XLVII
For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs. Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar face.
Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive, suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.
John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out momentarily in the midst of his degradation.
“Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.”
But it was a flash in the pan. Even the polite insolence seemed dead in him. He had caught his son’s arm and clung to it pleadingly.
“Think better of me, John. I came here to save the girl: I swear that, before God.”
And then he would show great cunning behind the chatterings of dismay, trying to worm from his son all that he knew, and also how he had come to know it. But John Gore kept a shut mouth and the face of a flint, the heart hard and contemptuous within him when he remembered the look in Barbara’s eyes when she had spoken these words: “I can forgive.” Surely there was no soul here worth forgiving. Better dead. That was the grim judgment his heart uttered.
Such was the first week at Thorn, with the dark rides to and fro along the woodland roads, the mournfulness and dolor of the winter landscape, love by the fireside, retribution amid ruins. Sometimes Barbara would walk out a little way toward Thorn in the hope of meeting John Gore upon the homeward ride. She could not but mark the bitterness in him, a certain questioning look about the eyes that seemed to gaze toward some inevitable end. The riddle would have been baffling enough even if his heart had been in the solving of it. Granted that the past were given to oblivion, his father was a proscribed man; there was some risk even in shielding him; any day he might be discovered and taken.
Nor could he tell Barbara all that he saw at Thorn. It was too sordid, too contemptible; and yet his very reticence led her to understand. Perhaps she had more sympathy, more vision than John Gore that winter. She knew what Thorn could be even to one without guilt, without physical pain, without an eternal dread, and with some one to bring food. This man had gone down into the deeps of misery and degradation. He had been starved and broken. That was her thought.
Once she asked John Gore to let her see him, but he shook his head and would not hear of it.
“He thinks that I am dead, John,” she said.
“Then let him think it. God! Are we to make the thing so easy?”
“John! John!”
His fierceness hurt her a little, seeming to wake a clash of discords in her, as though the brazen gates of that closed tragedy were jarring wide again.
“John, don’t speak like that, dear.”
His tenderness shone through the anger in him.
“Barbe, you may forget; I cannot. When I touch your hand, when I see the life in you, I remember.”
The memory of that night came back, and she shuddered: the dark room, those throttling hands, the violence and horror in the dark. She looked at her lover and understood.
“It is hard for you,” she said, very gently.
For to John Gore at that time it was like pampering a man who had sought to betray the honor of his wife.
The old year had gone; the new was in with white hoar-frost on the grass and the boughs each dawn, and a silvery smoke of mist melting into clear blue mornings. January went plodding on—a heavy, toothless, torpid month, despite the frost and the shimmer of sunlight; for January has little of the likeness of a child; rather it appears as a gray old man laboring in the dusk and the mists of the morning at some task that no man sees. It is a month when gnomes work below the ground, laboring for the mystery of beauty that is to be, touching the hidden seed with fire, breathing into brown roots the colors of the flowers that shall come hereafter.
With January, Stephen Gore’s life seemed to sink to the lowest level of lethargy. Torpor fell upon him till he was like a frost-nipped plant with the sap congealed, the leaves shrivelled and gray. He would sleep for hours, and even when awake lie staring at the beams in the ceiling above him, his face blank and without intelligence. He hardly ever spoke. Even the fever of fear left him. He asked for nothing, not even food. John Gore thought that my lord was dying, and even picked out a place in the garden where he would bring him when he was dead.
Yet it was not death with Stephen Gore, but a stupor that nature had brought upon him even as the winter fields lie inert and frost-crumbled under the sky. Fresh food and the warmth of the bed had a narcotic effect upon the man. The half-starved body seized greedily upon everything and bade the mere mind sleep, and so the mind slept on for many days, as though helping forward the old adage—“Mens sana in corpore sano.” For the body is but the stem of the tree of the senses, and the sick body is often the cause of the sick mind.
Toward the last week in January John Gore saw a slow and subtle change in his father, a change that came like the first thrusting of growth through the winter soil. The flabbiness melted out of the man’s face; his eyes grew brighter and full of the intelligence of inward life. He was still very silent, but it was the silence of growth, not the silence of paralysis. John Gore would find his father watching him, not with the old, furtive, cringing look, but with a kind of sadness, a mute perplexity that betrayed the mind working behind the eyes. More than once he had made tentative little attempts to show gratitude, always watching his son’s face as though conscious of its imperturbable sternness. His son’s face began to be a dial of destiny to him. He could read the truth about himself in the younger man’s grave eyes.
It became evident that Stephen Gore’s manhood and his self-respect were returning to him slowly as he lay in the kitchen of Thorn. What his thoughts were John Gore could only guess, though he was struck by the change in his father, the indefinable refining and strengthening of the outer and inner man, as though my lord had ceased to be the animal, and had come again to the cognizance of higher things. They seldom spoke to each other, these two, nor did they venture beyond the trivial needs or happenings of the day. Both were conscious of the imminent and dark shadow, and faltered before it, sheltering behind reticence and procrastination. Yet John Gore would see a certain look come into his father’s eyes, as though the man were dumb and were striving to speak.
And the first breaking of the superficial surface of reserve was caused by nothing more dramatic than a beard. My lord’s self-respect seemed intimately married to bodily cleanliness and perfection in dress. Silks and brocades and perfumes were beyond him; perhaps he would not have asked for them even if they had been at hand. But it was with a gleam of his old wit that he desired most humbly to be barbered, and to be deprived of the hair that had grown at Thorn.
John Gore accepted the incident without a smile, brought a razor with him next day, and dutifully shaved my lord’s upper lip and chin. He had done his barbering in silence, with the air of a man who had no care beyond the dexterity of his fingers, when my lord laid a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“You would like to cut my throat, John. Cut it.”
They looked at each other squarely in the eyes. Stephen Gore was the first to glance away.
“Nor should I blame you, my son.”
And that was all that passed between them over the shaving of my lord’s chin.
John Gore told Barbara of the change in Stephen Gore, and she listened with a faint smile hovering about her mouth, as though her intuition gave her some vision of the future.
“Be gentle with him, John,” she said. “I have heard it said that pottery is brittle when it first comes from the furnace.”
“Then you think the clay has been recast, child?”
“Why should it not be so!”
And he could only marvel at the change in her.
So the month went, and my lord’s “grand air” began to flutter out feebly like a faded butterfly on a sunny day in spring. Yet there was a certain humility about him that made John Gore reflect, for his father was very patient now, strangely so for one who had sworn at lackeys. Often the son would catch a troubled shadow darkening the father’s face. He would drop his eyes when they met John Gore’s, yet he watched his son almost hungrily when the son’s back was turned.
It was a day early in February, and John Gore sat on Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool before the fire, and cleaned his pistols that grew foul quickly in the damp winter air. His father had been asleep, and the son believed him still sleeping as he polished the barrels and scoured the powder-pans.
He heard a slight movement behind him, and, turning sharply, found my lord awake and watching him with thoughtful eyes. Both men colored slightly. John Gore turned again, and went on with his work.
Then he heard his father speak.
“John, how long have I been here?”
The son considered.
“Three months—or so,” he answered.
My lord sighed.
“This leg of mine is mending.”
The son said nothing.
“I am wondering whether it is worth the mending. A man must die some day; though it is better that he should die like a man, not like a dog.”
There was a minute’s silence. John Gore could hear his father’s breathing, but he went on doggedly with the cleaning of his pistols.
“John.”
My lord spoke softly, almost pleadingly.
“Yes.”
“Will you answer me a few questions?”
“Ask them.”
Again there was a short pause.
“Have you any news from Westminster?”
“What news?”
“The Catholics, my friends—the rest.”
John Gore laid one pistol down and took up the other.
“Coleman is dead,” he said, curtly.
“Coleman! How?”
“The scaffold.”
He heard his father mutter indistinctly, and the words sounded like the words of a Latin prayer.
“And the rest?”
“Some with Coleman, some in the Tower and the jails, some scattered. London has been calling for blood.”
My lord lay very still. Then he turned slightly, and his eyes were on his son.
“And in Pall Mall?”
“My Lady Purcell?”
“Yes.”
“She died three months ago.”
There was another and a longer pause.
“John.” And he spoke with effort.
“Yes.”
“Why did you save me from dying?”
The son frowned at the fire.
“I do not know,” he said, at last.
“John, you were always honest. Yet—God help me—with the irony of the truth.”
Stephen Gore asked no more questions, but lay staring at the beams above him, his mouth twitching, his eyes glazed with a film of thought. He seemed to forget the presence of his son. The great dim world of the past, and the vast “beyond” that holds the past world in its shadows, engrossed the life in him, and he made no sound.
As for John Gore, his heart was full of a conflict of strong emotions. Nor was his mouth so straight and stern when he turned and glanced at his father over his shoulder. Yet what he beheld moved him more deeply than any words my lord had spoken. For Stephen Gore’s eyes were wet and blurred, and there was the glisten of tears upon his face.
John Gore rose suddenly from before the fire, and, taking his pistols with him, went out without a word. He was half angry and half ashamed, for though pity had welled up like blood into his mouth, a rough and scolding bitterness pointed to the meaner motives of mankind, and the leer of a possible hypocrisy hardened his heart.
He rode home toward Furze Farm, meeting a strong west wind that made the sky move fast and the ash boughs clash in the thickets. And in the woods north of the farm Barbara met him, where a number of old hollies threw up a wall of dense, green gloom.
He dismounted, and kissed her with some of the brusqueness of a man whose eyes seem too shallow, and whose heart is too near his lips. She let the strangeness in him pass, and they walked on side by side, the horse following at their heels. John Gore looked at the grass road before him, Barbara at the sky. And for nearly half a furlong they walked on thus in silence.
“John, you two have spoken.”
He glanced at her sharply, as though wondering how she knew.
“Yes.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Questions. He asked questions.”
“About—”
“His friends; about your mother.”
“What did you tell him, John?”
“I told him the truth.”
“Yes; and then—”
“What could I say to the man? Curse him, he wept!”
She paused a moment, taking her lover’s arm, and holding him back a little as though about to speak. The impulse changed, however, and she walked on again with a light of infinite wisdom in her eyes. For a man’s nature is a proud and contrary thing. She felt what was passing in John Gore’s heart, and she was too tender and too prudent to drag it roughly into the light of day.
XLVIII
My lord took his first walk in the kitchen of Thorn leaning upon John Gore’s shoulder, the son’s arm about the father’s body. Any one who had seen the pair would have judged them to have been the best of friends, for the son steadied the father’s steps with the grave, patient air of one whose care was almost a devotion. And the father, who had the look of a man who had aged very rapidly, what with the white in his hair and the deep lines upon his face, seemed to lean upon the son with a sense of confidence and trust. He was wearing a new suit of plain black cloth, with a white scarf about his throat. Some of his little gestures and tricks of expression came to him as in the old days, save that they were less emphatic and less characteristic of the aggressive self.
At the third turn Stephen Gore looked at the window that was lit by the March sunlight, and a sudden wistfulness swept into his eyes, as though he were touched by pathetic memories. He paused, leaning his weight upon his son, for he was feeble and easily out of breath after those weeks upon his back.
“I should like to go into the open air, John, and sit in the sun.”
John Gore looked at him doubtfully.
“You are safer here,” he said.
My lord gave a shake of the head.
“Are you cautious for my sake, my son? John—John, you do not understand me yet.”
There seemed a new atmosphere of sympathy enveloping them, for John Gore answered his father very gently.
“It shall be as you wish.”
“Then put your arm under my shoulders, John—so. What a strong fellow you are! I can just toddle like a dot of two.”
They went out into the court-yard, Stephen Gore’s right leg dragging stiffly. He would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, since the limb that had been broken had been shortened by three inches in the mending. The son carried Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool in his left hand. They crossed the court-yard very slowly, and passed through a doorway into the wilderness of the garden. The green of the spring was thrusting through a thousand buds; there was the thrill of growth in the air, and the birds were singing.
Close on the sunny side of a ragged box-tree that was half netted in brambles a clump of Lent-lilies stood in bloom, swinging their golden heads over the weeds and grass. There seemed the beauty of symbolism about these flowers. The sunlight appeared to centre upon them, and to burnish their golden heads with the warmth of the March day.
My lord’s glance settled on the flowers. He paused before them with a sudden curious smile.
“Set the stool here, John.”
And he sat down there, with the clump of daffodils at his feet.
John Gore left him there awhile, and strolled on along the rank walks where primroses glimmered from lush green glooms, and gilliflowers were beginning to scent the air from the crumbling tops of the old brick walls. The softness and the glamour of spring seemed everywhere. There was no wind, hardly a cloud—nothing but the warm shimmer of the sunlight.
Father and son had come closer to each other those last days, not through any sentimental outburst of the emotions, but because the father had become once more a man, and a man whom it was even possible to respect. “Mea culpa,” he had said, and the dignity of a simple acceptance of guilt had given him a new impressiveness. It had been difficult, at first, for John Gore to accept his father’s humility as a thing born of the heart and the spirit. There was ever the sneer of possible “play-acting” penitence, the tawdry sentimental epilogue spoken with a hypocritical leer and a thought of the nearest brothel. John Gore had distrusted his father, and had watched keenly for the old self to betray itself. Yet he had still continued to behold a quiet, patient, and sorrowful old man who seemed grateful for small services, and who looked at him with watchful and troubled eyes. John Gore distrusted any religious display in such a man as my lord. And yet he came to understand by degrees all that was passing in his father’s heart.
He returned presently to where the elder man was seated, and found him in an attitude of saddened thought. Stephen Gore looked up as his son joined him, and then turned his head away so that his eyes were on the tower of Thorn. The place itself must of necessity force the full meaning of the past upon him. The stones spoke; the very silence of the place had a message of its own. For my lord still believed Anne Purcell’s child to be dead, and that thought had survived to haunt him above all others.
“John.”
“Yes.”
“I have something to say to you as between man and man.”
The son stood back, and leaned against the trunk of an apple-tree.
“You have given me the chance, John, to judge myself, and to discover the truth with my own eyes. Let us have no parson’s talk—no snivelling. As a man of the world I fought for myself, and pushed others out of the path. I blundered immortally over my selfishness, John, and they ought to hang me for a fool.”
He still looked toward the tower, and John Gore guessed whither his thoughts tended.
“That was the damnedest thing the self in me ever rushed on, my son. And yet I tried to alter it at the last—perhaps for my own sake, perhaps for the mother’s. She was dying then—I have told you that; perhaps that was why I repented. The heart of a man is a strange, elusive, treacherous thing, even to its owner, John. Sometimes we can hardly decide why we do the things we do.”
He sat in silence awhile, with his head bowed down.
“You must have hated me, my son; if you had spat upon me, I should hardly have questioned it. Words are not life: I cannot give you back that which I destroyed. And there is where bitterness grips the heart in a man when he sees what manner of ruin he has made. What are regrets, despair, protestations? Air—mere air in the brain! When once a man has fallen into the slough, John, his struggles seem only to carry him deeper. He may even drag others below the surface or splash foul mud onto innocent faces. But the awe and the bitterness are in the knowledge, John, of our own utter, miserable impotence. Things cannot be wiped out. They last and endure against us till the crack of doom.”
He stared at the grass and knitted his hands together.
“I had thought of giving myself up, my son, and telling the whole truth. But that—that cannot help the dead. And somehow I have come to shudder at the thought of throwing shame into the grave of the one woman who really loved me. And, John, I shall suffer more by living than by dying. Fools do not always realize that in this world. They tie a man to a rope, and think that they are even with him for his sins. They would often get the greater vengeance on him if they only let him live.”
He paused, staring straight before him, his shoulders bent.
“Weeks ago, John, I remember, as in a dream, that I lived in a mad horror of death. That has passed, I know not quite how. But I leave the judgment in your hands, my son. Do with me what you please.”
He seemed to grow very weary of a sudden, for his strength was but the strength of a sick man, and the grim truths of life seemed heavy on him. His son went to him, and, putting an arm about his father’s body, helped him to his feet, and led him back to the bed in the kitchen.
“I am not your judge, father,” he said, very gently; “there is another one who should judge, and from whom forgiveness may have come.”
He was thinking of Barbara, but my lord thought that he spoke of God.
The meadows about Furze Farm were full of the bleating of lambs those days, and the youngsters skipped and butted one another, galloping to and fro on their ridiculous legs, while the stupid old dames baaed, each to its own child. There had been one sick lamb that Christopher Jennifer had brought home in his arms, and the little beast had been laid upon hay in a basket beside the fire. There were also two cade-lambs in a pen in the orchard, and Barbara, who had many hours to herself now that John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, had asked Mrs. Winnie to let her have the tending of the two motherless ones, also the feeding of the early chicks and the gathering of the eggs. The whole life at the farm was fresh and quaint to her, and brisk life it was those spring days—a cackling, bleating, lowing life, with the thrushes singing in the beech-trees and the blackbirds in the hedgerows. The bloom on the apple and pear trees in the orchard would soon be pink and white, and there were daffodils nodding their heads at Furze Farm as well as in the wilderness of Thorn.
The evening after Stephen Gore’s confession at Thorn, John Gore took his love away over the uplands where the furze was all a glitter of gold, with the green slopes of the hills and the brown ploughlands making a foreground to the distant sea. They desired to be alone that evening, to feel the spirit of spring in them, and to watch the sun go down and the twilight creep into the valleys. Their happiness was the greater because others were not forgotten in the romance of their two selves. Moreover, the glamour of the morrow had the delight of a plot in it. Mrs. Winnie alone was suffered to taste the spice in the secret, though the duty fell to her of sending out for clean rushes, taking down the rosemary and bay from the beams in the pantry, and gathering flowers to spread upon the coverlet of the bed.
She smiled to herself very pleasantly when John Gore and the “little lady” rode out early next morning as though for nothing more solemn than a morning’s canter. She knew that the gentleman had smoked a pipe in the parson’s parlor more than a month ago, and Mrs. Winnie was quite wise as to what was in the wind. There was to be no stir made, and Chris Jennifer’s wife rather approved of being the solitary holder of such a secret. Her attitude was quite motherly. She spent the morning sweeping Barbara’s room, and strewing rushes and flowers about it, and putting posies of bay and rosemary upon the pillows.
The pair were back at Furze Farm by dinner-time, looking mild and innocent, even hungry, as though nothing serious had befallen. They walked into the kitchen just as Mr. Jennifer was settling himself to carve the meat. John Gore glanced at Mrs. Winnie, who had run forward to kiss and embrace her “little lady.” That occurred behind Mr. Jennifer’s back, and son William had too brisk an appetite to trouble about the emotions of his elders.
“Shall I give you a dump o’ fat, sir?”
And so they sat down to dinner.
They were half through with it when Mrs. Winnie accepted a nod from John Gore and pushed back her chair, and picking up a wedding-favor from under a mug on the dresser, she went to her man and held it under his nose.
Mr. Jennifer stared at the gilded sprigs and the ribbons very gravely.
“I dunno as I be a widower yet,” he said, as his slow brain took in the nature of the thing, “nor be you a widow, Winnie.”
“Oh, you thick-head, Chris!”
Mr. Jennifer looked at her, and then, with a sudden gleam of the eyes, at John Gore and the lady.
“Be that so, my dear?”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Winnie, in a whisper.
Then Mr. Jennifer laid a hand to his mug, rose slowly and solemnly, and stared hard at the bride and bridegroom.
“Ut be a pleasure—”
He paused and reconsidered the beginning.
“Ut be a pleasure—”
John Gore and Barbara looked up at him smilingly, and their eyes seemed to drive the whole art of oratory out of Mr. Jennifer’s head. He took refuge in his mug, brandished it toward them, and set it down empty, with emphasis. Then he looked at his wife with an affectionate grin.
“I be powerful pleased, my dear. Seven years ago—”
“Eight,” interposed the wife, with a shocked glance at son William.
“Eight be ut, then—I dared ut like a man, and I’d dare ut again, please God.”
“Lor’, Christopher!”
“William, keep t’ gravy off thy breeches. Mr. Gore, sir, you’ll be for pardoning me, but t’ lady’s face be a good bargain. T’ Bible says something of vines and fig leaves and olive branches—I dunno as I quite knows what; but I wish ye all of ut, sir, you—and the lady.”
So Barbara lay in her lover’s arms that night, and they heard the birds break out with their songs at dawn.
XLIX
The sun was up, the birds making the air quiver, the life of the world awake with the faint fragrance of a spring morning. Barbara, lying upon her lover’s arm, looked with shadowy eyes at the casement that caught the light of the glowing east. And with the first coming of consciousness she had remembered the refugee at Thorn and the part that they had set themselves to play that day. The “self” in them was to be thrust aside on that first morning of their life together.
Barbara, combing her hair at the little glass by the window, could hear her man walking to and fro in the garden; for he had risen first, and taken the bar down from the house door before the Jennifers were stirring. And though he whistled the tune of a love-song, she seemed to feel a spirit of melancholy and foreboding stealing up through the spring morning. Nor was her own consciousness without a sense of shadowiness and vague unrest. Bridal dawns are not always the happiest dawns, yet it was not the love in Barbara that had suffered pain. The destiny that she was to fulfil that day brought back a fog of recollections that chilled the air a little and weakened the sunlight. This was the aftermath, the second reaping and gathering of memories.
The joy of the night had been sweet, intimate, and wrapped in the darkness, and perhaps her heart was not ready for the daylight—and realities. It was a sensitive and sacred hour with her, and almost she could have desired to spend that day alone. There was so much to realize, so much to feel, so much to foreshadow. She was no longer herself; the sacrament had its mysteries; her maidenliness felt a little shy of the world at first.
She heard John Gore walking below her window, and a sudden rush of tenderness seized on her. For the moment she felt lonely, even afraid; for he to whom she had given everything alone could give everything in return. The sense of surrender was quick in her. She would be utterly alone in the world, save for this one man. Love was life. And the wistfulness made her yearn over him as though one day the world might take him from her.
“John!”
He turned and looked up at the window.
“Halloo, little wife!”
She leaned forward with her comb caught in a tress of her hair, knowing not what to say to him now that she had called him.
“What a heavy dew there has been!”
“Yes; the grass is gray in the meadows.”
“Is Mrs. Winnie up yet?”
“No; we are the larks this morning.”
She was silent a moment, looking away toward the distant hills. Her voice had a tremor when she spoke again.
“John!”
“Yes!”
“Come to me; I want you.”
And he went up, to find her weeping.
Man, being a creature of tougher fibre, cannot always comprehend a woman’s moods. They may seem inexplicable to him, because her sensitiveness can be as fine as gossamer, and hardly visible against the coarser background of reality. Even as a man cannot always gauge the strange, shrinking prides of a shy child, so he may blunder against the delicate and sacred things of a woman’s soul, unless love, spiritual love, gives him that intuition that sees beyond the carnal clay.
“Why, Barbe—weeping!”
He looked at her, not a little troubled, searching his own heart guiltily, yet having no consciousness of having wounded her in any way. The tears of a woman whom he loves have always a personal issue for a man. They may pique him if he is vain, challenge him if he be honest.
“Oh, it is nothing, John!”
He did the only thing a man could do, and that was to take her face between his two hands and kiss her.
“Little wife, no secrets from me. Let us begin life so; we shall never regret it.”
She closed her eyes, and, putting her hands upon his shoulders, hung her head a little.
“It was foolish of me, dear. I have been so happy, and sometimes when one has been very happy—”
“The tears come, little wife.”
“I have never been very happy till now, John. And just now it came into my heart so suddenly—”
She faltered, and he stood looking down at her as he held her in his arms.
“Barbara—wife, you felt lonely.”
She darted up a look at him as though surprised that he should know.
“How do I know, child? Because I had something of the same feeling myself. What a pair of fond fools, eh! No, it is something deeper and more sacred than that.”
“Yes, John, I know. But do you think—”
“I think a great many things, Barbe.”
“Yes; but that I shall make you happy, that I can fill your life for you?”
He took her unloosed hair, and put it back from off her forehead. Perhaps he was learning the familiar truth that no being can be more fiercely conscientious and self-critical than a good woman newly married. Fevers of doubt and of introspection rise in her. The surrender is so final, so utter, and the future seems so precious.
“Barbe, we have been married not quite a day. Yes—yes—I know. It is the sweet, brave heart in you that is blind to its own worth. Little wife, look in my eyes and see if you see any shadows there.”
She looked and smiled.
“No, John.”
“Then never look for them, dear heart. One’s imagination may create curses. Always speak out; never think in. If I ever hurt you—yet God forbid—tell me so; that can be mended.”
She felt for his hands and held them.
“I will try always not to think of myself, John.”
“Then you will be a very foolish woman, dear, and I shall have to do the thinking for you.”
“And you will take me to Thorn to-day?”
He looked at her gravely.
“You wish that?”
“I wish it.”
It was still early when John Gore brought the horses to the gate after breakfast and lifted Barbara into her saddle. She wore a plain black riding-habit that morning, a black beaver with a black plume curled round the brim, and a collar of white lace about her throat. The life at Furze Farm had tinted her skin with a brown, pearly haze. She was never a girl for much color, but her lips were red and generous, and her figure more rich in womanliness than of yore.
The shy, introspective mood of the early morning had passed. Hill and valley bathed in sunlight, the freshness of the woods, the movement, the sympathy between heart and heart, brought back that happier courage that is the true boast of health. For it is the brave, clear-eyed woman who holds the love of a man in this world. Melancholy and helplessness may please the lover; they do not often hold the husband. Man needs a mate who can spread her wings with him, whose eyes look trustfully, who has no trick of selfish tears. And John Gore, riding beside his wife that morning, felt glad and strong and sure because of her, for generosity counts with a man almost before all other virtues. Let a woman be pure and generous, and she will never lack the reverence of men.
When they came to the valley of thorns that morning John Gore drew rein in the beech thicket that he knew so well. He desired to bring Barbara into Thorn without my lord suspecting it.
“I will go down first,” he said; “when I am ready I will come into the court and wave my cloak. Then, little wife, you will follow.”
And it was agreed between them as he said.
My lord was not in the kitchen that morning, and John Gore, seeing that the stool was gone, guessed that his father was in the garden. Going out into the court he waved his cloak as a sign to Barbara, and passing on into the garden he found Stephen Gore sitting in the sunlight with his sword across his knees. He looked younger by years than he had looked for many weeks. His eyes had an alertness new to them, and he rose up to meet his son with the air of an aristocrat and a man.
“Good-morning to you, John; I am making the most of the sunlight.”
The son looked questioningly at the father’s sword. My lord’s manner had something final, something stately in its tranquillity.
“I had a visitor yesterday, my son; I was glad that you were absent.”
“A visitor? Who?”
“One of those gentlemen, John, who walk through the world with a ladle full of hot sulphur. He came to spy and to discover. I entertained him. I assure you that he was mightily exalted.”
John Gore looked grave.
“An informer?”
“Call the creature what you will, my son, he has scented the fox and run him to earth. He seemed astonished at my urbanity, and sat with a hand upon his pistol. ‘Good sir,’ said I, ‘I am tired of the country, and yearn for the city and that noble place where so many good gentlemen are entertained. Do me the honor of waiting on me to-morrow with a few fiery Protestant friends; let us fix the hour at noon. I assure you that I shall not run,’ and I believe the fellow believed me. I shall be taken to-day, John; I am waiting for them quietly here. What does it matter! They cannot frighten me; I am beyond that now.”
He spoke simply yet pungently, a quiet pride giving him something of grandeur and impressiveness. John Gore was listening for the sound of Barbara’s coming. A clatter of hoofs from the court-yard rose on the morning air. My lord heard it and smiled, and then held out a hand to his son.
“Hear them, John! I did not expect the rogues so early. Clear, my lad; I don’t want you caught in the tangle. Get behind some of yonder bushes.”
John Gore looked hard at his father.
“It is not your friends yet,” he said; “wait here; this is my affair.”
The sunlight shone on Barbara’s face as she met her husband in the court-yard. He said but one word—“Come”—and led her by the hand into the garden. A tangle of shrubs hid the place where Stephen Gore waited. And thus John Gore and Barbara came upon my lord quite suddenly, and stood before him almost like a pair of runaways returning for a father’s pardon.
My lord looked at Barbara and went white to the lips. His arms hung limply. He stooped, and seemed to shrink into himself, his eyes remaining fixed on her as though unable to look away. For the moment the old, frightened, fawning expression came back into his eyes. Then he gave a sudden, inarticulate cry, flung out his hands, and stood groping almost like one struck blind.
“John, you have deceived me!”
He would probably have fallen had not the son sprung to him and put an arm about his body.
“John, you have deceived me! My God, are you against me, even at the last!”
“No, no; it is not that.”
He glanced at Barbara, for Stephen Gore seemed in a kind of agony. He trembled greatly, leaned heavily upon his son, almost clinging to him as though stricken with the dread that he had been tricked and condemned even at the last by the one man whose love was the one thing left to him.
Barbara answered her husband’s glance; her lips were quivering. This strong man’s anguish went to her heart.
“John, tell him—”
“It is forgiveness.”
“A blotting out of the past.”
At the sound of her voice Stephen Gore recovered his courage and his self-control. He stood back from his son, putting John Gore’s arm aside, as though he had strength enough to stand alone. He looked at Barbara sadly, yet with thankfulness—the look of a man whose grosser prides were dead.
“You are alive, child; thank God for that! The truth of this was hid from me.”
She would have spoken, but he held up his hands as though to beg her patience.
“You know everything? Does she know the whole truth, John?”
The son nodded and turned his face away. My lord spoke on.
“Child, I did you and yours a great wrong. I cannot justify myself; out of my own mouth I am judged. These are the words of a man who expects to die. Yet be it said, child, without pride of heart, that I would have gladly ended the thing I called my life that I might wipe out all the past.”
There was silence between the three for several seconds. Then Barbara looked at John Gore and he at her.
“We have buried the past,” she said, turning to my lord.
Stephen Gore did not move.
“John and I are man and wife. We have put the past away from us. It is better for us—and for the dead.”
My lord raised his eyes slowly till they rested on Barbara’s face. He saw nothing there but a mist of tenderness and tears.
“Child, you say this to me?”
She held out her hands generously.
“Out of my heart I say it.”
My lord bowed himself and took her hands, and when he had kissed them he put them reverently away from him, and stood up bravely, yet with a twitching face. John Gore had come to stand beside his wife. And the three looked at each other and were silent.
Then my lord spoke.
“Children, go—and God bless you.”
They looked at him questioningly, but he did not falter.
“John, my son, you understand. They will come for me soon; I am ready; I shall no longer be ashamed. Go. I would not have you near the fringe of the slough into which these good Protestants will throw me. You have your lives to live. It is my desire that no shadow of mine should ever darken them again.”
Barbara looked at her husband, for she did not understand the meaning of what was said. My lord smiled at her and pointed toward the distance. The authority seemed his that day.
“John will tell you the truth. It is for your sakes that I demand this.”
Both husband and wife faltered, but Stephen Gore’s eyes were clear and unflinching.
“John, if this should be the end of me, what I have is yours, unless the rogues sequestrate it. Now go, my son, and be happy. It is my last wish, and you will grant it me.”
And so they left him, sadly, unwillingly, feeling like traitors leaving a friend to death. For the man had seemed lovable, even great, at that last moment, and yet they had felt that it would have been graceless to question his last desire.
Stephen Gore watched them go, following them to the court-yard, and standing above the moat as they rode slowly away toward the woods. Under the beech-trees they turned and looked back at Thorn, and saw him standing there, and waved him a farewell.
“What will it mean?”
Barbara’s eyes asked her love that as he took her bridle and drew away into the woods.
“They will take him to-day,” he said; “yesterday he was discovered. Other heads have fallen; so may his.”
She was silent awhile, and then looked at John Gore wistfully.
“And we are leaving him!”
“Wife, it was his wish, his prayer, his penance. I—a man—would not grudge it him. Can you not understand?”
“Yes, John, I can understand.”
And they rode back to Furze Farm sadly, knowing that it would be wiser for them to leave the place and seek some other refuge till they saw how the times promised.
Before noon my lord was taken in Thorn as a Catholic and a conspirator against the state. He met them calmly, with the fine carriage of the man of the world, courteous and debonair, ready even with an epigram and a smile. His face seemed strangely tranquil as he rode with his escort out of the gate of Thorn.
“May the sins of the fathers rest not upon the children.”
That was the prayer that his heart uttered.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:
Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. Punctuation and minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.