XLIII
The days were pleasant enough at Furze Farm, with Barbara gaining in health and color, and in a womanly winsomeness that made even Mrs. Jennifer wonder. It was as though the real soul had come to life in her again, and her heart, that had been a thing of moods and sorrows of old, had warmed into a richer consciousness of life, so that the beautiful shell began to glow with the light of the beautiful spirit within. There was a sweet sparkle of youth in her that began to play over the surface of sadness, and though the past still shadowed her, she stood free from the utter gloom of it and saw the golden rim of the sun. She made friends with little Will Jennifer, played hide-and-seek with the boy, and told him tales in the dusk before he went to bed. She and Mrs. Winnie, too, were busy making up the stuffs from Battle into gowns and petticoats, and though Mrs. Winnie’s craft was simple and somewhat crude, the colors lighted up Barbara’s comeliness, and the very simplicity of the frocks seemed in keeping with that Sussex fireside. She even besought Mrs. Winnie to let her learn the lore of the dairy, the art of butter-making, and the like; for the primitive, busy life of the place seemed good to her, and full of the warmth and fragrance of a home.
John Gore took her riding with him over the winter fields, for he had bought her a quiet saddle-horse in one of the market towns. Yet though the days were magical for lover and beloved, there were the sterner issues of life to be confronted, nor could they forget those clouds that had withdrawn a little toward the horizon. Moreover, John Gore began to feel the very material need of a replenished purse, and an insight into the future that concerned him and his love, even unto the death.
He laid everything before Barbara one evening as they rode homeward toward Furze Farm, with a red, wintry glow in the west, and the hills wrapped in bluish gloom. Riding very close to him, she listened to all his reasonings, accepting things that went against her heart, because she knew that he loved her, and because she felt him to be shrewd and strong.
“Do that which you think best, John,” she said, with an upward look into his face; “I trust you with all that life can hold.”
And so their nags went homeward side by side, so close that the man’s arm was over the girl’s shoulders, and her breathing rising up to him in the keen, clear air like a little cloud of incense.
One morning early in December John Gore took the London road, following the same course that he and Mr. Pepys had taken—by Battle, Lamberhurst, Tunbridge, and Seven Oaks. Nor could he help contrasting the difference of the ways, and the different spirit that inspired him, though the woods were bare now, and the country gray and colorless when no sun shone. His thoughts went back over the Sussex hills to that farm-house with its broad black thatch, its beech-trees, and its uplands, its brick-paved, low-beamed kitchen with the fire red even to the chimney’s throat, and the kindly folk who moved therein. But chiefly he thought of Barbara sitting before that winter fire, her great eyes full of the light and dreams thereof, and her Spanish face betraying new deeps of womanhood because of the suffering she had borne and the spirit of beauty she had won thereby.
John Gore put up at an inn in Southwark, meaning to keep his distance from the precincts of St. James’s, and from that intriguing, cultured, cruel world that had held his own father as a murderer and a paramour. He had heard of grim things in the Spanish Provinces and the Islands, but nothing that had brought home to him the shame of the goddess self in passion as this tragedy in an English home had done. He could only think of the man—his father—with pity, and a kind of revolting of the honorable manhood in him. It was almost a subject beyond the pale of thought; a thing rather to be realized and then—buried.
Now John Gore was innocent of all knowledge of Oates’s Plot and of the wild ferment the City was in, for the news of it had not trickled as yet into the by-ways of Sussex, and he had kept to himself upon the road. His plan was to hunt out Samuel Pepys and hear the news of the surface of things, whether my lord was in town, and whether the Secretary would act for him in receiving and forwarding his Yorkshire moneys. His first visit across the water was to the Admiralty offices, and there, when he had sent his name in, Mr. Pepys came out in person with a mightily solemn face. He took his friend straight to a little private cabinet of his own, locked the door, and pushed John Gore unceremoniously into a chair.
“Well, John, you have come here, have you, with a lighted candle to look for sixpence in a barrel of gunpowder. Where have you been all these weeks?”
Mr. Pepys’s manner was the manner of a man who had some reason for being honestly perturbed.
“Within ten miles of the place you left me at, Sam. I have come up for news and money.”
Mr. Pepys looked at him steadily, yet with a species of alarmed awe.
“News, John! Gracious God, we are shaken in our shoes with fresh news every other day! You have heard of the Plot, of course.”
“Plot! What plot?”
Mr. Pepys’s silent stare expressed infinite things. He stepped forward, tapped John Gore on the chest with his forefinger, then stepped back again, and made him a reverence.
“Can I bow, sir, to a gentleman who has never heard of Titus Oates? Alack, John, I fear me I have many sad and solemn things to tell you! I thought that you had heard everything, and that you were wintering in the country—like a wise man. For it is not flattering at present to bear the name of Gore.”
He saw the sea-captain straighten suddenly in his chair and look up at him keenly.
“What do you mean, Sam?”
“Mean, sir? Did I not warn you that the papists were likely to burn their fingers? And we are in the thick of such fire and fright and fury because of them that we are all afraid to catechize our own souls. News, my good John! The Protestants raging, informers making Ananias seem a simpleton, Catholic peers in the Tower, hundreds in jail, Coleman the Jesuit tried and executed, a warrant out against your father, who has taken to his heels and fled.”
“Good God, Sam! Where?”
“That is what certain people would like to know, sir. I pity your innocence, John, but we are all of us shaking in our shoes. Even the Queen has not been pitied.”
John Gore sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, his eyes looking into the distance. He was silent a moment, while Mr. Pepys fidgeted with his feet and glanced nervously at both door and window.
“I have not seen my—Lord Gore since I left London with you, Sam.”
“No?”
“I have heard nothing of all this. What is more, I have had matters of my own.”
Mr. Pepys stroked his chin.
“There is yet another piece of news, John.”
“Well?”
“Concerning the Purcells.”
The sea-captain looked at him sharply.
“What?”
“Anne Purcell died of the small-pox a month ago.”
“Anne Purcell!”
“Yes; it would have been the talk of the town but for this furious belcher of accusations, even the man Oates.”
John Gore looked at him in silence.
“She was found dead in her bed in her house in Pall Mall. All the servants had fled, and the house had been rifled. But there also appears to be a mystery about the daughter. The lawyers have discovered that she was put away in the autumn for being of unsound mind; and now that all the property seems to have fallen to her, not a living soul knows what has become of the girl.”
The sea-captain smiled very slightly, with a grim light in the eyes.
“Who has the control of the matter?” he asked.
“It has fallen into Chancery.”
“Like the traveller to Jericho, Sam, in the parable. How long is it since my Lord Stephen hoisted sail?”
“Somewhere about a month ago—before I returned from Portsmouth.”
“Did Anne Purcell die before then?”
“Heaven help me if I know, John. But what has that to do with the case?”
“More than you know, my friend—more than you may suspect.”
He had the air of a man who was troubled and perplexed by many difficulties.
“Sam, I want your help and advice. I can trust you.”
Mr. Pepys made him a little bow.
“Where are you staying, John?”
“In Southwark. I had my reasons. Can you give me supper to-night, and an hour’s private talk? I have many things to turn over in my mind before then.”
The Secretary laid a hand upon John Gore’s shoulder.
“A friend’s trust is a friend’s affection, John. Come and sup with me; what I can do I will.”
The Secretary’s wife was feasting with friends that night, and Mr. Pepys and John Gore had the table to themselves. When supper was over, Mr. Samuel took the sea-captain to the library, locked the door, and prepared to play the part of counsellor and friend. For Mr. Pepys was a shrewd, sound man of the world, for all his oddities and love of news—a man who had walked the slippery path of public responsibility, and who knew the world’s deceitfulness, even to the latest lie from the lips of a king.
But even this critic of court scandals, and of the vanities of himself and of mankind at large, was flustered a little by John Gore’s account of his doings, and of the tragedy that had taken place at Thorn. Mr. Pepys could pass over a gay intrigue, but this darker and more sinister affair gripped the manhood in him, and made him understand his friend’s grimness.
“On the Cross of our Lord, Sam, I pledge you to silence over this. I know you are to be trusted where questions of life and death are concerned.”
There was no need to question the intenseness of the Secretary’s sincerity. He was a man of oak whose foibles and frivolities were merely the flutter of leaves in the wind.
“Have no doubt of that, John. But upon my conscience, this is black villany or something marvellous like it. Iago, oh Iago, thou dinest with us and smilest at us in church, thou art not only a thing of the stage!”
John Gore sat thinking, smoking his pipe, and snapping the thumb and middle finger of his right hand.
“It is the girl who has to be considered, Sam. She has borne enough, suffered enough, and from my own flesh and blood; that’s where the rub comes.”
Mr. Pepys sat and considered.
“The Chancery folk are such a dastardly meddlesome lot,” he said.
“I am not afraid of the lawyers, Sam; we can take our chances over the sea, if needs be. But there is this man—this father—to be considered. And, by my hope in Heaven, I will kill him as he killed Lionel Purcell if he meddles further with the girl’s life!”
Mr. Pepys looked a little shocked despite his sympathy. He had been a good son himself, and the word “father” had its true meaning for him.
“Softly, John, softly. There is always the other side of the case; we cannot always see into another man’s heart.”
John Gore stared at the floor grimly.
“What I have said, Sam, I have said; even one’s father is not privileged to seduce and murder as he pleases. I shall put my sword to his breast and say: ‘Sir, no further.’ He has his life in his hand.”
Mr. Pepys looked at him kindly.
“Have you not thought, John, that it may rest with the girl?”
“With her—how?”
“If she chooses not to speak, to play a part.”
John Gore met his friend’s eyes.
“Why should this—this man be shielded? There is blood upon his hands; he has stained the lives of others. Who shall consider him?”
“John, John, you talk like a man who stabs fiercely at a shadow. No man is wholly the devil’s creature, and, say what you will, his loins begot you.”
“The greater the need, Sam, to put aside false sentiment. Still, he is out of our ken at present. We must bide our time—and watch.”
Mr. Pepys rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.
“Do you know what I would have you do, John? Go back to this quiet farm; let the child come by her health and happiness. Keep the lawyers out of it, and marry her, if you can.”
“You are echoing my own thoughts, Sam.”
“Good; very good. See what a seal, my friend, you might set upon the past, if God granted you children and happiness, and the long love of wife and man.”
John Gore understood his meaning.
“The blood-debt might be wiped away, Sam, for the sake of the future.”
“God grant it. And now, John, you will want money.”
“Money! How do you know that?”
“John, my man, when I was in love I was always poor. I know how Dan Cupid picks a man’s pocket. Besides, money is above the law, John, and at a pinch you might find it useful.”
“I have money enough; it needs handling, that is all. There is all my property in Yorkshire.”
“Give me a written authority, John, and I will act for you.”
“Sam, you are a friend.”
“I am a man of business, sir. I can receive and hand on rentals, can I not? And as for the present need, I always keep money in my house. Take what you want; the security is good enough.”
John Gore began to thank him, but Mr. Pepys rose up from his chair and put his two hands on his friend’s shoulders.
“Man John, there may be two or three souls in the wide world whom a man may love without prejudice and without disaster. The friends of a life are few, John, and we find them without forethought. Men come to me for favors, scores of them in the year; most of them are sycophants, rogues, hypocrites; I know it, and there is no deep pleasure in what I do. But there are some men, John, to whom the heart goes out in the game of life. To be a friend to a friend comes not so very often. A man who has seen life will swear to that.”
XLIV
Rain was falling and the wind beating about the chimneys of Furze Farm as the daylight waned toward a gray night like a fog coming up from the sea. Barbara and Mrs. Jennifer were sitting before the kitchen fire, the girl watching the sparks fly upward, the woman’s brown hands busy with thread and needle. Gusts of wind came down the chimney, making the wood-ash shimmer at red heat, even blowing flakes of fire out on to the bricks. Now and again the drippings of the rain fell on the red mass, rousing the fire to spit like an angry cat.
Chris Jennifer’s wife, looking up from time to time at her “little lady,” could see that Barbara was listening for something beyond the mere roar of the wind in the chimney and the swish of the beech boughs in the gathering dusk. The pupils of her eyes would grow large of a sudden, and she would lift her chin and keep her bosom from breathing, as though she heard some sound far away in the coming night. Mrs. Winnie knew well what was passing in the girl’s heart. Nearly a week had gone since John Gore had ridden for London, and her thoughts were out on the wet road, wondering whether he were facing the wind and rain.
“I be thinking, my little lady”—and Mrs. Jennifer gave a tug to the gown she was making—“I be thinking that a bunch of red ribbon would look just fair for a shoulder-knot to yon scarf. My man Christopher has a liking for red in the winter, it being the color of the berries, he says, and warm and comely when there be snow about.”
Barbara only woke to the sense of Mrs. Winnie’s words when the good woman had come to the middle of her statement.
“Is that why they wear red stockings so much in the country, Mrs. Winnie?”
“Lor’, my dear, what a fancy! If I thought that about Christopher, I’d be talking to him with a broomstick. Red stockings for a man to stare at on market-day! No, my lady, red be a warm and comfortable color, like holly berries, and that shoulder-knot would just be a touch to t’ green.”
Barbara listened to the wind.
“How heavy the roads must be!” she said.
“Honest mud never harmed nobody, my dear. Lord bless you, we don’t think anything of mud in Sussex.”
“Are the roads dangerous at night?”
“And what may you mean by dangerous, my lady?”
“Footpads and rough men.”
“London way there be them kind of creatures. Puddles and ruts be our great trouble, and the mud-holes when the ways be rotten. A horse may break his leg in one of ’em; but there, God’s providence be powerfuller nor mud-holes.”
She went on with her stitching, watching a red slipper tapping a little restlessly on the brick curb about the hearth, as though beating out the furlongs and the miles. Dusk was falling rapidly, and though the fire was bright, Mrs. Winnie was thinking of lighting the candles when the red slipper ceased its tapping, and the figure before her remained motionless and alert.
“I can hear a horse, Mrs. Winnie.”
Mrs. Jennifer listened.
“It be a loose bough of the old plum-tree clapping against the wall.”
“I am sure it is a horse.”
She rose up and went to the window, and leaned her elbows on the sill. Mrs. Jennifer gave a nod of the head, as though assuring herself that youth must have its way. She knew every sound in and about the house when the wind blew from over the sea.
“I will put a candle in the window, Mrs. Winnie.”
She went and took one from the shelf, lit it, and put it upon the sill. And she was returning again toward the fire when she paused and stood listening, her head held a little to one side.
“There, do you hear it?”
Mrs. Winnie stopped her stitching and listened. This time she did hear something beyond the clapping of a bough against the wall.
“Why, yes, little lady.”
“Listen, there is the farm gate.”
She turned quickly toward the door, opened it, and stood looking out into the dusk.
Mrs. Winnie put her work aside, gave a glance through the window, smiled to herself, and then discovered that she had business in the dairy. In the dusk she had seen a man dismounting from a horse, and her husband plodding across the yard to welcome the traveller and take his nag to the stable. Mrs. Winnie was a woman of tact. She caught son William sneaking in by the back door, and took him with her to inspect the milk-pans.
Barbara stood framed in the doorway with a warm light playing about her, and the brown wainscoting, the great beams in the ceiling, and the red bricks for a background. Yet the impulse of the moment failed in her, and a shy panic took its place, so that she went and stood before the fire and turned her head away so as not to see his coming. For there was something in the intense truth that almost made her afraid, and she might have fled away to her room but for the thought that he had seen her at the door and might not understand the whim of a woman.
She heard his footsteps on the path, and when she looked he was on the threshold, wet and travel-stained, but with eyes that were very bright. He came and took her hands, but stood a little apart because of his wet clothes, and also because there was a sense of awe between them. His eyes searched her face to see whether there were any shadow of pain or sadness thereon. And now that he was so near to her, her shyness and her confusion fled, and simple love alone had utterance.
“John, how wet you are! Come to the fire, and let me dry your coat. I had a feeling that you would come to-night.”
She led him to the fire; yet though the initiative was hers, she went with his arm about her waist.
“You are looking wondrous well, Barbe!”
“Am I?” And she colored, and hid her eyes from him a moment. “I am glad, very glad, to have you back, John. I was afraid, with this rough weather, and the roads so bad, and you riding alone.”
“And yet I was not alone,” he said, touching her hair reverently. “I shall never be alone again, pray God.”
“Yes, dear, I understand.” And she put her face up for him to kiss her, her eyelids closed and the lashes shading her cheeks.
Then she made him sit down in the chair before the fire, and, fetching the rough towel that hung on one of the doors, she rubbed his coat while he sat patiently and tried not to look amused. For there was something infinitely quaint and sweet in this ministration to a man who had seen the wild world in its cups and in its quarrels. He caught the two hands and kissed them, and looked up into eyes that were full of a mysterious tremor of light.
“Do you know, child, what you bring into my mind?”
“No, John.”
“All the rough, blasphemous, accursed things that a man must see in this world, whether he wills it or not. They come to me, dear, as so many black memories, and I lift up these white hands—so—and I see what is clean and what is pure.”
She looked at him an instant, and then fell on her knees beside the chair and hid her face upon his shoulder.
“John, you forget; you make me ashamed when you speak thus; we women are not angels; we are quick, selfish, passionate things, though we may be unselfish when we love.”
“Dear, I forget nothing of that,” he said. “Do you think that I would choose to love a saint?”
“I am nothing of a saint, John.”
“Thank God,” said he.
John Gore told her nothing that night of her mother’s death, for the evening in that great warm kitchen seemed too goodly and dear a time to be marred by evil tidings. Perhaps self had some weight, too, with him that night, for it was a delight to watch the warm blood mantling under the soft skin, the radiance of her eyes, and the way she would look at him suddenly and color. John Gore’s eyes could not leave her that evening as they sat round the fire with Mrs. Winnie busy at her stitching, and Mr. Christopher smoking his pipe and trying to pretend that he was half asleep.
The eyes of the day were empty of tears on the morrow, the world full of winter sunlight, the sky all blue, the woods all purple and gray. John Gore borrowed Mr. Jennifer’s nag, for his own beast needed a rest, and, saddling Barbara’s horse, he took her out with him for a canter along the grass track that wound past Furze Farm and onward into the vague lands. It was a grass track that might have come down from old Celtic times, before the Romans spaced out their Itineraries, a highway that had run south of the great weald that stretched from the marshes of Portus Lemanis to the plains of Gwent.
John Gore waited till they were on the homeward road and not a mile from the farm before telling her of Anne Purcell’s death. They were riding along the ridge of a hill, with Beechy Head a great blue shadow far away, and the silver bow of the sea bent against the land. Barbara rode on beside him, with the light gone suddenly from her eyes, and a shocked silence making her mute. Her mother had borne and bred her, little more; she had even been ready to sacrifice the child to save her paramour and herself; and yet Barbara felt a great pity for that poor, gay woman who would paint her cheeks no more, nor ogle herself in the glass to see how her eyes beckoned. Barbara’s heart had changed greatly those months. She had a wider consciousness, more sympathy, more insight. It had become easier to pity than to hate.
John Gore saw that she was weeping the tears of compassion and of regret rather than the tears of passion. And he let her weep, pushing his horse a little ahead of hers to give her privacy, for there are times in life when every soul must meet its intimate thoughts alone.
They were within view of the farm when he heard her call to him, and her voice was very gentle, as though there were no malice and anger left in her.
“Death brings things home to the heart, John,” she said, softly; “it is like a great silence that compels one to think.”
He looked at her very dearly.
“My life, what can I say to you?”
“Tell me; John, that I was fierce and revengeful, and it would be the truth. Who are we that we should judge? One cannot gauge another’s temptations. She may have suffered while I was blind to it.”
John Gore reached for her bridle, and they rode the last furlong side by side. And compassion for the dead seemed to hallow the love in their hearts.
John Gore had said little concerning his father, save the news of the Popish Plot, and my lord’s flight with many others who were concerned. He was believed to have found refuge in France, and yet at Thorn, not five miles from Furze Farm, a miserable, maimed thing dragged itself to and fro like an animal that has been crushed in the jaws of a steel trap.
A long splint, sand-bags, and six weeks in bed—such should have been Stephen Gore’s portion; but when a man with a broken thigh is alone in a ruin he must either crawl or starve by inches. Destiny had hipped him, and Necessity had him at her mercy. It was with labor and a sweat of anguish that he went like a worm upon his belly, for the belly hungered and tortured him with thirst, and the worm still wriggled with a blind instinct toward life.
December was cold and raw at Thorn, but there was no fire, and the man lay on the stone floor with nothing under him but the cover and the padding that he had torn from the couch. There was no drink either in the kitchen of Thorn, and the quenching of his thirst became an ordeal that made his flesh quiver. Once a day a miserable, unwashen figure would go crawling across the court-yard to where the pump stood in a corner. The face of the thing that crawled resembled the face of a swimmer who feels a limb seized by the jaws of a shark. Slowly, with infinite carefulness, and a tremor of the whole body, he would prop himself against the wall, reach for the pump-handle, and trickle the water into the leather bottle that he had dragged after him by a strip of linen. Then he would crawl back again, agonized, cursing the pain of those grinding splinters as the leg came over the stones, the toe catching in the grass and weeds. Sometimes the water in the bottle would last him more than one day, for he husbanded it like a miser, knowing that each drop meant the sweat of his very blood. The food was an easier matter, for he had only to drag himself to the hole in the floor. But from the cold there was no escape. It froze into heart and marrow at midnight, keeping sleep from him, even making him weep like an idiot child.
What a change, too, on the surface of things! Hands grimed, nails black, a stubble of gray hair over the jowl, holes in the cloth over knees and elbows, the dirt of the court-yard upon his linen. A squalor about his bed on the stones such as is found in foul jails.
Even the lust for life, such life, would flicker out in him at times, and he would take his sword as he lay with the broken bone galling him like hot grit in the flesh, and run his fingers along the blade, and look at it, and consider. More than once he bared his breast and set the point of the sword over his heart, feeling for a gap between the ribs so that the steel should make no error. But the cold pricking of the point against the skin seemed to frighten even the despair and weariness in him, and he would lay the sword aside, cover his chest again, and stare at the beams in the ceiling. He had the blind lust to live, but not the blind courage to die. For even life in its most squalid misery may seem better, kinder than the black, unfathomable unknown.
XLV
Though all the gay stuffs, the reds and the greens and the rich brocades, were put aside for a season, and though Barbara wore a plain black gown that Mrs. Winnie bought of Mr. Bannister at Battle, they made ready for Christmas at Furze Farm in country fashion, with a great abundance of food and liquor, with a yule-log the size of a tub, and holly boughs gathered out of the woods. Mrs. Winnie would have quieted the day out of curtesy to her “little lady,” but Barbara would have none of their pleasure spoiled because she wore a black gown for her mother. To cheat the living of their good cheer would not comfort the sleeping dead, and the very kitchen seemed warming itself for the wassail-bowl, and the beef and the pies, and the women with their ribbons.
Now, Barbara had no money and a great deal of pride despite her love, so that John Gore, who knew how matters stood with her, had to resort to a lover’s stratagem to fill her purse. He told her a solemn tale of how the lord chancellor managed the affairs of the nation, and how she was her father’s heiress, though the estates were in the lawyers’ hands till the time came for her to step forward and prove herself a very comely young woman without a mad whim in her head, save that whim of loving a sailor. He also related that a very good friend of his had certain matters in hand, and was likely to receive on her behalf certain moneys that had been found in the house in Pall Mall. That money might come to her any day by private messenger, and so it did, though delivered to John Gore, and greatly to the girl’s secret delight, for she knew nothing of law, and, believing the lover’s invention, guessed not that the money was his.
Yet here John Gore wellnigh landed himself in a dilemma. She began to plead that she owed him money for all the things he had bought at Battle, nor could he silence her for a long while, and then only by pretending to be a little hurt. Whereat she dropped the money as though it had burned her, and went to him and asked his pardon.
The gold pieces had rolled hither and thither over the kitchen floor, and they gathered them and counted them into little piles. Barbara’s eyes had begun to dance with a multitude of generous desires, and she was already planning how to spend it.
“I must go a-shopping, John,” she said, “for Christmas. If we could only borrow Mr. Jennifer’s wagon.”
“A wagon, sweetheart! Do you want to empty all the shops in the town?”
“No, dear; but I feel that I cannot give enough to these good people here. It has been a home, and a very dear home, John; I shall not forget it to the day of my death.”
Now, John Gore talked privately to Mr. Jennifer, and Mr. Jennifer took counsel privately of his wife, and the result of all this talking was that Christopher prepared for a day’s jaunt into the county town of Lewes. He cleaned up his wagon, put straw and bracken in the bottom thereof, tied his horses’ manes with ribbons, and put out his Sabbath best. One of his men and his wife came into Furze Farm for the day, while the household went a-wagoning to Lewes, starting two hours before dawn because the roads were heavy and the days short. Barbara, Mrs. Winnie, and son William rode in the wagon, and John Gore on his horse, while sturdy Kit marched beside his cattle, his whip over his shoulder, and a sprig of holly in his hat.
Barbara had a radiant face and but little money left by noon that day in Lewes, for even if the heart has cause for sadness there is joy in giving others joy. She seemed incarnate womanhood that Christmas-tide, taking a delight in all the little mysteries and mummeries of the season and in the revels that were held. John Gore had bought all manner of merchandise: a new gun for Mr. Christopher; a great family Bible for the wife; toys, sweetmeats, and oranges for son William and the laborers’ children; a beautiful chain of amethysts for his love. There was much giving and receiving that Christmas-tide at Furze Farm. The three laborers came with their wives and youngsters to the state dinner in the kitchen. Mr. Jennifer brewed punch, got a flushed face, and talked more than he had talked for a whole year. Little Will nearly fell into the fire while roasting chestnuts. John Gore played with the Sussex children till Mrs. Winnie exclaimed at “the gentleman’s good-nature.” Pipes were smoked in the ingle-nooks. The three countrywomen tried their best manners, and stared hard yet kindly at “the lady” about whom there was a mystery that had set their tongues a-clacking. Yet a woman who is sweet to other women’s children wins a way into the hearts of mothers. “A gracious lady, surely,” they whispered to one another, and thought the better of her because she touched their children’s lips. And when ribbons and blankets and good woollen stuffs came to them from her hands, they may have regretted the disobedience of Mrs. Winnie’s orders as to the minding of their own business, for Mrs. Jennifer had forbidden them to gossip about the “quality biding at Furze Farm.” Yet gossip had gone abroad, for all Mrs. Winnie’s caution, and even the lazy parson knew that there were strangers in his parish.
With Christmas fare and festivity questions of the past, and St. Stephen claiming his day in the calendar, Mr. Jennifer had his cart-horses out for a gallop to sweat them well before the yearly bleeding, for it was the custom to give horses a warming and then to bleed them on St. Stephen’s day. Whether John Gore subscribed to the superstition or not, he saddled his own beast early and went out alone for a canter, having the Christmas dinner upon his conscience, and, what was more, a certain hankering to visit Thorn. For several weeks he had intended riding over to the place, but Barbara had been nearly always with him, and they had taken happier and less sinister paths. He desired to see whether there were signs of folk having been there since that November night when the horseman whom he had taken for Captain Grylls had ridden back to inquire after his lost packet.
It was a still and rather misty morning with moisture dropping from the trees, and the grass wet and boggy. The fog did not hinder him greatly, for he had learned to pick up his landmarks at every furlong, and the track was familiar and simple when once known. About ten of the clock he came into the valley of thorns, and saw the dim mass of the tower glooming amid the mist. The place seemed infinitely melancholy with the fog about it, and the dripping thorn-trees and the black, stagnant water that showed never a ripple. The very ivy looked wet and sodden with the raw vapor of that December day.
John Gore tethered his horse to one of the thorn-trees, and, finding the gate open, much as he had left it, he crossed the court-yard where the mist hung in the air like breath upon a mirror. He saw that the dog was gone, but, what was more, the kennel also, and this slight detail puzzled him a little and made him more cautious in his exploring. Going to the kitchen entry and finding the door ajar, he stood there and listened. The moisture was pattering down from the ivy leaves all about the house, yet from the kitchen came a sound that could not be easily mistaken—the regular, heavy breathing of a man in a deep sleep.
John Gore saw that his sword was loose in its sheath, and, pushing the door open cautiously, he passed on into the kitchen. The figure of a man lay upon the floor with nothing between him and the stones but what appeared to be a tatter of rags. A sword, a leather bottle, and two mouldy biscuits lay beside him. His head was thrown back and his throat showing, with the stubble of a beard making the jaw look gray and slovenly.
John Gore crossed the room softly, and recognized in that ragged, haggard thing my Lord Gore—his father.
It was well past noon when John Gore mounted his horse again, and rode away from the mist and shadows of Thorn, with the look of a man who had spoken, even as Dante spoke, with some soul in the deeps of hell. He was thinking of an old, yellow-faced man, maimed, dirty, servile, with clothes worn into holes, and an intelligence that had flapped between emotional contrition and paroxysms of selfish fear. This thing had been the mighty man of manners, the serene gentleman of Whitehall and St. James’s, whose body had smelled of ambergris and whose fine raiment had shamed the sheen of tropical birds. Pride, vanity, even self-honor, in the dust and dirt! A white, flaccid, furtive face that had lost all its buxom boldness, most of its intellect—almost its very reason.
What had they said to each other, those two?
Murderer and adulterer; lover and son.
Yet John Gore had filled the leather bottle for his father that morning, lit a fire with odd wood gathered from the rotting out-houses, and brought in an armful of musty straw to soften the sick man’s bed.
And my lord had wept—miserable, senile tears that had no dignity and no true passion. He had fawned on the man, his son, grovelled to him without shame, till the son’s manhood had revolted in him, for he would have welcomed savagery and cursing rather than moral slime. It had been like a polluted river bringing all manner of drift to the lip of a weir. And though he had ministered to his father, he had kept an implacable face and a firm mouth. He had acted as a man who knew everything, and chosen to let my lord realize that he knew it, even assuming the truth that Barbara was dead.
XLVI
John Gore rode for Furze Farm with many turbulent thoughts at work in him, and the raw mist that thickened from over the sea making the wet woods no more comforting than the degradation he had found at Thorn. He had been fierce at first with the man whom he called father, till my lord’s squalid ignominy had become apparent to him, and he had realized that he was dealing with a creature and not a man. For there had been no sense of strength opposed to him, no pride, no will, not even savage passion, nothing to struggle with, nothing to overcome with shame. My lord was dead in the better sense. Those weeks in Thorn had starved and frozen the soul out of him, and he had become half a savage, yet a timid, fawning savage whose consciousness was bounded by elemental things. At first there had been nothing but abhorrence and disgust for John Gore. This cringing thing with the face of an imbecile, embracing his own son’s knees, lying amid his own offal! What could a man say to this shadow of a self? Where lay the promise of judgment or of appeal? Good God! He could remember the time when he had stood in some awe of this same man because of his fine presence and his habit of command.
Yet as John Gore rode through the white mist the impressions and instincts of the morning began to sift themselves and to piece up a broader, saner picture. Incidents, acts, details started forward or receded into clearer, truer perspective. The offensive flavor of the thing began to prejudice him less. He tried to see the whole untarnished truth with the sincerity of a man who is not content with mere impressions.
Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where the mere physical miseries of existence would bring him near to death in body and mind. Pain, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, are grim inquisitors fit to break a man on the rack and tear the very senses from him. John Gore had looked into the hole where his father had kept his food, and had seen meat going putrid and biscuits covered with mould. He remembered, too, very vividly an incident in the Indies when he and his ship’s company had found a man who had been marooned on an island that was little better than a reef. The man was a Norman, and his sojourn there had been but a matter of days. Yet he was skull-faced, parched, abject, and as mad as an idiot child. He had run from them, screaming, when they landed, though his legs had given under him before he had gone fifty yards. And he had died on board John Gore’s ship, and they had buried him at sea, and often afterward at night the sea-captain had fancied that he still heard the man’s wild cry: “J’ai soif, mon Dieu! mon Dieu, j’ai soif!”
Now Stephen Gore had been a proud man, and a man of sentiment after his own ideals. He had had other things to torture and humiliate him besides anguish in the flesh. Proportionately as a man’s physical strength wanes, so the menace of spiritual suffering grows the more quick and poignant. This man had spilled blood and betrayed friends. A well-fed cynic might have put such things under his feet and trampled them. It would be otherwise with a half-starved, memory-haunted, isolated being shivering the nights through, listening and ever listening, while the solitude hung like an eternal silence, and the slightest movement of the body set bone grating against bone. Who could shrug his shoulders through such an ordeal and come forth smiling with an epigram? Would not the very intellect curse itself and die by its own hand? Innocent blood; the betrayal of honor and of friends; lies, inevitable self-salvation. These thoughts would grip such a man, throttle him, spit at his very soul. They would not be conjured or persuaded. They would be awake with him through the winter nights; scoff when some spasm of pain made him curse and set his teeth; watch him with cold eyes when the light of the dawn came in. The same miserable dragging of the days, the same miserable passion-play of the crucified soul. Where would a man’s manhood be at the end of such a chastisement?
The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer, who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a candle.
In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting.
“You have had a long ride, John.”
He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his.
“They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little woman?”
She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who loves him.
“Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.”
He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler.
“I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.”
“John!”
Her voice had a touch of appeal in it.
“This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned with more than I foreshadowed.”
“Where have you been, John?”
“To Thorn.”
“Thorn!”
“Yes.”
She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others rather than himself.
“You are troubled, John. Tell me.”
He looked down at her reflectively, and his eyes seemed to say: “Shall I or shall I not?” Womanwise, she appeared to understand.
“You are afraid for my sake, John.”
“A little.”
“Is it because you cannot trust me?”
Her eyes held his, and for once it was as though she had the greater power of will.
“No. Because I wish worry and care away.”
“John, do you think I shall leave all the burden of life to your shoulders? Are we so little to each other? Am I so selfish?”
She felt his hands tighten on hers.
“Barbe, I have found my father.”
“At Thorn?”
“Yes.”
She shuddered slightly, despite herself, and he saw her eyes darken.
“John, did you speak to him?”
“Without mercy.”
“Does he know?”
“He thinks you dead.”
“Why is he at Thorn?”
“Hiding from the law because of this Plot; hiding from us, a miserable wreck of a man, half starved, almost mad.”
She saw his face grow haggard and stern, the lines deepening about the mouth, his eyes staring fixedly at the fire, as though he were looking upon a thing that revolted him. The instinct in her was one of a strong, pure passion to be of use. He had feared for her courage, perhaps for her magnanimity. Yet it was she who took the torch that evening, and carried it so that the darkness seemed less dark.
“John, my heart, tell me everything.”
She drew him by the hands into the inner room, and shut the world out, save that world at Thorn. He looked down at her, as though wondering at the will in her, and feeling a strength and courage near him that might have the power of turning destiny into providence. She was calm yet infinitely vital, and her face had a radiance that drove scorn and bitterness and malice into the dark. He beheld a transfiguration—love bending toward love, beautiful with the beauty of sacrifice, pity, and desire.
“John, do you fear for me?”
He opened his arms, but paused with a sudden awe of her, and, bowing himself, touched her hands.
“No, not now.”
“Then tell me everything.”
And he told her, sitting in the firelight, with his hands clasped upon his knees.
Silence held them awhile in thrall. Barbara was leaning against the jamb of the chimney, one hand laid along her cheek, her eyes full of the past. It was as though some sharp struggle were passing within her, and for a moment her eyes had a glitter of anger. But the gleam passed from them, and her mouth softened.
She looked down at the man with a mystery of a smile—a smile with no mirth in it, but full of sadness, yearning, and self-reproach.
“John.”
He started, almost as though he had forgotten her.
“Do you love your father?”
The question seemed to stagger him; he frowned at the fire.
“Love that!”
She rested her head upon her arm; his scorn had made the heart leap in her.
“I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!”
“But you—”
“John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I should feel that, even more than you?”
He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man. And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself.
He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her.
Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and then turned to him with a look he would never forget.
“John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.”
“Child!”
“It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.”
He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him, while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness.
“Barbe, you can forgive!”
“Yes.”
“But it is for my sake?”
She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears.
“Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.”
He bent, and kissed her lips.
“Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep you!”