LITMIR.BIZ

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of her love, Mercedes sloughed the caprices that would have pained and puzzled him, forgot the very echoes of the acclamations of her court, and lived in the sanctuary of her husband's devotion. For nearly three years the strangely assorted lovers dwelt in their dream, while the world passed by them like a pageant viewed through a glory of coloured glass. Then a sudden sickness tore them apart; and when the dazed man came slowly back to the realisation that he had been left to live, all his love, with all the illusion of it, centred itself fixedly upon the little one, Barbara, whom Mercedes had left to him.

      As Barbara grew more and more like her mother, her ascendency over her father grew more and more complete. Tenderly but firmly he ruled his parish and his plantation. But he gradually forgot to rule Barbara. Too nearly did she represent to him all that he had lost in his worshipped Mercedes; and he could not bring himself to see anything but freshness of character and vigour of personality in the child's very faults. Hence he evolved, to suit her particular case, a theory very much out of harmony with his time, to the effect that a child—or rather, perhaps, such a child as this of Mercedes—should not be governed or disciplined, but guided merely, and fostered in the finding of her own untrammelled individuality. This plan worked, for the time, to Barbara's unqualified approval, but she was destined to pay for it, in later years, a heavy price in tears, and misunderstandings, and repentance. With the growth of her intense and confident personality there grew no balancing strength of self-control. Unacquainted with discipline, she was without the safeguard of self-discipline. Before she was eight years old she held sway over every one on the plantation but herself,—and her rule, though pretty and bewitching, was not invariably gentle. As for her father, though ostensively her comrade and mentor, he was by this time in reality her slave. He rode with her; he read with her; he taught her,—but such studies only as ensnared her wayward inclination, and with such regularity only as fell in with her variable mood. The hour for a lesson on the spinet would go by unheeded, if Barbara chanced to be interested in the more absorbing occupation of climbing a tree; and the time for reciting Latin syntax was lightly forgotten if berries were a-ripening in the pasture. Under such auspices, however, Barbara did assuredly grow straight-limbed and active, slight and small indeed, by heritage from her mother, but strong and of marvellous endurance, with the clear blood red under her dark skin, her great gray-green eyes luminous with health. Her father devoted to her every hour of the day that he could spare from the claims of his parish. In a sunny and sandy cove near the house he taught her to swim. Rowing and canoeing on the Pawtuxet were mysteries of outdoor craft into which he initiated her as soon as her little hands could pull an oar or swing a paddle. A certain strain of wildness in her temperament attuned her to a peculiar sympathy with the canoe, and won her a swift mastery of its furtive spirit. In the woods, and in the seclusion of remote creeks and backwaters, her waywardness would vanish till she became silent and elusive as the wild things whose confidence she was for ever striving to gain. Her advances being suspiciously repelled by the squirrels, the 'coons, and the chipmunks, her passion was fain to expend itself upon the domestic animals of the plantation. The horses, cattle, dogs, and cats, all loved her, and she understood them as she never understood the nearest and best-beloved of her own kind. With the animals her patience was untiring, her gentleness unfailing, while her thoughtless selfishness melted into a devotion for which no sacrifice seemed too great.

      The negroes of the plantation, who seemed to Barbara akin to the animals, came next to these in her regard, and indeed were treated with an indulgence which made them almost literally lay their black necks in the dust for her little feet to step on. But with people of her own class she was apt to be hasty and ungracious. Their feelings were of small account in her eyes—certainly not to be weighed for a moment against those of a colt or a kitten. There was one sweet-eyed and lumbering half-grown puppy which Barbara's father—not for an instant, indeed, believing anything of the sort—used to declare was more precious to her than himself. But her old black "Mammy" 'Lize used to vow there was more truth than he guessed in "Marse Ladd's foolin'."

      However, when a fever snatched the gentle priest away from the scene of his love and kindly ministrations, the child's true self emerged through its crust of whim and extravagance. Stricken beyond a child's usual capacity to feel or realise such a blow, she was herself seized with a serious illness, after which she fell into a dejection which lasted for the better part of a year. In her desolation she turned to her animals rather than to her human companions, and found the more of healing in their wordless sympathy.

      At last, youth and health asserted themselves, and once more Barbara rode, paddled, swam, tyrannised, and ran wild over the plantation, while relatives from Maine to Maryland wrangled over her future.

      There was one young uncle, her mother's only brother, whom Barbara decided to adopt as her sole guardian. But other guardians came to another decision. Uncle Bob Glenowen was an uncle after Barbara's own heart, but a little more disciplined and reasonable than herself. The two would have got on delightfully together—together careering over the country on high-mettled horses, together swimming and canoeing at the most irregular hours, together lauding and loving their four-foot kindred and laughing to scorn the general stupidity of mankind. But Uncle Glenowen had little of gold or gear, and his local habitation was mutable. He loved Barbara too well not to recognise that she should grow up under the guidance of steadier hands than his. It was finally settled—Barbara's fiery indignation being quite disregarded—that she should go to her father's younger sister, Mistress Mehitable Ladd, in Second Westings.

      Mistress Ladd was a self-possessed, fair-faced, aristocratic little lady, with large blue eyes and a very firm, small mouth. She was conscientious to a point that was wont to bring her kindness, at times, into painful conflict with her sense of duty. The Puritan fibre ran in unimpaired vitality through the texture of her being, with the result that whenever her heart was so rash as to join issue with her conscience, then prompt and disastrous overthrow was the least her heart could expect for such presumption. In the matter of Barbara's future, however, Distress Mehitable felt that duty and inclination ran together. She had loved her brother Winthrop with unselfish and admiring devotion, and had grieved in secret for years over his defection from the austere fold of the Congregationalists to what she regarded as the perilously carnal form and ceremony of the Church of England. Her hampered spirit, her uncompleted womanhood, yearned toward Barbara, and she shuddered at the idea of Winthrop's child growing up untaught, unmothered, uncontrolled. She made up her mind that Barbara should come to Second Westings, become a daughter to her, and be reared in the purity of unsullied Congregationalism. With a sigh of concordant relief it was recognised by the other relatives that Mehitable was right. They washed their hands of the child, and forgot her, and were thankful—all but Uncle Bob. And so Barbara went to Second Westings.

CHAPTER IV.

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      Little enough, indeed, would Second Westings ever have seen of the heartsore and rebellious child, but for this Uncle Bob. Searching his own spirit, he understood hers; and maintaining a discreet silence as to the chief points of his discovery, he set himself the duty of accompanying Barbara on the long, complicated journey to Connecticut. Not content with delivering his charge into the hands of Mistress Mehitable,—whom he liked despite her uneasy half-disapproval of himself,—he stayed long summer weeks at Second Westings, thus bridging over for Barbara the terrible chasm between the old life and the new, and by his tactful conciliation on every side making the new life look a little less hatefully alien to her. He took her riding all over the township; he took her canoeing on the lake, and down the outlet to its junction with the river; and so not only won her a freedom of movement hitherto unheard-of among the maidens of Second Westings, but also showed her that the solace of wild woods and sweet waters was to be found no less in Connecticut than in her longed-for Maryland. Moreover, Uncle Bob had "a presence." Second Westings scrutinised him severely, all ready to condemn the stranger folk to whom Winthrop Ladd had turned in his marrying. But Second Westings felt constrained to acknowledge at once that Winthrop Ladd had married within his class. To high and low alike—and the line between high and low was sharply drawn at Second Westings—it was obvious that the sister of Mr. Robert Glenowen must have been gently born. Those who would not let themselves

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