When he went into the street he spoke kindly to the women at the doors, with an obvious forgetfulness of names and circumstances which made him an object of contemptuous pity. They could not conceive how any one in his senses could make such foolish mistakes, and were inclined to look on the Established Church as a convenient provision for weak-minded gentlefolks. They grinned when he had gone by, and repeated his well-meant inquiries, plaiting all the time. It was only natural that the vicar should prefer his parishioners dead. They did not then indulge in coarse laughter, they never described unpleasant ailments, and they were neatly labelled with their names, or else altogether silent concerning them.
The vicar's shortcomings might have been less remarked had the tenants of Mitchelhurst Place taken their proper position in the village. But where, seventy or eighty years before, the great gates swung open for carriages and horses, and busy servants, and tradesmen, there came now down the mossy drive only an old man on foot, and a girl by his side, with eyes like dark waters, and a sweet richness of carnation in her cheeks. Mr. Hayes and his niece lived, as the later Rothwells had lived, in a corner of the old house. It was queer that a man should choose to hire a place so much too big for him, people said, but they had said it for nineteen years, and they never seemed to get any further. Herbert Hayes might be eccentric, but he was shrewd, he knew his own business, and the villagers recognised the fact. He was not popular, there was nothing to be got by begging at the Place, and he would not allow Barbara to visit any of the cottages. But it was acknowledged that he was not stingy in payment for work done. And if he lived in a corner he knew how to make himself comfortable there, which was more than the last Rothwell had been able to do.
The church and vicarage were at one end of Mitchelhurst, and the Place, which stood on slightly rising ground, was at the other. It was a white house, and in a dim light it had a sad and spectral aspect, a pale blankness as of a dead face. The Rothwell who built it intended to have a stately avenue from the great ironwork gates to the principal entrance, and planted his trees accordingly. But the site was cruelly exposed, and the soil was sterile, and his avenue had become a vista of warped and irregular shapes, leaning in grotesque attitudes, dwarfed and yet massive with age. In the leafiness of summer much of this singularity was lost, but when winter stripped the boughs it revealed a double line of fantastic skeletons, a fit pathway for the strangest dreams.
The gardens, with the exception of a piece close to the house, had been so long neglected that they seemed almost to have forgotten that they had ever been cultivated. Almost, but not quite, for they had not the innocence of the original wilderness. There were tokens of a contest. The plants and grasses that possessed the soil were obviously weeds, and the degraded survivals of a gentler growth lurked among them overborne and half strangled. There was a suggestion of murderous triumph in the coarse leaves of the mulleins and docks that had rooted themselves as in a conquered inheritance, and the little undulations which marked the borders and bits of rock-work of half a century earlier looked curiously like neglected graves.
It seemed to Barbara Strange, as she stood looking over it all, on the day on which Mr. Harding was to come to Mitchelhurst, that there was something novel in this aspect of desolation. She knew the place well, for it was rather more than a year since she came, at her uncle's invitation, to live there, and she had seen it with all the changes of the seasons upon it. She knew it well, but she had never thought of it as home. The little Devonshire vicarage which held father and mother, and a swarm of young sisters and brothers—almost too many to be contained within its walls—was home in the past and the present. And if the girl had dreams of the future, shy dreams which hardly revealed themselves even to her, they certainly never had Mitchelhurst Place for a background. To her it was just a halting-place on her journey into the unknown regions of life. It was like some great out-of-the-way ruinous old inn, in which one might chance to sleep for a night or two. She had merely been interested in it as a stranger, but on this October day she looked at it curiously and critically for Mr. Harding's sake. She would have liked it to welcome him, to show some signs of stately hospitality to this son of the house who was coming home, and for the first time a full sense of its dreariness and hopelessness crept into her soul. She could do nothing, she felt absurdly small, the great house seemed to cast a melancholy shadow over her, as she went to and fro in the bit of ground that was still recognised as a garden, gathering the few blossoms that autumn had spared.
Barbara meant the flowers to brighten the rooms in which they lived, but she looked a little doubtfully into her basket while she walked towards the house. They were so colourless and frail, it seemed to her that they were just fit to be emptied out over somebody's grave. "Oh," she said to herself, "why didn't he come in the time of roses, or peonies, or tiger lilies? If it had been in July there might have been some real sunshine to warm the old place. Or earlier still, when the apple blossom was out—why didn't he come then? It is so sad now." And she remembered what some one had said, a few weeks before, loitering up that wide path by her side: "An old house—yes, I like old houses, but this is like a whited sepulchre, somehow. And not his own—I should not care to set up housekeeping in a corner of somebody else's sepulchre." Barbara, as her little lonely footsteps fell on the sodden earth, thought that he was perfectly right. She threw back her head, and faced the wide, blind gaze of its many-windowed front. Well, it was Mr. Harding's own family sepulchre, if that was any consolation.
Her duty as a housekeeper took her to the blue room, which Mr. Hayes had chosen for their guest, a large apartment at the side of the house, not with the bleak northern aspect of the principal entrance, but looking away towards the village, and commanding a wide prospect of meadow land. The landscape in itself was not remarkable, but it had an attraction as of swiftly varying moods. Under a midsummer sky it would lie steeped in sunshine, and dappled with shadows of little, lightly-flying clouds, content and at peace. Seen through slant lines of grey rain it was beyond measure dreary and forlorn, burdening the gazer's soul with its flat and unrelieved heaviness. One would have said at such times that it was a veritable Land of Hopelessness. Then the clouds would part, mass themselves, perhaps, into strange islands and continents, and towering piles, and the sun would go down in wild splendours of flame as of a burning world, and the level meadows would become a marvellous plain, across which one might journey into the heart of unspeakable things. Then would follow the pensive sadness of the dusk, and the silvery enchantment of moonlight. And after all these changes there would probably come a grey and commonplace morning, in which it would appear as so many acres of very tolerable grazing land, in no wise remarkable or interesting.
Barbara did not trouble herself much about the prospect. She was anxious to make sure that soap and towels had been put ready for Mr. Harding, and candles in the brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, and ink and pens on the little old-fashioned writing-table. With a dainty instinct of grace she arranged the heavy hangings of the bed, and, seeing that a clumsy maid had left the pillow awry, she straightened and smoothed it with soft touches of a slender brown hand, as if she could sympathetically divine the sullen weariness of the head that should lie there. Then, fixing an absent gaze upon the carpet, she debated a perplexing question in her mind.
Should she, or should she not, put some flowers in Mr. Harding's room? She wanted to make him feel that he was welcome to Mitchelhurst Place, and, to her shyness, it seemed easier to express that welcome in any silent way than to put it into words. And why not? She might have done it without thinking twice about it, but her uncle's little jests, and her own loneliness, while they left her fearless in questions of right and wrong, had made her uneasy about etiquette. As she leaned against one of the carved pillars of the great bed, musing, with lips compressed and anxious brow, she almost resolved that Mr. Reynold Harding should have nothing beyond what was a matter of housewifely duty. Why should she risk a blush or a doubt for him? But even with the half-formed resolution came the remembrance of his unlucky humiliation in her service, and Barbara started from her idle attitude, and went away, singing softly to herself.