yes; but us I said, they often change things.”

“How is that?”

“Sometimes they will change a word, thinking it ought to be another; sometimes they will alter a passage because they do not understand it, putting it all wrong, and throwing aside a great meaning for a small one: the change of a letter may alter the whole idea. But they often do it just by blundering. Shall I tell you an instance that came to my knowledge yesterday? It is but a trifle, yet is worth telling.—Of course you know the Idylls of the King?”