And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the tunes came alive in their own air—as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but tending to the devilish.
Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a great flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out, and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady Ann's tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was no hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.
The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault she had in the eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with affectation or humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing that might coexist with it, the needful chance.
So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable, unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive as inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the new birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her war was to come.
Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady Ann, Mrs. Wylder was insufferable—a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman, purse-proud and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady Ann vastly inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady Ann was the superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her self-assured pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation far more objectionable than Mrs. Wylder's abrupt movements, or the rough and ready speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of a matter. Even the look that would kill a man if it could, never roused such hate as sprang to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship. Many a man with no admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge in Mrs. Wylder's plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils? Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of a fearless, bountiful, redeeming woman.
Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time. She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. “Stuck-up kangaroo!” she cried her.
“I'll lay you my best sapphire,” she said to her daughter, in the hearing of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, “that for the last three hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own young!”
Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann's exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as in that of the doctor's wife, who happened to be in the room when lady Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father's having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance! Arthur had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him! She must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She was anxious also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her continuous absence from Mortgrange.
Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara in such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless—not to her son, or to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the money to be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake of her complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and ride over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because she was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners, grew importunate, Barbara flatly refused.