Read Online Through a Glass Darkly: A Novel by Karleen Koen - Free Book Online Page B

rock, her touchstone for life.
       The Duchess shook her head wearily, her face once more thin, old, sad.
       "I love Roger, Grandmama," Barbara said slowly. "The way you loved Grandfather."
       The simple, startling truth of Barbara's statement hit the Duchess between the eyes. Yes…perhaps she did. But Roger was forty–two, and Richard had been two years younger than she when they married. Roger was a man, established in his ways…his faults as well as his graces. Richard and she had grown old together, twining around each other like two young greening vines until you could hardly tell one from the other. And even then, they had had their share of quarrels and troubles. Roger was not the man Richard was. Once more a feeling of foreboding clutched at her. "You are fifteen!" she said more harshly than she meant because she was afraid. "What do you know of love? It comes from being with someone, from facing life together! Life in its awfulness as well as its joy! You love a handsome face. Nothing more!"
       Barbara shook her head, her face stubborn and mutinous once more.
       "Listen to me, chit! I will tell you of love—the kind of love you feel. Your mother fell in love with Kit Alderley, a handsome, worthless devil, even then—may God forgive me for speaking so of your father—and we let her marry him because he came from a good family, and because we had three boys to inherit. Diana could do as she pleased, your grandfather was always too soft with her! I begged her to wait. I begged him. She was fifteen at the time, mad for Kit. Yes! Stare, chit! You cannot think that your mother was ever fifteen." She moved impatiently. She was expending too much energy on this, but she was beyond stopping herself. "Well, she was! And a wild, willful piece if ever there was one! Worse than you could ever be! So we let her have Kit. And one morning, Diana woke up with seven children to feed, a traitor for a husband, and no more money left. No! And no love, either! It had dribbled away in fits and starts for years! So do not speak of love, missy! Even the greatest love will fly out the window without truth, honor, and duty to anchor it down!"
       Barbara was silent. Am I wasting my breath? the Duchess thought, staring at her, trying to fathom what lay behind that smooth, young, untouched skin on her forehead. Does she understand? Can one understand at fifteen? A Bible verse sprang into her mind: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
    "Make your mother tell you why she wants this marriage," she said harshly. "Make her tell you why Roger Montgeoffry considers you at all. It is for land, for property, and not for your pretty self! Make no mistake about that!"
       "Your love came later," Barbara said softly. "His will too."
       "And what if it does not?"
       Barbara smiled a slow, seductive smile, one the Duchess had never seen on her face before. "I shall make him love me, Grandmama. I can do it."
       Sweet Jesus! Had not Richard often said the same thing, smiled the same way, thinking to charm someone into doing what he wished—and succeeding! Except for death. He could not charm death from his sons or from himself.
       "Your love for Roger may change after you marry, Bab," she said, exhausted now by the futility of this talk, by the girl's stubbornness, by her own old woman's fears. "You may not find him to be all you want him to be. That is when you need to remember your duty. It is all that lasts." These last words were faint; the color of her face looked like putty. Barbara rose quickly to ring for her grandmother's tirewoman, thinking as she did so, Grandmama is old, she does not understand, does not remember. Of course she would do her duty; after all, she was a Tamworth as well as an Alderley. But she would also follow her heart.
    * * *

       There were no more lectures on duty in the days