“And then you told her where you found it?”
“I did not.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I said to her, ‘If it’s a bad book,
here goes!’ and threw it in the fire.”
“Then I’m not to know the end of the story!
But I can send to London for another copy! I’m
much obliged to you, Mr. Wingfold, for destroying my
property!—But you didn’t tell her
where you found it?”
“I did not. She never asked me.”
Mrs. Wylder was silent. She seemed a little ashamed,
perhaps a little softened. Wingfold bade her
good-morning. She did not answer him.
MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA.
To make all this quite credible to a doubting reader,
it would be necessary to tell Mrs. Wylder’s
history from girlhood. She had had a very defective
education, and what there was of it was all for show.
Then she was married far too young, and to a man unworthy
of any good woman. She indeed was not a good
woman, but she was capable of being made worse; and
in the bush, where she passed years not a few, and
in cities afterward, she met women and men more lawless
yet than herself or her husband. Overbearing
where her likings were concerned, and full of a certain
generosity where but her interests were in question,
the slackness of the social bonds in the colonies
had favoured her abnormal development. It is
difficult to say how much man or woman is the worse
for doing, when freed from restraint, what he or she
would have been glad to do before, but for the restraint.
Many who go to the colonies, and there to the dogs,
only show themselves such as they dared not appear
at home: they step on a steeper slope, and arrive,
not at the pit, for they were in that already, but
at the bottom of it, so much the faster. There
were, however, in Mrs. Wylder, lovely rudimentary
remnants of a good breed. She inherited feelings
which gave her a certain intermittent and fugitive
dignity, of some service to others in her wilder times,
and to herself when she came into contact with an
older civilisation. She would occasionally do
a right generous thing—not seldom give
with a freedom and judge with a liberality which were
mainly rooted in carelessness.
She had much confidence in her daughter; and it said
well for the mother that, with all her experience,
she yet had this confidence—and none the
less that she had never taken pains to instruct her
in what was becoming. The most she had done in
this way was once to snatch from her hand and throw
in the fire a novel she had herself, a moment before,
finished with unquestioning acceptance. If she
had found her behaving like some of her acquaintance
to whose conduct she did not give a second thought,
for her friends might do as they pleased so long as
they did not offend her, she would certainly,
in some of her moods at least, have killed her.
