CHAPTER II
THE NEW YEAR FEAST
Barbara did not die. On the contrary Barbara got quite well again, but her recovery was so slow that Anthony only saw her once before he was obliged to return to college. This was on New Year’s Day, when Mr. Walrond asked him to dinner to meet Barbara, who was coming down for the first time. Needless to say he went, taking with him a large bunch of violets which he had grown in a frame at the Hall especially for Barbara. Indeed, she had already received many of those violets through the agency of her numerous younger sisters.
The Rectory dinner was at one o’clock, and the feast could not be called sumptuous. It consisted of a piece of beef, that known as the “aitch-bone”—which is perhaps the cheapest that the butcher supplies when the amount of eating on it is taken into consideration—one roast duck, a large Pekin, the New Year offering of the farmer Stevens, and a plum-pudding somewhat pallid in appearance. These, with late apples and plenty of cold water, made up the best dinner that the Walrond family had eaten for many a day.
The Rectory dining-room was a long, narrow chamber of dilapidated appearance, since between meals it served as a schoolroom also. A deal bookcase in the corner held some tattered educational works, and the walls that once had been painted blue, but now were faded in patches to a sickly green, were adorned only with four texts illuminated by Barbara. These texts had evidently served as targets for moistened paper pellets, some of which still stuck upon their surface.
Anthony arrived a little late, since the picking of the violets had taken longer than he anticipated, and, as there was no one to open the front door, walked straight into the dining-room. In the doorway he collided with the little maid-of-all-work, a red-elbowed girl of singularly plain appearance, who having deposited the beef upon the table, was rushing back for the duck, accompanied by two of the young Walronds, who were assisting with the vegetables. The maid, recoiling, sat down with a bump on one of the wooden chairs, and the Walrond girls, a merry, good-looking, unkempt crew (no boy had put in an appearance in all that family), burst into screams of laughter. Anthony apologised profusely; the maid, ejaculating that she didn’t mind, not she, jumped up and ran for the duck, and the Reverend Septimus, a very different Septimus from him whom he met a month or so before, seizing his hand, shook it warmly, calling out: “Julia, my dear, never mind that beef; I haven’t said grace yet. Here’s Anthony.”
“Glad to see him, I am sure,” said Mrs. Walrond, her eyes still fixed upon the beef, which was obviously burnt at one corner. Then, with a shrug, for she was accustomed to such accidents, she rose to greet him.
Mrs. Walrond was a tall and extremely good-looking lady of about fifty-five, dark-eyed and bright-complexioned, whose chestnut hair was scarcely touched with grey. Notwithstanding all the troubles and hardships that she had endured, her countenance was serene and even happy, for she was blessed with a good heart, a lively faith in Providence and a well-regulated mind. Looking at her it was easy to see whence Barbara and her other daughters inherited their beauty and air of breeding.
“How are you, Anthony?” she went on, one eye still fixed upon the burnt beef. “It is good of you to come, though you are late, which I suppose is why that girl has burnt the meat.”
“Not a bit,” called out one of the children—it was Janey; “it is very good of us to have him when there’s only one duck. Anthony, you mustn't eat duck, as we don’t often get one, and you have hundreds.”
“Not I, dear; I hate ducks,” he replied automatically, for his eyes were seeking the face of Barbara.
Barbara was seated in the wooden arm-chair with a cushion in it, near the fire of driftwood, advantages that were accorded to her in honour of her still being an invalid. Even to a stranger she would have looked extraordinarily sweet with her large and rather plaintive violet eyes, over which the long black lashes curved, her waving chestnut hair parted in the middle, and growing somewhat low upon her forehead, her tall figure, very thin just now, and her lovely shell-like complexion heightened by a blush. To Anthony she seemed a very angel, an angel returned from the shores of death for his adoration and delight. Oh! if things had gone the other way—if there had been no sweet Barbara seated in that wooden chair! The thought gripped his heart with a hand of ice; he felt as he had felt when he looked at the window-place from the crest of Gunter’s Hill. But she had come back, and he was sure that they were each other’s for life. And yet, and yet, life must end one day, and then, what? Once more that hand of ice dragged at his heart-strings.
In a moment it was all over, and Mr. Walrond was speaking. “Why don't you bid Barbara good-day, Anthony?” he asked. “Don’t you think she looks well, considering? We do—better than you in fact,” he added, glancing at his face, which had suddenly grown pale, almost grey.
“He’s going to give Barbara the violets, and doesn’t know how to do it,” piped the irrepressible Janey. “Anthony, why didn’t you ever bring us violets when we had the whooping cough?”
“Because the smell of them is bad for delicate throats,” he answered, and without a word handed the sweet-scented flowers to Barbara.
She took them, also without a word, but not without a look, pinned a few to her dress, and reaching a cracked vase from the mantelpiece, disposed of the rest of them there till she could remove them to her own room. Then Mr. Walrond began to say grace, and the difficulties of that meeting were over.
Anthony sat by Barbara. His chair was rickety, one of the legs being in much need of repair; the driftwood fire, that burned brightly about two feet away, grilled his spine, for no screen was available, and he nearly choked himself with a piece of very hot and hard potato. Yet, to tell truth, never before had he Shared in such a delightful meal. For soon, when the clamour of “the girls” swelled loud and long, and the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Walrond was entirely occupied with the burnt beef and the large duck that absolutely refused to part with its limbs, he found himself almost as much alone with Barbara as though they had been together on the wide sea-shore.
“You are really getting quite well?” he asked,
“Yes, I think so.” Then, after a pause and with a glance from the violet eyes, “Are you glad?”
“You know I am glad. You know that if you had—died, I should have died too.”
“Nonsense,” said the curved lips, but they trembled and the violet eyes were a-swim with tears. Then a little catch of the throat, and, almost in a whisper: “Anthony, father told me about you and the window-blind and—oh! I don’t know how to thank you. But I want to say something, if you won't laugh. Just at that time I seemed to come up out of some blackness and began to dream of you. I dreamed that I was sinking back into the blackness, but you caught me by the hand and lifted me quite out of it. Then we floated away together for ever and for ever and for ever, for though sometimes I lost you we always met again. Then I woke up and knew that I wasn’t going to die, that’s all.”
“What a beautiful dream!” began Anthony, but at that moment, pausing from her labours at the beef, Mrs. Walrond said:
“Barbara, eat your duck before it grows cold. You know the doctor said you must take plenty of nourishment.”
“I am going to, mother,” answered Barbara. “I feel dreadfully hungry.” And really she did; her gentle heart having fed full, of a sudden her body seemed to need nourishment.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Walrond, pausing from his labours and viewing the remains of the duck disconsolately, for he did not see what portion of its gaunt skeleton was going to furnish him with dinner, and duck was one of his weaknesses—“dear me, there’s a dreadful smell of burning in this room. Do you think it can be the beef, my love?”
“Of course it is not the beef,” replied Mrs. Walrond rather sharply. “The beef is beautifully done.”
“Oh!” ejaculated one of the girls who had got the calcined bit; “why, mother, you said it was burnt yourself.”
“Never mind what I said,” replied Mrs. Walrond severely, “especially as I was mistaken. It is very rude of your father to make remarks about the meat.”
“Well, something is burning, my love.”
Janey, who was sitting next to Anthony, paused from her meal to sniff, then exclaimed in a voice of delight: “Oh! it is Anthony’s coat tails. Just look, they are turning quite brown! Why, Anthony, you must be as beautifully done as the beef. If you can sit there and say nothing, you are a Christian martyr wasted, that’s all.”
Anthony sprang up, murmuring that he had thought there was something wrong behind, which on examination indeed there proved to be. The end of it was that the chairs were all pushed downwards, with the result that for the rest of that meal there was a fiery gulf fixed between him and Barbara, which made further confidences impossible. So he had to talk of other matters. Of these, as it chanced, he had something to say.
A letter had arrived that morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean war. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from “fever and severe chill,” which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, though doubtless they were in fact compatible enough. Still, he wrote a very interesting letter, which, after the pudding had been consumed to the last spoonful, Anthony read aloud, while the girls ate apples and cracked nuts with their teeth.
“Dear me! George seems to be very unwell,” said Mrs. Walrond.
“Yes,” answered Anthony, “I am afraid he is. One of the medical officers whom my father knows and who is working in that hospital, says they mean to send him home as soon as he can bear the journey, though he doesn’t think it will be just at present.”
This sounded depressing, but Mr. Walrond found that it had a bright side. “At any rate he won’t be shot like so many poor fellows; also he has been in several of the big battles and will be promoted. I look upon him as a made man. He'll soon shake off this cold in his native air”
“And we shall have a real wounded hero in the village,” said one of the girls.”
“He isn’t a wounded hero,” answered Janey, “he’s only got a chill.”
“Well, that’s as bad as a wound, and I am sure he would have been wounded if he could.” And so on.
“When are you going back to Cambridge, Anthony?” asked Mrs. Walrond presently.
“To-morrow morning, I am sorry to say,” he answered, and Barbara’s face fell at the words. “You see I go up for my degree this summer term, and my father is very anxious that I should take high honours in mathematics. He says that it will give me a better standing at the Bar. So I must begin to work at once with a tutor before term, for there’s no one near here who can help me.”
“No,” said Mr. Walrond. “If it had been classics now, with a little furbishing perhaps I might. But mathematics are beyond me.”
“Barbara should teach him,” suggested one of the girls slyly. “She’s splendid at Rule of Three.”
“Which is more than you are,” said Mrs. Walrond in severe tones, “who always make thirteen out of five and seven. Barbara love, you are looking very tired. All this noise is too much for you; you must go and lie down at once in your own room. No, not on the sofa; in your own room. Now say good-bye to Anthony and go.”
So Barbara, who was really tired, though with a happy weariness, did as she was bid. Her hand met Anthony’s and lingered there a little; her violet eyes met his brown eyes and lingered there a little; her lips spoke some few words of commonplace farewell. Then, staying a moment to take the violets from the cracked vase, and another moment to kiss her father as she passed him, she walked, or rather glided, from the room, with the graceful movement that was peculiar to her: and lo! at once for Anthony it became a very emptiness, Moreover he grew aware of the hardness of his wooden seat, and that the chatter of the girls was making his head ache. So presently he too rose and departed.