That night Barbara cried herself to sleep, but to her tears brought no relief—rather an added shame for the weakness which made them flow so bitterly. She felt overwhelmed by a great calamity—face to face with a situation out of which she must herself, unaided, find an issue.
She had asked so little of the shattered broken life which remained to her—only quietude and the placid enjoyment of a friendship which had come to her unsought, and in which there could be no danger, whatever Madame Sampiero or Mrs. Turke might think. Did not the feeling which bound her to James Berwick enjoy the tacit approval of such a woman as was Arabella Berwick? What else had made Miss Berwick say to her, as she had done, that her brother could never marry? Surely the words had been uttered with intention, to show Mrs. Rebell how desirable it was that he should have—friends?
Till to-night, love, to Barbara Rebell, had borne but two faces. The one, that of the radiant shadow-like figure, half cupid half angel, of her childhood and girlhood, was he who had played his happy part in the love affair of her father and mother, binding them the one to the other as she, Barbara, had seen them bound. It was this love—noble, selfless, unmaterial in its essence, or so she had thought—that lighted up Madame Sampiero's face when she spoke, as she sometimes did speak, in the same quivering breath, of Lord Bosworth and her little Julia.
Love's other face, that which she shuddered to know existed, had been revealed to her by Pedro Rebell. It was base, sensual, cunning, volatile, inconstant in its very essence, and yet, as Barbara knew, love after all—capable, for a fleeting moment, of ennobling those under its influence. Such, for instance, was love as understood by the coloured people, among whom she had spent these last years of her life, and with whose elementary joys and sorrows she had perforce sympathised.
Now, to-night, she realised that love could come in yet a third guise—nay, for the first time she saw that perhaps this was the only true love of them all, and that her first vision of the passion had been but its shadow. Some such feeling as that which now, she felt with terror, possessed her body as well as her soul, must have made her mother cling as she had clung, in no joyless way, to sombre, disgraced Richard Rebell.
Love again—warm, tender, passionate love—had linked together Lord Bosworth and Barbara Sampiero for so many years, and had found expression in their child. Thinking of those last two, Barbara lay and trembled. Bitter words of condemnation uttered by her father leapt from the storehouse of memory, as did the fact that her mother had once implied to her that but for Madame Sampiero, but for something—was it something wrong, or merely selfish and unwise which she had done?—Barbara's father might have returned in time to England and made some attempt to rehabilitate himself.
The maid who brought in her cup of tea in the morning laid a parcel down on Barbara's bed. It was a book wrapped in brown paper, and fully addressed to her with the superscription:—
"Dear Mrs. Rebell,—Here is the book I promised to send you.
"Yours truly,
"James Berwick."