Yet, spite of all that Nature did
To make his uncouth form forbid,
This creature dared to love.
* * * * * *
But virtue can itself advance
To what the favourite fools of chance
By fortune seem design'd.
PARNELL.
"Is your sweet lady out yet, pretty Barbara?" inquired Robin Hays of Barbara Iverk, as he met her in the flower-garden of Cecil Place, when it was nearly midday.
"My poor lady is, I am sure, very ill; or, what is still worse, ill at ease," replied the maiden. "She has not been in bed all night, I know, for the couch was undisturbed this morning, so I just came here to gather her some flowers: fresh flowers must always do one good, and I think I never saw so many in bloom so early."
"Barbara, did you ever hear tell of a country they call the East?"
"A country!" repeated Barbara, whose knowledge of geography was somewhat more extensive than that of Robin, although she had not travelled so much, "I believe there are many countries in the East."
"Well, I dare say there may be. Mistress Barbara: you are going to chop scholarship with me; but yet, I suppose, you do not know that they have in that country a new way of making love. It is not new to them, though it is new to us."
"Oh, dear Robin! what is it?"
"Why, suppose they wished you, a young pretty maiden as you are, to understand that I, a small deformed dragon, regarded you, only a little, like the beginning of love, they would--" Robin stooped as he spoke, and plucked a rose-bud that had anticipated summer--"they would give you this bud. But, suppose they wanted you to believe I loved you very much indeed, they would choose you out a full-blown rose. Barbara, I cannot find a full-blown rose; but I do not love you the less for that."
"Give me the bud, Robin, whether or no; it is the first of the season:--my lady will be delighted with it--if, indeed, any thing can delight her!"
"I will give it you to keep; not to give away, even to your lady. Ah, Barbara! if I had any thing worth giving, you would not refuse it."
"And can any thing be better worth giving, or having, than sweet flowers?" said the simple girl. "Only it pains me to pull them--they die so soon--and then, every leaf that falls away from them, looks like a reproach!"
"Should you be sorry if I were to die one of these days, Barbara," inquired the Ranger, "like one of those flowers?"
"Sorry! have I ever appeared ungrateful, Robin? When first I came here, you used to be so kind me:--indeed, you are always kind--only I fear lately you are displeased with me about something or other. You have avoided me--are you angry, Robin?"
"Indeed I am not; nor do I forget how often you have driven away the 'shadows' that used to come over me."
"And do you--I mean, do you esteem me as much as ever?"
Robin looked earnestly into her face, and then taking her hand, gently replied:--
"I do esteem you, as you term it, more than ever; but I also love you. When a little helpless thing, I took you from your father's arms: I loved you then as a parent would love a child. When Lady Cecil took you under her care, and I saw you but seldom, my heart leaned towards the daughter of my best friend with a brother's love. And when, as I have just said, the sunlight of your smile, and the gentleness of your young girlish voice, dispelled much melancholy from my mind, I thought--no matter what. But now the case is altered--you see in me a mere lump, a deformed creature, a being unseemly to look upon, a wretch----!"
"Robin Hays, you wrong yourself," interrupted Barbara; "I do not see you thus, nor think you thus. The raven is not a beautiful bird, nor hath it a sweet voice, yet it was welcomed and beloved of the prophet Elijah."
"So it was, Barbara; but why?--because it was useful to him in his hour of need. Think you that, in the time of his triumph and prosperity, he would have taken it to his bosom, as if it had been a dove?"
"I do not see why he should not," she said: "God is so good, that he never takes away one beauty without bestowing another; and the raven's glossy wing might be, to some, even more beautiful than the purple plumage of the dove: at all events, so excellent a man would not be chained by mere eye-beauty, which, after all, passeth quickly. Though I think it was very uncourteous of Mr. Fleetword to say, in my hearing, Robin, that the time would come when Mistress Constance would be as plain-favoured as old Dame Compton, whose countenance looks like the worm-eaten cover of Solomon Grundy's Bible."
"Ah, Barbara! you are a good girl: but suppose I was as rich as I ought to be before thinking of marrying--and supposing you came to the knowledge of your father, and he agreed--and supposing Mistress Cecil did not say nay--supposing all this----?"
Robin paused, and Barbara, with her eyes fixed on the ground, commenced pulling to pieces the rose-bud he had given her.
"Supposing all this, Barbara----?"
"Well, Robin?"
"Do you think, Barbara, you would then--marry me?"
"I never thought of marriage, seeing that I am too young, and, withal, too inexperienced; but there is one thing, Robin----"
"I knew it," interrupted the Ranger, in one of his sudden bursts of bitterness; "I might easily have known it--Beauty and ugliness!--Fool! fool! to imagine that a girl could look on me without loathing! There--go to your mistress, go to your mistress, and make gay sport of Robin Hays!"
The soft eyes of Barbara filled with tears; she made no reply, but prosecuted her attack on the rose-bud so vigorously, that nought but the stem remained in her fingers.
"You need not have torn that rose to bits before my face! Ay, trample on its leaves as you do on my heart!--Why do you not go to your mistress?"
"You are very wayward, Robin; one time smooth, at other times, and without cause, rugged as a path through a thorny common: I can only pray that the Lord may teach you better than to misinterpret my words, and mock a poor girl who never entertained a thought to your disadvantage."
She could say no more, for the large round tears forced their way down her cheeks, as she turned towards the house with a bowed head and a feeble step. But Robin's mood had again changed.
"I beg your pardon, Barbara: forgive me; and think, that if my mind sometimes takes a crooked turn, it is the fault of my damnable body!"
"Do not swear; it is the profaneness of your words, and, I fear me too truly, of your life also, that hurts me. Oh, Robin! do tell me who my father is, that I may find him, and have some heart to lean upon that will not always cause me tears. My lady is ever sad, and you are ever wayward and uncertain: I am a double orphan; and were it not for the consolation afforded me by better thoughts, should be most miserable."
"Forgive me, girl, forgive me; but every one alludes to this cursed deformity, and it is ill to bear--" said Robin, walking by her side.
"I never alluded to it, never even thought of it," replied Barbara, sobbing: "if the voice and the eye is kind, and, above all, if the face become familiar, it is one, all one, whether the features be formed according to beauty or otherwise. I never thought of looking into little Crisp's face, when he licked my hand but now; I only felt that the creature loved me."
"Crisp is no more a beauty than his master," observed Robin, patting the dog, who leaped to the caress: "but you cannot like him as well as black Blanche, or Bright-eye, your mistress's silken favourites, who show their teeth at the poor fellow whenever he approaches the entrance?"
"Bright-eye is a trifle conceited, I grant; but Blanche is like a lamb, only what can she do? Crisp comes gammocking up, wagging his tail, seeming in the best of good humours; poor Blanche receives him kindly, and sometimes walks before him to the buttery; then, all of a sudden, just as she is thinking how very glad she is to meet Crisp--thinking, too, that notwithstanding his shaggy coat and crooked legs, he is a thousand times more to be esteemed and liked than the fine and conceited Bright-eye--at that very time, and just as suddenly as you fly into your passions, Crisp stops, grins, twirls his tail, and will neither return her civility nor accept her invitation. What can poor Blanche do, Robin?"
This statement was made by the pretty Puritan with a mingling of simplicity and shrewdness, for which, to have looked in her innocent face, one would scarcely have given her credit. The tears of youth dry as quickly as the dews in summer; and the young heart rebounds from grief as swiftly as the arrow from the bow. Robin looked upon her with doubting, but with strong affection. He knew, though he struggled with hope against the conviction, that Dalton's friendship would hardly induce him to bestow his daughter upon such an unpropitious personage as himself; and he felt assured--or, at least, believed, in his more gloomy moments, that so it must be--no woman could, by any possibility, feel affection for him. He was also, at times, under the full assurance that Barbara only laughed at his addresses; and though she had more than once given him all reasonable encouragement, he most industriously placed it to the account of the universality of female coquetry, a theory in which he most conscientiously believed.
Without, therefore, any notice of her little fable, or the visible inference so easily drawn from the comparison between Crisp and himself, he started off from the subject nearest his heart, with an abrupt inquiry as to whether her mistress would be likely to go abroad that evening.
"I dare say she will come out in the twilight," replied Barbara, who had sufficient of the sensitiveness of her sex to feel deeply mortified at Robin's heedlessness of her delicate allusion, adding, "Good day; I cannot stay any longer with you; so give you good day;" and she added in a lower tone, "a more gentle humour when next we meet." Woman's pride impelled her footsteps with extraordinary alacrity; woman's affection, or curiosity, both of which are oftentimes at war with her reason, obliged her to look back as she entered the postern, and then she enjoyed the little triumph of observing that Robin remained on the same spot gazing after her.
"I don't think I said any thing very unkind to him," she thought while passing along the gallery. "I have a great mind to go back and ask him if he wanted to send any message to my lady; I did not give the poor fellow time to speak--I ought not to serve anyone so. What would good Mr. Fleetword say, if he knew I spoke so snappishly to any fellow-christian?--Keep your cold nose away from my hand, Master Bright-eye; you forget how you behaved to my friend Crisp yesterday."
Just as she arrived at this point of her soliloquy, she stood before a window, overlooking the part of the garden where she had left Robin.--He was no longer there! and the fond heart of little Barbara, at once forgetful of the harshness and waywardness of her early friend, was only aroused from profound reasoning upon her own unworthiness, by a smart tap on the shoulder from the fair hand of Lady Frances Cromwell.
"Pretty Barbara in meditation!" she exclaimed;--"but this is no time to ask upon what or why. What is the meaning of your lady's sudden resolve?"
"What resolve, madam?"
"Why, a resolve to marry Sir Willmott Burrell within this week."
Barbara was panic-struck: she remained silent for a few minutes, and then clasping her hands, implored Lady Frances to do--she knew not what.
"Ah! she will die, my lady, she will die! for who could live married to such a man? He is, indeed, a fearful husband for such a one. My lady, I know she does not love him--she never did--never could. I have heard her say in her sleep----"
"What, good maid?" asked Lady Frances eagerly, and with her usual curiosity. But the habitual integrity of Barbara's mind was awakened: with tears and sobs she replied,--
"What I must not, as a true girl, repeat. I crave your pardon, my lady, but it would ill become me to speak of what is said in sleep: only, dear, dear lady, if you love my dear mistress--if her life be dear to you--prevent, if possible, this marriage."
