XXIII
They will tell you in those parts how Waller, the parliamentarian, battered with his cannon the Purcells’ house of Thorn, leaving it half ruinous, as a warning to all royalists who felt tempted to trust in the breadth of their moats or the stoutness of their walls. Be the woodland legend what it may, the Purcells were poor after the long war, and Thorn had been for thirty years a haunt of owls and jackdaws—a strange, dim place set in the midst of stagnant water, far from a high-road, and hidden by wastes and woods. From broken gable ends and tottering battlements a red-brick tower and a few twisted chimneys rose against the blue. Even in those short years ivy had climbed up over the walls, pouring over the stone sills of the windows, and growing knotty and stout of stem even up to the leaden water-spouts of the tower. When the wind blew from the southwest the whole house seemed to shake and glimmer with the movements of those myriad leaves. And through the windows of roofless rooms you could see the sky redden or grow gold at dawn or sunset.
As for the moat, it was a checker of black and green, with moor-hens swimming on it and water-rats making rippling tracks from wall to wall, while here and there great rambling roses, that had not felt the knife for many a year, poured over the brick parapet, and hung in summer-like banners of green flowered with crimson and gold. The crown of the bridge had been broken, and several tree-trunks, ranged side to side and banked with earth and brushwood, filled up the gap. The court-yard gate, a new one since Waller’s day, seemed the only unruined thing about the place; but the court-yard itself was knee-deep with grass and weeds at hay-time. In the garden there were stretches of turf that had once been lawns, paths that were no longer visible, roses and shrubs growing as they listed, for a corner of the vegetable-garden alone had been kept in cultivation. The out-houses and stables in the kitchen court were crumbling and falling in—a quaint medley of ragged thatch and gaunt roof timber, falling plaster, and lichened brick.
Yet the old thorns that grew in the grass-land beyond the moat, thorn-trees that had given the house a name and were outliving it, stretched out their flat tops like so many pleading and appealing hands. They were white each spring above the green rushes, the brown mole-heaps, and the dew-wet grass. And in the winter the birds flocked to them and fed upon the red berries, welcome, indeed, when the turf was frost-bound or when the snow lay deep. So the old thorns lived on as they had lived for generations, while “Thorn” crumbled brick by brick, and the ivy, as though yearning to hide its nakedness, made it dim with glimmering green.
Thorn had its ghost, and no Sussex churl would come within half a mile of it when dusk began to fall. An old Scotch gardener and his wife had lived there some ten years, warm and snug in the rain-proof kitchen, daring the devil and all spirits and insects with a handful of good sulphur. MacAlister and his dame had been given their quittance that autumn, and had been packed off into some distant county, no man knew why or where, and no man cared. The owls might fledge their broods, the jackdaws build in the chimneys, and the place be given up to all manner of mystery and ghostliness. None had troubled in those parts about Thorn, save one farmer who had needed a new barn, and had driven a wagon over to thieve bricks, and come away with such a scaring that every one believed him when he swore the place was cursed.
There were ghosts at Thorn that autumn—but solid, hungry, and most gluttonous ghosts, who seemed to have abundance of good beer and food stowed away in the huge cupboards of the kitchen. The kitchen and the two rooms over it had been made habitable for the MacAlisters, and were now used by the new spirits who haunted Thorn—a big, stocky man, with a back like a flagstone; a comely, broad-hipped woman, with black eyes and a tight, hard face. They had come there suddenly, when the moon was full, walking by the woodland track from a great black coach that had set them down upon the high-road.
One evening in October, as the dusk was falling, the figure of a man, a burly blotch of darkness in the half light of the yard, came across from an out-building that was used as a wood-shed with an apron full of oak blocks for the fire. Farmer Knapp, he who had come to steal bricks, had told how he had come to the gate of Thorn and had seen through the grill, not a foot from his own eyes, a great white face as big as the moon when full. Farmer Knapp had not taken a second look, and, although it was only three in the afternoon, he had jumped into his wagon and driven off with his cart-horses lumbering at a canter. Now the man who crossed the court-yard, carrying his billets of wood, had a piece of white cloth covering his face, tied under the chin and about the forehead, with two holes for the eyes and a slit where the mouth should be.
The huge calves of the man’s legs rubbed together as he walked, and under the brim of his beaver his pate was as bald as the ivory knob of a gentleman’s cane. He went down into the kitchen by three steps and a short passageway, and tumbled his wood into a corner of the open hearth.
At the table the woman was stirring something in a basin. A big black pot hung on a rack and chain over the fire, and on the bricks before the hearth lay a dog of the mastiff breed, who lifted his head and blinked when the man entered.
“Supper ready?”
“Throw some more wood on, Sim, will ye?”
The man tossed two or three blocks into the red heart of the fire, pulled a rough settle forward with one foot, and sat down and stared at the pot. The firelight glittered on the eyes behind the white cloth, showing up the red lids unshaded by the trace of an eyelash.
“Lord, what a dull hole this is, or I’m saved!”
The woman had her sleeves turned up, and her big forearms were brown and comely.
“Dull,” said the man, “when there’s plenty to eat?”
“And drink, Sim?”
“Better than Tyburn or Newgate, anyway. Only there ain’t nothing to lay one’s fist to; not so much as a dog for old Blizzard to take by the throat.”
“Turn smuggler, my dear, if you want to let blood.”
The man sniffed at the pot.
“Smuggler? No, thank ye; we don’t want none of those gentry inside Thorn. Stodging about the country for a keg of liquor when we can have it for going to the cupboard! This deuced viz of mine smarts like hot Hollands to-night.”
He untied the strings and turned the mask up, but the woman did not look at him, it being near supper-time and food upon the table. They were not Sussex folk, nor even country people, by their speech, but gentry whose childhood had been passed within hail of Southwark or the Savoy.
“Who’s going to carry the girl’s food up to-night?”
The man took an oil flask and a piece of linen from the long shelf above the open fireplace. Over the shelf hung a long gun and a couple of heavy pistols, also a seaman’s cutlass and a pair of iron wristlets. He dropped some of the oil on the rag, and began to dab his face with it, blinking his red lids like an owl.
“Take it up yourself, Nance; I’m tired.”
She looked at him with a shrewish lift of the chin.
“Tired, you great hulk! Dang those rickety stairs, they make my knees ache; a bat put the candle out last night. Mother of God! I wouldn’t be here another week but for the doubloons! Think of the smell of the sausage shops and the snug little taverns Southwark way! I would give a gold Jacobus to sniff the river mud at low water. They might take us for papists from St. Omer; as for the girl—Black Babs, she’s no more mad than I am.”
The woman had a certain air of culture—the culture, perhaps, of a bold and clever orange girl who had caught some of the courtliness of the playhouses and the gardens.
“So we are papists,” quoth the man, still dabbing his face, “and to say whether a wench is mad or not is none of our business.”
“It’s my business, Sim, to see no one drops a noose over my neck.”
“Noose be damned! When a great gentleman opens his purse, you slut, wise folk ask no questions.”
“P’r’aps not. Lift the pot off. My Lord Pomposity wishes the girl mad, I gather, and mad she will be in six months, with the winter coming—or, maybe, stiff as a frozen bird. Then it will be old Drury and Whitefriars again.”
“As likely as not. Captain Grylls will be black-guarding it this way with orders before long. They must get us fresh supplies sent in before December.”
“That’s the real business of life, Sim, to be sure. There’s the girl’s bread and dripping. Run up with it like a good lad, or I shall spoil the pudding. You had better take the lantern; the old tower is full of bats and draughts.”
The man put the oil flask on the shelf, and, dropping the white cloth over his face, took down a horn lantern from a beam and lit the candle in it with a burning brand from the fire. He trod on the dog’s paw in the doing of it, and gave the beast his boot in the ribs because he presumed to snarl at him.
“Anything to wash it down?”
“I filled the jug this morning.”
Simon Pinniger picked up the pewter plate and marched off swinging the lantern. From the kitchen a passage led to what had been the hall, now rafterless, with the stars blinking between ivied walls. A flight of steps led to a door that opened into the lower story of the tower. Simon put the lantern down, pulled out a key, and, unlocking the door, picked up the lantern again and began to climb the interminable stair. Thud, thud, thud, up into the darkness, with the light from the lantern swinging this way and that, and the raw cold of the autumn night breathing in at the open squints, and through the shot-holes that could be seen here and there in the walls. Simon Pinniger climbed sixty steps or so, passing two narrow landings before he came to a door with a bar across it. He put down the lantern, unlocked the door, lifted the bar that worked upon a pin, and, opening the door about a foot, pushed the plate in with the toe of his boot.
“Supper,” was all he said.
Then, after the turning of the lock and the creaking of the bar, the thud, thud died down again into the darkness of the stair.
Only one thing moved for the moment in the tower-room, and that a mouse, who came out boldly to nibble at the bread on the pewter plate. A single window, high up in the wall and closed with stanchions, let in the brown gloom of the dusk and the glitter of a star. There was no fire, no furniture to speak of, and nothing that could be broken and used as an edge to cut and wound.
In one corner stood a truckle-bed, and sitting thereon a still, shadowy figure whose face showed a gray oval in the darkness. The place seemed far above all sound, though the wind might moan there and shake the ivy on the wall.
The figure rose from the bed and moved toward the door. It went on its knees there, and with cold hands began to crumble some of the rough bread. A tiny shadow crept up toward the white fingers and took crumbs. It was so little a thing, too small to be caressed, yet it had grown tame in one short month, and, above all, it was alive.
Barbara, kneeling there, fed the mouse with crumbs, and ate some mouthfuls of the bread herself. For there was nothing for her to do at Thorn but to watch for this friend at dusk, or for the white pigeons that sometimes flew up to her window during the day. She could see nothing of the world, not even the waving woods, but only the clouds moving and a few stars at night. One book they had given her, and that an old Bible bound in faded red leather. She had read it twice from cover to cover, sometimes with listlessness, sometimes with fierce hunger, sometimes with tears. And for an hour or more she would sit on the bed and think, her white face thin and questioning, but with no madness in her eyes.
XXIV
There was a shadow of unrest over England that year, as though each man distrusted his neighbor, and was ready to accuse his own friend of treason and papish practices, of taking the French King’s money, or of complicity in some wild and improbable plot. There had been no rush of the mob as yet, no Protestant fury, but the discontent and the fear and the distrust were there, spread on either side by vague whisperings and all manner of monstrous rumors. Men were seen to sit cheek by jowl in the taverns, and talk of an armed landing, of a second Massacre of St. Bartholomew, when all good Protestants were to be murdered in their beds. There were tales of Jesuits swarming over the country-side like silent, night-flying moths. The Catholic lords had long been arming, so it was said, and were ready even to murder his Majesty the King, and set up the Duke of York, that morose-faced inquisitor, in his stead.
John Gore, who had suspected his father of being trammelled up in some secret undertaking, had called on my Lady Purcell one gray afternoon, and was walking home alone across the park, taking a circuit so as to pass by Rosamond’s Pool. He had been often of late to the house in Pall Mall, drawn thither by instincts that he could not smother. He went to hear news, and more than once he had spoken to Anne Purcell of her daughter; but my lady had set her mouth very firmly, and made him believe that the affair was too poignant for her. He had even questioned Mrs. Jael quietly, and the woman had drawn two gold pieces from him with her emotional loquacity and the trickle of tears down her plump cheeks.
My lord had advised patience, and John Gore had done his best to abide by the advice, suspecting no treachery in it, and hoping for all that God might give. Yet often he rebelled against his blindness, yearning but to know the place where they had hidden her away. The truth might have been had by bribery, but John Gore had no reason as yet to persuade him to bribe his father’s servants, nor would he have stooped to such a thing without great need. Yet the girl had vanished out of the world, and there was no horizon toward which he might turn his eyes and know that she was there, like a light beyond the hills. In his heart he kept her image bright, even as she had appeared to him those summer days, swarthy and sorrowful, with silent lips and watchful eyes.
Dusk was falling as John Gore crossed the park, and there were few people strolling along the paths. He had come close to Rosamond’s Pool when he saw two figures leaning over the rail, with the collars of their cloaks turned up and their hats down over their eyes. They turned from the water as John Gore came by, and even in the dusk he recognized the taller of the two as Stephen Gore, his father.
The son stopped, and saw his father give a tug to the shorter man’s cloak.
“Well met, Jack; you are the man I want. This, Captain Grylls, is that son of mine who has sailed a ship farther than any of your sea-going bravoes.”
My lord’s companion bowed and lifted his hat. He was pock-marked and somewhat overdressed, with a hook nose and a sharp, dry mouth. One of his shoulders appeared higher than the other, and his head set a little askew upon his neck.
“The great navigator! Proud to approach you, sir; we are mere duck-pond gentry, some of us, though we may have fought the Dutch.”
His nose wrinkled queerly when he smiled, and he displayed a row of teeth discolored by tobacco. John Gore judged the man to be a rogue, and a hanger-on to the skirts of patrons about the court. His eyes had a knack of seeming to look both ways, and no doubt he would have been pleased if he had been able to see behind him like a hare.
“Attend to this little affair of mine, Grylls. I shall expect you some day this week.”
“Yes, my lord; you know me to be as steady as a clock.”
“Yet clocks need winding, Grylls.”
The man laughed politely as though he saw the gilt edge of the jest, and, lifting his hat, moved away with the discretion of an underling who has learned to tell instantly when he is no longer wanted.
My lord opened his cloak and set his hat at a happier angle.
“Come along, Jack; I have business for you to-night.”
Now John Gore carried one matter uppermost in his mind that evening. My lord seemed to read the nature of his son’s thoughts, and dashed any illusion with the candor of a friend.
“No, nothing of that kind, Jack; I had news this morning. She is well in body, but she has not changed greatly yet in soul. Put it behind you, and wait for the best. After all, there are stirring things to be done in the world, and a maid should not make a man’s blood turn to milk.”
John Gore walked on in silence, his father humming a tune that sounded very much like a chant. For my Lord Stephen was a papist, though the conversion had not come till his maturer years, and whether it had been a question of conscience or of statecraft none but a Jesuit could have explained.
“Who was the man you were talking with by the Pool?”
“Grylls? A poor, willing kind of rogue who has learned to make himself of use. Small fry, Jack, to float in shallow streams. I have deeper waters for you, sir, with all your guns and tackle.”
There was a gleam of grimness in his eyes as he spoke.
“The Bible sayeth, Jack, ‘Put not your trust in princes.’ A wise saying, truly; yet I have a wiser, and that, sir, is, ‘Put not your faith in the mob.’ Trust the sheep-dog, and watch the wag of his tail, rather than bump and scurry and run with the flock. Yonder lies our anchorage.”
A house rose before them amid the trees, its windows dark save for one in the first story, and that dim with the shadow of drawn curtains. John Gore recognized it as the house of Hortense. They were crossing the ground where he had fought my Lord Pembroke that wet night in summer.
“Is your call there, sir?”
Stephen Gore glanced this way and that, and then laid a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Yes. Join with me, Jack; there are nobler prizes to be won here than you will ever take at sea.”
They entered the Mazarin’s house through the little garden door, behind which some one seemed to have been waiting, for it was opened directly my lord had given five sharp knocks. The door closed behind them, and in the dim light John Gore saw the janitor was a woman. My lord walked straight ahead toward a back stairway as though he knew the intimate secrets of the house. John Gore was following him, when he felt the woman touch his arm.
“Of your curtesy, sir, the lock has caught; will you turn it for me?”
She spoke with a slightly foreign accent, drawing out every syllable with quaint directness.
“Have you the key?”
“Here it is, sir. Fie, now, I have dropped it; how very clumsy!”
She began to draw her skirts this way and that in the narrow passage, peering for the thing in the dark, and even sweeping the floor with her hands. John Gore bent down to help her. And in the quest the woman’s hair brushed up against his cheek.
She gave a sudden, thrilling little laugh, and took John Gore softly by the ear.
“So you have come to join us, Signor Giovanni? That is very sweet of you. We need brave men.”
To be held by the ear by a waiting-woman surprised the sea-captain for the moment. He took a firm but meaning hold upon the lady’s wrist. But with the other hand she put back the hood of the cloak she wore.
“Ah, how good! I have played a trick upon you both. Have you never been held by the ear, Sir John, by some pretty little waiting-maid? Now do not pretend, Sir John; I shall be able to tell a different tale.”
She seemed to grow taller suddenly, and to radiate splendor even in the dusk. Her voice changed also from a mincing treble to a full contralto that seemed made for song.
John Gore knew that it was Hortense.
“Madam,” he said, “I beg your pardon.”
She laughed with mischievous charm, and drew her hand away slowly so that it brushed his cheek.
“How simple of you, Sir John. And yet you can handle a sword so well. Shall we follow my lord?”
“And the key?” he asked, with a glance at the floor.
“Is in the lock. And the lock is turned. So you see!”
She dropped the cloak that she was wearing, and as they ascended into the light he could see the splendor of her dress gleam up gradually, the color of her hair, and the compelling beauty of her face. Her eyes seemed full of sparkles of light; her lips red, soft, and mobile, as though on the brink of a smile.
She paused at the head of the stairway, and stretched out an arm across the passage that led toward a room whence light and the sound of voices came. John Gore paused also, and she stood and looked into his eyes with an earnestness that made him color.
“I am serious now, Sir John. We are risking our necks here; it may be no mere supper-party and a trifling loss at cards. You are young—and, then, you have been in other lands. And yet, after all, I am speaking to you as though you were a boy.”
For the moment he could only look at her, for she was so very lovely and so womanly that it was not in a man’s nature not to look.
“I am in the dark,” he said, at last.
“Are you afraid of the dark?”
“I have dared it before—for the sake of adventure.”
She still stood regarding him with her great eyes, so liquid, so mysterious, and perhaps a little sad. John Gore saw her press something to her bosom, and when she took her hand away he saw that it was a little silver crucifix hung by a chain about her neck. Her lips moved as though she were repeating some Latin prayer.
“Fides sanctissima, Maria beatissima, Pater-noster in cœlo.”
And then she swept forward toward the room, and John Gore followed her lest she should think him afraid.
The room was quite small, panelled with dark oak, and with a fire burning upon the open hearth at one end. A long table stood in the centre. About it were seated some half a score men, and at the head thereof, in a great leather-backed chair, Coleman the Jesuit, chaplain to the Duchess of York.
My Lord Gore exchanged glances with Hortense.
“It was you, then, most magical Dian, playing porter at the door. I wondered what had become of our friend here. Had I known—” And he laid a hand over his heart.
Hortense turned her head for an instant with an audacious flash of the eyes at John Gore.
“I will not betray him, but he wished to help a woman find a key that she had not dropped, gallant Sir John!” And the look she gave him would have made the greatest epicure push his plate aside and talk.
Father Coleman, infamous or sainted Coleman, as men were soon to call him, sat at the head of a table that was covered, not with papers and epistles, but with dishes of fruit, wineglasses, bottles, comfits, and spiced cakes. The gentlemen about it appeared to have easy consciences and pleasant thoughts. They were debonair, familiar, talkative, very much in the grace of pleasure. The panelling of the room was fanatical and austere, yet the Duchess’s chaplain had cheerful cheeks and vivacious eyes, and bore himself with that easy-flowing worldliness that carries a clever priest into the intimate life of palaces.
It might have been nothing more than a gathering of lords and gentlemen who gossiped over their wine, comparing their views, and exchanging the ordinary news of the day. There appeared to be no elaboration of secrecy, no self-conscious sense of urgent peril. They ladled out punch, or filled their wineglasses, smiling across the table at one another, and listening to little pieces of scandal with the ingenuous cheerfulness of country ladies over their dishes of tea.
All of those present appeared very interested in the breeding of race-horses, and the technicalities of the sport were bandied to and fro, even Father Coleman appearing to be possessed of very pronounced views upon so unpriestly a subject. They talked much of a famed French horse named “Soleil d’Or,” and also of a Dutch stallion whose breed none of the gentry seemed to fancy. There were a great number of noted beasts in the shires whose names and points were familiar to the whole table. “Norfolk Joe,” “Northern Star,” “Jenny of Cheshire,” “Hertford Prince”—such were some of the many titles that John Gore heard passing from mouth to mouth. Being a seaman, he felt himself out of touch with the “horse gossip” of the day. That some gentleman contemplated introducing a stud of French mares into the country was news whose significance was largely lost to him. He knew very little of Italian roans and Spanish jennets, nor why “Oak Apple” should be spoken of as a sire who had not been properly watched.
There was no coarseness in their gossiping, and John Gore, who sat at one corner of the table close to Father Coleman and Hortense, saw no need for either the priest or the lady to look embarrassed. The gentlemen were still intent upon the topic when the Mazarin leaned over the side rail of her chair and drew a plate of grapes toward her.
She cut a small bunch, and began to eat the grapes one by one, doing it so daintily that it was good to watch her white hands and her full red mouth. She glanced now and again at the man beside her with a charming suggestion of coy interest in him that contrasted with the mischievous mood of an hour ago.
“You know more of ships than of horses, Sir John?”
She gave him the title as though it provided her with an excuse for mouthing two very pretty syllables where one might have sounded blunt and clumsy.
John Gore looked at her with his grave eyes and smiled.
“At the Nore you would have heard ships talked of in much the same fashion.”
“Yes. A sea-captain must love his ship as an Arab loves his horse.”
“If she can spread her wings well and swing her shot home into an enemy.”
“Truly, Sir John, even I should love to go to sea, and sail away for leagues and leagues—away to those dim islands where everything is new and strange. I feel like a little ignorant girl when I think of what you men of the sea have seen.”
She looked at him so delightfully, with her eyes full of wonder and interest, that a far stronger man than Ulysses might have lingered to tell her of the splendors of unsailed seas. John Gore discovered himself in Calypso land, with white hands pushing dishes of fruit toward him and proffering Spanish wine.
He was telling her of the grim passage of Cape Horn, and of the savages who lived in those wild parts, when a sudden gleam from his inner consciousness swept across his mind. He remembered how he had told the same tales to that silent, sad-eyed girl whose life had had no glamour of homage in it, and whose tragic face looked out at him from a mist of madness.
He grew silent quite suddenly, bringing his voyages to a clumsy and confused end, and not noticing the questioning look in Hortense’s eyes. He felt instinctively that she was nearer to him than he wished. Her beauty became a sudden glare, clashing with something more spiritual, more mysterious, and more strangely sad. He was glad when some of the gentlemen rose and began to kiss Father Coleman’s hand.
They went down by the same stairway, Hortense herself lighting them with a little Italian lamp. She was very close to John Gore in the passageway. Her dress brushed against him, while the lamp she carried made her beauty seem softly brilliant amid the shadows.
“Good-night, my lord; good-night, Sir John; I hope we have not frightened you very greatly?”
She searched him with her great eyes, so full of intentness for the moment that he felt their power and could not look away.
“You must tell me more of those wild seas, the great rivers, and the Indians, the gold and the pearls.”
He bowed to her a little gauchely, but did not touch her hand, and he had a last glimpse of her standing there with the glow from the lamp upon her face as he went out into the night.
My lord appeared in excellent spirits as they walked home together in the dark. His son had a silent mood upon him, and Stephen Gore found nothing in his silence to be reproved.
“Pearls and gold and strange lands. That is Hortense,” he said, suddenly, as they entered the broad street; “a splendid creature, too—in heart as well as in body.”
John Gore walked on with no sound save the crisp beat of his feet upon the stones.
“What was the meaning of it all, sir?” he asked, at last.
“Meaning, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“Why, just what you please, my lad. We choice spirits and good Catholics love to have our gossip, and you can find in it just as much as you wish to know. You must come with me again, and tell the lady more about the pearls and the gold and the strange lands. I tell you, John Gore, there is something for you to discover more mysterious and alluring than anything Cortés and all the Spaniards discovered in the New World over the sea.”
XXV
In the salon of the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall there hung a portrait of the Spanish lady whom the Purcell of Queen Bess’s days had won with the romantic daring of an adventurer’s sword. It was the portrait of a young woman in a quaint stiff dress of black and gold, her dark hair curled loosely about her head, and her black eyes looking down out of a proud and rather peevish face.
The portrait was touched by a ray of sunlight that October morning when John Gore stood beneath it, finding a strange and wistful familiarity in the Spaniard’s face. He was waiting in the salon for my Lady Purcell, being the bearer of a letter from his father, who had ridden suddenly into the eastern counties, giving no other reason than that of business with a friend. These Purcell pictures had been familiar to John Gore from his boyhood, yet they were full of a deeper significance for him now as he searched face after face, but especially that of the lady in black and gold. There was a stretch of landscape in one corner of the picture, the one sunlit space upon the canvas, a scene of meadows and of woodlands, with a mansion of red brick rising from the narrow waters of a moat. John Gore guessed it to be the Purcells’ house of Thorn, now ruinous in a Sussex waste, but once the home of the fair Spaniard with the peevish mouth.
He was looking at this picture with some intentness when Anne Purcell came in to him, with cross lines about her mouth, and the strained air of a woman whose temper is not at its best when inconsiderate persons make morning calls. She was wearing a faded puce-colored gown, and lace and ribbons that were none too clean, and she looked sallow in the morning sunlight, and restless yet heavy about the eyes.
“Good-morning, Jack.”
She treated him with blunt ceremony, having seen his ears boxed as a boy. John Gore turned and bowed to her, with his head full of other things.
“I was looking at Donna Gloria’s picture,” he said, making the most obvious remark, as a man commonly does on such occasions; “there is a strange likeness there.”
“Ah, yes, Gloria had a temper.”
“Is that Thorn—in the corner of the canvas, where the patch of sunlight lies?”
My lady glanced at him as though she had found him infinitely tiresome on previous visits.
“Thorn? I suppose it is.”
“It lies some miles from the Rye road, does it not—not far from a place called Battle?”
Anne Purcell looked at him with sudden suspiciousness, and, turning aside, sat down on a low couch with her back toward the light. John Gore had always angered her of late with the grim and quiet persistency of a forlorn and ridiculous faith. And possibly this impatience of hers came from the inevitable pain she suffered when gleams of the finer spirit in her broke through the shades of self.
John Gore, feeling in his pocket for his father’s letter, could not help being struck by the haggard expression of my lady’s face. So ripe and healthy by nature, the change in her was the more obvious and the more marked. The woman looked ill, with an indefinable grayness about the mouth and a heaviness about the eyes. Wrinkles had appeared in the skin that she had not touched that morning with rouge and powder, making her look thin, yellow, and even old.
“I have a letter for you from my father.”
“For me?”
Her face lighted up instantly, yet John Gore was struck by a shallow gleam like fear in her eyes.
“He has gone into the country for a few days.”
“The country! Where?—what part?”
“Suffolk, I believe.”
He handed her the letter, and turned to the window as though to give her leisure to break the seal and read it. Yet for nearly half a minute she suffered the letter to lie unopened upon her lap as though she were afraid to dip into its contents. Her eyes had fixed themselves with a look of prophetic dread upon the Spaniard’s picture where the sunlight shone.
John Gore, standing at the window, heard the stiff crackle of the paper in her hands as she spread it upon her knee. Stephen Gore and my Lady Purcell had been friends for so many years that the son almost thought of them as brother and sister. His father had been Lionel Purcell’s friend and Barbara’s godfather, and the sympathies of the two families had seemed to flow in one common channel.
“John”—her voice startled him, for his thoughts had flown elsewhere, as a lover’s thoughts will; he turned and saw her sitting with the letter on her lap, her face dead white, and the muscles twitching about her mouth—“will you ring for Jael?”
He looked at her keenly, with some concern.
“Have you had bad news—”
“No—”
“—about Barbara?”
“No, no, I am only faint. I have not been well these last few days.” And she crumpled the letter in her hands.
As he crossed the room he heard her give a curious, shivering cry, and when he turned again she was sitting with her face hidden in her hands, swaying slightly from side to side, her whole body shaken by some convulsive storm of tears. John Gore looked at her helplessly. Experience had not taught him to deal with an hysterical woman of forty.
Seizing the most discreet impulse, he moved toward the door and nearly pushed against Mrs. Jael as he opened it. He stood aside, and nodded her into the room, feeling that only a woman could deal with a woman in such a case. What the woe was he could only conjecture; perhaps some woman’s affair that made her emotions passionate and uncertain.
The spirit of unrest that seemed in the blood of every man that year might well have entered into John Gore’s mood as he wandered without purpose in the park after leaving my Lady Anne to Mrs. Jael’s ministrations. To a man who had led an active and adventurous life the court world seemed a trivial world, unless he were a libertine, a gambler, or a dabbler in ambitious schemes. John Gore felt himself out of touch with all these people, for after a three years’ voyage a man may be more ignorant of the political passions of the moment than a ploughboy who can catch the village gossip in a tavern. There were causes and interests to be served, and numberless back-stair intrigues to enthrall those who loved crooked pleasures and the mystery of some plot. John Gore realized that his father had plunged both hands into some secret undertaking, yet even the glamour of the Mazarin’s private salon did not lure him to mingle an amour with intrigues. The times seemed sinister, and full of violent yet treacherous motives. The life about him appeared vague, elusive, and unsatisfying. Even my Lady Purcell, so plump and buxom of yore, seemed to have fallen under the spell of some secret panic, to judge by her sickly look, and the strange emotion she had betrayed that morning. He found himself wondering what she had read in my lord’s letter, for the suddenness of her distress could hardly be explained by a fit of the vapors. For Anne Purcell had always appeared to him to be a thoughtless and selfishly cheerful woman, affectionate toward those who pleased her, but not one who would suffer greatly for the sake of others. The thought haunted him that the news had concerned Barbara, and that she had concealed the truth from him with a spasm of motherly pity.
His mood was of restlessness and discontent that morning—the restlessness of a man who lacks a purpose for the moment, and who longs for something to grapple with and overcome. My Lord Gore had counted on this adventurous spirit in the son, believing that it would lure him into the angry intrigues of the hour, and that he would forget that which my lord wished heartily to be forgotten. The fascinations of Hortense might have won many a man’s sword, and her splendor have dimmed the feeble and romantic glimmer of a distant face. To forego such plunder for a sulky girl whose mouth did not seem to be made for kisses! My lord’s worldliness scoffed at the chance. Hortense would disenchant him for any such sickly whim, and with a pout of her red lips or a touch of the hand, turn him aside from stupid melancholy. Yet Stephen Gore misunderstood the nature of the man, for though the vicissitudes of life make most folk fickle, there are some fanatics who grow more obstinate when threatened by fate.
John Gore passed by the Duke of Albemarle’s rooms, and entered the street by Holbein’s Gate. He walked under the windows of the Banqueting Hall, over the place where a king’s head had fallen, and turned in at the Palace Gate. He was strolling across the first court with the air of a man who wishes the whole world with the devil, when at the entry of the passage that ran past the Great Hall and the Chapel to Whitehall Stairs, he cannoned against an equally preoccupied person who came out by a side alley with a couple of books under his arm.
“Pardon, sir; but may I remind you that God gave us eyes!”
“Tu quoque, my friend; you have some weight behind those books, to judge by the dig in the ribs you gave me.”
They stared at each other irritably for the moment, and then fell a-laughing like a couple of boys.
“Bless my eyes, Jack Gore, but they are always playing me these scurvy tricks. I shall be kissing all my neighbors’ wives soon in mistake for my own.”
“And no doubt the excuse will be useful, unless the husbands are fools.”
“Ah, you dog! Remember my dignity, and in the public and august place. Where are you bound?”
“Anywhere—and nowhere.”
“The most devilish, dangerous course, John Gore, that a man can ever sail; it ends too often with places beginning with T and B. It also betokens a precarious state of mind, sir—a readiness to be made a fool of by a satin slipper or the turn of an ankle. I have had experience. Don’t laugh, you buccaneer. I am minded to take you under cover of my guns, and sail you into the country, where you can run into nothing more dangerous than a milkmaid with scarlet stockings.”
Mr. Pepys insinuated a hand round John Gore’s arm, and turned him back in the direction of the Palace Gate.
“Lest you find your way to the Stone Gallery, John, or to the bowers of the maids of honor, I will conduct you under escort as one who may prove an incorrigible vagrant. But to be most serious. Are you so incontinently idle and unoccupied?”
“I am.”
“Then you should be the very man for a fat and purblind friend who is driven to making pilgrimages on other people’s business. It is an error, sir, to be considered honest and good-tempered. How would a week’s saddle-shaking help your hunger. You have the took of a man too full of bile.”
John Gore looked into Mr. Pepys’s florid, short-sighted, and shrewdly amiable face.
“Are you going into the country?”
“Yes, like a Jew to Babylon. For of all the things I abominate, John Gore, commend me to country inns and the sloughs that bumpkins call roads. Being plump, Jack, I am piteously popular with certain officious insects, and when I consider it, I am moved by the reflection that these insects might split their affections out of curtesy to a strapping sailor.”
Mr. Pepys turned abruptly in his bustling way, dragging John Gore round by the elbow.
“We will go back by boat and dine, and after dinner a friend can refuse nothing. Take count of my inflictions, John Gore: Item one, to visit a female cousin and inquire into some business where she has been robbed and skinned by some rogue of a steward; and the woman is monstrously ugly, Jack, with not so much as a simper to make a man feel gallant. Item two, to go in person and render some private matter to Lord Montague who is resting—resting in one of his accursed country houses; it is no real business of mine, John Gore, but the kind of sottish business that a man allows himself to be saddled with because he is what people call trustworthy. Item three, to ride on to Portsmouth and poke my nose into certain unsavory messes there. This is what it means, sir, to be a man of affairs, and the most popular purse-carrier in an accursedly large family.”
John Gore laughed at Mr. Pepys’s declamatic energy, knowing him to be a man who would read a beggar a sharp lecture and then give him sixpence to drink with on the road.
“When do you start?” he asked.
“To-morrow.”
“And by what road?”
“The Rye road, John—and a wry road it is, I wagerdown to some miserable town called Lamberhurst, in Kent. They work iron there, and I suppose the beds are full of smuts that bite and smuts that don’t. Thence to the town of Battle to find my Lord Montague, if he chances to be there and not at Cowdray. Thence on to Portsmouth, and so home. The one cup of spiced wine is that we ride by Tunbridge; I shall visit The Wells, buy apples from the country girls, drink ink, and perhaps see some fine women. And if you will take the road with me, I shall be more easy in my mind as to footpads and fleas.”
Now there had flashed into John Gore’s mind the vision of Donna Gloria’s picture, with the glimpse of Thorn amid its woods and meadows. And sometimes a man is swayed by the veriest whim toward destinies that are far beyond the moment’s vision. So it proved with John Gore as he followed Mr. Pepys into the boat at Whitehall Stairs, for he promised to share with him the mellow comfort of St. Luke’s summer, and to serve as partner in the matter of rustic beds.