He could not sleep when he went to bed that night. The head which he laid on the chilly softness of his pillow was full of a joyous riot of waking visions, and he closed his eyes on the shadows only to see a girl's shining glances and rose-flushed cheeks.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
BARBARA'S TUNE.
Harding fell asleep towards morning, and woke from his slumber with a vague sense that the world had somehow expanded into a wide and pleasant place, and that he had inherited a share of it. And though the facts were not quite so splendid when he emerged from his drowsy reverie, enough remained of possibilities, golden or rosy, to colour and brighten that Saturday. It is something to wake to a conviction that one's feet are set on the way to love and wealth.
While he dressed, he thought of the letter he had to write, and then of its consequences. How long would it be before he would have the right to come and say to Barbara, "I have begun the fortune you ordered. I am not rich yet, but I have fairly started on the road to riches and Mitchelhurst—will you wait for me there?" Or might he not say, "Will you travel the rest of the way with me?" How long must it be before he could say that? Two years? Surely in two years he might unclose his lips; for he would work—it would be no wearisome task. A longing, new and strange, to labour for his love flooded the inmost recesses of his soul. The man's whole nature was suddenly broken up, and flowing forth as a stream in a springtide thaw. It seemed to him that he could give himself utterly to the most distasteful occupations; in fact, that he would reject and scorn any remnant of himself that had not toiled for Barbara.
The girl herself woke up, a room or two away, and lay with her eyes fixed on the tester of the great shadowy bed. It was early, she need not get up for a few minutes more. The pale autumn morning stole in between the faded curtains, and lighted her vivid little face, a little face which might have been framed in a couple of encircling hands. And yet, small as it was, where it rested, with a cloud of dusky hair tossed round it over the pillow, it was the centre and the soul of that melancholy high-walled room. She had dreamed confusedly of Reynold Harding, and hardly knew where her dream ended and her waking thought began—perhaps because there was not much more reality in the one than in the other.
Girls have an ideal which they call First Love. It is rather a troublesome ideal, involving them in a thousand little perplexities, self-deceits, half-conscious falsehoods; but they adore it through them all. First Love is the treasure which must be given to the man they promise to marry; the bloom would be off the fruit, the dewdrop dried from the flower, if they could not assure him that the love they feel for him was the earliest that ever stirred within their hearts. The utmost fire of passion must have the freshness of shy spring blossoms. Love, in his supreme triumphant flight from soul to soul, must swear he never tried his wings before.
But, to be honest, how often can a girl speak confidently of her first love? She reads poems and stories, and the young fellows who come about her, while she is yet in her teens, are hardly more than incarnate chapters of her novels. How did she begin? She loved Hector, it may be, and King Arthur, and Roland, and the Cid. Then perhaps she had a tender passion for Amyas Leigh, for the Heir of Redclyffe, or for Guy Livingstone; and the curate, or the squire's son, just home with his regiment from India, carries on the romance. This she assures herself is the mystic first love; but the curate goes to another parish, or the lieutenant's leave comes to an end, and the living novel is forgotten with the others. She will order more books from Mudie's and take an interest in them, and in the hero of some private theatricals at a country house close by. She will meet the young man who lives on the other side of the county, but who dances so perfectly and talks so well, at the bachelors' ball. She will think a while first of one, then of the other; and afterwards, when the time comes to make that assurance of first love, she will, half unconsciously efface all these memories, and vow, with innocent, smiling lips, that her very dreams have held no shape till then.
Miss Strange was intent on the change in her little world of coloured shadows. Adrian Scarlett and Reynold Harding rose before her eyes as pictures, more life-like than she could find in her books, but pictures nevertheless, figures seen only in one aspect. Adrian, a facile, warmly-tinted sketch of a summer poet; Reynold, a sombre study in black and grey—what could the little girl by any possibility know of these young men more than this? Reynold's romance, with its fuller development, its melancholy background, its hints of passion and effort, might well absorb the larger share of her thoughts. Her part was marked out in it; she was startled to see how a word of hers had awakened a dormant resolution. She was flattered, and, though she was frightened too, she felt that she could not draw back; she had inspired young Harding with ambition, and she must encourage him and believe in him in his coming fight with fortune. Barbara found herself the heroine of a drama, and for the sake of her new character she began to rearrange her first impressions of the hero, to dwell on the pathos of his story, to deepen the ditch into which he had slipped in her service, till it would hardly have known itself from a precipice, to soften the chilly repulsion which she had felt at their meeting into the simple effect of his proud reserve. She lay gazing upward, with a smile on her lips, picturing his final home-coming, grouping all the incidents of that triumphant day about the tall, dark figure with the Rothwell features, who was just the puppet of her pretty fancies. The vision of his future, expanding like a soap-bubble, rose from the dull earth, and caught the gay colours of Barbara's sunny hopes. Everything would go well, everything must go well; he should make his fortune while he was yet young, and come back to the flowery arches and clashing bells of rejoicing Mitchelhurst. Beyond that day her fancy hardly went. Of course he would have to take the name of Rothwell, the name which, for the perfection of her romance, should have been his by right. At that remembrance she paused dissatisfied—the pork-butcher was the one strong touch of reality in the whole story. In fact the mere thought of him brought her back to everyday life, and to the certainty that she must waste no more time in dreams.