And Barbara? Ah! she undoubtedly would agree with almost every word of it; he caught himself wondering whether the position he had won, and which he owed in a measure,—perhaps in a very great measure,—to his wife's fortune, would be really forfeited, were he to become again a comparatively poor man. Berwick had by no means forgotten what it was to be straitened in means; and he realised that want of substantial wealth had been a great bar even to Lord Bosworth. Still, oddly enough, the thought of giving up his wealth for the sake of Barbara was beginning to appeal to his imagination. He went so far as to tell himself that, had he come across her as a girl, he would of course have married her, and forfeited his large income without a regret.
So it was that, during the long solitary spring day, spent by him almost wholly in the forest, Berwick experienced many phases of acute and varying feeling, most of which tended to war with the course to which he was being inexorably driven by his sense of honour rather than by his conscience.
But for Boringdon's revelation as to Pedro Rebell's state, Berwick's conscience would have been at ease. So much he had the honesty to admit. Apart from that one point which so intimately involved his honour, he was without scruple, and that although he loved Barbara the more for being, as he well knew she was, scrupulous, and, as he thought, conscience-ridden. Nothing, so he told himself again and again during those hours of fierce battle, could alter the fact that she belonged to him in that special sense which is, as concerns a man and a woman, the outcome of certain emotional experiences only possible between two natures which are drawn to one another by an over-mastering instinct.
In the days that followed the fire at Chancton Priory, there had arisen, between Berwick and Barbara, a deep, wordless intimacy and communion, which at the time had had the effect of making him divine what was in her mind, with a clearness which had struck those about them as being actually uncanny. And yet it was then, during those days, that Berwick had sworn to himself that his love was pure and selfless in its essence. As she had lain there, her hand quivering when it felt his touch, every gross element of his nature had become fused and refined in the clear flame of his passion. It had been during these exquisite, to him sacred moments, that he had told himself that on these terms of spiritual closeness and fusion he would be content to remain.
But alas! that mood had quickly changed; and the interview with Boringdon had reawakened the violent primeval instinct which had slumbered,—only slumbered,—during the illness of Barbara. The knowledge that another man loved her, with an ordinary, natural love by no means free from that element of physical attraction which Berwick himself had been striving, not unsuccessfully, to control in his own heart, had had a curious effect upon him. His soul, ay, and something much less spiritual and more tangible than his soul, rushed down from Heaven to earth, and he began to allow himself, when in the company of the woman he loved, certain experiments, slight, almost gossamer in texture, but which he would afterwards recall with a strange mingling of shame and rapture, for they proved him master of that most delicate and sensitive of human instruments, a pure and passionate heart.
The wide solitary glades carpeted with flowers, the chestnut groves, skirting the great avenue of firs, which is one of the glories of the Forest,—everything to-day seemed to minister to his passion, to bring Barbara Rebell vividly before him. Coming on a bank from whose mossy surface sprang high, delicately tinted windflowers, Berwick was suddenly haunted by a physical memory—that of Barbara's movement of surrender two days before. Again he felt her soft quivering mouth yielding itself to his lips, and, still so feeling, he suddenly bent down and put these lips, now sanctified, to the cool petals of a windflower. Was it a sure instinct which warned him that Barbara's love for him, even if it contained every element the natural man seeks to find in his mate, was so far governed by conscience that she would never be really content and unashamed so long as they were outside the law? More, if Boringdon were right, if Pedro Rebell were indeed dying, and Barbara became in time James Berwick's wife, would she ever forget, would she ever cease to feel a pang of pain and remorse in, the fact of this episode, and of the confession which would—which must—follow after? He had to ask himself whether he was prepared to cast so dark a shadow over the picture of these days, these hours, which her mind would carry into all the future years of their lives.
More difficult, because far more subtle and unanswerable, was the knowledge that Boringdon might after all have been wrong, and that Barbara might never be free. In that case, so Berwick with fierce determination told himself, he would be fool indeed to retard the decisive step which would resolve what had already become, both to him and to Barbara, if the truth were to be faced honestly, an intolerable situation.
But in his heart Berwick knew well that Oliver Boringdon had spoken the truth. Even now, to-day, release might have come, and Barbara might be a free woman. Slowly, painfully, as he fought and debated the question with himself, he became aware that only one course was compatible with his own self-respect.
A secret misgiving, a hidden, unmentionable dread, which would have troubled, perhaps with reason, many a man in Berwick's position, was spared this man. He knew that he need have no fear that Barbara would misunderstand, or question, even in her heart of hearts, his sacrifice. It would not be now, but later, that she would suffer,—when they went back to their old humiliating position at Chancton, as lovers unacknowledged, separated, watched.