There & Back. George MacDonald
for her after midnight, perhaps to find her strayed beyond the park, out upon the solitary heath. She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names indeed, but by names she had herself given them. She had tales of her own, fashioned in part from the wild myths of the aborigines, to account for the special relations of such as made a group. She would weave the travels of the planets into the steady history of the motionless stars. Waning and waxing moons had a special and strange influence upon her. She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old nurse, who had come with her—a strange creature, of what mingled blood no one knew—told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night. No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth’s Lucy, and made her a lady of her own.
As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius—the faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara’s questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing.
Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style, Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled men; real, she charmed alike men and fools.
She had read few books worth reading—had read a few which one would not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing, therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She imagined them all attractive—but at the first assay turned from the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it seemed to them, set her down as stupid.
As to religion, she had never been taught any. But from before her earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this feeling she never thought of attempting to account, neither would have recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought it; a sweep of the earth away from her feet would bring it; any horizon far or near called it up, perhaps most keenly of all. In England she often sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling, she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them. Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from her the Presence? When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. She had no idea of ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm, a moonlit night, a sweet wind—anything that woke the sense of the old freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it a presence.
Neither did she know that there was a place where the very essence, of that whose loss made her sad was always waiting her—a place called in a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the one horizon—infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of loss and need.
Her father’s desire was to see her so married as to raise his influence in the county. He was proud of her—selfishly proud. Was she not his? Was he not “the author of her being”? If he did not quite imagine he had created her, he certainly never thought of any one but himself as having to do with her existence. All the credit in it was his! He forgot even what share her mother might claim; not to mention what in her might belong to the Sum of Things, the insensate Pan. A self-glorious man is the biggest fool in the world.
Her mother, too, was proud of her—loved her indeed after a careless fashion—was even in a sort obliged to her for having come to her. But she did not care for her enough to interfere with her. Notwithstanding the mother’s coarseness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she loved far more, and the other far less.
Barbara had no pride. She spoke in the same tone to lord and tradesman. She had been the champion of the blacks in her own country, and in England looked lovingly on the gypsies in their little tents on the windy downs.
CHAPTER XVI. BARBARA AND RICHARD
Hardly had Lestrange left the room, when Barbara entered, noiseless as a moth, which creature she somehow resembled at times: one observant friend came to see that she resembled all swift, gay, and gentle creatures in turn. She was in the same green dress which had favoured her concealment in the beech, and in which Richard had seen her afterward at the breakfast-table, but of which he had not since caught a glimmer. Her blue eyes—at times they seemed black, but they were blue—settled upon Richard the moment she entered, and resting on him seemed to lead her up to the table where he was at work.
“What have you done to make Arthur so angry?” she said, her manner as if they had known each other all their lives.
“What I am doing now, miss—making this book last a hundred years longer.”
“Why should you, if he doesn’t want you to do it? The book is his!”
“He will be pleased enough by and by. It’s only that he thinks I can’t, and is afraid I shall ruin it.”
“Hadn’t you better leave it then?”
“That would be to ruin it. I have gone too far for that.”
“Why should you want to make it last so long? They are always printing books over again, and a new book is much nicer than an old one.”
“So some people think; but others would much rather read a book in its first shape. And then books get so changed by printers and editors, that it is absolutely necessary to have copies of them as they were at first. You see this little book, miss? It don’t look much, does it?”
“It looks miserable—and so dirty!”
“By the time I have done with it, it will be worth fifty, perhaps a hundred pounds—I don’t know exactly. It is a play of Shakespeare’s us published in his lifetime.”
“But they print better and more correctly now, don’t they?”
“Yes; but us I said, they often change things.”
“How is that?”
“Sometimes they will change a word, thinking it ought to be another; sometimes they will alter a passage because they do not understand it, putting