"I recollect an almost startling effect one night," Scarlett continued. "And the avenue too—that queer avenue—gnarled boughs, with thin foliage quivering in the wind, and glimpses of summer sky shining through. I think if I were a painter I would make a picture of those trees."
There was a picture of them, stripped of their leaves, and wrestling with an October gale, before the eyes of the man to whom he spoke. "They might be worth painting," he said. "I suppose they weren't worth cutting down. If they had been, I fancy there wouldn't be any avenue left."
"I suppose not. Well, anyhow I'm glad it was spared. There's an individuality about the place—melancholy it may be, perhaps dreary, as you say, but it isn't commonplace, so it misses the worst dreariness of all." He recurred to his first idea. "I wonder who will live there now poor old Hayes is dead."
"Rats," said Reynold. "And perhaps an old man and his wife, to take care of it."
Scarlett stood, with a shadow on his pleasant face. He had meant to go back to Mitchelhurst quite early in the summer, and he slipped a hand into his pocket, and fingered the little bundle of printed leaves which had played a part in his day-dream. He had counted on a welcome from the white-haired old gentleman, whose whims and oddities he understood and did not dislike, and he had waited contentedly enough till the time should come. In fact, he had found plenty to do that winter, what with Christmas visits, and the preparation of his poems for the press. As Adrian looked back, he realised that it had been a very agreeable winter, and that it had slipped away very quickly. The thought of Mitchelhurst had been there through it all, but, to tell the truth, it had not been very prominent. He would have spoken to Barbara in the autumn, if he had been left to himself, yet he had recognised the wisdom of the old man's prohibition, he had enjoyed the pathos of that unspoken farewell, and the sonnet which he touched and retouched with dainty grieving, and he had looked forward, very happily, to the end of his probation. Barbara, who was certainly very young, was growing a little older while he waltzed, and sang, and polished his rhymes, and made new friends wherever he went. Adrian had too much honesty to pretend to himself that he had been broken-hearted in consequence of their separation. He had not even felt uneasy, for, without being boastful, he had been very frankly and simply sure of the end of his love-story. He knew Barbara liked him.
And now it seemed that his testy little white-haired friend had gone out of the great old house into a smaller dwelling-place, and he had been reckoning on a dead man's welcome. A welcome—to what? To the cold clay of Mitchelhurst churchyard? The week before Christmas—Scarlett remembered that he had been very busy the week before Christmas, helping in some theatricals at a country house. He had been called, and called again at the end of the performance. And just then, at Mitchelhurst, the curtain had fallen for ever on the little part which Mr. Hayes had played, and Barbara had looked on its black mystery.
He bit his lip impatiently. There had been no harm in the theatricals, just the usual joking and intimacy among the actors behind the scenes, and the usual love-making and embraces on the stage. Adrian's conscience was clear enough, and yet the recollection of the girl who played the heroine (painted and powdered a little more than was absolutely necessary, for the mere pleasure of painting and powdering, as is the way with amateurs), came back to him with unpleasant distinctness. He could see her face, close to his own, as he remembered it on the hot little gaslit stage, in their great reconciliation scene, the scene that was always followed by a burst of applause. Everybody had admired his very becoming dress, and Scarlett himself had been rather proud of it. But now in a freak of his vivid imagination, he pictured the masquerading figure that he was, all showy pretence, with a head full of cues and inflated speeches, set down suddenly in the wintry loneliness of Mitchelhurst Place, and passing along the corridors to the threshold of the dead man's room, to see Barbara turn with startled eyes in the midst of the shadows. God! how pitiful and incongruous was that frippery, as he saw it in his fancy, brought thus into the presence of the last reality!
And Barbara, had she wondered at his silence during all these months? Never one word of regret for the old man who had been kind to him! "I wouldn't have had it happen for anything!" he said to himself. "What has she thought of me?"
Harding, with eyelids slightly drooping, was watching him, and Scarlett suddenly became aware of the fact.
"No, I suppose nobody is likely to take the old house," he said hurriedly. "I used to think it must be dull for Miss Strange, shut up there with nobody but her uncle."