HIS is the tale of Barbara, Barbara who came back to save a soul alive.
The Reverend Septimus Walrond was returning from a professional visit to a distant cottage of his remote and straggling parish upon the coast of East Anglia. His errand had been sad, to baptize the dying infant of a fisherman which, just as the rite was finished, wailed once feebly and expired in his arms. The Reverend Septimus was weeping over the sorrows of the world. Tears ran down his white but rounded face, for he was stout of habit, and fell upon his clerical coat that was green with age and threadbare with use. Although the day was so cold he held his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and the wind from the moaning sea-tossed his snow-white hair. He was talking to himself, as was his fashion on these lonely walks.
“I think that fresh milk would have saved that child,” he said, “but how was poor Thomas to buy fresh milk at threepence a quart? I ought to have given it to him. I could have done without these new boots till spring. But I thought of my own comfort—the sin that doth so easily beset me—and poor Barbara, my darling Barbara, hanging between life and death.”
He sobbed, then began to pray, still aloud: “O God of Pity, in the Name of the loving and merciful Christ, help me and poor Thomas in our troubles.”
“I ought to have put Thomas’s name first—my selfishness again,” he ejaculated, then went on: “Give consolation to Thomas, who loved his baby; and if it pleases Thee in Thine infinite wisdom and foresight, spare my dearest Barbara’s life, that she may live out her days upon the earth, and perhaps in her turn give life to others. Or if Thou decreest otherwise, then take me also, O God, for I can bear no more. Four children gone! I can bear no more, O God.”
He sobbed again and wiped away a tear, then muttered: “My selfishness, always my selfishness! With six remaining to be looked after, that is counting Barbara if she still lives, I dare to ask to be relieved of the burdens of the flesh. Pitiful Christ, visit not my wickedness on me or on others. I will have faith. I will have faith.”
He thrust his hat upon his head, and walked forward quite jauntily for a few yards. “What a comfort these new boots are!” he said. “If I had stepped into that pool with the old ones my left foot would be wet through now. Let me thank God for these new boots. Oh! how can I, when I remember that the price of them should have been spent in milk for the poor baby? If I were really a Christian I ought to take them off and walk barefoot, as the old pilgrims used to do. They say it is healthy, and I tried to think so because it is cheap, though I am sure that this was the beginning of poor little Cicely’s last illness. With her broken chilblains she could not stand the snow. Well, she has been in bliss three years, three whole years, and how thankful I ought to be for that! How glad she will be to see Barbara too, if it pleases God in His mercy to take Barbara! I ought to remember that: But I can’t, for I am a man still. Oh! curse it all! I can’t; and like Job, I wish that I had never been born. Job got a new family and was content, but that’s their Eastern way. It’s different with us Englishmen.”
He stumbled on for a hundred yards or more, vacuously, almost drunkenly, for the hideous agony that he was enduring half paralysed his brain, and by its very excess was bringing to him some temporary relief. He looked at the raging sea to his right, and in a vague fashion wished that it had swallowed him. He looked at the kind earth of the ploughed field to his left, and wished vividly—for this idea was more familiar—that six feet of it lay above him. Then he remembered that just beyond that sand-heap he had found a plover’s nest with two eggs in it fifty years ago when he was a boy, and had taken one egg and left the other, or rather had restored it because the old bird screamed so pitifully about him. In some strange way that little, long-forgotten act of righteousness brought a glow of comfort to his tormented spirit.
In its way the November afternoon was very beautiful. Where the sun would shortly vanish long bars of purple lay above the horizon; to his excited fancy they looked like the gateway of another and a better world, set above the uttermost pylons of the West. What lay there beyond the sun? Perhaps even now Barbara knew!
A figure appeared standing upon a sand-dune between the pathway and the sea. Septimus was short-sighted and could not tell who it was; but in this place at this hour doubtless it must be a parishioner, perhaps one waiting to see him. He must forget his private griefs. He drew himself together and walked on briskly.