A Life's Eclipse

by George Manville Fenn

“Never, James.”

“Well, then, it will become softened down as time goes on; she’s gentler towards Daniel Barnett, too, now. There: it will all come right in the end.”

Mrs Ellis sighed and shook her head, but all the same she thought that after all her husband might prove to be correct.

“For James is a very wise man,” she argued, “and one can’t go on mourning for ever, however much one may have loved.”

Daniel Barnett placed his own interpretation on Mary’s manner towards him, and there were times when he was exulted, and felt how successfully he had climbed up the ladder of life. Head-gardener at Mrs Mostyn’s by eight-and-twenty; James Ellis’s prospective son-in-law; and in the future he would be bailiff and agent, when Ellis was removed by infirmity or death; and in the latter case he and Mary, the only child, would inherit the nice little bit of money the old man had saved, and the six cottages which he had bought from time to time.

Very pleasant all this, joined to the success in the gardens, where Mrs Mostyn had begun to show him more favour, and had several times expressed great satisfaction at the state of her garden.

But Daniel Barnett was not happy. He was perfectly sure that Mary would some day yield to his and her mother’s wishes, and become his wife; but even that knowledge did not clear away the black cloud which overhung his life. For, sleeping or waking, he could not get rid of the feeling that John Grange’s remains would some day be discovered, and conscience troubled him with the idea that he was more or less to blame for the poor fellow’s untimely end. It was in vain that he indignantly protested to himself that it was not likely a man should risk his life if he could help it. That he was not bound to climb that tree, and that he did quite right to take care of himself, and so escape what might have been his fate. “I might have fallen, and turned blind, or might have been killed,” he would often say to himself. “It was a bit of luck for me—ill-luck for him, poor chap. He went, and there’s an end of it.”

But there was not “an end of it,” for Daniel Barnett’s life was made a misery to him by the thoughts of how Grange had suffered, and how he had treated him, till in despair—

“Yes; that’s it,” Tummus would whisper to him; “he went and walked into the river, or—”

Daniel Barnett shivered and avoided the big well in the garden, and stubbornly refused to have the two great underground rain-water tanks cleaned out in the dry time for fear of some revelation being made.