He passed into the garden and loitered there, recalling the notes after a tuneless fashion of his own. The neglected grounds, which had seemed so sodden and sad when first he looked out upon them, had a pale, shining beauty as he walked to and fro, keeping time to the memory of Barbara's music. The eye did not dwell on their desolation, but passed through the leafless boughs to bright misty distances of earth and cloudland. Reynold halted at last by the old sun-dial. The softly diffused radiance marked no passing hour upon it, but rather seemed to tell of measureless rest and peace. There was a slight autumnal fragrance in the air, but the young man perceived a sweeter breath, and stooping to the black earth, he found two or three violets half hidden in their clustering leaves. He hardly knew why they gave him the pleasure they did; he was not accustomed to find such delicate pleasure in such things. Perhaps if he had analysed his feelings he might have seen that, for a man who had just pledged himself to a life of hurrying toil, there was a subtle charm in the very stillness and decay and indolent content of Mitchelhurst, breathing its odours of box and yew into the damp, windless air. It was a curious little pause before the final plunge. Reynold felt it even if he did not altogether understand, as he stood by the sun-dial which recorded nothing, with the violets at his feet, and the rooks sailing overhead across the faintly-tinted sky. A clump of overgrown dock-leaves stirred suddenly, Barbara's cat pushed its way through them and came to rub itself against him. He bent down and caressed it. "I'll come again—I'll come home," he said softly, as he stroked its arching back.
[CHAPTER IX.]
OF MAGIC LANTERNS.
It was fortunate that young Harding demanded little in the way of gaiety from Mitchelhurst. Such as it could give, however, it gave that evening, when the vicar, and a country squire who had a small place five or six miles away, came to dinner. The clergyman was a pallid, undersized man, who blinked, and twitched his lips when he was not speaking, and had a nervous trick of assenting to every proposition with an emphatic "Yes, yes." After the utterance of this formula his conscience usually awoke, and compelled him to protest, for he considered most things that were said or done in the world as at any rate slightly reprehensible. This might happen ten times in one conversation, but the assent did not fail to come as readily the tenth time as the first. It would only have been necessary to say, with a sufficient air of conviction, "You see, don't you, Mr. Pryor, that under these circumstances I was perfectly justified in cutting my grandmother's throat with a blunt knife?" to secure a fervent "Yes, yes!" in reply.
The squire was not half an inch taller, a little beardless man with withered red cheeks, and brown hair which was curiously like a wig. Barbara had doubted through two or three interviews whether it was a wig or not, and she had been pleased when he talked to her, because it gave her an excuse for looking fixedly in the direction of his head. At last he arrived one day with his hair very badly cut, and a bit of plaster on his ear, where the village barber had snipped it, after which she took no further interest in him. Happily her previous attention had given him a very high opinion of her intelligence and good taste, and Mr. Masters remained her loyal admirer. "A very sensible girl, Miss Strange," he would say, and Mr. Pryor would reply "Yes, yes," and then add doubtfully that he feared she was rather flighty, and that her indifference to serious questions was much to be regretted. This meant that Barbara would not take a class in the Sunday-school, and cared nothing about old books and tombstones.
The dinner was not a conversational success. Mr. Masters, on being introduced to Reynold Harding, was amazed at the likeness to the old family, and repeatedly exclaimed, "God bless my soul! How very remarkable!" Harding looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, and the vicar said "Yes, exactly so." The little squire's eyes kept wandering from the young man's face to the wall and back again, as if he were referring him to all the family portraits. By the time they had finished their fish the resemblance was singularly heightened. Reynold was scowling blackly, and answering in the fewest possible words, which seemed to grate against each other as he uttered them. Mr. Hayes, who did not care twopence for his young guest's feelings, looked on with indifferent eyes, and would not interfere, while Barbara made a gallant little attempt to divert attention from Reynold's ill-temper by talking with incoherent liveliness to the clergyman. As ill-luck would have it, Mr. Masters, who had more than once addressed his new acquaintance as "Mr. Rothwell," suddenly grasped the fact that he was not Rothwell at all, but Harding, and began to take an unnecessary interest in the Harding pedigree. He was so eager in his investigation that he did not see the young man's silent fury, but went on recalling different Hardings he had known or heard of. "That might be about your grandfather's time," he reckoned.
"You never knew my Hardings!" said Reynold abruptly, in so unmistakable a tone that Mr. Masters stopped short, and looked wonderingly at him, while Barbara faltered in the middle of a sentence. At that moment the remembrance of his grandfather was an intolerable humiliation to the poor fellow, tenfold worse because Barbara would understand. The dark blood had risen to his face and swollen the veins on his forehead, and his glance met hers. She coloured, and he took it as a confession that he had divined her thoughts. In truth she was startled and frightened at her hero of romance under his new aspect.
"Pryor," said Mr. Hayes sharply, "you are all wrong about that inscription in the church. Masters and I have been talking it over—eh, Masters?—and we have made up our minds that your theory won't do."