His appeal touched Mistress Lynn to the quick. She wiped her brow, and hid her trembling old mouth with the edge of the sheet.
That ancient love which could not go out, though it might suffer an eclipse, began to shine again, and slowly illuminated her features, like an inner light. A cry that came from the soul had power to stir her. Deep called unto deep.
The door opened and Barbara entered. She had heard the voices, and come down to learn the meaning of them. A shepherd's plaid of black and white check was thrown over her shoulders, and her hair hung in a glistening mass. The clearness of her face was like the coming of moonlight out of clouds. She stood on the threshold, looking from Joel to the old woman, then closing the door, moved to the four-poster.
"Dost need me, great-granny?" she asked.
Barbara's sudden entrance into that intense atmosphere caused a change to work among the elements, just as a wind rising on a sultry day, may mean the coming of storm, or the freshening of the weather.
Joel was not sure whether to be glad or sorry. He looked at her in awe as a benighted traveller might look at a snow peak, which the rising moon all at once revealed towering overhead. He felt himself to be little better than a clod of earth in her presence.
To her great-grandmother Barbara's coming was a relief. The old woman had received a blow, and however bravely she might hide the wound, she could not stanch its inward bleeding. For once she was glad to shift responsibility from her own to younger shoulders.
"Sit thee down, Barbara," she said, "Joel's in sore trouble, and he has come to me. Very right and proper of him! For who else should he come to but his grandfather's old friend? Yet I don't ken what to do. Tell thy tale, my lad, but tell no more than a young lass's ears may hear."
She shot a warning look at him under her shaggy brows, and he understood that she meant to keep to herself the knowledge of his unworthy intentions. He thanked her by a grip of the hand, overwhelmed by the forbearance she showed, which was as unexpected as it was gracious in so masterful a soul. The meaning lay much deeper than he could probe. It lay in the foundations of her nature—foundations of goodness and love, although nearly a hundred years of building had raised over them a superstructure, grim and narrow.
He told his story. It was a story of adverse circumstances acting upon a mind too indolent to do battle with them. Barbara listened with interest and sympathy. Her life upon the mountains, her isolation,—for her character was little understood by those nearest and dearest to her—had made her a student of other people. She read their reasons and acts with a clearness of vision unusual in one of little worldly experience. But experience is not always knowledge. It was her own heart, with its possibilities for good and evil, her own nature, curbed on every side, that gave her insight into and understanding of life. Meditation had taught her to know herself, and so given her a key with which to open the secret doors of other souls.