It was in this mood, being at the moment out of love with love, that Berwick had come back this autumn to Sussex and to Chancton Priory. It was in this same mood that he had first met Barbara Rebell, and had spent with her the evening of which he was afterwards to try and reconstitute every moment, to recall every word uttered by either. He had been interested, attracted, perhaps most of all relieved, to find a woman so different from the type which had caused him so much distress, shame, and—what was perhaps, to a man of his temperament, worse—annoyance.
Then, after that short sojourn at the Priory, he had gone away, and thought of Barbara not at all. Certain matters had caused him to come back to Chillingworth before going on to Halnakeham Castle, and during those days, with a suddenness which had left him defenceless, had come a passion of deep feeling—none of those about them ventured to give that feeling its true name—for the desolate-eyed, confiding creature, who, if now thrown defenceless in his way as no woman had ever yet been, was yet instinct with some quality which seemed to act as a shield between himself and the tremulous, tender heart he knew was there, if only because of the love Barbara lavished on Madame Sampiero.
During those early days, and for the first time in Berwick's experience, humility walked hand in hand with love, and the lover for a while found himself in that most happy state when passion seems intensified by respect. James Berwick had hitherto been always able to analyse every stage of his feeling in regard to the woman who at the moment occupied his imagination, but with regard to Mrs. Rebell he shrank from such introspection.
Yet another feeling, and one oddly new, assailed him during those long hours which were spent in Barbara's company—now in the quiet stately downstair rooms of the Priory, now out of doors, ay, and even by Madame Sampiero's couch, for there Barbara, as if vaguely conscious of pursuit, would often take refuge. Jealousy, actual and retrospective jealousy, sharpened the edge of Berwick's feeling,—jealousy of Boringdon, of whom he gathered Barbara had lately seen so much, and with whom, as he could himself see, she must be on terms of pleasant comradeship—jealousy, far more poignant and searching, of Pedro Rebell, and of that past which the woman Berwick was beginning to regard as wholly his, had spent with him.
Mrs. Rebell never made the slightest allusion to her husband, and yet for six long years—those formative years between nineteen and five-and-twenty—Pedro Rebell must have been, and in a sense rarely allowed to civilised man, the master of this delicate, sensitive woman, and, when he so pleased, her lover. Who else save the half-Spanish West Indian planter could have brought that shadow of fear into Barbara's eyes, and have made her regard the passion of love, as Berwick had very soon divined she did regard it, as something which shames rather than exalts human nature?
From one and another, going even to Chancton Cottage, and questioning Mrs. Boringdon in his desire to know what Barbara he knew well would never tell him, Berwick had so far pieced together her past history as to come somewhere near the truth of what her life had been. He could picture Barbara's quiet childhood at St. Germains: could follow her girlhood—spent partly in France, partly in Italy—to which, as she grew to know him better, she often referred, and which had given her a kind of mental cultivation which, to such a man as himself, was peculiarly agreeable. Then, lastly, and most often, he would recall her long sojourn in the lonely West Indian plantation. There, if Grace Johnstone was to be believed, she had at times suffered actual physical ill-treatment from the man whom she had married because he had come across her path at a moment when she had been left utterly alone; and also because—so Berwick, as he grew to understand her, truly divined—Pedro Rebell bore her father's name, and shared the nationality of which those English men and women who are condemned to exile are so pathetically proud.
Mrs. Turke, Doctor McKirdy, and Madame Sampiero all watched with varying feelings the little drama which was being enacted before their eyes.
Of the three, Mrs. Turke had the longest refused to believe the evidence afforded by her very shrewd senses. The old housekeeper took a frankly material view of life, and Doctor McKirdy had not been far wrong when he had once offended her by observing, "I should describe you, woman, as a grand old pagan!" There were few things she would not have done to pleasure James Berwick; and that he should enjoy a passing flirtation with Mrs. Rebell would have been quite within his old nurse's view of what should be—nay more, Mrs. Turke would have visited with condemnation any lady who had shown herself foolishly coy in accepting the attentions of such a gentleman.
But when the old woman realised, as she soon came to do, that Berwick's feeling for Madame Sampiero's kinswoman was of a very different quality from that with which she had at first credited him, then Mrs. Turke felt full of vague alarm, and she liked to remind herself that Mrs. Rebell was a wife, and, from certain indications, a good and even a religious woman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.