"Yes, indeed, Marraine, if it would not tire you! You know it was his sister who was so kind to me in Santa Maria. May I send for him now? He evidently wants to see you about something very important—"
But McGregor, convinced that there would be no answer to the note he had most unwillingly conveyed upstairs, had not waited, as Barbara had expected to find, in the corridor. She hesitated a moment, then, gathering up her long brown skirts, ran down to the hall.
Boringdon was walking up and down, waiting with dogged patience for the message which might, after all, not be sent to him. "Will you kindly come up—now—to Madame Sampiero? She is quite ready to see you!" To the young man the low, very clear voice, seemed at that moment the sweetest in the world: he turned round quickly and looked at the messenger with a good deal of curiosity.
No thought that this elegant-looking girl could be Mrs. Rebell came to his mind. Doubtless she was one of the few people connected with Madame Sampiero's past life—perhaps one of the cousins who sometimes came to Chancton, and whom, occasionally, but very rarely as the years had gone on, the paralysed woman consented to receive.
Rather bewildered at the ease with which the fortress had been stormed and taken, he followed the unknown young lady upstairs. But once in the corridor, when close to Madame Sampiero's door, Barbara stopped, and with heightened colour she said, "I know that you are Grace Johnstone's brother, I have been hoping the last few days to go and see your mother. Will you please tell her how much I look forward to meeting her?" And before he could make any answer, she whom Boringdon now knew to be Mrs. Rebell had opened the door, and was motioning him to precede her into the room into which he had not been allowed to come for two months.
A moment later he stood at the foot of Madame Sampiero's couch, feeling the place in which he found himself curiously transformed, the atmosphere about him more human, less frigid than in those days when his weekly conferences with the owner of Chancton had been regarded by him with such discomfort and dread.
The presence of the low table on which now lay a tea-tray and a bowl of freshly-gathered roses affected him agreeably, though he still quailed inwardly when his eyes met those of the paralysed woman stretched out before him: Boringdon was not imaginative, and yet these wide open blue eyes had often haunted him—to-day they rested on him kindly, and then looked beyond him, softening as they met those of her god-daughter.
Before he was allowed to begin on what he felt to be such disagreeable business, Mrs. Rebell—the woman whom he now knew to be his sister's friend, and regarding whom he was being compelled to alter, moment by moment, all his preconceived notions—had poured him out a cup of tea, and had installed him by her side. Later, when she made a movement as if to leave him alone with Madame Sampiero, she was stopped with a look, and Boringdon, far from feeling the presence of a third person as disagreeable and as unwarranted as he had always felt that of McKirdy or of Mrs. Turke, was glad that Mrs. Rebell had been made to stay, and aware, in some odd way, that in her he would have an ally and not, as had always been the case with McKirdy, a critic, if not an enemy.
After a short discussion, he was allowed to go with the point settled to his satisfaction. Madame Sampiero had retained all her shrewdness, and all her essential justness of character; moreover, his case, presented partly through the medium of Barbara's voice, had seemed quite other than what it would have done explained inimically by Alexander McKirdy. Indeed, during the discussion Boringdon had the curious feeling that this soft-voiced stranger, who, after all, was in no position to judge between himself and the peccant farmer, was being made to give the ultimate decision. It was Barbara also who had to repeat, to make clear to him, reddening and smiling as she did so, her god-mother's last words, "If you're not busy, you might take Mrs. Rebell down to the Beeches. The trees won't look as well as they are doing now in a week's time;" and while murmuring the words Madame Sampiero's eyes had turned with indefinable longing towards the high windows which commanded the wide view she loved and knew so well, but which from where she lay only showed the sky.
A rude awakening awaited both Barbara and Boringdon in the hall below; and a feeling of guilt,—an absurd unwarrantable feeling, so he told himself again and again when he thought over the scene later,—swept over the young man when he saw Doctor McKirdy pacing, with quick angry steps, that very stretch of flag-stones where he himself had walked up and down so impatiently half an hour before.