XIX
When Anne Purcell returned to the music-room she found my lord waiting for her there, walking to and fro with his hands behind his back and his handsome face lined and shadowed with thought. He looked up quickly when she entered, a look full of infinite meaning, as though he had felt a chill of loneliness and was glad that this woman shared with him what the future might convey.
He closed the door and casements carefully, after walking round the garden to see that no one was lurking there. Anne Purcell’s face still looked white and scared. The horror of a betrayal haunted her as she went to the window-seat, where the moonlight was already glimmering upon the glass.
“Speak softly. I had better draw the curtains.”
He did so, leaning over my Lady Anne, and stooping to kiss her before he drew away. Restlessness seemed in his blood, for he kept walking to and fro as they talked, pausing sometimes as though to think.
“Does the woman Jael know anything of this?”
“She knows everything. It was she who saved your life by tampering with the charges.”
“She knew the girl had pistols?”
“Yes—by watching through the hole in the wainscoting. She saw where Barbara kept them, and found a key to fit the coffer. Jael seemed to have foreseen something, for to-night she found that the pistols were no longer there.”
My lord turned to the table where the steel barrels glistened in the candle-light. He picked them up and looked at them closely, a deep pucker of thought upon his forehead.
“Who would have thought that the girl had so much devil in her! I tell you, Nan, she must have been playing with us all these years, watching and waiting, and pretending to be asleep. And it was a narrow thing, by God! But for that woman of yours, I should be lying there, where—”
He did not complete the sentence, but broke off abruptly, for the conscious shock seemed to strike him more heavily now the intensity of the moment had passed. He looked white about the mouth, and his eyes had a hard, scared wrath in them that made them ugly.
Anne Purcell turned on the window-seat to look at him, and then covered her face with her hand.
“She said that the stain is still there. And it is—”
“Fiddle-faddle! What of that, Nan?” And the evil spirit in him flashed out fiercely. “The girl has cornered us. It is no time for whimpering.”
He recovered his serene and cynical poise almost instantly, and, putting two fingers in the pocket of his embroidered vest, drew out the curb of gold with its knot of pearls.
“This little thing came very near ending everything. I shall give it no second chance. Like the easy fool I am I put that cloak away and forgot it, never suspecting that it had left such a clew behind. Jack turned it out of an old chest when he came home shirtless from sea, and wore it that night at Hortense’s. It was only when we got home that I noticed the thing, and talked him into surrendering it. She must have cross-questioned him. And, by the prophets of Israel, Jack was near having a bullet in his heart! She said she told him nothing. God grant that’s true. Jack’s a man with a tight mouth and a kind of grimness that sails straight in the face of a storm.”
He paused, staring hard at the flame of one of the candles, and tossing the chain up and down in his palm.
“What are you going to do, Stephen?”
“Do?” And his face darkened, although so close to the light. “Keep the Spanish fury out of danger. What can you desire—”
She stretched out an arm to him, her face rigid with dread.
“No, not again, Stephen. I cannot bear it—I will not—”
“There, there,” and he laughed, “how you women leap at conclusions! There is no such serious need. But I value my neck too much, and yours, my dear, to let her run at large.”
“Then how?”
He looked down at her steadily.
“The girl is mad.”
“Barbara!”
“Yes, mad, poor thing, as a March hare. Mad! Drink the word in, and live on it. Mad—mad! This wild scarecrow of a suspicion is nothing but a shadow on the brain, a shadow of distortion and madness brought on by poor Lionel’s death. There are some of us to swear to that, and our words carry more weight and volume than the ravings of a girl. Mrs. Jael must be worth her money. The whole affair will be very simple. Thank Heaven, son Jack is in the country! I can bleed him and doctor him when he returns.”
Anne Purcell watched him with a trace of wonder in her eyes. The man was so many-sided, such an actor, such a cynic.
“Then—”
“She must be treated as one gone mad, yet discreetly and gently, as though the family niceness were to be considered. No idle talking, no news about town. Yet being dangerous, even, perhaps, against herself—mark that, Nan!—she must be put under soft restraint in some quiet corner where she can do no harm.”
He spoke so shrewdly, and with such a meaning between the words that Anne Purcell again looked scared.
“No whips, Stephen, and all those things. I have heard—”
“Tush, my love, am I a fool?”
“But—”
He opened his arms to her, with an impulse of tenderness and strong appeal.
“Now, sweetheart, trust me. We have been too much to each other, you and I. Look at me, Nan; what I am I am because you are what you are. We are on the edge of a cliff. Don’t tell me that I must drag you over.”
He played to the woman in her, yet not without real feeling. She rose to him, and for a moment he had her in his arms.
“There. You understand, Nan, why I want to live. It is for your sake as well as mine, though I shall not see fifty again. We cannot help ourselves. And I tell you the girl is mad. I have said so to others before it came to this.”
My lord put her gently out of his arms, and led her with some majesty back to the window-seat.
“You must know, Nan, that this will be de prerogativa regis—that is to say, it will be the chancellor’s affair, and he is an easy man to manage. As to a private inquiry, we can probably slip by it—with Christian discretion. The point is—that the unfortunate subject is confined in custody under the care of her nearest friends or kinsfolk.”
Anne Purcell began to understand.
“But there may still be danger in it.”
“No; trust me; very little. It can be done quietly. There is your place of Thorn.”
“Thorn! Why, it is half in ruins, and no one ever goes there.”
“Nan, my sweet, are you a fool?”
“No, Stephen; but—”
“The country air and food, and contact with some simple couple—what more could the poor wench wish for? An old house in the deeps of Sussex, seven miles from a town. Why, it is made for such a case.”
She looked at him helplessly, for her selfish worldliness had received a shock that night.
“There is no other way?”
“None, unless you wish to feel a silk rope round your neck, my dear.”
They said little more that night, my lord putting on a cloak to hide his powder-blackened coat, and kissing her very kindly before he went. He gave her a few words of warning, commended Mrs. Jael to her, and spoke of the money that should be forthcoming. Barbara was to see no one but Mrs. Jael and her mother. They were to keep her locked in her room till my lord should bring a physician whom he could trust to inquire into the state of the girl’s mind.
Yet there was one thought that haunted Stephen Gore as he walked home alone by the light of the moon without a single torch to keep him company and scare away footpads: it was possible that the girl might turn against herself. And though he tried not to hanker after the chance, he knew how it would simplify the tangle. Barbara’s window stood some height from the ground, and there were no bars to it. My lord remembered these details before he went to bed. He was careful to show the man Rogers his blackened coat, and to tell him that he had been fired at by some villain, but that the ball had missed him by some mercy of God.
Mrs. Jael came down from her attic next day soon after dawn, her eyes red and suffused, her bosom full of sentimental sighings. She went about the house, blubbering ostentatiously in odd corners, dabbing with her handkerchief, and setting all the servants spying on her.
Yet all she would say was:
“Poor dear, poor sweet! The brain is turned over in her. And so young, too! I always was afeard of it, she took it so to heart. Oh, dear Lord, what a sad world it is, surely! The poor child’s made me ten years older.”
And then she would shuffle away, jerking her fat shoulders and trying to smother sobs, so that every servant in the house knew that something strange had happened, and were ready to hear of anything—and to accept it as an interesting fact.
XX
John Gore, riding over the yellow stubbles with some burly farmer at his side, seemed very far from the stately littlenesses of Whitehall. For, next to the open sea, John Gore had always loved the open country, either moor, field, or forest, so long as the eye could take in some sweeping distance. He loved, also, the smell of the soil, the byres, and the old farm-houses with the scent of the hay and the fragrant breath of cattle at milking-time. Much of his boyhood clung to the memories of it all, where the play of lights and shadows upon the moors made the purples and greens and gold as glorious as the colors of sky and sea at sunset.
John Gore had inherited these Yorkshire lands from his mother, who had been able to will them to him by right of title. Her marriage with Lord Gore had not been a happy one, for he had been too desirous of pleasing all women, while she was a lady of sweet earnestness who would have given her heart’s blood for a man—had he been worthy. Her character appeared to have mastered my lord’s, for her nature ousted his from the soul of their only child—a boy, John Gore. She had died in her Junetide while the lad was schooling at the great school of Winchester, leaving her property in trust for him till he should come of age.
Shirleys, for such was the name of the manor-house and the park, had been leased to a city merchant, a man who had trudged to London as a Yorkshire lad, and driven out of it as Sir Peter in a coach-and-six. The farms and holdings were under the eye of a steward, Mr. Isaac Swindale, a lawyer at Tadcaster. The whole estate was worth a good sum yearly to John Gore, and it was with the money, therefore, that he had bought and fitted out theSparhawk, and sailed in her as gentleman adventurer into strange seas.
John Gore passed some days at Shirleys as Sir Peter Hanson’s guest, for his mother had died in the old house, and he had wished to see the place after the passing of three years. Perhaps his heart went out the more to the memory of that dead mother because she had taught him to reverence women, and given him that most precious thing that a man can have: the power to love deeply and with all the tenderness that makes love stronger even than death. The gardens and the walks were just as in his mother’s day, for John Gore had stipulated that nothing should be meddled with, and the flowering shrubs and the herb borders were there as she had left them.
The spirit of the place seemed full of sympathy for him that September. Its memories had a restfulness that touched him even more than of old. For the thought of his mother bending her pale, serious face over the rose-bushes and the green ferns where the roach pool lay seemed more dear and vivid to him because of that other thing that had taken birth within his heart. He felt that he would have given much to have walked with his mother through those little coppices and the green aisles of the orchard where the Lent-lilies dashed the April winds with gold, and to have talked to her as a son can sometimes talk to a mother, even though he be a grown man with the tan of the wide world upon his face. So near did her spiritual presence seem to him that he would not go to kneel before the stately tomb in the chantry at the church, feeling that she lived in the place that she had loved, and not under that mass of alabaster and of marble that covered the mere dust.
For John Gore had found the one woman in the world who could make the heart grow great with awe in him—as with the awe of unsailed seas. It was sweet even to be so far away from her that he might feel the dream-lure drawing him amid those Yorkshire moors. The memory of his mother shared in the tenderness thereof, as though she had breathed into him at birth that soul of hers that could love even in sadness and regret.
John Gore spent two weeks upon his land, walking in the gardens and the park of Shirleys, and talking to Sir Peter of the great ships and the trade routes, and the doings of the Dutch in the East Indies. Sir Peter and his wife were a grave and homely couple without children, whose simple dignity hurt none of his recollections. Or he would ride over the various farms, finding old friends among the farmers and the men, inquiring into his tenants’ affairs, and ready to sit down and take his dinner in the great kitchens with the country folk and their children. For John Gore was more at home in an ingle-nook, with some little Yorkshire maid on his knee, than idling in his father’s painted salon with a score of somebodies trying to seem more splendid and more witty than either their estates or their brains could justify.
Now John Gore dreamed a quaint dream the last night that he lay at Shirleys in the very room where his mother had died. He dreamed that he was at sea again, and sitting in the stern-sheets of a boat that was being rowed in toward an unknown shore. It was all vivid and real to him—the heave of each billow under the boat, the dash through the surf, the men leaping out and dragging the boat up on the sand. He crossed the beach alone, drawing toward a little grove of palms whose green plumes were clear and breathless against a tropical sky. And as he neared the grove a woman came out from among the straight boles of the palm-trees, and that woman was his mother.
There is no astonishment in dreams, and John Gore went toward her as though she had not known death, and as though there was nothing strange in finding her there where palm-trees grew in lieu of elms and birches.
But she held up her hands to him, and cried:
“Go back—go back!”
Then there was the sound like the ringing shot of a carbine, and he woke in the room at Shirleys, wondering whether there were thieves in the house, and whether the old merchant knight had used a musket or a pistol upon the marauders.
Yet though believers in dreams might have sworn that his brain had caught an echo of some tragedy that concerned him deeply, how little John Gore thought of the dream may be judged by the fact that he went back to bed, after sallying forth with a candle and a horse-pistol to reconnoitre, and slept till the servant drew back the curtains to let in the sun. For the episode of Barbara Purcell’s expiation had become a thing of the past by the time John Gore reached Shirleys.
The day following the affair in the music-room, Stephen Gore drove a jaundice-faced old gentleman in his coach to the house in Pall Mall. They talked gravely together on the road, the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles compelling them to mouth their words almost in each other’s ears. The old gentleman wore a white periwig, and a kind of gown or cassock of black silk, beneath which protruded a very thin pair of legs ending in clumsy square-toed shoes. The top of his long cane was made to carry snuff, and the whole front of his silk gown appeared blotched with the powder. His long nose prying out from his shrewd face gave one the impression that the habit of snuff-taking had lengthened it abnormally. The skin over either cheek-bone was mottled with small blue veins, and his mouth, long and curved like a half-moon, made one wonder whether he was smiling or sneering.
My lord had explained the nature of the case to Dr. Hemstruther, adopting a tone of paternal and chivalrous concern that he contradicted on several occasions by a majestic wink. The physician was a quaint character, for he combined in himself two vices that might have been considered mutually opposed. Yet the resulting energy that arose from the friction between these two passions, the love of precious stones and the love of the eternal feminine, inspired Dr. Hemstruther with a lust to grab every gold Carolus he could lay his fingers to. He was a man of great repute, and had made money out of “back-stairs secrets,” though the apothecaries and the midwives hated him, swearing that he knew more than a mere physician should.
Now this shrewd, snuffy, peaky-faced little man was ushered about twelve o’clock into Barbara Purcell’s room, with my lady and Mrs. Jael to act as guards. The curtains were drawn, and Barbara, dressed in simple black, with her hair upon her shoulders, was lying, in the dim light, on her bed. She sat up and looked at them with her large eyes as they entered—heavy, languid eyes, that seemed to have been empty of sleep.
Dr. Hemstruther made a little bow to her, handed his hat and cane to Mrs. Jael, tossed back one of the curtains, and drew a chair up toward the bed. He sat down, keeping his eyes fixed on Barbara’s face, and sniffing from time to time as though he missed his snuff.
“So you are not feeling in good health, my dear young lady.”
He had a soft, silky voice, easy to swallow as good wine. Barbara, seated on the bed, stared at him and said nothing. It was easy to see that the girl had suffered greatly, either in mind or body, for the youth seemed to have left her face, leaving it blanched, lined, and very weary. Her eyes looked doubly big because of the shadows under them, and her lips were no longer firmly pressed together. The strain of her sacrifice had broken the heart in her, and she had fallen into a stupor like one whose brain has been numbed by frost.
Dr. Hemstruther considered her with his clever eyes.
“Can you sleep, my dear?” he asked her, at last.
“No.”
She was only dimly conscious that her mother and Mrs. Jael were in the room, and who the little man was she hardly had the will to wonder.
“What is it that keeps you from sleep at night?”
“Oh, thoughts—and other things.”
“Perhaps you hear voices?”
She looked at him vaguely.
“Yes, voices.”
“And they talk to you?”
“Sometimes. There are often voices with one, are there not?”
Dr. Hemstruther rubbed his hands together, forgetting to sniff for a minute or more, a lapse that the sentimental Jael mended.
“Are they the voices of people whom you know?”
“Sometimes.”
“And perhaps you hear bells ringing, and other such sounds? Do you ever see the people who talk to you at night?”
She maintained an indolent yet questioning silence. Dr. Hemstruther repeated the question.
“Yes, I have fancied it,” she answered; “one can fancy so many things in the dark.”
Dr. Hemstruther gave a jerk of the chin as though to emphasize this as a fact worth noting. He drew his chair nearer, and, taking her hand, looked at it attentively, rubbing the skin with his thumb-nail. Then he asked her a few more questions, keeping his eyes on hers, and watching her with the alertness of a hawk.
My lady and Mrs. Jael saw the girl’s eyelids begin to quiver. When Dr. Hemstruther spoke to her she did not answer him, but sat rigid, like a cataleptic, her face betraying no feeling and no intelligence. She remained in some such posture till the old man rose and pushed back his chair. Then a deep breath seemed to come from her with a great sigh, and the lashes closed over her eyes so that she appeared asleep.
Dr. Hemstruther watched her for a while, and then turned to Anne Purcell with an expression of sympathetic gravity upon his face.
“She is best left alone, madam, at present.”
And he marched out at my lady’s heels, Mrs. Jael following and carrying his hat and cane.
Dr. Hemstruther had satisfied a pliant conscience with regard to the nature of the case. He sat—much at his ease—in one of the leather-seated chairs in the room that had been Lionel Purcell’s library, and declared his conviction that the girl was of unsound mind.
“I can understand, madam,” he said, with a courtly little bob of the wig to my lady, “how much exercised you are in mind over your daughter’s sanity. At present it is the calm after the storm, the cool dew after the fire of noon. The pulse is depressed, the brain almost torpid, and she did not even hear some of the things I said. Then you heard her confess to hearing voices; that is a very common and significant symptom. My experience goes to prove that some of these cases are the most dangerous and distressing.”
He nodded his head, took snuff with emotion, and looked under half-lowered eyelids at my lord.
“The young gentlewoman must be most carefully watched. It would be expedient to have non compos mentis proven. That gives her guardians the very necessary power to have her cared for and restrained in some safe place.”
He was merely advising what he knew Stephen Gore desired in the matter of advice. There was sufficient on which to swear that the girl’s mental state was not healthy. Young gentlewomen who fired pistols and made wild accusations against old and honorable friends could scarcely be regarded as either sane or safe.
“Then you advise us to apply for powers of custody and restraint.”
“Assuredly, my lord, for the patient’s sake. She cannot be trusted not to turn against herself. I would suggest that you send her into the country and put her in charge of some capable relative—some sensible maiden aunt, let us say.” And his mouth curved with huge self-satisfaction.
“You prefer the country?”
“Far away from all distractions and all cares. Perfect rest, and a convent life. Then I may hope that God’s grace will heal her.” And he rose with a bow to my lady.
Stephen Gore touched him on the shoulder.
“Supposing that one of those violent fits should occur? A dose of soothing physic, eh?”
“Certainly, my lord, certainly. I will have it compounded and despatched to you without delay.”
That same afternoon Stephen Gore drove out in his two-horse coach, and called on no less a person than Sir Heneage Finch, the Keeper of the Great Seal. My lord and the chancellor happened to be well disposed toward each other for the moment, and Stephen Gore approached him as a friend with an air of grief and of concern. He spoke most movingly about “the child.” It was a sad affair, and might have been far sadder but for the mercy of God. Dr. Hemstruther had seen Mistress Barbara Purcell that morning, and given it as his opinion that she was of unsound mind. He had advised immediate seclusion and restraint, warning them that unless she was watched and guarded she might do some damage to herself.
My lord’s sympathies were importunate and appealing. It would be less humiliating for both the mother and the daughter if the thing could be done quietly, and without noise or scandal. The chancellor, being an amiable man, and not proof against sentiment on occasions, declared himself ready to agree. Yet since it was a question of the King’s prerogative, his Majesty would have the matter laid before him quietly; that was the only formality that would be needed, and no very serious one, for the King was grateful to people who took business off his hands, provided they did not relieve him also of the perquisites.
In three days the whole affair was settled, thanks to my lord’s briskness and influence—and his ability to pay. On the third evening he was carried in a sedan to the house in Pall Mall, and spent more than an hour with my lady in her salon. He had made his plans, and all that the mother had to do was to agree with him and to commend him for his ingenuity.
“We had better travel at once,” he said, when they had talked over every detail; “we can take her in a closed coach. And the nurse and her man can come with us; they are both trustworthy people. You say that there are only a gardener and his wife at Thorn? They must be pensioned and discharged.”
“Yes, no one else.”
“We must have the girl mewed up before Jack comes back. I shall be able to deal with him. He must not know where we have hidden her.”
“No; but should he—”
“Prove obstinate! We must find a substitute, or pack him off to sea again. The man has a roving disposition. But listen—in your ear, Nan: I have discovered some one who has taken a sudden liking to Captain John.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Not poor Barbara—she does not count.”
“No, no; but Hortense.”
My lady looked at him with open eyes.
“Hortense! Why, she has only seen him perhaps twice in her life. And then—?”
“His Majesty? Oh, Mr. Charles is—well, her banker. It would be like Hortense; it is the blood, and the southern fire in her.”
“But how do you know this?”
He flipped her playfully on the chin.
“How long have I lived in the world, Nan, and how much do I know about women?”
XXI
Ablustering, cheerless wind beat up over the hills as John Gore rode the last five miles of a three days’ journey, and saw the vague glimmer of the distant city clinging to the loops of the river Thames. Scudding clouds made the sky cold and full of a gray hurrying unrest, though it was splashed toward the west with stormy gouts of gold.
John Gore rode over the heathlands, with the furze-bushes shivering as the wind swished through them; and the sandy road was dry and adrift with dust, although the sky looked so wet and sullen. The servant behind him on the cob kept a sharp eye cocked on the hollows of the heath and the knolls of furze, and nursed his blunderbuss for comfort, though his face looked as red and as round as the sunny side of an apple. Here and there clumps of stunted hollies jostled each other, their whisperings making the evening seem doubly gray and dreary. An unhallowed dusk was creeping over the landscape—an unhallowed dusk that made travellers imagine footpads lurking behind the thorn-bushes or the furze.
As they trotted downhill a solitary horseman came creeping up a side track, with his cloak blowing about him and his beaver over his nose. John Gore had a hand ready for a pistol, and the man Tom began to nudge the butt of his blunderbuss against his knee. Yet the stranger appeared more scared of them than they of him, for he went skimming like a swallow into the dusk, itching for his own chimney glow and the warm side of a safely barred door.
John Gore had come by an instinctive distrust of the man Tom’s forefinger. He pulled up, and sent him ahead.
“I shall be safer at your back, Tom, with that tool of yours ready to roar like a boy at the sight of the birch.”
Tom obeyed him with rather a shamefaced grin, for thirty miles south of Shirleys his blunderbuss had exploded at two in the afternoon, the road running through a wood with a stray cow pushing through the hazel-bushes. A scattering of slugs and buckshot had pattered into the grass beside John Gore’s horse; for Tom’s forefinger had a habit of crooking itself for comfort round the trigger when the road wound into shady bottoms. And if an owl screeched at dusk along a hedge-row, Thomas would give such a start in the saddle that it was a mere turn of the coin whether the flint would come sparking on the powder in the pan.
It was growing very gray in the west when they came by Edgeware toward Hyde Park, and soon saw the spires of Westminster like faint streaks against a fainter sky. The lights that were looking up in the gathering twilight had a heartening, warming twinkle. Tom slung his blunderbuss by a strap over his shoulder, and began to look buxom and bold enough—as though he already sniffed a hot supper and felt the ale-mug tickling his beard. They came without event toward St. James’s, Charing Village, and Whitehall, and all that sweet savor of courtliness where great gentlemen and roguish “maids of honor” drank wine and let the warmth thereof mount into their eyes.
To John Gore the whole purlieu of the palaces had a mystic glow—a glow that the romance of the heart throws out like a June sun over an Old-World garden. His thoughts were very different from those of red-faced Tom, who may have associated the ogle of a pair of merry eyes with the glint of a pewter pot; for John Gore forgot a twenty-mile hunger at a glimpse of the dim trees of St. James’s and the imagined gleam of Rosamond’s Pool. And hunger in a strong man is an earnest pleader. Therefore, romance had the greater glory, and even so the queen thereof—a girl in a black dress, with white bosom and white arms, and eyes so sombre that the sorrow of the world might have sunk therein.
The lower windows of my Lord Gore’s house were aglow as John Gore and his man rode up St. James’s Street with a homeward clatter over the stones. The iron gates leading into the court-yard at the side of the house stood open, and in the yard itself several coaches were standing without their horses, and a couple of sedan-chairs in one corner with the poles piled against the wall. Yet though there was as much talking going on as in the parlor of a river-side tavern, there was not such a thing as a servant to be seen.
As John Gore rolled out of the saddle, being a little stiff after three days’ riding, a couple of red faces were poked out of the near window of one of the coaches. The postilions and footmen had taken their master’s places, issued invitations to the chairmen and the grooms, and were all much at their ease with the beer-mugs passing round, and one of my lord’s cook-boys playing “powder-monkey,” and running round from coach to coach with a great can and an apron full of bread and cheese. In one of the carriages that was upholstered in orange and blue a fat chairman had stuck a farthing candle on the prong of a dung-fork, and so arranged the primitive candle-stand by leaning it against the door that the company within had a light to drink by, though the upholsterings might suffer from the droppings of the tallow. Even my lord’s grooms were making familiar with plush and scarlet cloth and stamped leather, with their heavy stable-boots planted where a satin slipper or a silver-buckled shoe alone had the right of repose.
The impudent roguery of it so tickled John Gore that he gave the two men at the near window a gruff “Goodevening,” coarsening his voice so that they should think him one of themselves.
“Hallo! Be that you, Sam Gibbs?”
“Samuel it is, old codger. Liquor going?”
“A hogshead full. Come inside; there’s room for a porker.”
John Gore laughed. It was dark in the yard, and the men could not recognize him.
“Whose coach?” he asked.
“This ’ere? Old Porteus Panter’s. And pant he would, the liquoring old scoundrel, if he knew what honest fellows were warming his cushions. Come along in, lad. Skin o’ my eyes, where’s that damned boy with the beer?”
“I’ll go and clap the horses in, and come and clink mugs.”
He walked toward the stables, leading his horse by the bridle. Catching the man Tom while he was still staring at the dim but vociferous vehicles in the yard, he slapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“Keep mum, Tom, my lad. There is some fun here. Put the horses in, and swing your heels on the manger for half an hour.”
John Gore managed to slip into the house by the garden entry, and making his way along a passage, reached the door of the dining-room without meeting any of my lord’s servants. Supper was over, and the gentlemen were at their wine, and talking so hard that a company of carol-singers might have struck up in the court-yard without being noticed. John Gore turned the handle and walked in—top-boots, riding-cloak, and all, dusty, and a little hot. His father sat with his back to him at the head of the long table, with some dozen guests talking and drinking on either side hereof.
Seated on Stephen Gore’s right hand was one of the gentlemen who had been at Bushy those few days in the summer. He was the first to recognize the intruder, and welcomed him with a laugh and an upraised glass of wine.
“All hail, John Gore! Here are we, all on the right side of the table—as yet!”
John Gore’s eyes were fixed upon his father. He saw him turn sharply with the look of a man who sees in a mirror the face of an enemy behind his chair. He was on his feet almost instantly, his buxom face pleasant as a glass goblet full of Spanish wine.
“Jack, my lad, this is well timed! We are all friends here, or should be. Gentlemen, my son, Captain John Gore, just out of the saddle from Yorkshire. Never mind your boots, boy. You have a hungry look, and a dry look. Pull the bell-rope, Launce, and I’ll thank you. Supper is the song that a man wants to hear after a hard day’s ride.”
A boy in a pink velvet coat, and with the grand airs of a lord chamberlain, rose and offered John Gore his chair. The sea-captain bowed to the youngster in turn, though the child’s attitude of condescension was vastly quaint to a man who had dared more adventures in one year than the young fop would meet in a lifetime.
“You seem to have left a great many of your friends outside in the cold, gentlemen,” he said, still standing, and looking down the long table; “my father has enough chairs, and more than enough liquor.”
His coming had brought a momentary lull with it, and not a few of the gentry at the table were staring with some curiosity at a man who had seen the inside of a Barbary prison.
My lord caught his son’s words.
“What’s that you are saying, Jack?”
“These gentlemen have left some of their friends outside in their coaches. Sir Porteus, sir,” and he bowed to an apoplectic old fellow with a fringe of white hair and a tonsure like a monk’s, “there are people in your carriage. I trust you have not been too modest.”
The baronet stared boozily across the table.
“People in my coach, sir?”
“Certainly. And drinking small-beer when they should be drinking sherry.”
John Gore had such a stern and serious way with him at times that casual acquaintances might have set him down as a Puritan, with none of the sly, jesting spirit behind his swarthy and imperturbable face.
“I assure you, sir, there were gentlemen seated inside your coach. My father’s house is not so niggardly—”
Stephen Gore caught his son’s eye and twinkled. A servant came in at the same opportune moment, having taken fully three minutes to answer the bell.
“Here, Jeremy, sirrah, Sir Porteus has left some gentlemen to wait in his coach. Desire them to join us; my table is big enough.”
The man stared, and then appeared in a great hurry to go about his master’s business. But my lord hindered him.
“Jeremy, you rascal, come here. Pardon me, Porteus”—and my lord assumed his most impressive manner—“perhaps you had better call these friends of yours in to us.”
“I should recommend the other gentlemen to do likewise,” said John Gore, gravely; “Sir Porteus is not the only culprit. The more the merrier.”
The curiosity of the whole room appeared piqued. Several of my lord’s guests pushed their chairs back and made toward the door. But what Sir Porteus and the rest of them said when they poked their heads into the windows of their respective coaches no one but a hostler could possibly confess. The tallow dip on the pitchfork was knocked over by a judicious fist, but not before it had gutted all down the cushions of the door. There was a sudden exodus of stable boots and small clothes into the dark, and from the whistling and hissing in the stable any innocent man might have imagined that horses had never been so carefully rubbed down after a two-mile drive. The boy with the beer-can was the only thing captured, and most unjustly cuffed because his ears happened to be at the right level for the easy exercise of a gentleman’s hand.
It was well after midnight before Stephen Gore and his son were left alone in the great dining-room, with the air thick with the fumes of tobacco and of wine. John Gore opened the windows that faced the street. His father was standing by the Jacobean fireplace, with one elbow on the ledge of the carved oak over-mantel and the stump of a little brown cigarro between his fingers. He was frowning to himself, and looking at the dying fire upon the irons, for a log fire had been burning, though it was still September.
John Gore pulled out a short clay pipe and a tortoise-shell box from a pocket. He filled the pipe leisurely, and lit it with a splinter of burning wood that he picked up with the tongs.
“Well, Johnny, how is Yorkshire?”
My lord, like a father, showed no discretion or sense of proportion either in the diminutives or in the vernacular renderings of his son’s name. Moreover, the Yorkshire moors were very far away, and a more vivid vista blotted them into the distance.
“Shirleys has changed very little. They have a new pump in the village. All the farms are in good fettle. Swindale seems as honest as such men ever are.”
My lord appeared distraught and preoccupied.
“How are old Peter Hanson and his woman? Does she still wear a farthingale?”
“Well—as ever, like the solid north country folk they are. I have no news, save that the new pump’s leaden snout was cut off the first week it was put up, and that a couple of deer were shot at Shirleys three days afterward. How have things passed here—in the world?”
My lord put his cigarro to his lips, drew a deep breath, and expelled the smoke slowly, watching it curve under the hood of the chimney.
“Oh, somewhat sadly. I have a thing to tell you, Jack.”
John Gore’s face darkened perceptibly.
“News?”
“Yes. After all, it may not concern you much—at least—I trust not. We all have our little impulses, our chance inclinations. Do you remember, Jack, something I said to you in this very room the night you fought Phil Pembroke?”
John Gore remembered that something very keenly. His eyes betrayed as much.
“Does it concern Barbara Purcell?”
My lord gave him one look, and then threw the stump of his cigarro into the fire.
“It does, poor child. She has gone stark mad. There’s the blunt truth, Jack. If I have hit you hard, take it in the face like a man—and forget.”
XXII
John Gore asked few questions that night, but went to his room with a silent and impenetrable air that refused to betray any inward bleeding of the heart. His reserve challenged my lord to decide whether the son was really unconcerned, or whether he hid what he might feel beneath a casual surface. For Stephen Gore had spoken with great pathos of this “maid’s tragedy,” and had tempted his son with a display of sympathy to make some sentimental confession of faith.
But John Gore had knocked his pipe out against the hood of the fireplace, pulled off his heavy boots, and pretended that he was sleepy after a forty-mile ride and a good supper. He had taken one of the candles from the table and gone to his room, leaving his father no wiser as to what the son felt or what he knew.
John Gore did not sleep that night, despite the September wind over the open country and the dust that had been blown into his eyes. He had left my lord that he might be alone, and escape that parental curiosity and concern that grated upon the raw surface of his consciousness. For, strong man that he was, he had felt sick at heart over the news of the girl’s madness; it had come as a shock at the end of a day of dreams; sudden as a musket-ball lodged beneath the ribs, making him faint with the pain of it and with an inward flow of blood. In those few seconds, when his father had spoken to him, he had realized how deeply he had pledged himself to that mystery of mysteries. It had laid bare the truth to him as a knife lays bare the bleeding heart of a pomegranate.
John Gore left the candle burning and sat at the open window, his arms crossed upon the window-ledge. It was the attitude of one whose eyes gazed out into the night with sadness and great awe, while the soul went down into the deeps to drink bitterness bravely to the dregs and gain new strength thereby. He was still there, fully dressed, when the candle guttered in the candlestick, throwing up spasmodic gleams of light before dying into the dark. The dawn came up and found him there, like one who has kept watch all night on the deck of a great ship before a battle.
With men who live the life of action the coming of each new day brings a fresh impulse and fresh inspiration. John Gore seemed to throw off the stupor of the night as the grayness of the dawn deepened into bands of blue and gold across the east. He shook himself, dashed cold water over his head and face, and, putting on fresh linen and new clothes, went down into the house before a servant so much as stirred. Opening the street door, he met the dewy breath of the morning and all the silent and gradual glamour of the dawn. He was not the man to mope and write sonnets in a corner, or to surrender a strenuous will to feeble speculation. Wandering down to the river, he hired a waterman who happened to be industriously early with a pot of paint down by Charing Stairs, and, making the man row him into mid-stream, he stripped and plunged, and swam a good half-mile with the tide, feeling the fitter for it in body and heart.
Returning, he breakfasted alone, and, inquiring from the man Rogers, learned that my lord had rung for his morning cup of chocolate, which he always drank in bed. He heard also the account of how Sparkin had been sent to school some days ago, for John Gore had entered the youngster as a boarder at St. Paul’s. He had been packed off, as Mr. Rogers described it, like a pressed man to a king’s ship, swearing that he would desert at the first chance, and cut the servant’s throat who had had the insolence to drag him schoolward by the collar. But Rogers, who had been sent by my lord to inquire after the child, confessed that he had found Sparkin more resigned to his fate. He had fought three fights in as many days, and been royally licked in the last encounter. Defeat seemed to have decided Mr. Sparkin to remain, in order to be avenged as honor and the prestige of the past demanded.
My lord was luxuriously at his ease, leaning against a pile of pillows in the four-post bed, when his son paid him a morning call. He lost a little of his dignity in a silk nightcap and a black velvet bed-gown as elaborately belaced as some priestly vestment. But Stephen Gore was still the great gentleman, the man of affairs, the dispenser of favors, as the litter on the quilt testified—letters, pamphlets, a needy poet’s new book of poems, bills, petitions, and what not. The man Rogers was laying out shirts, stockings, and silk underwear—preparing for that most solemn ceremonial, the sacrament of the toilet.
“You can leave us, Rogers, for half an hour. If any of my people call, keep them waiting till I ring.”
John Gore had opened the window, and stood looking down into the little garden at the back of the house.
“My dear Johann, I am not seasoned, like you, to sea breezes. Please pity my gray hairs, my son. I allow no draughts till I have gotten me my periwig. Hum—ha, what’s this! Will your honor put such and such a matter before the Duke of York? Yes, of course, dirty work, as usual. Let it bide. I hope you have got rid of the saddle-ache, Jack, my fellow. My business hour—this; look at all this infernal paper; it is an amazing pity that so many people should learn to write.”
He was picking up letters and papers, and tossing them aside, stopping now and again to scribble notes upon his tablets.
“I had a secretary, Jack, for a year, but I distrust the tribe. I find that they are always selling one’s secrets behind one’s back. Is this a filial visit, or am I to include it among my business?”
John Gore was watching his father with those dark, intent eyes of his.
“I want to speak to you about Barbara Purcell.”
My lord threw his tablets upon the bed, and looked at his son with questioning keenness. It was still of vital interest to him to discover whether this sea-rover had lost his heart or no.
“Tell me one thing first, Jack. Had you any strong fancy for the girl?”
“It is four months since I smelled the sea, sir.”
“Then she had some flavor for you—beyond the mere scent of a petticoat?”
“Yes, a good deal more than that.”
His father regarded him with sympathetic solemnity. Yet my lord’s attitude betrayed the fact that even a clever man of the world may prove shallowly pompous in dealing with a son.
“I gave you all the information I have, Jack, last night. If you care to see the pistol-mark the poor child made on me, the coat is hanging in that cupboard.”
John Gore kept his place.
“You said, sir, that she believed that you knew the name of her father’s murderer.”
“Some such madness, Jack. But I can assure you that it was a most unholy, startling incident. I can see her now standing like a young figure of Fate, with a pistol in her hand and her eyes like two live coals. I told her to go to bed, and then she fired at me. Southern blood—Southern blood! Not that I bear any malice against the poor thing, John, though she was so near sending me to my account with all my sins upon my head. What more do you want to know?”
“Where she is.”
My lord pushed some of the papers aside with a trace of impatience.
“Safe, and well cared for, Jack. Dr. Hemstruther’s commands. We applied to the Chancery—”
“Where, sir, did you say?”
“The child has everything that can make life easy.”
“You have not told me yet, sir, where she is.”
My lord swung to one side of the bed, and, putting an arm round the carved corner-post, looked straight into his son’s face.
“You want to know the one thing, Jack, that I have not the least intention of telling you.”
“And why not, sir?”
“Why not!” And Stephen Gore threw himself back again upon the pillows with some of the dramatic action that he could make appear so natural. “Look you, most obstinate of bulkheads, do you care one brass culverin for the girl? Answer me that.”
There was no need for the answer; my lord galloped on.
“Do you want her to come by her reason and her right mind again? You will protest that you do. Of course. Once more, John, my son, would you like to see your love making mouths at you, gnawing her bib, and perhaps shouting like a fish-wife? You will protest, perhaps, that you do not.”
John Gore stood very still about two paces from his father’s bed. His eyes had a gleam of fierceness in them, for even the possible truth filled him with an impulse to strike the man who uttered it. My lord, who was watching him as a swordsman watches his enemy’s eye, changed his tactics abruptly, and held out an appealing hand like an orator pleading for a reasonable understanding.
“Don’t glare at me, Jack, my boy, as though I had called some one a bona roba. If I have struck hard, it is for your good. Understand that I am not an old fool, and that I have some sense. You are one of those men who love a woman with the same headlong fierceness with which you would board an enemy’s ship. Look at the matter through my eyes. You would only harm the girl by seeing her, for, by God’s providence, she may recover if we rest her as we rest inflamed eyes in the dark. It would only hurt your heart, Jack, if you were to see her as she is now. That is why I am minded to keep temptation out of your way.”
He threw himself back again upon the pillows, for he had been leaning forward like a preacher over a pulpit rail.
“You must trust me, my son. Some day you may thank me for this. I may be pardoned for wishing the best in life for you, for though you may think me a wild old worldling, even a courtier, Jack, may have a heart.”
He spoke with such a burst of manliness and emotion that John Gore bent over his father’s hand.
“You are in the right, sir, and I thank you.”
And he went out from my lord’s room touched to the heart, and awed a little by the sudden fervor of this great gentleman of the court whose flippant splendor had so much of the simpler, braver manhood.
Yet so strange and mercurial a thing is temperament that Stephen Gore lay back upon his pillows when his son had gone with the drawn look of a man caught by some spasm of a faltering heart. He forgot for the moment to ring for Rogers, but sat staring straight before him, his hands moving amid the papers on the quilt. For my Lord Gore, like many a man embarked on crooked courses, was very human, as such men often are. He could not forever be callous in hypocrisy, and a touch of tenderness lurks like a faint red glow amid the cold embers of every heart.
Stephen Gore felt a sudden pity for his son that morning. Something drew him toward that silent, brown-faced man, so strong and yet so simple—so wise, and yet so ready to believe. Yet what was the use of soliloquizing over broken pitchers and squandered wine? He had entered an alley in which there was no turning, and those who hindered him must be brushed aside. To hesitate would only plunge all those concerned into bitterer complexities, and perhaps into deeper guilt. And yet he could not forget that look in his son’s eyes, for the man trusted him, and the man was his own son.
“Crooked corners are best left crooked,” he said to himself, at last, as he reached out a hand toward the bell-rope. “After all, he need not make an Arabella Stewart of the girl; there are handsomer and better-tempered women by the score.—Come along, Rogers; I am late as it is. Put my plum-colored suit out. And have you stropped those razors properly? They were beginning to bite like files.”
Rogers bustled forward with hot water, scented napkins, and a phial of perfumes.
“Yes, sir, they are as sharp as your own wit, sir.”
“Give me the glass, Rogers. I feel yellow this morning. Do I look it?”
“A little tired, sir, perhaps. Nothing more.”