Charles Roberts - Barbara Ladd

For answer Barbara clutched her fiercely around the neck, sobbed and clung to her for a moment, cried extravagantly, "Yes, you are the best friend I've got in all the world!" then gathered up her basket of kittens and fled wildly down the path to the canoe. Impetuously she pushed off, the world a golden blur before her eyes; and without once looking back, she disappeared around the next winding of the stream. Old Debby stood for some minutes gazing after this meteor-like – and very Barbara-like – exit. There was amusement now, unhindered, on her hard old face, but a kind of fierce devotion withal. When the stern of the canoe had vanished behind the leafage, she muttered to herself: "Well! Well! Well! was ever sech a child! When ye set yer finger onto her, she ain't there! I reckon that mincing-mouthed Aunt Kitty's hed her bad times, too. But the sooner I git 'round to see Doctor Jim the better it's goin' to be fer the little wild witch. Land's sakes alive! But 'twon't be 'Debby dear' to me agin fer awhile. How them eyes'll blaze! I'll not go nigh her till she's hed time to git over it an' to know who's really her friends. No, Pippin, ye can't come with me! Go 'way!"

Turning into the long lean-to of a shed which stretched behind the cabin, she brought out two stumpy oars. These under her left arm, her stalwart stick in her right hand, she limped with massive alertness down to the waterside, shoved off the punt, climbed into it with a nicety of balance remarkable in one of her weight, clicked the oars into the rowlocks, and pulled up-stream toward the lake whence Barbara had come.

The child who set forth so fearlessly, on so audacious and ill-regulated a venture, that midsummer morning of the year 1769, – in a time when audacity on the part of small girls was apt to meet the discouragement of a peculiarly strenuous discipline, – was an accident in her period, an irreconcilable alien to her environment. In her intense individuality, and in the confident freedom with which she claimed the right to express that individuality, she belonged to an earlier or a later day, but not to a New England of the eighteenth century. Two years before, at the age of twelve, an age when other children's personalities were colourless to the eyes of their elders, she had been projected into the tranquil routine of the little world of Second Westings. It was an established, crystallised, unchanging life there in the back country of Connecticut, where hours, seasons, actions, habits, revolved in so orderly a fashion as to have worn themselves grooves out of which they could hardly even look, still less achieve to deviate. Into this rigid placidity the dark child came like a grain of ferment; and presently, no one could tell just how, the mass began to work. Barbara was everywhere discussed. She was rather unanimously disapproved of. And, nevertheless, as it were in the teeth of all probability, she won to herself here and there a friend.

At the time of Barbara's transplanting from the cordial soil of Maryland to the austere uplands of Connecticut, her father, the Reverend Winthrop Hopkins Ladd, clergyman of the Established Church, had been dead over two years, and the child's hurt, as such things will, had outwardly healed; though the hidden wounds would agonise in her heart at unexpected times, set vibrating to some poignant touch of scent or sound or colour. The child had adored her father with a tempestuous and jealous devotion, which, however, had not prevented her waywardness from diversifying his repose with many a wakeful night. Her mother, who had died when Barbara was scarce out of arms, had been a bewildering birth from the kiss of North Wales on the warm south of Spanish passion. The son of an old Welsh family, adventuring to the New World to capture himself a fortune, had captured himself also a wife to beggar envy. Where or how he got the fortune, no man knew and few presumed to wonder; but where and how he got the wife was matter of noonday knowledge. He saw her at church in New Orleans. There were looks that burn and live. Through that emotional spring Glenowen sniffed the incense of more masses than he had thought to attend in a lifetime. Once there was a stolen word behind a pillar, eyes warily averted. Twice notes passed from hand to hand. Then a girl, the daughter of one of the haughtiest houses of Colonial Spain, was audaciously carried off by night from a convent school in the safe heart of the city. When next seen of the world, she was Glenowen's wife, most radiantly and graciously dispensing an accepted hospitality in Baltimore.

The result that in particular pertains to this history was a small, flame-like, imperious girl, one Mistress Mercedes Glenowen, who, from the night of ceremony when she first made her bow to the governor and joyously turned her disastrous eyes upon the society of Baltimore, for the space of some three years dispersed vain heartache throughout the colony. Into the remotest plantations went the name of her and the fame of her – and too often, also, the sickness of a hopeless desire of her. There were duels, too, discreetly laid to other cause; and old friendships changed to hate; and wild oaths made perjury. But the heart of Mistress Mercedes went free. A quiet young clergyman, a kinsman to the governor, came to Baltimore from Boston, on his way to a country parish on the Pawtuxet, to which he had just been appointed. Dining at Government House, he met Mistress Mercedes, but his eyes, being at that moment immersed in dreams, looked not upon but through and beyond her. Mercedes could not rest an instant until those far-wandering, Northern eyes were ensnared, imprisoned, and denied a range beyond the boundaries of her heart. But the capture was not a quick one, and in the interest of it she had the accident to become herself entangled, to such a degree that she had no longer any use for freedom. And so it came about, to the wrathful amaze of her retinue, but the unspeakable content of the Reverend Winthrop Ladd, that the dark rose of Maryland was on a sudden removed from Baltimore to bloom on a churchly plantation by the pale waters of the Pawtuxet.

Mr. Ladd, though a dreamer so far as consisted with outdoor life and sanity of brain and muscle, was a strong man, one of those who have the force to rule when they must, and the gentleness to yield when they may. In the passionate completeness of her love, Mercedes sloughed the caprices that would have pained and puzzled him, forgot the very echoes of the acclamations of her court, and lived in the sanctuary of her husband's devotion. For nearly three years the strangely assorted lovers dwelt in their dream, while the world passed by them like a pageant viewed through a glory of coloured glass. Then a sudden sickness tore them apart; and when the dazed man came slowly back to the realisation that he had been left to live, all his love, with all the illusion of it, centred itself fixedly upon the little one, Barbara, whom Mercedes had left to him.

As Barbara grew more and more like her mother, her ascendency over her father grew more and more complete. Tenderly but firmly he ruled his parish and his plantation. But he gradually forgot to rule Barbara. Too nearly did she represent to him all that he had lost in his worshipped Mercedes; and he could not bring himself to see anything but freshness of character and vigour of personality in the child's very faults. Hence he evolved, to suit her particular case, a theory very much out of harmony with his time, to the effect that a child – or rather, perhaps, such a child as this of Mercedes – should not be governed or disciplined, but guided merely, and fostered in the finding of her own untrammelled individuality. This plan worked, for the time, to Barbara's unqualified approval, but she was destined to pay for it, in later years, a heavy price in tears, and misunderstandings, and repentance. With the growth of her intense and confident personality there grew no balancing strength of self-control. Unacquainted with discipline, she was without the safeguard of self-discipline. Before she was eight years old she held sway over every one on the plantation but herself, – and her rule, though pretty and bewitching, was not invariably gentle. As for her father, though ostensively her comrade and mentor, he was by this time in reality her slave. He rode with her; he read with her; he taught her, – but such studies only as ensnared her wayward inclination, and with such regularity only as fell in with her variable mood. The hour for a lesson on the spinet would go by unheeded, if Barbara chanced to be interested in the more absorbing occupation of climbing a tree; and the time for reciting Latin syntax was lightly forgotten if berries were a-ripening in the pasture. Under such auspices, however, Barbara did assuredly grow straight-limbed and active, slight and small indeed, by heritage from her mother, but strong and of marvellous endurance, with the clear blood red under her dark skin, her great gray-green eyes luminous with health. Her father devoted to her every hour of the day that he could spare from the claims of his parish. In a sunny and sandy cove near the house he taught her to swim. Rowing and canoeing on the Pawtuxet were mysteries of outdoor craft into which he initiated her as soon as her little hands could pull an oar or swing a paddle. A certain strain of wildness in her temperament attuned her to a peculiar sympathy with the canoe, and won her a swift mastery of its furtive spirit. In the woods, and in the seclusion of remote creeks and backwaters, her waywardness would vanish till she became silent and elusive as the wild things whose confidence she was for ever striving to gain. Her advances being suspiciously repelled by the squirrels, the 'coons, and the chipmunks, her passion was fain to expend itself upon the domestic animals of the plantation. The horses, cattle, dogs, and cats, all loved her, and she understood them as she never understood the nearest and best-beloved of her own kind. With the animals her patience was untiring, her gentleness unfailing, while her thoughtless selfishness melted into a devotion for which no sacrifice seemed too great.