Chapter III: "welcome to Mitchelhurst Place."

Mitchelhurst was, as Mr. Hayes had said, a dull little village, by no means likely to attract visitors. It was merely a group of houses, for the most part meanly built, set in a haphazard fashion on either side of a wide road. Occasionally a shed would come to the front, or two or three poplars, or a bit of garden fence. But the poplars were apt to be mercilessly lopped, with just a tuft at the extreme tip, which gave each unlucky tree a slight resemblance to a lion's tail, and the gardens, if not full of cabbages, displayed melancholy rows of stumps where cabbages had been. There was very little traffic through Mitchelhurst Street, as this thoroughfare was usually called, yet it showed certain signs of life. Fowls rambled aimlessly about it, with a dejected yet inquiring air, which seemed to say that they would long ago have given up their desultory pecking if they could have found anything else to do. A windmill, standing on a slight eminence a little way from the road, creaked as its sails revolved. Sounds of hammering came from the blacksmith's forge. Children played on the foot-path, a little knot of loungers might generally be seen in front of the "Rothwell Arms," and at most of the doorways stood the Mitchelhurst women, talking loudly while their busy fingers were plaiting straws. This miserably paid work was much in vogue in the village, where generation after generation of children learned it, and grew up into stunted, ill-fed girls, fond of coarse gossip, and of their slatternly independence.

At the western end of the village, beyond the alehouse, stood the church, with two or three yews darkening the crowded graveyard. The vicarage was close at hand, a sombre little house, with a flagged path leading to its dusky porch. Mitchelhurst was not happy in its vicars. The parish was too small to attract the heroic enthusiasts who are ready to live and die for the unhealthy and ignorant crowds of our great cities. And the house was too poor, and the neighbourhood too uninteresting, for any kindly country gentleman, who chanced to have "the Reverend" written before his name, to come and stable his horses, and set up his liberal housekeeping, and preach his Sunday sermons there. No one chose Mitchelhurst, so "those few sheep in the wilderness" were left to those who had no choice, and the vicars were almost always discontented elderly men. As a rule they died there, a vicar of Mitchelhurst being seldom remembered by the givers of good livings. The incumbent at this time was a feeble archaeologist, who coughed drearily in his damp little study, and looked vaguely out at the world from a narrow and mildewed past. As he stepped from the shadowy porch, blinking with tired eyes, he would pause on the path, which looked like a row of flat unwritten tombstones, and glance doubtfully right and left. Probably he had some vague idea of going into the village, but in nine cases out of ten he turned aside to the graveyard, and sauntered musingly in the shadow of the old yews, or disappeared into the church, where there were two or three inscriptions just sufficiently defaced to be interesting. He fancied he should decipher them one day, and leave nothing for his successor to do, and he haunted them in that hope.

When he went into the street he spoke kindly to the women at the doors, with an obvious forgetfulness of names and circumstances which made him an object of contemptuous pity. They could not conceive how any one in his senses could make such foolish mistakes, and were inclined to look on the Established Church as a convenient provision for weak-minded gentlefolks. They grinned when he had gone by, and repeated his well-meant inquiries, plaiting all the time. It was only natural that the vicar should prefer his parishioners dead. They did not then indulge in coarse laughter, they never described unpleasant ailments, and they were neatly labelled with their names, or else altogether silent concerning them.

The vicar's shortcomings might have been less remarked had the tenants of Mitchelhurst Place taken their proper position in the village. But where, seventy or eighty years before, the great gates swung open for carriages and horses, and busy servants, and tradesmen, there came now down the mossy drive only an old man on foot, and a girl by his side, with eyes like dark waters, and a sweet richness of carnation in her cheeks. Mr. Hayes and his niece lived, as the later Rothwells had lived, in a corner of the old house. It was queer that a man should choose to hire a place so much too big for him, people said, but they had said it for nineteen years, and they never seemed to get any further. Herbert Hayes might be eccentric, but he was shrewd, he knew his own business, and the villagers recognised the fact. He was not popular, there was nothing to be got by begging at the Place, and he would not allow Barbara to visit any of the cottages. But it was acknowledged that he was not stingy in payment for work done. And if he lived in a corner he knew how to make himself comfortable there, which was more than the last Rothwell had been able to do.

The church and vicarage were at one end of Mitchelhurst, and the Place, which stood on slightly rising ground, was at the other. It was a white house, and in a dim light it had a sad and spectral aspect, a pale blankness as of a dead face. The Rothwell who built it intended to have a stately avenue from the great ironwork gates to the principal entrance, and planted his trees accordingly. But the site was cruelly exposed, and the soil was sterile, and his avenue had become a vista of warped and irregular shapes, leaning in grotesque attitudes, dwarfed and yet massive with age. In the leafiness of summer much of this singularity was lost, but when winter stripped the boughs it revealed a double line of fantastic skeletons, a fit pathway for the strangest dreams.

The gardens, with the exception of a piece close to the house, had been so long neglected that they seemed almost to have forgotten that they had ever been cultivated. Almost, but not quite, for they had not the innocence of the original wilderness. There were tokens of a contest. The plants and grasses that possessed the soil were obviously weeds, and the degraded survivals of a gentler growth lurked among them overborne and half strangled. There was a suggestion of murderous triumph in the coarse leaves of the mulleins and docks that had rooted themselves as in a conquered inheritance, and the little undulations which marked the borders and bits of rock-work of half a century earlier looked curiously like neglected graves.

It seemed to Barbara Strange, as she stood looking over it all, on the day on which Mr. Harding was to come to Mitchelhurst, that there was something novel in this aspect of desolation. She knew the place well, for it was rather more than a year since she came, at her uncle's invitation, to live there, and she had seen it with all the changes of the seasons upon it. She knew it well, but she had never thought of it as home. The little Devonshire vicarage which held father and mother, and a swarm of young sisters and brothers--almost too many to be contained within its walls--was home in the past and the present. And if the girl had dreams of the future, shy dreams which hardly revealed themselves even to her, they certainly never had Mitchelhurst Place for a background. To her it was just a halting-place on her journey into the unknown regions of life. It was like some great out-of-the-way ruinous old inn, in which one might chance to sleep for a night or two. She had merely been interested in it as a stranger, but on this October day she looked at it curiously and critically for Mr. Harding's sake. She would have liked it to welcome him, to show some signs of stately hospitality to this son of the house who was coming home, and for the first time a full sense of its dreariness and hopelessness crept into her soul. She could do nothing, she felt absurdly small, the great house seemed to cast a melancholy shadow over her, as she went to and fro in the bit of ground that was still recognised as a garden, gathering the few blossoms that autumn had spared.

Barbara meant the flowers to brighten the rooms in which they lived, but she looked a little doubtfully into her basket while she walked towards the house. They were so colourless and frail, it seemed to her that they were just fit to be emptied out over somebody's grave. "Oh," she said to herself, "why didn't he come in the time of roses, or peonies, or tiger lilies? If it had been in July there might have been some real sunshine to warm the old place. Or earlier still, when the apple blossom was out--why didn't he come then? It is so sad now." And she remembered what some one had said, a few weeks before, loitering up that wide path by her side: "An old house--yes, I like old houses, but this is like a whited sepulchre, somehow. And not his own--I should not care to set up housekeeping in a corner of somebody else's sepulchre." Barbara, as her little lonely footsteps fell on the sodden earth, thought that he was perfectly right. She threw back her head, and faced the wide, blind gaze of its many-windowed front. Well, it _was_ Mr. Harding's own family sepulchre, if that was any consolation.

Her duty as a housekeeper took her to the blue room, which Mr. Hayes had chosen for their guest, a large apartment at the side of the house, not with the bleak northern aspect of the principal entrance, but looking away towards the village, and commanding a wide prospect of meadow land. The landscape in itself was not remarkable, but it had an attraction as of swiftly varying moods. Under a midsummer sky it would lie steeped in sunshine, and dappled with shadows of little, lightly-flying clouds, content and at peace. Seen through slant lines of grey rain it was beyond measure dreary and forlorn, burdening the gazer's soul with its flat and unrelieved heaviness. One would have said at such times that it was a veritable Land of Hopelessness. Then the clouds would part, mass themselves, perhaps, into strange islands and continents, and towering piles, and the sun would go down in wild splendours of flame as of a burning world, and the level meadows would become a marvellous plain, across which one might journey into the heart of unspeakable things. Then would follow the pensive sadness of the dusk, and the silvery enchantment of moonlight. And after all these changes there would probably come a grey and commonplace morning, in which it would appear as so many acres of very tolerable grazing land, in no wise remarkable or interesting.

Barbara did not trouble herself much about the prospect. She was anxious to make sure that soap and towels had been put ready for Mr. Harding, and candles in the brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, and ink and pens on the little old-fashioned writing-table. With a dainty instinct of grace she arranged the heavy hangings of the bed, and, seeing that a clumsy maid had left the pillow awry, she straightened and smoothed it with soft touches of a slender brown hand, as if she could sympathetically divine the sullen weariness of the head that should lie there. Then, fixing an absent gaze upon the carpet, she debated a perplexing question in her mind.

Should she, or should she not, put some flowers in Mr. Harding's room? She wanted to make him feel that he was welcome to Mitchelhurst Place, and, to her shyness, it seemed easier to express that welcome in any silent way than to put it into words. And why not? She might have done it without thinking twice about it, but her uncle's little jests, and her own loneliness, while they left her fearless in questions of right and wrong, had made her uneasy about etiquette. As she leaned against one of the carved pillars of the great bed, musing, with lips compressed and anxious brow, she almost resolved that Mr. Reynold Harding should have nothing beyond what was a matter of housewifely duty. Why should she risk a blush or a doubt for him? But even with the half-formed resolution came the remembrance of his unlucky humiliation in her service, and Barbara started from her idle attitude, and went away, singing softly to herself.

When she came back she had a little bowl of blue and white china in her hands, which she set on the writing-table near the window. It was filled with the best she could find in her basket--a pale late rosebud, with autumnal foliage red as rust (and the bud itself had lingered so long, hoping for sunshine and warmth, that it would evidently die with its secret of sweetness folded dead in its heart), a few heads of mignonette, green and run to leaf, and rather reminding of fragrance than actually breathing it; a handful of melancholy Michaelmas daisies, and two or three white asters. The girl, with warm young life in her veins, and a glow of ripe colour on her cheek stooped in smiling pity and touched that central rosebud with her lips. No doubt remained, if there had been any doubt till then--it was already withered at the core, or it must have opened wide to answer that caress.

"Don't tell me!" said Barbara to herself with a little nod. "If such a drearily doleful bouquet isn't strictly proper, it ought to be!"

It was late in the afternoon before the visitor came. There was mist like a thin shroud over the face of the earth, and little sparks of light were gleaming in the cottage windows. Reynold Harding held the reins listlessly when the driver got down to open the great wrought-iron gate, and then resigned his charge as absently as he had accepted it. He stared straight before him while the dog-cart rattled up the avenue, and suffered himself to sway idly as they bumped over mossy stones in the drive. The trees, leaning overhead, dropped a dead leaf or two on his passive hands, as if that were his share of the family property held in trust for him till that moment.

There was something coldly repellent in the stony house front, where was no sign of greeting or even of life. The driver alighted again, pulled a great bell which made a distant clangour, and then busied himself at the back of the cart with Harding's portmanteau, while the horse stood stretching its neck, and breathing audibly in the chilly stillness. There was a brief pause, during which Harding, who had not uttered a word since he started, confronted the old house with a face as neutral as its own.

Then the door flew open, a maid appeared, the luggage was carried into the hall, and Mr. Hayes came hurrying out to meet his guest. "Welcome to Mitchelhurst Place!" he exclaimed. That "Welcome to Mitchelhurst Place!" had been in his thoughts for a couple of hours at least, and now that it was uttered it seemed very quickly over. Harding, who was paying the driver out of a handful of change, dropped a couple of coins, made a hurried attempt to regain them, and finally shook hands confusedly with Mr. Hayes, while the man and the maid pursued the rolling shillings round their feet. "Thank you--you are very kind," he said, and then saw Barbara in the background. She had paused on the threshold of a firelit room, and behind her the warm radiance was glancing on a bit of white-panelled wall. Reynold hastily got rid of his financial difficulties and went forward.

"Oh, what a cold drive you must have had!" she cried, when their hands met. "You are like ice! Do come to the fire."

"We thought you would have been here sooner," said Mr. Hayes. "The days draw in now, and it gets to be very cold and damp sometimes when the sun goes down."

Harding murmured something about not having been able to get away earlier.

"This isn't the regular drawing-room, you know," his host explained. "I like space, but there is a little too much of it in that great room--you must have a look at it to-morrow. I don't care to sit by my fireside and see Barbara at her piano across an acre or two of carpet. To my mind this is big enough for two or three people."

"Quite," said Reynold.

"The yellow drawing-room they called this," the other continued.

The young man glanced round. The room was lofty and large enough for more than the two or three people of whom Mr. Hayes had spoken. But for the ruddy firelight it might have looked cold, with its cream-white walls, its rather scanty furniture, and the yellow of its curtains and chairs faded to a dim tawny hue. But the liberal warmth and light of the blazing pile on the hearth irradiated it to the furthest corner, and filled it with wavering brightness.

"It's all exactly as it was in your uncle's time," said Mr. Hayes. "When he could not go on any longer, Croft took the whole thing just as it stood, with all the old furniture. But for that I would not have come here."

"All the charm would have been lost, wouldn't it?" said Barbara.

"The charm--yes. Besides, one had need be a millionnaire to do anything with such a great empty shell. I suspect a millionnaire would find plenty to do here as it is."

"I suppose it had been neglected for a long while?" Reynold questioned with his hard utterance.

Mr. Hayes nodded, arching his brows.

"Thirty or forty years. Everything allowed to go to rack and ruin. By Jove, sir, your people must have built well, and furnished well, for things to look as they do. Well, they shall stay as they are while I am here; I'll keep the wind and the rain out of the old house, but I can do no more, and I wouldn't if I could. And when I'm gone, Croft, or whoever is master then, must see to it."

"Yes," said the young man, still looking round. "I'm glad you've left it as it used to be."

"Just as your mother would remember it. Except, of course, one must make oneself comfortable," Mr. Hayes explained apologetically. "Just a chair for me, and a piano for Barbara, you see!"

Reynold saw. There was a large eastern rug spread near the fire-place, and on it stood an easy-chair, and a little table laden with books. A shaded lamp cast its radiance on a freshly-cut page. By the fire was a low seat, which was evidently Barbara's.

"That's the way to enjoy old furniture," said Mr. Hayes. "Sit on a modern chair and look at it--eh? There's an old piano in that further corner; that's very good to look at too."

"But not to hear?" said Harding.

"You may try it."

"That's more than I may do," said Barbara, demurely.

"You tried it too much--you tried me too much," Mr. Hayes made answer. "You did not begin in a fair spirit of investigation. You were determined to find music in it."

The girl laughed and looked down.

"And I did," she murmured to herself.

"Ah, you are looking at the portraits," Mr. Hayes went on. "There are better ones than the two or three we have here. I believe your Uncle John took away a few when he left. Your grandmother used to hang over there by the fire-place. The one on the other side is good, I think--Anthony Rothwell. You must come a little more this way to look at it."

Harding followed obediently, and made various attempts to find the right position, but the picture was not placed so as to receive the full firelight, and being above the lamp it remained in shadow.

"Stay," said the old gentleman, "I'll light this candle."

He struck a match as he spoke, and the sudden illumination revealed a scornful face, and almost seemed to give it a momentary expression, as if Anthony, of Mitchelhurst Place, recognised Reynold of nowhere.

The younger man eyed the portrait coldly and deliberately.

"Well," he said, "Mr. Anthony Rothwell, my grandfather, I suppose?"

"Great-grandfather," Mr. Hayes corrected.

"Oh, you are well acquainted with the family history. Well, then, I should say that my great-grandfather was remarkably handsome, but----"

"If it comes to that you are uncommonly like him," said his host, with a little chuckle, as he looked from the painted face to the living one, and back again.

Reynold started and drew back.

"Oh, thank you!" he said, with a short laugh. If he had been permitted to continue his first remark, he would have said, "but as unpleasant-tempered a gentleman as you could find in a day's journey."

The words had been so literally on his lips that he could hardly realise that they had not been uttered when Mr. Hayes spoke.

For the moment the likeness had been complete. Then he saw how it was, laughed, and said--

"Oh, thank you."

But he flashed an uneasy glance at Barbara, who was lingering near. Was he really like that pale, bitter-lipped portrait? He fancied that her face would tell him, but she was looking fixedly at Anthony Rothwell.

"Mind you are not late for dinner, Barbara," said her uncle quickly.

She woke to radiant animation.

"_I_ won't be," she said. "But if you are going to introduce Mr. Harding to all the pictures first----"

"I'm not going to do anything of the kind."

"That's right. Mr. Harding's ancestors won't spoil if they are kept waiting a little, but I can't answer for the fish."

"Pray don't let any dead and gone Rothwells interfere with your dinner," said Reynold. "If one's ancestors can't wait one's convenience, I don't know who can."