The mistress of Chancton Priory had hesitated painfully before allowing Doctor McKirdy to write the letter which had bidden Barbara Rebell come to England. The old Scotchman, who to her surprise had urged Madame Sampiero to send for her god-daughter, regarded the coming of Barbara as a matter of comparatively small moment. If the experiment was not successful, well then Mrs. Rebell could be sent away again; but the mistress of the Priory knew that to herself the coming of Richard Rebell's daughter must either bring something like happiness, and the companionship for which she sometimes craved with so desperate a longing, or the destruction of the dignified peace in which she had known how to enfold herself as in a mantle.
For a few days, Barbara's fate had indeed hung in the balance, and could money have taken the place of the shelter asked for, it would have been sent in ample measure. At last what had turned the balance and weighed down the scale had been a mere word said by Mrs. Turke--a word referring incautiously to James Berwick as the probable future owner of Chancton Priory.
Hearing that word, the present owner's trembling lips had closed tightly together. So that was what they were all planning? That the Priory should be, in the fulness of time, handed over to James Berwick, to be added to the many possessions he had acquired by the sale of himself--Madame Sampiero, discussing the matter in the watches of her long night, did not choose and pick her words--by that of his young manhood, and of his already growing political reputation, to a sickly woman, older than himself, whose death had been the crowning boon she had bestowed on her husband.
And so Chancton, which Madame Sampiero loved with so passionate an affection, was meant to take its place, as if by chance, at the end of the long list of Berwick's properties--that list which all who ran might read in those books of reference where the mightiness of Lord Bosworth's nephew was set forth--after Chillingworth, after the town house, after Churm Paddox, Newmarket, even after the property he had inherited from his own father in France. The thought whipped her as if with scorpions--perhaps the more so that for one moment, in the long ago, at a time when Barbara Sampiero wished to share everything with the man she loved, and before little Julia, that _enfant de miracle_, was born, she had seriously thought of making Lord Bosworth's nephew her heir. But his marriage had revolted her profoundly, and had, of course, made the questions of his future and his career, which had at one time been a matter for anxious thought on the part of his uncle and political godfather, more than secure. Well, indeed, had he, or rather his sister Arabella, feathered James Berwick's nest!