There was no shake in the hard jauntiness of her voice, but the girl, searching with bent head for the dropped stitch, felt her fingers tremble as they touched the rough worsted—felt something pluck at her heart. Barnaby was dead, and she had never known him; but he was the one real person walking through a dream in which she had lost herself.
She was not strong yet. She still had a trick of putting out her hand to some steady object when she stood up alone. And at first she had not understood—too ill to question, not wondering. It was as if she had died one night and awakened to a consciousness of protection, a mystery of care and kindness, of strangers who took charge of her, treating her like a precious doll. When she at last knew the reason, she had felt like one who, falling from a precipice, found herself clinging, the dizzy horror stopped by a branch;—she could not let it go.
So they had found her, and brought her over the sea, and put her to bed in a great, comfortable room, in a house that was haunted. It was Barnaby's house, and it was for Barnaby's sake that people were kind to her. Somehow they were all shadows to her beside the thought of him. His name had been invoked to shelter her; it had been enough to lift her out of despair. She had begun to feel safe in a confused assurance that she belonged to him.
She remembered last night. She remembered the door sliding softly, and a rustle in the room, and how she had lain quite still, shutting her eyes, holding her breath, startled out of sleep. Someone was smoothing the bedclothes under her chin. She longed to cover her face, but could not. It was not a ghost, for mortal fingers had touched her cheek. Soon the rustle had withdrawn from her bedside, and she had heard a little sound that might have been a sigh. Afterwards the door had closed, and the room was empty.
Seized by an unaccountable impulse, she had put her foot to the floor, and crossed the wide carpet to the fireplace, where the visitor had gone from her side. The fire had fallen in, flaring high in a quivering blaze, and by its light she had seen that over the chimney-piece hung the picture of a man. Instinct had told her who it was, and she stared at him, fascinated.
The other woman had left her the wrong photograph in her hurry. This was no weak boy with a foolish mouth, bundled over-seas by his people. This was a man with a steady face that betrayed nothing of himself, and eyes that held her startled gaze. Blue eyes, audacious and understanding. Her heart beat strangely. For this must be Barnaby the reckless, who had married a wife and got himself killed ... and she, poor fool, was calling herself his widow.
She clung to the chimney-piece, shivering with excitement, a quaint, slight figure in her white night-dress.
"I'll hurt nobody.... I'll hurt nobody!" she was explaining to him in an imploring whisper; and it seemed to her that the man in the picture smiled.
"—There, give it back to me," said Lady Henrietta jealously, and her voice scattered mists of imagination. "You don't think I'm crazy, do you? You know why it is I can't stop knitting his stockings.—We'll not talk about him, Susan. You and I have each our own memories, and we can't share them.—I don't want yours. But we'll fight for him together; since he belongs to us."
Her manner took on a sudden fierceness.