Barbara rode home with strange things in her mind. Here was a romance brought to her very door! She was nowise hungry after romance, being of the essence of romance her own lovely self, in the simplicity which carried her direct to the heart of things. She was life in such relation to life, that her very existence was natural romance. How should there be any romance to equal that of pure being, of existence regarded and encountered face to face, of the voyage forth from the heart of life, and the toilsome journey, peril-beset, back to the home of that same heart of hearts! Here was one wrapt in a strange cloud: why should she not pass through the cloud, and join her fellow-traveller within?
Naturally then, from this time, the thoughts of Barbara rested not a little upon the person and undeveloped history of the man with whose being she was before linked by a greater indebtedness than any but herself could understand. Any enlargement of relation to the unseen world—the world, I mean, of thought and reality, region of recognizable relation, or force—is an immeasurably more precious gift than any costliest thing that a mortal may call his own until death, but must then pass on to another; and Richard had thrown open to Barbara the wealthiest regions of the literature of her race! She, on her part, had so much influenced him, that he had at least become far less overbearing in the presentment of his unbelief. For Barbara's idea, call it, if you will, her imagination of a God, was one with which none of those things for the hate's sake of which he had become the champion of a negation, held fellowship; and he carried himself toward it with so much courtesy that she had begun to hope he was slowly following her out of the desert places, where, little as she yet knew about God, she felt life impossible. The strongest bonds were thus in process of binding them; and Barbara's feeling toward Richard might very naturally develop into one or other of the million forms to which we give the common name of love.
As for Richard, he was already aware that his feeling toward Barbara could be no other than love; but he knew love as only the few know it who give themselves, who cherish no hope, look for no response, dream of no claim. To expect any return of his devotion would have seemed to Richard the simplest absurdity. He did not even say to himself that the thing could not be. Not therefore, however, was he to escape suffering; the seeds of it were already sown in him plentifully, though its first leaves are not to be distinguished from those of other plants, and it sometimes takes long for the flower to appear. Barbara was lovely to Richard as the Luna of a heavenly sky, descending and talking with him, the Diana of a lower world, bound by her destiny, and without a choice, to return to her heaven, and be once more the far, unapproachable Luna. She shone in his eyes like a lovely mysterious gem which he might wear for an hour, but which must presently, with its hundred-fold shadow and shine, pass from his keeping. He knew that love was his, but he did not know that he was Love's. He knew he loved Barbara, but he did not know that her exquisiteness was permeating his whole being with an endless possession. In truth no man good and free could have kept her soul out of his. She was so delicate, yet so strong; so steady, yet so ready; so original, yet so infinitely responsive—what could he do but throw his doors wide to her! what could he do but love her!
And now that Barbara believed she knew more about him than he did himself; now that the road appeared to lie open between them, would she escape falling in love with such a man whose hands of labour were mastered with a head full of understanding, and whose head was quickened by a heart in which dwelt an imagination at once receptive and productive? Could any true woman despise the love of such a workman?
From this time, for some weeks, they saw less of each other. Without knowing it, Barbara had, since the revelation of Alice, grown a little shy of Richard. It came of her truthfulness, mainly. As Dante felt ashamed of the discourteous advantage of alone possessing eyesight in the presence of the poor souls upon the second cornice of the purgatorial mountain, just so Barbara, without altogether defining to herself her feeling, regarded it as unfair to Richard, as indeed taking an advantage of him, to seek his company knowing about him more than she seemed to know. She felt even deceitful in appearing to know of him only what he chose to tell her, while in truth she more than suspected she knew of him what he did not know himself. She not only knew more than she seemed to know, but she knew more than Richard himself knew! At the same time she felt that she had no right to tell him what she almost believed; she ought first to be certain of it! If the conjecture were untrue, what harm might it not, believed by him, occasion both to him and his parents! Supposing it true, if those who had cherished him all his life did not tell him the fact, could it be right in her, coming by accident upon it, to acquaint him with it? Whether true or not, it must, if believed by him, change the whole tenor of his way—might perhaps, seeing he had no faith in God, destroy the very tone of his life; certainly, if untrue, it would cause endless grief to the parents whom to believe it would be to repudiate! Richard was indeed, she allowed, in less danger of being injured by the suggestion than any other young man she had known; but the risk, a great one, was there.
She did not now, therefore, go so often to Mortgrange. Every day she went out for her gallop—unattended, for, accustomed to the freedom of hundreds of leagues of wild country, the very notion of a groom behind her was hateful—and would often find herself making for some point whence she could see the chimneys of the house when the resolve of the day was one of abstinence, but that resolve she never broke. If it was not the drawing-room and Theodora, but the library and Richard; not the hideous flowers that happily never came alive from lady Ann's needle, but the old books reviving to autumnal beauty under the patient, healing touch of the craftsman, that ever drew her all the way, who can wonder! Or who will blame her but such as lady Ann, whose kind, though slowly, yet surely vanishes—melting, like the grimy snow of our streets, before the sun of righteousness, and the coming kingdom.
Lady Ann and she were now on the same footing as before their misunderstanding, if indeed their whole relation was anything better than a misunderstanding; for what lady Ann knew of Barbara she misunderstood, and what she did not know of Barbara was the best of her; while what Barbara knew of lady Ann, she also misunderstood, and what she did not know of lady Ann was the worse of her. But Barbara had told lady Ann that she was sorry she had spoken to her as she had, and lady Ann had received the statement as an expected apology. Their quarrel had indeed given lady Ann no uneasiness. Daughter of one ancient house, and mother in another, a pillar of society, a live dignity with matronly back flat as any coffin-lid, she was of course in the right, and could afford to await the acknowledgment of wrong due and certain from an ill bred and ill educated chit of the colonies! For how could any one continue indifferent to the favour of lady Ann! She was incapable of perceiving the merit of Barbara's apology, or appreciating the sweetness from which it came. For the genial Barbara could not bear dissension. She had seen enough of it to hate it. In just defence of a friend she would fight to the last, but in any matter of her own, she was ready to see, or even imagine herself in the wrong. Anger in its reaction always made her feel ill, which feeling she was apt to take for a reminder from conscience, when she would make haste to apologize.
Lady Ann's relations with Barbara were therefore not so much restored as unchanged. The elder lady neither sought nor avoided the younger, gave her always the same cold welcome and farewell, yet was as much pleased to see her as ever to see anybody. She regarded her as the merest of butterflies, with pretty flutter and no stay—a creature of wings and nonsense, carried hither and thither by slightest puff of inclination: it was the judgment of a caterpillar upon a humming bird. There was more stuff in Barbara, with all her seeming volatility, than in a wilderness of lady Anns. The friendship between such a twain could hardly consist in more than the absence of active disapproval.
When Barbara went into the library, she would always greet Richard as if she had seen him but the day before, asking what piece of work he was at now, and showing an interest in it as genuine as her interest in himself. If there was anything in it she did not quite understand, he must there and then explain it. So eager was she to know, that he had not seldom to remind her that his minutes were not his own. But now and then he would lay aside his work for a time, never forgetting to make up for the interval afterward, and show her some process from beginning to end. For Barbara, finding now more time on her hands, had begun to try her repairing faculty on some of the old books in the house, hoping one day to surprise Richard with what she had done, and this led to her asking many and far-reaching questions in the art.
But Richard continued to give her his more important aid: he was still her master in literature, directing her what to read and what to meditate, and instructing her how to get her mind to rest on things. He was the most capable of teachers, for he followed simply the results of his own experience. Having prepared for her, with his father's help, a manuscript-book of hand-made paper, bound in levant morocco, the edges gilded in the rough, he made her copy certain poems into it, attending carefully to every point, and each minutest formality. He would not have her copy whatever she might choose; she could not yet, he said, choose to advantage; for she was of such a “keen clear joyance,” that, happy over what was not the best, she would waste her love. But neither would he altogether choose for her: from among the poems he had already brought before her, she must take those she liked best! This, he said, would make her choice a real one, for it would take place between poems already known to her, with regard to which therefore she was in a position to determine her own preference. Then the unavoidable brooding over it caused in the copying of the one chosen, would make it grow in her mind, and assume something of the shape it had in the author's.