Chapter II: An Unexpected Invitation

The old gentleman's face would have been a mere note of interrogation, but for a hint of chilly displeasure in its questioning. The young people answered with blushes. The word was the same for both, but the fact was curiously different. The colour that sprang to Barbara's cheek was light and swift as flame, while the man at her side reddened slowly, as if with the rising of a dark and sullen tide, till the lines across his face were angrily swollen. The bandage, loosely wound round his hand, showed the wet stains, and the new-comer's bright gaze, travelling downwards, rested on it for a moment, and then passed on to the muddy boots and trousers.

"Uncle," said Barbara, "I dropped my gold cross, and this gentleman was so kind as to get it back for me."

"It was nothing--I was very glad to be of any service, but it isn't worth mentioning," the stranger protested, again with a rough edge of effort in his tone.

"On the contrary," said the old gentleman, "I fear my niece has given you a great deal of trouble. I am sure we are both of us exceedingly obliged to you for your kindness." He emphasised his thanks with a neat little bow. To the young man's angry fancy it seemed that his glance swept the landscape, as if he sought some perilous precipice, which might account for the display of mud and wounds.

"Yes," said Barbara, quickly, "the bank is so slippery, and there are such horrid brambles--look, uncle! I came to meet you, and I was gathering some leaves, and my chain caught and snapped."

"Ah! that bank! Yes, a very disagreeable place," he assented, looking up at the stranger. "I am really very sorry that you should have received such----" he hesitated for a word, and then finished, "such injuries."

"The bank is nothing. I was clumsy," was the reply.

"I think, Barbara, we must be going home," her uncle suggested. The young man stood aside to let them pass, with a certain awkwardness and irresolution, for their road was the same as his own.

"I beg your pardon," he said, abruptly, "but perhaps, if you are going that way, you can tell me how far it is to Mitchelhurst."

They both looked surprised. "About a mile and a half. Were you going to Mitchelhurst?"

"Yes, but if you know it----"

"We live there," said Barbara.

"Perhaps you could tell me what I want to know. I would just as soon not go on this afternoon. Is there a decent inn, or, better still, could one be tolerably sure of getting lodgings in the place, without securing them beforehand?"

"You want lodgings there?"

"Only for a few days. I came by train a couple of hours ago"--he named a neighbouring town--"and they told me at the hotel that it was uncertain whether I should find accommodation at Mitchelhurst; so I left my luggage there, and walked over to make inquiries."

"I do not think that I can recommend the inn," said the other, doubtfully. "I fear you would find it beery, and smoky, and noisy--the village alehouse, you understand. Sanded floors, and rustics with long clay pipes--that's the kind of thing at the 'Rothwell Arms.'"

"Ah! the 'Rothwell Arms'!"

"And as for lodgings," the old man continued, with something alert and watchful in his manner, "the fact is people _don't_ care to lodge in Mitchelhurst. They live there, a few of them--myself for instance--but there is nothing in the place to attract ordinary visitors."

He paused, but the only comment was--

"Indeed?"

"Nothing whatever," he affirmed. "A little, out-of-the-way, uninteresting village--but you are anxious to stay here?"

The stranger was re-arranging the loosened handkerchief with slender, unskilful fingers.

"For a few days--yes," he repeated, half absently, as he tried to tuck away a hanging end.

"Uncle," said Barbara, with timid eagerness, "doesn't Mrs. Simmonds let lodgings? When that man came surveying, or something, last summer, didn't he have rooms in her house? I'm very nearly sure he did."

Her uncle intercepted, as it were, the stranger's glance of inquiry.

"Perhaps. But I don't think Mrs. Simmonds will do on this occasion."

"Why not?" the other demanded. "I don't suppose I'm more particular than the man who came surveying. If the place is decently clean, why not?"

"Because your name is Harding. I don't know what his might happen to be."

The young man drew himself up, almost as if he repelled an accusation. Then he seemed to recollect himself.

"Yes," he said, "it is. How did you know that?"

The little Mitchelhurst gentleman found such pleasure in his own acuteness that it gave a momentary air of cordiality to his manner.

"My dear sir," he replied, looking critically at Harding's scratched face, "I knew the Rothwells well. I recognise the Rothwell features."

"You must be a keen observer," said the other curtly.

"Voice too," the little man continued. "Especially when you repeated the name of the inn--the Rothwell Arms."

Harding laughed.

"Upon my word! The Rothwells have left me more of the family property than I was aware of."

"Then there was your destination. Who but a Rothwell would ever want to stay at Mitchelhurst?"

"I see. I appear to have betrayed myself in a variety of ways." The discovery of his name seemed to have given him a little more ease of manner of a defiant and half-mocking kind. "What, is there something more?" he inquired, as his new acquaintance recommenced, "And then----"

"Yes, enough to make me very sure. You wear a ring on your little finger which your mother gave you. She used to wear it thirty years ago."

"True!" said Harding, in a tone of surprise. "You knew my mother then?"

"As I say--thirty years ago. She is still living, is she not? And in good health, I trust?"

"Yes." The young man looked at his ring. "You have a good memory," he said, with an inflection which seemed to convey that he would have ended the sentence with a name, had he known one.

The little gentleman took the hint.

"My name is Herbert Hayes." He spoke with careful precision, it was impossible to mistake the words, yet there was something tentative and questioning in their utterance. The young man's face betrayed a puzzled half-recognition.

"I've heard my mother speak of you," he said.

"But you don't remember what she said?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. It is very stupid of me. But that I have heard her speak of you I'm certain. I know your name well."

"There was nothing much to say. We were very good friends thirty years ago. Mrs. Harding might naturally mention my name if she were speaking of Mitchelhurst. Does she often talk of old days?"

"Not often. I shall tell her I met you."

Barbara stood by, wondering and interested, glancing to and fro as they spoke. At this moment she caught her uncle's eye.

"By the way," he said, "I have not introduced you to my niece--my great-niece, to be strictly accurate--Miss Barbara Strange."

Harding bowed ceremoniously, and yet with a touch of self-contemptuous amusement. He bowed, but he remembered that she had seen him slide down a muddy bank on his back by way of an earlier introduction.

"Mr. Rothwell Harding, I suppose I should say?" the old man inquired.

"No. I'm not named Rothwell. I'm Reynold Harding."

"Reynold?"

"Yes. It's an old name in my father's family. That is," he concluded, in the dead level of an expressionless tone, "as old a name as there is in my father's family, I believe."

"I suppose his grandfather was named Reynold," said Mr. Hayes to himself. Aloud he replied, "Indeed. How about Adam?"

Harding constrained himself to smile, but he did it with such an ill grace that Mr. Hayes perceived that he was a stupid prig, who could not take a joke, and gave himself airs.

"About these lodgings?" the young man persisted, returning to the point. "If Miss Strange knows of some, why won't they do for me?"

Mr. Hayes gulped down his displeasure.

"There is only one roof that can shelter you in Mitchelhurst," he said magnificently, "and that is the roof of Mitchelhurst Place."

"Of Mitchelhurst Place?" Reynold was taken by surprise. He made a little step backward, and Barbara, needlessly alarmed, cried, "Mind the ditch!" Her impulsive little scream nearly startled him into it, but he recovered himself on the brink, and they both coloured again, he angrily, she in vexation at having reminded him of his mishap. "How can I go to Mitchelhurst Place?" he demanded in his harshly hurried voice.

"As my guest," said Mr. Hayes. "I am Mr. Croft's tenant. I live there--with my niece."

The young man's eyes went from one to the other. Barbara's face was hardly less amazed than his own.

"Oh thank you!" he said at last. "It's exceedingly good of you, but I couldn't think of troubling you--I really couldn't. The lodgings Miss Strange mentioned will do very well for me, I am sure, or I could manage for a day or two at the inn."

"Indeed--" Mr. Hayes began.

"But I am not particular," said Harding with his most defiant air and in his bitterest tone, "I assure you I am not. I have never been able to afford it. I shall be all right. Pray do not give the matter another thought. I'm very much obliged to you for your kindness, but it's quite out of the question, really."

"No," said Mr. Hayes, resting his little black kid hands on the top of his stick and looking up at the tall young man, "it is out of the question that you should go anywhere else. Pray do not suggest it. You intended to go back to your hotel this evening and to come on to Mitchelhurst to-morrow? Then let us have the pleasure of seeing you to-morrow as early as you like to come."

"Indeed--indeed," protested Harding, "I could not think of intruding."

The little gentleman laughed.

"My dear sir, who is the intruder at Mitchelhurst Place? Answer me that! No," he said, growing suddenly serious, "you cannot go to the pot house--you--your mother's son--while I live in the Rothwells' old home. It is impossible--I cannot suffer it. I should be for ever ashamed and humiliated if you refused a few days' shelter under the old roof. I should indeed."

"If you put it so----"

"There is no other way to put it."

"I can say no more. I can only thank you for your kindness. I will come," said Reynold Harding, slowly. Urgent as the invitation was, and simply as it was accepted, there was yet a curious want of friendliness about it. Circumstances constrained these two men, not any touch of mutual liking. One would have said that Mr. Hayes was bound to insist and Harding to yield.

"That is settled then," said the elder man, "and we shall see you to-morrow. I am a good deal engaged myself, but Barbara is quite at home in Mitchelhurst, and can show you all the Rothwell memorials--the Rothwells are the romance of Mitchelhurst, you know. She'll be delighted to do the honours, eh, Barbara?"

The girl murmured a shy answer.

"Oh, if I trespass on your kindness I think that's enough; I needn't victimise Miss Strange," said the young man, and he laughed a little, not altogether pleasantly. "And I can't claim any of the romance. My name isn't Rothwell."

"The name isn't everything," said Mr. Hayes. "Come, Barbara, it's getting late, and I want my dinner. Till to-morrow, then," and he held out his hand to their new acquaintance.

Young Harding bowed stiffly to Barbara. "Till to-morrow afternoon."

The old man and the girl walked away, he with an elderly sprightliness of bearing which seemed to say, "See how active I still am!" she moving by his side with dreamy, unconscious grace. They came to a curve in the road, and she turned her head and looked back before she passed it. Mr. Reynold Harding had taken but a couple of steps from the spot where they had left him. He had apparently arranged his bandage to his satisfaction at last, and was pulling at the knot with his teeth and his other hand, but his face was towards them, and Barbara knew that he saw that backward glance. She quickened her steps in hot confusion, and looked straight before her for at least five minutes.

During that time it was her uncle who was the hero of her thoughts. His dramatic recognition of Harding and Harding's ring, his absolute refusal to permit the young man to go to any house in Mitchelhurst but the Place, something in the tone of his voice when he uttered his "thirty years ago," hinted a romance to Barbara. The conjecture might or might not be correct, but at any rate it was natural. Girls who do not understand love are apt to use it to explain all the other things they do not understand. She waited till her cheeks were cool, and her thoughts clear, and then she spoke.

"I didn't know you knew the Rothwells so well, uncle."

"My dear," said her uncle, "how should you?"

"I suppose you might have talked about them."

"I might," said Mr. Hayes. "Now you mention it, I might, certainly. But I haven't any especial fancy for the gossip of the last generation."

"Well, I have," said the girl. And after a moment she went on. "How long is it since they left the Place?"

Her uncle put his head on one side with a quick, birdlike movement, and apparently referred to a cloud in the western sky before he made answer.

"Nineteen years last Midsummer."

"And when did you take it?"

"A year later."

The two walked a little way in silence, and then Barbara recommenced.

"This Mr. Harding--he is like the Rothwells, then?"

"Rothwell from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. The old people, who knew the family, will find him out as he walks through the village--see if they don't. The same haughty, sulky, sneering way with him, and just the same voice. Only every Rothwell at the Place, even to the last, had an air of being a _grand seigneur_, which this fellow can't very well have. Upon my word, I begin to think it was the pleasantest thing about them. I don't like a pride which is conscious of being homeless and out at elbows."

Barbara undauntedly pursued her little romance.

"You are talking about the men," she said. "Is Mr. Harding like his mother?"

"Well, she was a handsome woman," Mr. Hayes replied indifferently, "but she had the same unpleasant manner."

The girl was thrown back on an utter blankness of ideas. A woman beloved may have a dozen faults, and be the dearer for them; but she cannot possibly have an unpleasant manner. Barbara could frame no theory to fit the perplexing facts.

As they turned into the one street of Mitchelhurst, Mr. Hayes spoke musingly.

"To-morrow afternoon, Barbara, let that young man have the blue room--the large room. You know which I mean?"

"Yes, uncle."

"See that everything is nice and in order. And, Barbara----"

"Yes, uncle," said Barbara again, for he paused.

"Mr. Reynold Harding will probably look down on you. I suspect he thinks that you and I are about fit to black his boots. Be civil, of course, but you needn't do it."

"I'm sure I don't want," said the girl quietly; "and at that rate I should hope he would come with them tolerably clean to-morrow."

Mr. Hayes laughed suddenly, showing his teeth.

"By Jove!" he said, "they were dirty enough this afternoon!"

"In my service," said Barbara. "Now I come to think of it, it seems to me that I ought to clean them."

"Nonsense!" her uncle exclaimed, still smiling at the remembrance. "And you saw him roll into the ditch?--Barbara, the poor fellow must hate you like poison!"

She looked down as she walked, drawing her delicate brows a little together.

"I dare say he does," she said softly, as if to herself.

* * * * *

Between ten and eleven that evening Mr. Reynold Harding sat by his fireside, staring at the red coals as they faded drearily into ashes. Being duly washed and brushed, he showed but slight traces of his accident. The scratches on his face were not deep, and his torn hand was mended with little strips of black plaster. Intently as he seemed to think, his thoughts were not definite. Had he been questioned concerning them he could have answered only "Mitchelhurst." Anger, tenderness, curiosity, pride, and bitter self-contempt were mixed in silent strife in the shadows of his soul. The memory of the Rothwells had drawn him on his pilgrimage--a vain, hopeless, barren memory, and yet the best he had. He had intended to wander about the village, to look from a distance at the Rothwells' house, to stand by the Rothwells' graves in the churchyard, and to laugh at his own folly as he did so. And now he was to sleep under their roof, to know the very rooms where they had lived and died, and for this he was to thank these strangers who played at hospitality in the old home. He thought of the morrow with curious alternations of distaste and eagerness.

Mr Hayes, meanwhile, with the lamplight shining on his white hair, was studying a paper in the Transactions of the County Archaeological Society, "On an Inscription in Mitchelhurst Church." Mr Hayes had a theory of his own on the subject, and smiled over the vicar's view with the tranquil enjoyment of unalloyed contempt.

And Barbara, in the silence of her room, opposite a dimly-lighted mirror, sat brushing her shadowy hair, whose waves seemed to melt into the dusk about the pale reflection of her face. As she gazed at it she was thinking of some one who was gone, and of some one who was to come. Dwelling among the old memories of Mitchelhurst Place, her girlish thoughts had turned to them for lack of other food, till the Rothwells were real to her in a sense in which no other fancies ever could be real. She was so conscious that her connection with the house was accidental and temporary, that she felt as if it still belonged to its old owners, and she was only their guest. They were always near, yet, whimsically enough, in point of time they were nearest when they were most remote. Barbara's phantoms mostly belonged to the last century, and they faded and grew pale as they approached the present day, till the latest owner of the Place was merely a name. The truth was that at the end of their reign the Rothwells, impoverished and lonely, had simply lived in the house as they found it, and were unable to set the stamp of any individual tastes upon their surroundings. They were the Rothwells of the good old times who left their autographs in the books in the library, their patient needlework on quilts and bell-pulls, their mouldering rose-leaves in great china jars, their pictures still hanging on the walls, and traces of their preferences in the names of rooms and paths. There were inscriptions under the bells that had summoned servants long ago, which told of busy times and a full house. The lettering only differed from anything in the present day by being subtly and unobtrusively old-fashioned. "MR. GERALD" and "MR. THOMAS" had given up ringing bells for many a long day, and if the one suspended above MISS SARAH'S name sometimes tinkled through the stillness, it was only because Barbara wanted some hot water. Miss Sarah was one of the most distinct of the girl's phantoms. Rightly or wrongly, Barbara always believed her to be the beautiful Miss Rothwell of whom an old man in the village told her a tradition, told to him in his boyhood. It seemed that a Rothwell of some uncertain date stood for the county ("and pretty nigh ruined himself," said her informant, with a grim, yet admiring, enjoyment of the extravagant folly of the contest), and in the very heat of the election Miss Rothwell drove with four horses to the polling-place, to show herself clothed from head to foot in a startling splendour of yellow, her father's colour.

"They said she was a rare sight to see," the old man concluded meditatively.

"And did Mr. Rothwell get in?" asked Barbara.

"No, no!" he said, shaking his head. "No Rothwell ever got in for the county, though they tried times. But he pretty nigh ruined himself."

Had she cared to ask her uncle, Barbara might very possibly have ascertained the precise date of the election, and identified the darkly beautiful girl who was whirled by her four spirited horses into the roaring, decorated town. But she was not inclined to talk of her fancies to Mr. Hayes. So, assuming the heroine to be Miss Sarah, she remained in utter ignorance concerning her after life. Did she ever wear the white robes of a bride, or the blackness of widow's weeds? Barbara often wondered. But at night, in her room, which was Sarah Rothwell's, she could never picture her otherwise than superbly defiant in the meteor-like glory of that one day.

As she brushed her dusky cloud of hair that evening she called up the splendour of her favourite vision, and then her thoughts fell sadly away from it to Reynold Harding, the man who had kindred blood in his veins, but no inheritance of name or land. Those iron horse-hoofs, long ago, had thundered over the bit of road where Barbara gathered her autumn nosegay, and where young Harding--oh, poor fellow!--slipped in the mire, and scrambled awkwardly to his feet, a pitiful, sullen figure to put beside the beautiful Miss Rothwell.

Was she glad he was coming? She laid down her brush and mused, looking into the depths of her mirror. Yes, she was glad. She did not think she should like him. She felt that he was hostile, scornful, dissatisfied. But Mitchelhurst was quiet--so few people ever came to it, and if they _did_ come they went away without a word--and at eighteen quiet is wearisome, and a spice of antagonism is refreshing. Did he hate her as her uncle had said? Time would show. She took her little cross from the dressing table, and looked at it with a new interest. No, she did not like him. "But, after all," said Barbara to herself, "he is a Rothwell, and my fairy godmother introduced us!"

Many miles away a bunch of hips, scarlet and orange, lay by a scribbled paper. They had had adventures since they were pulled from a Mitchelhurst brier that afternoon. They had been lost and found, and travelling by rail had nearly been lost again. A clumsy porter, shouldering a load, had blundered against an absorbed young man, who was just grasping a rhyme; and the red berries fell between them to the dusty platform, and were barely saved from perils of hurrying feet. Still, though a little bruised and spoilt, they glowed ruddily in the candle-light, and the paper beside them said--

"_Speech was forbidden me; I could but stay,
Ambushed behind a leafless hawthorn screen,
And look upon her passing. She had been
To pluck red berries on that autumn day,
And Love, who from her side will never stray,
Stole some for pity, seeing me unseen,
And sighing, let them fall, that I might glean--
'Poor gift,' quoth he, 'that Time shall take away!'
Nay, but I mock at Time! It shall not be
That, fleet of foot, he robs me of my prize;
Her smile has kindled all the sullen skies,
Blessed the dull furrows, and the leafless tree,
And year by year the autumn, ere it dies,
Shall bring my rosy treasure back to me!_"