THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.
The rector had often wished his wife could in some
natural way get hold of Miss Wylder; he suspected
something exceptionally fine in her: how else
could she, with such a father and such a mother, have
such a countenance? There must be a third factor
in the affair, and one worth knowing—namely
herself! That she seemed to avoid being reckoned
among church-goers might be a point in her favour!
What reports reached him of her wild ways, mingled
with exaggerated stories of her lawlessness, did not
shock him: what was true in them might spring
from mere exuberance of life, whose joy was her only
law—and yet a real law to her!
He had had no opportunity of learning either how peculiar
the girl was, or how capable. She was not yet
up to his teaching; she had to have other water to
drink first, and was now approaching a source that
might have caused him anxiety for her, had he ever
so little believed in chance. But a shepherd
is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty
of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food.
That its best instincts may not be to the taste either
of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing
against those instincts. Without appearing to
their guardians both strange and headstrong, some
sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep
them alive. Confined to the provender even their
shepherds would have them contented withal, many would
die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes
of “society,” haunted with the cries of
its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on
which their souls can live, they have to die, and
climb the grassy slopes of the heavenly hills.
Barbara had as yet had no experience of pain—or
of more at least than came from sympathy with suffering—a
sympathy which, though ready, could hardly be deep
in one who had never had a headache herself. To
all dumb suffering things, she was very gentle and
pitiful; but her pity was like that of a child over
her doll.
She was always glad to get away from home. While
her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the
rector, she was flying over hedge and ditch and rail,
in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour
and his grandson found open when first the former
took the latter to see the place: Barbara had
a key to it.
She went with swift gliding step, like that of a red
Indian, into the library. Richard was piecing
the broken cords of a great old folio—the
more easily that they were double—in order
to re-attach the loosened sheets and the hanging board,
and so get the book ready for a new cover. She
carried in her hand something yet more sorely in need
of mending—a pigeon with a broken wing,
which she had seen lying in the park, and had dismounted
to take. It kept opening and shutting its eyes,
and she knew that nothing could be done for it; but
