The Heather-Moon
Grandma again open her lips. She had seemed to be thinking intently, as
if making up her mind how to begin. Perhaps she was praying for
guidance, Barrie told herself; but the morning and evening prayers in
the dining-room with a few servants assembled were like harangues or
didactic instructions to Heaven rather than supplications. Barrie
thought that her grandmother had created a God for herself in her own
image, and considered that she had a right, therefore, to tell Him what
to do. Why should an all-good, all-wise God create a disagreeable,
unkind person like Grandma? It didn't stand to reason. And Miss Hepburn
was of opinion that God was indeed beneficent, in spite of those eternal
fires in which she, almost equally with Grandma, fervently believed.
When there was no further sound of the housekeeper, Mrs. MacDonald began
to speak, slowly and very deliberately.
"My son married against my will. His father was dead, and a woman's
authority was not enough, for he was stubborn, though a good son until
_she_ got hold of him with her witcheries and her false charms. He met
her in London, and took her out of the theatre, where he had no business
to go; and if he never had gone, all our troubles would have been saved.
The woman was a play-actress--a light, frivolous creature with no more
sense of moral responsibility than a butterfly."
"Butterflies are beautiful!" Barrie broke in. "God made them, I suppose,
just as much as He made ants, and I'm sure He loves them heaps better."
She thought of her grandmother as a big black ant, hoarding disagreeable
crumbs in a gloomy hole.
Mrs. MacDonald went on as if she had not heard.
"The woman married my son because he had money, and when she had spent
all she could lay her hands on--spent it on dresses and hats and every
kind of sinful vanity--she left him and his home, left her baby a year
old, to return to the theatre, I suppose. I thank God that I still had
influence with Robert my son to keep him from running after her like a
love-sick fool, and trying to bring her back to the decent home she had
disgraced. But his heart was broken by her wicked folly. Two years
they'd had together under this roof and the disappointments she had made
the boy suffer undermined his health. Two years more he was spared to
me, and then he was taken. Never once did your mother write to him or to
me, not so much as to ask whether her husband and child were alive or
dead. While Robert lived, her things remained in her room just as she
had left them the night she stole away like a thief, carrying only a
handbag. There was the furniture the poor bewitched man had bought
because he thought nothing in his mother's house was fit for his
wonderful bride. There were her clothes--the very dress you have on,
made on purpose to show off her brazen looks in a portrait she induced
my son to order from a painting man. There was everything, except her
jewels, which she was careful to take--jewels more fit for an empress of
a heathen nation than a self-respecting Englishwoman: and that is where
the root of the mischief lay. She wasn't English. I warned my son in the
beginning when he wrote of his infatuation. I said, 'It is bad enough
that she should be a play-actress; but the daughter of an _Irish father_
and an _American mother_, that is _fatal_!' He would not listen, and he
was punished for his obstinacy. You were no comfort to him, for, as I
pointed out many a time, you were bound to grow up the living image of
the woman who had betrayed us. I told him if he lived he'd have it all
to go over again in you--maybe worse, if that could be possible, for the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and
fourth----"
"But I thought it was my mother I was like," Barrie flung at her.
"Figuratively speaking, it is the same thing, as you well understand,
unless you are a fool. Your father was not strong enough to bear the
burden which his own mistakes had bound on his shoulders. He left the
responsibility of bringing up that woman's daughter to me, and under
Heaven I have done my best. I have kept you away from vanities, hoping
that in spite of all you might remain unspotted from the world. But
blood will tell. To-day I find that, as your mother before you stole
like a thief out of the house, so you have stolen into this place, which
was forbidden you, to gratify your curiosity and your vanity. I find you
as bold as brass parading in that low-necked red dress, which I told
your mother was a shame to any woman when I saw her flaunting in it. Now
you know what she was, and what you are and are like to be. I tell you
again, take off that gown as you would tear off a poisoned toad from
your flesh; then go down to your own room and spend the rest of the day
in prayer and meditation."
It was a triumph for Grandma that Barrie did not throw at her an
insolent answer. For a moment the girl did not reply at all. Then she
said, in a singularly quiet way, that she would take off the dress and
put it back in the trunk, but not unless her grandmother would leave her
alone to do it. Afterward, she would ask nothing better than to go to
her own room and stay there. "I _want_ to think," she added; "I have a
lot to think about. But I shall think only good things of my mother.
What you have told me has made me very, very happy. I believed that my
mother was dead. Now I know she's in the same world with me, I could
almost die of joy."
"It is like her daughter to feel that," Mrs. MacDonald returned
bitterly. "If you are not downstairs in ten minutes, I will have the
door locked and keep you in the garret without food or drink or light
for twenty-four hours."
"I should _love_ that!" exclaimed Barrie suddenly, in the manner of her
old self. Nevertheless, she descended and advertised her return to the
prosaic world by closing the door loudly in less than ten minutes after
Mrs. MacDonald had gone.
She walked straight into her own room and bolted herself in. If Grandma
had seen her then, she could not have helped admitting that there was as
much of Robert MacDonald in the lines of the girl's face as of the
guileful Barbara Ballantree.
II
No notice was taken of Barrie until half-past eight o'clock that
night--half-past eight being considered night in Mrs. MacDonald's
house-hold. At that time, just as the hour was announced by an old
friend, the grandfather clock on the landing, who had seen the girl go
into the garret, Miss Janet Hepburn knocked at Barrie's door.
"Barribel," she called, as always pronouncing the fanciful name with a
certain reluctance, partly on principle, partly because it was known to
have been chosen by "that woman." "Barribel, by your grandmother's
permission, I've brought you some supper. Open your door and take in the
tray."
A voice answered from behind the panel, "I'll open the door if you will
bring in the tray yourself."
Miss Hepburn hesitated for a moment. In the dun gaslight of the corridor
her sharp profile looked eager as the face of a hungry bird. She thought
quickly. Mrs. MacDonald had not yet finished her own supper. No such
frivolity as evening dinner was known at Hillard House. Soup after dark
except for an invalid would have been considered a pitfall; but the old
lady liked to linger alone over the last meal of the day, reading a
religious volume by the light of a lamp placed on the table at the left
of her plate. When Miss Hepburn and Barrie finished they always, as a
matter of form, asked to be excused, though they both knew, and Mrs.
MacDonald knew that they knew, how more than willing she was to be left
alone with her book. At a quarter past nine the servants were called,
they having already supped on bread and cheese. A chapter, preferably
from the Old Testament, was read, a prayer offered up, and at
nine-thirty precisely the family was ready to go to bed. Miss Hepburn
had reason to believe that for three quarters of an hour she was free to
do as she wished, and she wished as ardently as she was able to wish
anything, to see Barrie. She had heard next to nothing of the day's
events from Mrs. MacDonald, whose companion she was supposed to be now
that the girl no longer needed her whole morning's services as
governess. And from Mrs. Muir, into whose room she had slipped at
tea-time, very little had been dragged out. Yet it was certain that
something tremendous had happened. If she wanted to know what, her one
hope lay with Barrie.
"Very well," she said, with the proper mingling of kindness and dignity,
"I will bring in the tray."
The door immediately opened, and closed again after the flat figure of
Miss Hepburn. Barrie thought that if the good Janet had been born a fish
she would have been a skate, or at roundest a sole. Even her profile was
flat, as if the two sides of her face had been pressed firmly together
by a strong pair of hands. She wore her hair very flat on her head,
which was flat behind; and just at the nape of the neck was a flat
drab-tinted knot, of almost the same grayish-yellowish brown as her
complexion. On her flat breast was a flat brooch with a braid of pale
hair as a background. Even her voice sounded flat in its effort at
meekness and self-repression, calculated to appease Mrs. MacDonald in
trying circumstances. Miss Hepburn looked about forty-five; but she had
always looked forty-five for the last twelve years, and Barrie could
hardly have believed that she had ever been younger.
"Your grandmother thinks that you have now been sufficiently punished,"
she announced, "and you are to come down as usual to prayers."
"Oh, am I?" echoed Barrie. "We'll see about that. As for punishment, if
it pleases Grandma to think she's punished me, she may. I don't care.
She couldn't have made me come out of my room to-day if she tried. But I
don't bear _you_ any grudge, Heppie. I'm very glad to see you. I want
you to tell me things."
"What things?" inquired Miss Hepburn. "I didn't come to talk. I am here
simply to see you begin your supper. You must be--er--very hungry."
"I've had plenty of food all day," said Barrie--"food for thought." She
cleared a place on the one table by pushing a few school-books out of
the way. She had been sitting in the twilight, for she was not allowed
to have matches. Their possession might have tempted her to burn gas
after ten o'clock, when at latest all lights had to be out. Now, Janet
Hepburn brought a box of matches on the tray; and the gas, when lit,
showed the sparsely furnished room with its gray-painted, pictureless
wall, against which Barrie's red hair glowed like a flame. Outside the
open window the old ivy and the young peeping roses, which had been
green and pink and gold in the twilight, lost their colour as the gas
flared up, and evening out of doors darkened into night.
"I've brought you bread and cheese with a slice of cold beef," announced
Miss Hepburn, "and Mrs. Muir has baked you a potato, but I am not sure
whether your grandmother would approve of that. She distinctly said a
cold supper."
"Will you please thank Mrs. Muir for me?" Barrie asked.
"You can thank her to-morrow."
"I mayn't have a chance. Do thank her for me to-night. Say I wanted you
to."
"Why are you in such a hurry?"
"Oh--just _because_. Will you?"
"Yes, I will try, after prayers, when she is shutting up the house. Now,
eat your supper."
"I don't want to, yet. Please, Heppie, dear Heppie, tell me what you
know about my mother. You weren't here when she was, but you're a kind
of cousin of Grandma's, and you must have heard all about her."
"If I had, that would not give me the right to tell you," replied Miss
Hepburn, clinging desperately to her stiff dignity, despite the pleading
voice and the "dear, dear Heppie," against which, being one third human,