"When we are married," Adrian had said on that blissful day in Nutfield Lane, "before we go abroad, before we go anywhere, we will run down to Mitchelhurst for a day, won't we?"

Barbara had agreed to this, as she would have agreed to anything he had suggested, and the plan had been discussed during the summer months, till it seemed to have acquired a kind of separate existence, as if Adrian's light whim had been transformed into Destiny. The bleak little English village stood in the foreground of their radiant honeymoon picture of Paris and the south. The straggling rows of cottages, the cabbage plots, the churchyard where the damp earth, heavy with its burden of death, rose high against the buttressed wall, the blacksmith's forge with its fierce rush of sparks, the Rothwell Arms with the sign that swung above the door—were all strangely distinct against a bright confusion of far-off stir and gaiety, white foreign streets, and skies and waters of deepest blue. All their lives, if they pleased, for that world beyond, but the one day, first, for Mitchelhurst.

Thus it happened that the careless fancy of April was fulfilled in January. January is a month which exhibits most English scenery to small advantage; and Mitchelhurst wore its dreariest aspect when a fly from the county town drew up beneath the swaying sign. The little holiday couple, stepping out of it into the midst of the universal melancholy, looked somewhat out of place. Adrian and Barbara had that radiant consciousness of having done something very remarkable indeed which characterises newly-married pairs. They had the usual conviction that an exceptional perfection in their union made it the very flower of all love in all time. They had plucked this supremely delicate felicity, and here they were, alighting with it from the shabby conveyance, and standing in the prosaic dirt of Mitchelhurst Street. The sign gave a long, discordant creak by way of greeting, and they started and looked up.

"It wouldn't be worse for a little grease," the landlord allowed, in a voice which was not much more melodious than the creaking sign.

Scarlett laughed, but he realised the whole scene with an amusement which had a slight flavour of dismay. Was this the place which was to give his honeymoon an added touch of poetry? How poor and ignoble the houses were! How bare and bleak the outlines of the landscape! How low the dull, grey roof of sky! How raw the January wind upon his cheek! There was only a momentary pause. Barbara was looking down the well-known road, the bullet-headed landlord scratched his unshaven chin, and the disconsolate chickens came nearer and nearer, pecking aimlessly among the puddles.

"I suppose you can give us some luncheon?" said the young man, and in the interest of that important question it hardly seemed as if there had been a pause at all.

The landlady arrived in a flurry, asking what they would please to order, and Adrian and she kept up a brisk dialogue for the next five minutes. Finally, it was decided that they should have chops. Perhaps the discussion satisfied some traditional sense of what was the right thing to do on arriving at an inn. There was nothing to have but the chops which Adrian had chosen, and he murmured something of "fixed fate, free-will" under his moustache, as he crossed the road in the direction of the church.

"In an hour," he said. "That will give us time to see the church and the village. Then, after luncheon, we will go to the old Place, and the fly shall call for us there, and take us back the short way. Will that do, Barbara?"

Of course it would do; and when they reached the churchyard she bade him wait a moment and she would get the key. The stony path to Mrs. Spearman's cottage was curiously familiar—the broken palings, the pump, the leafless alder-bush. The only difference was that it was Barbara Scarlett—a different person—who was stepping over the rough pebbles.

She returned to Adrian, who was leaning against the gate-post.

"Mitchelhurst isn't very beautiful," he said, with an air of conviction. "I thought I remembered it, but it has come upon me rather as a shock. Somehow, I fancied—Barbara, is it possible that I have taken all the beauty out of it—that it belongs to me now, instead of to Mitchelhurst? Can that be?"

She smiled her answer to the question, and then—

"I think it looks very much as usual," she said, gazing dispassionately round. "Of course, it is prettier in the spring—or in the summer. It was summer when you came, you know."

She had a vague recollection of having pleaded the cause of Mitchelhurst at some other time in the same way, which troubled her a little.

"Yes, I know it was summer," said Adrian. "But still——"

"You mustn't say anything against Mitchelhurst," cried Barbara, swinging her great key. "It isn't beautiful, but I feel as if I belonged to it, somehow. It changed me, I can't tell why or how, but it did. After I had been six months with Uncle Hayes, I went home for a fortnight in the spring, and everything seemed so different. It was all so bright and busy there, everybody talked so fast about little everyday things, and the rooms were so small and crowded. I suppose it was because I had been living with echoes and old pictures in that great house. Louisa and Hetty were always having little secrets and jokes, there wasn't any harm in them, you know, but I felt as if I could not care about them or laugh at them, and yet some of them had been my jokes, before I went to Mitchelhurst. And I could not make them understand why I cared about the Rothwells and their pictures, when I had never known any of them."

"Louisa is a very nice girl," said Scarlett; "but if Mitchelhurst is all the difference between you two, I am bound to say that I have a high opinion of the place."

"Well, I don't know any other difference."

"Don't you?" and he smiled as he followed her along the churchyard path. "No other difference? None?" He smiled, and yet he knew that the old house had given a charm to Barbara when he saw her first. She had been like a little damask rose, breathing and glowing against its grim walls. He took the key from her hand, and turned it in the grating lock.

It seemed as if the very air were unchanged within, so heavy and still it was. Barbara went forward, and her little footfalls were hardly audible on the matting. Adrian, with his head high, sniffed in search of a certain remembered perfume, as of mildewed hymn-books, found it, and was content. It brought back to him, as only an odour could, his first afternoon in the church, when he stood with one of those books in his hand, and watched the Rothwell pew which held Barbara.

Having enjoyed his memory he faced round and inspected St. Michael, who was as new, and neat, and radiant as ever. Adrian speculated how long it would take to make him look a little less of a parvenu. "Would a couple of centuries do him any good, I wonder?" he mused, half-aloud. "Not much, I fear." The archangel returned his gaze with a permanent serenity which seemed to imply that a century more or less was a matter of indifference to his dragon and him.

Barbara had gone straight to the Rothwell monuments, where Scarlett presently joined her. She did not take her eyes from the tombs, but she stole a warm little hand under his arm. "I wish he could have been buried here," she said in a low voice.

Reynold had said that he bequeathed her his memory, but now, in her happiness, it seemed to be receding, fading, melting away. She gazed helplessly in remorseful pain; he was only a chilly phantom; the very fierceness of his passion was but a dying spark of fire. She could recall his words, but they were dull and faint, like echoes nearly spent. She could not recall their meaning—that was gone. The declaration of love which had burst upon her like a great wave, filling her with pity and wonder and fear, had ebbed to some unapproachable distance, leaving her perplexed and half incredulous. Adrian, in flesh and blood, was at her side, and she thrilled and glowed at his touch; but when she thought of Reynold Harding she met only a vague emptiness. He was not with the Rothwells in this quiet corner; he was not where she had left him, lying back in his leathern chair. That room was swept and garnished and cold, as he had said. No doubt they had put him in some suburban cemetery, some wilderness of graves which to her was only a name of dreariness. Standing where he had once stood in Mitchelhurst Church, she only felt his absence, and she thought that she could have recalled him better if he had been at rest beneath the dimly-lettered pavement on which her eyes were fixed.

She was wrong. Memories cannot bear the outer air, or be laid away in the cold earth; they can only live when they are hidden in our hearts, and quickened by our pulses. Barbara could not keep the remembrance of Reynold's love alive, with no love of her own to warm it. But in her ignorance she said, wistfully—

"I wish he could have been buried here!" and then added in a quicker tone, "I suppose you'll say it makes no difference where he lies."

"Indeed I sha'n't," said Adrian. "There may be beauty or ugliness, fitness or unfitness, in one's last home as well as any other. Yes, I wish he were here. But he was an unlucky fellow; it seemed as if he were never to have anything he wanted, didn't it?"

"How do you mean—not anything?"

"Well, I think he would have liked Mitchelhurst Place."

"Yes," said Barbara, "he would, I know."

"And I am sure he would have liked the name of Rothwell. He was ashamed of his father's people. That pork-butcher rankled."

"Oh!" said Barbara, still looking at the tombs, "did you know about that? Did everybody know?" She spoke very softly, as if she thought the dusty Rothwell, peering out of his marble curls, might overhear. "No, I suppose he didn't like him."

"I know he didn't. Well, he hadn't the name he liked: he was saddled with the pork-butcher's name. And then, worst of all, he couldn't have you, Barbara!"

She turned upon him with parted lips and a startled face.

"Well," said Scarlett, "he couldn't, you know."

"Adrian! how did you know he cared for me? He did, but how did you know it? I thought I ought not to tell anybody."

"I saw him once," said Scarlett, "and I found it out. I saw him again—just passed him in the road, and we did not say a word. But I was doubly sure, if that were possible. Poor devil! If he could have had his way we should not have met in the lane that day, Barbara."

"I never dreamed of it," she said. "I thought he hated me."

"If a girl thinks a man hates her," said Adrian, "I suppose the chances are he does one thing or the other."

"I never dreamed of it," she repeated, "never, till he told me at the end. It could not be my fault, could it, as I did not know? But it seemed so cruel—so hard! He had cared for me all the time, he said, and nobody had ever cared for him."

"You mustn't be unhappy about that," said Scarlett, gently.

"But that's just it!" Barbara exclaimed, plaintively. "I ought to be unhappy, and I can't be. Adrian! I've got all the happiness—a whole world full of it—and he had none. I must be a heartless wretch to stand here, and think of him, and be so glad because——"

Because her hand was on Adrian's arm.

"My darling," he said, in a tone half tenderly jesting, half earnest, "you mustn't blame yourself for this. What had you to do with it? Do you think you could have made that poor fellow happy?"

She looked at him perplexed.

"He loved me," she said.

"I know he did. You might have given him a momentary rapture if you had loved him. But make him happy—not you! Not anybody, Barbara! How could you look at his face, and not see that he carried his unhappiness about with him? I verily believe that there was no place on the earth's surface where he could have been at peace. Underneath it—perhaps!"

Barbara sighed, looking down at the stones.

"You people with consciences blame yourselves for things foredoomed," said Scarlett. "Harding's destiny was written before you were born, my dear child. Besides," he added, in a lighter tone, "what would you do with the pair of us?"

"That's true," she said, thoughtfully.

"Take my word for it," he went on, "if you want to do any good you should give happiness to the people who are fit for it. You can brighten my life—oh, my darling, you don't know how much! But his—never! If you were an artist you might as well spend your best work in painting angels and roses on the walls of the family vault down here as try it."

"Yes," said Barbara. Then, after a pause, she spoke with a kind of sob in her voice, "But if one had thrown in just a flower before the door was shut! I couldn't, you know, I hadn't anything to give him!"

Scarlett, by way of answer, laid his hand on hers. When you come face to face with such an undoubted fact as the attraction a man's lonely suffering has for a woman, argument is useless. It is an ache for which self-devotion is the only relief. He perfectly understood the remorseful workings of Barbara's tender heart.

"I couldn't do without you, my dear," he said.

"Oh, Adrian!—no!" she exclaimed. "That day when I said good-bye to him, he fancied I was crying for him once, and even that was for you. I was just thinking, if it had been you sitting there!"

"Foolish child! I'm not to be got rid of so easily."

"Don't talk of it!" said Barbara.

Her hand tightened on his arm, and she looked up at him, with a glance that said plainly that the sun would drop out of her sky if any mischance befell him.

"Well," she said, after a minute, more in her ordinary voice, as if she were dismissing Reynold Harding from the conversation, "I'm glad you know. I wanted you to know, but of course I could not tell you."

"It's wonderful with women," said Adrian, gliding easily into generalities, "the things they don't think it necessary to tell us, taking it for granted that we know them, and we can't know them and don't know them to our dying day—and the things they do think it necessary to tell us, with elaborate precautions and explanations—which we knew perfectly well from the first."

"Oh, is that it?" Barbara replied, smartly. "Then I shall tell you everything, and you can be surprised or not as you please."

"I sha'n't be much surprised," said Adrian, "unless, perhaps, you tell me something when you think you are not telling anything at all."

And with this they went off together to look at the seat in which he sat when Barbara saw him first, and then she stood in her old place in the Rothwells' red-lined pew, and looked across at him, recalling that summer Sunday. It would have been a delightful amusement if the church had been a few degrees warmer, but Barbara could not help shivering a little, and Adrian frankly avowed that he found it impossible to maintain his feelings at the proper pitch.

"I'm blue," he said, "and I'm iced, and I can't be sentimental. And you wore a thin cream-coloured dress that day, which is terrible to think of. Might write something afterwards, perhaps," he continued, musingly. "Not while my feet are like two stones, but I feel as if I might thaw into a sonnet, or something of the kind."

Barbara looked up at him reverentially, and Adrian began to laugh.

"Let's go and eat those chops," he said.

Later, as they walked along the street towards Mitchelhurst Place, Scarlett was silent for a time, glancing right and left at the dull cottages. Here and there one might catch a glimpse of firelight through the panes, but most of them were drearily blank, with grey windows and closed doors. It was too cold for the straw-plaiters to stand on their thresholds and gossip while they worked. There was a foreshadowing of snow in the low-hanging clouds.

"What are you thinking of?" Barbara asked him.

"Don't let us ever come here again!" he answered. "It's all very well for this once; we are young enough, we have our happiness before us. But never again! Suppose we were old and sad when we came back, or suppose——" He stopped short. "Suppose one came back alone," should have been the ending of that sentence.

"Very well," she agreed hastily, as if to thrust aside the unspoken words.

"We say our good-bye to Mitchelhurst to-day, then?" Adrian insisted.

"Yes. There won't be any temptation to come again, if what they told us is true—will there?"

She referred to a rumour which they had heard at the Rothwell Arms, that as Mr. Croft could not find a tenant for the Place he meant to pull it down.

"No," said Scarlett. "It seems a shame, though," he added.

Presently they came in sight of the entrance—black bars, and beyond them a stirring of black boughs in the January wind, over the straight, bleak roadway to the house. The young man pushed the gate. "Some one has been here to-day," he said, noting a curve already traced on the damp earth.

"Some one to take the house, perhaps," Barbara suggested. "Look, there's a carriage waiting out to the right of the door. I wish they hadn't happened to choose this very day. I would rather have had the old Place to ourselves, wouldn't you?"

"Much," said Adrian.

These young people were still in that ecstatic mood in which, could they have had the whole planet to themselves, it would never have occurred to them that it was lonely. Their eyes met as they answered, and if at that moment the wind-swept avenue had been transformed into sunlit boughs of blossoming orange, they might not have remarked any accession of warmth and sweetness.

The old woman who was in charge recognised Barbara, and made no difficulty about allowing them to wander through the rooms at their leisure. In fact, she was only too glad not to leave her handful of fire on such a chilly errand.

"Is it true," Mrs. Scarlett asked eagerly, "that Mr. Croft is going to pull the house down?"

"So they tell me, ma'am. There's to be a sale here, come Midsummer, and after that they say the old Place comes down. There's nobody to take it now poor Mr. Hayes is gone."

Adrian's glance quickened at the mention of a sale, and then he recalled his expressed intention never to come to Mitchelhurst again. "Perhaps he'll find a tenant before then," he said. "You've got somebody here to-day, haven't you?"

The woman started in sudden remembrance. "Oh, there's a lady," she said, "I most forgot her. She said she was one of the old family, and used to live here. My orders are to go round with 'em when they come to look at the house, but the lady didn't want nobody, she said, she knew her way, and she walked right off.

"I hope it ain't nothing wrong, but she's been gone some time."

"I should think it was quite right," said Scarlett. "Come, Barbara."

They went from room to room. All were silent, empty, and cold, with shutters partly unclosed, letting in slanting gleams of grey light. The painted eyes of the portraits on the wall looked askance at them as they stood gazing about. All the little modern additions which Mr. Hayes had made to the furniture for comfort's sake had been taken away, and the Rothwells had come into possession of their own again.

Scarlett opened the old piano as he passed. "Do you remember?" he said, glancing brightly, and with a smile curving his red lips, as he began, with one hand, to touch a familiar tune. But Barbara cried "Hush!" and the tinkling, jangling notes died suddenly into the stillness. "Suppose she were to hear!"

"I wonder where she is," he rejoined, with a glance round. "She must have come to say good-bye to her old home, too."

There was no sign of her as they crossed the hall (where Barbara's great clock had long ago run down) and went up the wide, white stairs. But it was curious how they felt her unseen presence, and how the knowledge that at any moment they might turn a corner and encounter that living woman, made the place more truly haunted than if it had held a legion of ghosts. They walked in silence, like a couple of half-frightened children, along the passages, and the remembrance that the old house was doomed was with them all the time. It was strange to lay their warm light hands on those strong walls, which had outlasted so many lives, so much hope, and so much hopelessness, and to think that they, in their fragile, happy existence might well remain when Mitchelhurst Place was forgotten. It seemed hardly more than a phantom house already.

"I almost think she must have gone," Barbara whispered, as they came down-stairs again.

"No," said Adrian, with an oblique glance which her eyes followed.

Kate Harding was standing by one of the windows in the entrance hall, a stately figure in heavy draperies of black. Hearing the steps of the intruders she turned slightly, and partially confronted them, and the light fell on her face, pale and proud, close-lipped, full of mute and dreary defiance. Only she herself knew the passionate eagerness with which, as a girl, she had renounced her old home—only she knew the strange power with which Mitchelhurst had drawn her back once more. Fate had been too strong for her, and she had returned to her own place, perhaps to the thought of the son who had belonged more to it than to her. Her presence there that day was a confession of defeat too bitter to be spoken, a last homage of farewell to the old house which she was not rich enough to save.

Her eyes, resting indifferently on the girl's face, widened in sudden recognition, and she looked from Barbara to Adrian. Her glance enveloped the young couple in its swift intensity, and then fell coldly to the pavement as she bent her head. Barbara blushed and drooped, Scarlett bowed, as they passed the motionless woman, drawn back a little against the wall, with the faded map of the great Mitchelhurst estate hanging just behind her.

Their fly was waiting at the door, and in less than a minute they were rolling quickly down the avenue. Adrian, stooping to tuck a rug about his wife's feet, only raised himself in time to catch a last glimpse of the white house front, and to cry, "Good-bye, Mitchelhurst!" Barbara echoed his good-bye. Mitchelhurst was only an episode in her life; she cared for the place, yet she was not sorry to escape from its shadows of loves and hates, too deep and dark for her, and its unconquerable melancholy. She left it, but a touch of its sadness would cling to her in after years, giving her the tenderness which comes from a sense—dim, perhaps, but all-pervading—of the underlying suffering of the world. She looked back and saw her happiness tossed lightly and miraculously from crest to crest of the black waves which might have engulfed it in a moment; and even as she leaned in the warm shelter of Adrian's arm, she was sorry for the lives that were wrecked, and broken, and forgotten.

"Look!" he said quickly, as the road wound along the hill-side, and a steep bank, crowned with leafless thorns and brown stunted oaks, rose on the right, "this is where I said good-bye to you, Barbara, and you never knew it!"

"Never!" she cried. "No, I thought you had gone away, and hadn't cared to say good-bye."

"Well, you were kinder to me than you knew. You left me a bunch of red berries lying in the road."

"Ah, but if I had known you were there!"

"Why," said Adrian, "you wouldn't have left me anything at all. You would have died first! You know you would! It was better as it was."

"Perhaps," she allowed.

"Anyhow, it is best as it is," said he conclusively, and to that she agreed; but her smile was followed by a quick little sigh.

"What does that mean?" he demanded, tenderly.

"Nothing," she said, "nothing, really."

It was nothing. Only, absorbed in picturing Adrian's mute farewell, she had passed the place where she first saw Reynold Harding, and had not spared him one thought as she went by. And she was never coming to Mitchelhurst again.

THE END.

Clay and Taylor, Printers, Bungay, Suffolk.

Transcriber's Notes

Spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been standardised.