These stormy November days, so rough without, so peaceful within, each big with the presage of coming winter, reminded Mrs. Turke of another autumn at Chancton, and of other lovers who had found the atmosphere of the Priory strangely conducive to such a state of feeling as that which seemed to be brooding over James Berwick and Barbara Rebell.
True, Madame Sampiero and Lord Bosworth had been far more equally matched in the duel which had ended in the defeat of both: but the woman, in that conflict, had been troubled with fewer scruples. They also had begun by playing at friendship—they also had thought it within their power to absorb only the sweet, and to reject the bitter, of the feast spread out before them. In those far away days Mrs. Turke had been, to a certain limited extent, the confidante of her mistress, and now she felt angered at the knowledge that her foster-son was becoming impatiently aware of her watching eyes, and nervously afraid of any word, even said by his old nurse in joke, concerning his growing intimacy with Mrs. Rebell.
To Madame Sampiero, the present also brought back the past, and that, ah! yes, most poignantly. As she lay in her beautiful room, her solitude only broken by those two whom she had begun to watch so painfully, or by Doctor McKirdy who gave her news of them, she felt like the wounded warrior to whom heralds bring at intervals news of the conflict raging without. A word had been said by Mrs. Turke soon after Berwick's return, but the housekeeper had been rebuked by her paralysed mistress with sharp decision.
The thought that the creature who was beginning not to take, so much as to share, in her heart the place of her dead child, could be caught in the net out of which she herself had not even yet cut herself free, was intolerable—the more so that she had been amused, rather cynically amused, at the effect her god-daughter had produced on the austere Boringdon. To see them together, to see his growing infatuation, and Barbara's utter unconsciousness of the feeling which, after the first memorable interview, brought him daily to the Priory, had been to Barbara's god-mother a delicious comedy. The woman in her delighted in the easy triumph of this other woman, more particularly because at first she had not credited Barbara Rebell with the possession of feminine charm.
In this matter Boringdon showed Madame Sampiero how wrong she had been, and not he only, but many others also had at once come under her spell. And then, as is nearly always the way with those women who inspire sudden passions, Mrs. Rebell's charm was not, in its essence, one of sex. The grim, silent Scottish woman, Madame Sampiero's night attendant, smiled when Barbara came into the room, and Léonie, the French maid, had very early informed her mistress, "Je sens que je vais adorer cette Madame Rebell!" while as for James Berwick, his attitude the more moved and interested Madame Sampiero, because she had never seen him in any relation save in that of her own kind, cool, and attentive guest.
Every nature betrays feeling in a manner peculiarly its own. Berwick would have been surprised indeed had he realised his constant betrayal of a passion so instinctive as to be as yet only partially revealed to his innermost self. For the first time in his experience he loved nobly—that is, with tenderness and abnegation. To be constantly with Barbara, to talk to her with that entire intimacy made possible by the solitary circumstances of her life, was all he asked as yet. Barbara Rebell, during those same short weeks, was also happy, and wholly content with the life she saw spread out before her—looking back to the six years spent with Pedro Rebell as to a terrible ordeal lying safely far behind her, so deep, so racial had been, after the first few weeks of their married life, the antagonism between them.
Feeling her physical helplessness more than she had ever done, Madame Sampiero asked herself, with a foreboding which deepened into pain, whether certain passages in her own life were now about to be enacted over again in that of her own cousin? Lying there, her mind alone free, she told herself that while regretting nothing that had been, she yet would do all in her power to prevent one she loved from going through what she had endured—the more so that, to her mind, James Berwick was not comparable to the man for whom she had herself sacrificed everything. Lord Bosworth's only desire, and that over long years, had been to make the woman he loved his wife. She knew well that the nephew had a more ingenious and a less simple nature—that the two men looked at life from a very different standpoint.
Madame Sampiero also realised to the full what Berwick's great wealth had meant and did mean to him, and how different a man he would have been without it. Had Barbara Rebell been free, so the paralysed woman now told herself, James Berwick would have fled from the neighbourhood of the Priory at the first dawn of his attraction.
Barbara's god-mother would have given much to know what neither her own observation nor Doctor McKirdy's could tell her—namely, how Berwick's undisguised passion was affecting the object of it. Every day the older woman looked for some sign, for some conscious look, but Barbara remained in this one matter an enigma to those about her. Madame Sampiero knew—as every woman who has gone through certain experiences is bound to know—the deep secrecy, the deeper self-repression, which human beings, under certain conditions, can exercise when the question involved is one of feeling, and so sometimes, but never when Mrs. Rebell was actually with her, she wondered whether the attitude of Barbara to Berwick hid responsive emotion, which, when the two were alone together, knew how to show itself articulate.
One thing soon became clear. Barbara much preferred to see either Boringdon or Berwick alone; she avoided their joint company; and that, so the three who so closely observed her were inclined to think, might be taken as a sign that she knew most surely how it was with them, if still ignoring how it was with herself.