As for Barbara, she had fallen into a strange mood that day when John Gore rode northward out of her life. She rose early, and walked alone in the garden, showing an untroubled face to her mother when my lady descended after taking breakfast in bed. Barbara, to appear occupied, had a basket on her arm, and a pair of scissors with which she was cutting off the dead flowers along the border.
Anne Purcell was a lady who had never bent her back over such a hobby. “Such things were for maiden ladies with round shoulders and no bosoms.” And the mother was a little inquisitive that morning, for John Gore’s face had told her nothing the night before. Her wishes were all for an understanding between the two, and she was not squeamish. The grip of a man’s arm would hug the mopes out of the girl. Barbara needed hot blood to teach her to live and to enjoy. My lady was wise in all these matters.
“It is a new thing for you to touch the harpsichord, Barbe,” she said, with that kindness that comes easily when people seemed inclined to shape themselves to one’s wishes. “I will send Rogers to the City and have a man out to tune the wires.”
Barbara reached for a dead flower, showing off her figure finely as she leaned over the border—but there was no man there to see.
“You can have a singing-master again, if you wish for it, so that you can sing to some one when he comes riding back from the North.”
She laughed and looked at her daughter with motherly archness. It was good, at least, to see the girl busying herself even over such things as dead flowers.
“What! When some one is ready to sit in the dusk and hear you sing?”
Barbara looked at her mother innocently enough. She was all meek guile that morning.
“Why, to be sure, he shall give you a lesson or two. We must get you some new songs pricked. The old ones are too chirrupy and out of date.”
Thus my lady imagined that she had discovered much of the truth, and perhaps she had discovered some small portion of it beneath that placid surface. Dead flowers! Anne Purcell had no prophetic instinct in such matters. And Barbara was glad when she was gone, and the garden empty of all thought save the thought of expiation. She was neither happy nor sad, but possessed by a strange tranquillity, like the first sense of coming sleep to one who has been in pain. She might have been surprised at her own calmness had she been in a mood to be surprised at anything. It was as though bitterness and doubt had been swept out of her path, leaving the way easy toward the inevitable end.