"You must be tired. Would you like to go to sleep?" his voice shook with tenderness, but he put a strong restraint on himself. He was bound by every code of honour to treat her to-night as he would have done any stranger confided by his sister to his care.
Barbara started slightly, and shook her head. She had been living again the last three hours of the ball. How delightful and how unexpected it had all been! She had enjoyed intensely her long talk with the French Ambassador. He also had spent his childhood, and part of his youth at St. Germains, the stately forest town where the brighter days of her parents' exile had been passed. It is well sometimes to meet with one who can say, "I too have been in Arcadia." Even Monsieur Parisot's little compliments on her good French had reminded Barbara of the sweet hypocrisies which make life in France so agreeable to the humble-minded, and especially to the very young.
Lord Bosworth had surely been the magician, for it was after his arrival that everything had changed from grey to rose-colour. It was then that James Berwick had again become to her what he always was in manner, and the uncle and nephew had vied with one another in amusing and interesting her. And then had come this delightful conclusion, the drive back in this fairy chariot!
"This is a very pretty, curious little carriage," her eyes met his frankly; "I feel like Cinderella going to, not coming back from, the ball!"
Berwick allowed himself to look his fill. The brougham was lined with some sort of white watered silk, and never would Barbara have a kinder background, or one which harmonised more exquisitely with her rather pale, dark beauty. Women were then wearing their hair cut straight across the forehead, and dressed in elaborate plaits about the nape of the neck; Barbara's short curls seemed to ally her with a more refined, a less sophisticated age,—one when innocence and archness were compatible with instinctive dignity.
And yet, such being the nature of man, Berwick would have been better pleased had she not been now so completely, so happily at her ease. He felt that between them there lay—not the drawn sword which played so strange and symbolical a part in mediæval marriage by procuration—but a sheaf of lilies. Berwick would have preferred the sword.
His had been the mood which seeks an extreme of purity in the woman beloved. Till now he had been glad to worship on his knees, and where she walked had been holy ground. But now he craved for some of the tenderness Barbara lavished on Madame Sampiero. Could she not even spare him the warmth of feeling shown by her when speaking of Grace and Andrew Johnstone? Since that last interview with Mrs. Marshall he had felt free—free as he had not felt for over a year. Was he to have no profit of his freedom?
"It is you who look tired, Mr. Berwick; I'm afraid you stayed on for my sake?"
Barbara was looking at him with real concern. How unlike himself he had been all that evening! Perhaps, when she had been stupidly annoyed at his supposed neglect of her, he had really been suffering. His face looked strained and thin in the bright light thrown by a cunning little arrangement of mirrors. She felt a pang of fear. How would she be able to bear it if he fell ill, away from her, in that large bare house which seemed so little his home?
It was well perhaps that Berwick could not see just then into her heart, and yet it was still an ignorant and innocent heart. The youngest girl present at the Halnakeham Castle ball could probably have taught Mrs. Rebell more than she now knew of the ways of men—almost, it might be said, of the ways of love. Her father had had the manhood crushed out of him by his great misfortune. Barbara, as child and girl, had reverenced—not the chill automaton, caring only for the English papers and a little mild play, which Richard Rebell had become in middle life,—but the attractive early image of him sedulously presented to her by her mother. She had had no brothers to bring young people to the many homes of her girlhood. Then, across her horizon, had come the baleful figure of Pedro Rebell, but at no time, after her marriage, had she made the mistake of regarding him as a normal man. No, her first real knowledge of the average Englishman had been during those weeks of convalescence, spent at the Government House of Santa Maria, when she had been slowly struggling back into a wish to live. There she had known, and had shrunk from the knowledge, that all those about her were aware of what sort of life she had been compelled to lead on her husband's plantation. Every step of Mr. Johnstone's negotiations with Pedro Rebell was followed by her new friends with intense sympathy, and when at last the planter had been half persuaded, half bribed into signing a document binding him not to molest his wife, her only longing had been to go away, and never to see any of the people connected with the island again.