Perhaps Miss Rawlings’s was a countenance that all little girls are apt to look at with extreme interest—especially when the owner of it is asleep in the train. It was a broad countenance with a small but powerful nose with a round tip. There was a good deal of fresh colour in the flat cheeks beneath the treacle-coloured eyes; and the hair stood out like a wig beneath the huge bonnet. Miss Rawlings, too, had a habit of folding her kid-gloved hands upon her lap as if she was an image. None the less, you could hardly call it only “a coincidence” that these little girls were so much alike, and so much like the face at the window. And so very much like the real lost Little Gal that had always, it seemed, been at the back of Miss Rawlings’s mind.
Not that there had ever been any kind of a ghost in Miss Rawlings’s family. Her family was far too practical for that; and her mansion was most richly furnished. All I mean is that each one of these little girls happened to have a rather narrow face, a brown pigtail, rather small dark brown bright eyes and narrow hands, and except for the one at the window, they wore round beaver hats and buttoned coats. No; there was no ghost there. What Miss Rawlings was after was an absolutely real Little Gal. And her name was Barbara Allan.
This sounds utterly absurd. But so it had come about. For a long time—having talked about her Little Gal again and again to the Archdeacon and Mrs. Tomlington and Mr. Moffat and other ladies and gentlemen in the Parish, Miss Rawlings had had no name at all for her small friend. But one still summer evening, there being a faint red in the sky, while she was wandering gently about her immense drawing-room, she had happened to open a book lying on an “occasional” table. It was a book of poetry—crimson and gilt-edged, with a brass clasp—and on the very page under her nose she had read this line:
“Fell in love with Barbara Allan.”
The words ran through her mind like wildfire. Barbara Allan—it was the name! Or how very like it! An echo? Certainly some words and names are echoes of one another—sisters or brothers once removed, so to speak. Tomlington and Pocklingham, for example; or quince and shrimp; or angelica and cyclamen. All I mean is that the very instant Miss Rawlings saw that printed “Barbara Allan,” it ran through her heart like an old tune in a nursery. It was her Little Gal, or ever so near it—as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing, viz., crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry.
Now, if Miss Rawlings had been of royal blood and had lived in a fairy-tale; if, that is, she had been a Queen in Grimm—it would have been a quite ordinary thing that she should be seeking a little lost Princess, or badly in need of one. But except that her paternal grandfather was a Sir Samuel Rawlings, she was but very remotely connected with royalty. Still, if you think about it, seeing that once upon a time there were only marvellous Adam and beautiful Eve in the Garden, that is in the whole wide world, and seeing that all of Us as well as all of the earth’s Kings and Queens must have descended from them, therefore all of Us must have descended from Kings and Queens. So too with Miss Rawlings. But—unlike Mrs. Tomlington—she had not come down by the grand staircase.
Since then Miss Rawlings did not live in a fairy-tale nor in Grimm, but was a very real person in a very real Parish, her friends and acquaintances were all inclined in private to agree with Mrs. Tomlington that her Little Gal was nothing but a bee in her bonnet. And that the longer it stayed there the louder it buzzed. Indeed, Miss Rawlings almost began to think of nothing else. She became absent-minded, quite forgetting her soup and fish and chicken and French roll when she sat at dinner. She left on the gas. She signed cheques for the Funds without looking back at the counterfoils to see what she had last subscribed. She gave brand-new mantles and dolmens away to the Rummagers; ordered coals from her fishmonger’s; rode third class with a first class ticket; addressed a postcard to Mrs. Tomfoolington—almost every kind of absent-minded thing you can imagine.
And now she was always searching: even in the house sometimes; even in the kitchen quarters. And her plump country maids would gladly help too. “No, m’m, she ain’t here.” “No, m’m, we ain’t a-seed her yet.” “Lor’, yes’m, the rooms be ready.”
Whenever Miss Rawlings rose from her chair, she would at once peer sharply out of the window to see if any small creature were passing in the street beyond the drive. When she went a-walking, she was frequently all but run over by cabs and vans and phaetons and gigs, because she was looking the other way after a vanishing pigtail. Not a picture-shop, not a photographer’s could she pass without examining every single face exhibited in the window. And she never met a friend, or the friend of a friend, or conversed with a stranger without, sure enough, beginning to talk about Young Things. Puppies or kittens or lambs, perhaps, first, and then gradually on to little boys. And then, with a sudden whisk of her bonnet, to Little Girls.
Long, long ago now she had learnt by heart the whole of “Barbara Allan”: