Barrington. Volume 1

“I think I could, too,” cried Fifine, eagerly. “I feel as though I could work in the fields and be happy, just in the conscious sense of doing what it was good to do, and what others would praise me for.”

“There’s a paymaster will never fail you in such hire,” said Miss Dinah, pointing to her brother; and then, turning away, she walked back to the little inn. As she drew nigh, the landlord came to tell her that a young gentleman, on seeing her name in the list of strangers, had made many inquiries after her, and begged he might be informed of her return. On learning that he was in the garden, she went thither at once.

“I felt it was you. I knew who had been asking for me, Mr. Conyers,” said she, advancing towards Fred with her hand out. “But what strange chance could have led you here?”

“You have just said it, Miss Barrington; a chance, – a mere chance. I had got a short leave fron| my regiment, and came abroad to wander about with no very definite object; but, growing impatient of the wearisome hordes of our countrymen on the Rhine, I turned aside yesterday from that great high-road and reached this spot, whose greatest charm – shall I own it? – was a fancied resemblance to a scene I loved far better.”

“You are right. It was only this morning my brother said it was so like our own cottage.”

“And he is here also?” said the young man, with a half-constraint.

“Yes, and very eager to see you, and ask your forgive ness for his ungracious manner to you; not that I saw it, or understand what it could mean, but he says that he has a pardon to crave at your hands.”

So confused was Conyers for an instant that he made no answer, and when he did speak it was falteringly and with embarrassment, “I never could have anticipated meeting you here. It is more good fortune than I ever looked for.”

“We came over to the Continent to fetch away my grand-niece, the daughter of that Colonel Barrington you have heard so much of.”

“And is she – ” He stopped, and grew scarlet with confusion; but she broke in, laughingly, —

“No, not black, only dark-complexioned; in fact, a brunette, and no more.”

“Oh, I don’t mean, – I surely could not have said – ”

“No matter what you meant or said. Your unuttered question was one that kept occurring to my brother and myself every morning as we journeyed here, though neither of us had the courage to speak it. But our wonders are over; she is a dear good, girl, and we love her better every day we see her. But now a little about yourself. Why do I find you so low and depressed?”

“I have had much to fret me, Miss Barrington. Some were things that could give but passing unhappiness; others were of graver import.”

“Tell me so much as you may of them, and I will try to help you to bear up against them.”

“I will tell you all, – everything!” cried he. “It is the very moment I have been longing for, when I could pour out all my cares before you and ask, What shall I do?”

Miss Barrington silently drew her arm within his, and they strolled along the shady alley without a word.

“I must begin with my great grief, – it absorbs all the rest,” said he, suddenly. “My father is coming home; he has lost, or thrown up, I can’t tell which, his high employment. I have heard both versions of the story; and his own few words, in the only letter he has written me, do not confirm either. His tone is indignant; but far more it is sad and depressed, – he who never wrote a line but in the joyousness of his high-hearted nature; who met each accident of life with an undaunted spirit, and spurned the very thought of being cast down by fortune. See what he says here.” And he took a much crumpled letter from his pocket, and folded down a part of it “Read that. ‘The time for men of my stamp is gone by in India. We are as much bygones as the old flint musket or the matchlock. Soldiers of a different temperament are the fashion now; and the sooner we are pensioned or die off the better. For my own part, I am sick of it. I have lost my liver and have not made my fortune, and like men who have missed their opportunities, I come away too discontented with myself to think well of any one. They fancied that by coldness and neglect they might get rid of me, as they did once before of a far worthier and better fellow; but though I never had the courage that he had, they shall not break my heart.’ Does it strike you to whom he alludes there?” asked Conyers, suddenly; “for each time that I read the words I am more disposed to believe that they refer to Colonel Barrington.”

“I am sure of it!” cried she. “It is the testimony of a sorrow-stricken heart to an old friend’s memory; but I hear my brother’s voice; let me go and tell him you are here.” But Barrington was already coming towards them.

“Ah, Mr. Conyers!” cried he. “If you knew how I have longed for this moment! I believe you are the only man in the world I ever ill treated on my own threshold; but the very thought of it gave me a fit of illness, and now the best thing I know on my recovery is, that I am here to ask your pardon.”

“I have really nothing to forgive. I met under your roof with a kindness that never befell me before; nor do I know the spot on earth where I could look for the like to-morrow.”

“Come back to it, then, and see if the charm should not be there still.”

“Where ‘s Josephine, brother?” asked Miss Barrington, who, seeing the young man’s agitation, wished to change the theme.

“She’s gone to put some ferns in water; but here she comes now.”

Bounding wildly along, like a child in joyous freedom, Josephine came towards them, and, suddenly halting at sight of a stranger, she stopped and courtesied deeply, while Conyers, half ashamed at his own unhappy blunder about her, blushed deeply as he saluted her. Indeed, their meeting was more like that of two awkward timid children than of two young persons of their age; and they eyed each other with the distrust school boys and girls exchange on a first acquaintance.

“Brother, I have something to tell you,” said Miss Barrington, who was eager to communicate the news she had just heard of General Conyers; and while she drew him to one side, the young people still stood there, each seeming to expect the other would make some advance towards acquaintanceship. Conyers tried to say some commonplace, – some one of the fifty things that would have occurred so naturally in presence of a young lady to whom he had been just presented; but he could think of none, or else those that he thought of seemed inappropriate. How talk, for instance, of the world and its pleasures to one who had been estranged from it! While he thus struggled and contended with himself, she suddenly started as if with a flash of memory, and said, “How forgetful!”

“Forgetful! – and of what?” asked he.

“I have left the book I was reading to grandpapa on the rock where we were sitting. I must go and fetch it.”

“May I go with you?” asked he, half timidly.

“Yes, if you like.”

“And your book, – what was it?”

“Oh, a charming book, – such a delightful story! So many people one would have loved to know! – such scenes one would have loved to visit! – incidents, too, that keep the heart in intense anxiety, that you wonder how he who imagined them could have sustained the thrilling interest, and held his own heart so long in terrible suspense!”

“And the name of this wonderful book is – ”

“‘Waverley.’”

“I have read it,” said he, coldly.

“And have you not longed to be a soldier? Has not your heart bounded with eagerness for a life of adventure and peril?”

“I am a soldier,” said he, quietly.

“Indeed!” replied she, slowly, while her steadfast glance scanned him calmly and deliberately.

“You find it hard to recognize as a soldier one dressed as I am, and probably wonder how such a life as this consorts with enterprise and danger. Is not that what is passing in your mind?”

“Mayhap,” said she, in a low voice.

“It is all because the world has changed a good deal since Waverley’s time.”

“How sorry I am to hear it!”

“Nay, for your sake it is all the better. Young ladies have a pleasanter existence now than they had sixty years since. They lived then lives of household drudgery or utter weariness.”

“And what have they now?” asked she, eagerly.

“What have they not! All that can embellish life is around them; they are taught in a hundred ways to employ the faculties which give to existence its highest charm. They draw, sing, dance, ride, dress becomingly, read what may give to their conversation an added elegance and make their presence felt as an added lustre.”

“How unlike all this was our convent life!” said she, slowly. “The beads in my rosary were not more alike than the days that followed each other, and but for the change of season I should have thought life a dreary sleep. Oh, if you but knew what a charm there is in the changeful year to one who lives in any bondage!”

“And yet I remember to have heard how you hoped you might not be taken away from that convent life, and be compelled to enter the world,” said he, with a malicious twinkle of the eye.

“True; and had I lived there still I had not asked for other. But how came it that you should have heard of me? I never heard of you!”

“That is easily told. I was your aunt’s guest at the time she resolved to come abroad to see you and fetch you home. I used to hear all her plans about you, so that at last – I blush to own – I talked of Josephine as though she were my sister.”

“How strangely cold you were, then, when we met!” said she, quietly. “Was it that you found me so unlike what you expected?”

“Unlike, indeed!”

“Tell me how – tell me, I pray you, what you had pictured me.”

“It was not mere fancy I drew from. There was a miniature of you as a child at the cottage, and I have looked at it till I could recall every line of it.”

“Go on!” cried she, as he hesitated.

“The child’s face was very serious, – actually grave for childhood, – and had something almost stern in its expression; and yet I see nothing of this in yours.”

“So that, like grandpapa,” said she, laughing, “you were disappointed in not finding me a young tiger from Bengal; but be patient, and remember how long it is since I left the jungle.”

Sportively as the words were uttered, her eyes flashed and her cheek colored, and Conyers saw for the first time how she resembled her portrait in infancy.

“Yes,” added she, as though answering what was passing in his mind, “you are thinking just like the sisters, ‘What years and years it would take to discipline one of such a race!’ I have heard that given as a reason for numberless inflictions. And now, all of a sudden, comes grandpapa to say, ‘We love you so because you are one of us.’ Can you understand this?”

“I think I can, – that is, I think I can understand why – ” he was going to add, “why they should love you;” but he stopped, ashamed of his own eagerness.

She waited a moment for him to continue, and then, herself blushing, as though she had guessed his embarrassment, she turned away.

“And this book that we have been forgetting, – let us go and search for it,” said she, walking on rapidly in front of him; but he was speedily at her side again.

“Look there, brother Peter, – look there!” said Miss Dinah, as she pointed after them, “and see how well fitted we are to be guardians to a young lady!”

“I see no harm in it, Dinah, – I protest, I see no harm in it.”

“Possibly not, brother Peter, and it may only be a part of your system for making her – as you phrase it – feel a holy horror of the convent.”

“Well,” said he, meditatively, “he seems a fine, frank-hearted young fellow, and in this world she is about to enter, her first experiences might easily be worse.”

“I vow and declare,” cried she, warmly, “I believe it is your slipshod philosophy that makes me as severe as a holy inquisitor!”

“Every evil calls forth its own correction, Dinah,” said he, laughing. “If there were no fools to skate on the Serpentine, there had been no Humane Society.”

“One might grow tired of the task of resuscitating, Peter Barrington,” said she, hardly.

“Not you, not you, Dinah, – at least, if I was the drowned man,” said he, drawing her affectionately to his side; “and as for those young creatures yonder, it’s like gathering dog-roses, and they ‘ll stop when they have pricked their fingers.”

“I’ll go and look after the nosegay myself,” said she, turning hastily away, and following them.

A real liking for Conyers, and a sincere interest in him were the great correctives to the part of Dragon which Miss Dinah declared she foresaw to be her future lot in life. For years and years had she believed that the cares of a household and the rule of servants were the last trials of human patience. The larder, the dairy, and the garden were each of them departments with special opportunities for deception and embezzlement, and it seemed to her that new discoveries in roguery kept pace with the inventions of science; but she was energetic and active, and kept herself at what the French would call “the level of the situation;” and neither the cook nor the dairymaid nor Darby could be vainglorious over their battles with her. And now, all of a sudden, a new part was assigned her, with new duties, functions, and requirements; and she was called on to exercise qualities which had lain long dormant and in disuse, and renew a knowledge she had not employed for many a year. And what a strange blending of pleasure and pain must have come of that memory of long ago! Old conquests revived, old rivalries and jealousies and triumphs; glorious little glimpses of brilliant delight, and some dark hours, too, of disappointment, – almost despair!

“Once a bishop, always a bishop,” says the canon; but might we not with almost as much truth say, “Once a beauty, always a beauty”? – not in lineament and feature, in downy cheek or silky tresses, but in the heartfelt consciousness of a once sovereign power, in that sense of having been able to exact a homage and enforce a tribute. And as we see in the deposed monarch how the dignity of kingcraft clings to him, how through all he does and says there runs a vein of royal graciousness as from one the fount of honor, so it is with beauty. There lives through all its wreck the splendid memory of a despotism the most absolute, the most fascinating of all!

“I am so glad that young Conyers has no plans, Dinah,” said Barrington; “he says he will join us if we permit him.”

“Humph!” said Miss Barrington, as she went on with her knitting.

“I see nothing against it, sister.”

“Of course not, Peter,” said she, snappishly; “it would surprise me much if you did.”

“Do you, Dinah?” asked he, with a true simplicity of voice and look.

“I see great danger in it, if that be what you mean. And what answer did you make him, Peter?”

“The same answer that I make to every one, – I would consult my sister Dinah. ‘Le Roi s’avisera’ meant, I take it, that he ‘d be led by a wiser head than his own.”

“He was wise when he knew it,” said she, sententiously, and continued her work.

And from that day forth they all journeyed together, and one of them was very happy, and some were far more than happy; and Aunt Dinah was anxious even beyond her wont.