"You mustn't say anything against Mitchelhurst," cried Barbara, swinging her great key. "It isn't beautiful, but I feel as if I belonged to it, somehow. It changed me, I can't tell why or how, but it did. After I had been six months with Uncle Hayes, I went home for a fortnight in the spring, and everything seemed so different. It was all so bright and busy there, everybody talked so fast about little everyday things, and the rooms were so small and crowded. I suppose it was because I had been living with echoes and old pictures in that great house. Louisa and Hetty were always having little secrets and jokes, there wasn't any harm in them, you know, but I felt as if I could not care about them or laugh at them, and yet some of them had been my jokes, before I went to Mitchelhurst. And I could not make them understand why I cared about the Rothwells and their pictures, when I had never known any of them."
"Louisa is a very nice girl," said Scarlett; "but if Mitchelhurst is all the difference between you two, I am bound to say that I have a high opinion of the place."
"Well, I don't know any other difference."
"Don't you?" and he smiled as he followed her along the churchyard path. "No other difference? None?" He smiled, and yet he knew that the old house had given a charm to Barbara when he saw her first. She had been like a little damask rose, breathing and glowing against its grim walls. He took the key from her hand, and turned it in the grating lock.
It seemed as if the very air were unchanged within, so heavy and still it was. Barbara went forward, and her little footfalls were hardly audible on the matting. Adrian, with his head high, sniffed in search of a certain remembered perfume, as of mildewed hymn-books, found it, and was content. It brought back to him, as only an odour could, his first afternoon in the church, when he stood with one of those books in his hand, and watched the Rothwell pew which held Barbara.
Having enjoyed his memory he faced round and inspected St. Michael, who was as new, and neat, and radiant as ever. Adrian speculated how long it would take to make him look a little less of a parvenu. "Would a couple of centuries do him any good, I wonder?" he mused, half-aloud. "Not much, I fear." The archangel returned his gaze with a permanent serenity which seemed to imply that a century more or less was a matter of indifference to his dragon and him.
Barbara had gone straight to the Rothwell monuments, where Scarlett presently joined her. She did not take her eyes from the tombs, but she stole a warm little hand under his arm. "I wish he could have been buried here," she said in a low voice.
Reynold had said that he bequeathed her his memory, but now, in her happiness, it seemed to be receding, fading, melting away. She gazed helplessly in remorseful pain; he was only a chilly phantom; the very fierceness of his passion was but a dying spark of fire. She could recall his words, but they were dull and faint, like echoes nearly spent. She could not recall their meaning—that was gone. The declaration of love which had burst upon her like a great wave, filling her with pity and wonder and fear, had ebbed to some unapproachable distance, leaving her perplexed and half incredulous. Adrian, in flesh and blood, was at her side, and she thrilled and glowed at his touch; but when she thought of Reynold Harding she met only a vague emptiness. He was not with the Rothwells in this quiet corner; he was not where she had left him, lying back in his leathern chair. That room was swept and garnished and cold, as he had said. No doubt they had put him in some suburban cemetery, some wilderness of graves which to her was only a name of dreariness. Standing where he had once stood in Mitchelhurst Church, she only felt his absence, and she thought that she could have recalled him better if he had been at rest beneath the dimly-lettered pavement on which her eyes were fixed.
She was wrong. Memories cannot bear the outer air, or be laid away in the cold earth; they can only live when they are hidden in our hearts, and quickened by our pulses. Barbara could not keep the remembrance of Reynold's love alive, with no love of her own to warm it. But in her ignorance she said, wistfully—
"I wish he could have been buried here!" and then added in a quicker tone, "I suppose you'll say it makes no difference where he lies."