XXXII
Little Dr. Hemstruther, in his rusty clothes, came out from my Lady Purcell’s house and entered the “chair” that was in waiting for him, telling the men to carry him to my Lord Gore’s, in St. James’s Street. He took snuff vigorously as the two chairmen swung along over the cobbles, patted his chest, and beat his hands together to keep them warm. His unwholesome face had a beaky, bird-like alertness, and he appeared cynically amused by something, for Dr. Hemstruther delighted in the quaint inconsistencies of human nature, and had a fanatical hatred of all altruism and the sentiment of religion. Like many sour old men, he was hugely pleased when he had discovered anything mean and scandalous. And yet he was to be trusted in the keeping of a secret, his cynical temper helping him to cover up the follies of those who filled his purse. He merely jeered and mocked at them in philosophic privacy, taking their money, and mocking his own self for being the creature of such hire.
The chairmen stopped before the house in St. James’s Street, Dr. Hemstruther waiting in the chair till the house door opened, for a keen northwest wind was sweeping the street. Toddling in at last—a shrewd, meagre figure, his long nose poking forward between the curls of his huge wig—he was shown by the man Rogers into a little room at the back of the house where Stephen Gore kept his books and papers.
Dr. Hemstruther was warming his hands at the fire when my lord came in to him, his florid cheerfulness struggling to shine through a cloud of anxiety and unrest. His suit of sky-blue satin, the lace ruffles at his wrists, the very rings upon his fingers, seemed part of a radiance that was wilfully assumed. A keen eye could detect a certain hollowness in the face, a bagginess beneath the eyes, some slackness of the muscles about the mouth. The silky gloss of his fine manner betrayed through the very beauty of its texture the darker moods and thoughts beneath.
Dr. Hemstruther noted and commented on all this as he bowed his lean little body, and rubbed his hands for fear of chilblains; and Dr. Hemstruther despised my lord, though he covered up his sneers with subserviency and unction. For my Lady Purcell had fallen sick of the small-pox some days ago, and in her panic and distress of soul was sending my lord messages, which he—brave gentleman—put discreetly to one side.
“Well, sir, what news to-day?”
Dr. Hemstruther carried a very solemn face for the occasion.
“Great peril, my lord—great peril.”
“What! No better?”
“A threatening of malignancy, my lord.”
A flash of impatience escaped from Stephen Gore.
“What is your experience worth, Dr. Hemstruther, if you cannot handle a woman with a fever? The greater part of our earthly wisdom is a mere matter of words.”
He walked to the window and opened it.
“Poor Nan Purcell, to have escaped so long with a clean skin! There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth and covering up of mirrors.”
The petulance in his voice betrayed his resentment at the lack of improvement in her affairs. Her sickness was infinitely mischievous at such a moment, and inspired him with an uneasy and savage impatience. He flung down into a chair, with all his sweet loftiness in peril of toppling into a snarl of unseemly temper. Dr. Hemstruther appeared to be intent upon brushing some of the snuff from his coat.
“The danger is not skin deep, sir,” he said.
“You find yourself quite helpless, Dr. Hemstruther, eh? There, pardon my peevishness—”
“I would not venture the weight of a feather either way, my lord. And she is a bad patient, mens turbida in corpore ægro.”
He sniffed, smoothed his wig, and looked deferentially at his shoes.
“My Lady Purcell is asking for you, my lord.”
“Then she is conscious—of everything?”
“Conscious to the quick, in spite of the heat of the fever. If I may be pardoned—”
His eyes met my lord’s, and Stephen Gore was the more embarrassed of the two.
“You think that I should do her good?”
“More good, my lord—”
“Than all your draughts and bleedings!”
Dr. Hemstruther bowed, and hid a smile with the obeisance.
“My Lord Gore might find some words to soothe the lady.”
“But you forget, man, that—”
He did not complete the sentence, for even his egotism stumbled at the confession of the instinct of cowardice and self-love. Dr. Hemstruther understood him, and mocked inwardly at the great man’s prudence.
“There is some danger, my lord; but still I would advise—”
“As a matter of policy?”
“As a matter of policy.”
Stephen Gore pushed back his chair and stood at his full height, as though he felt the need of feeling himself taller than this little crab of a man who knew so much, and whose authority was so obsequious and yet so strong.
“Women have no patience, sir, and will scream ‘fire’ when a log falls on the hearth. I am up to my eyes in a rush of affairs to-day. And my friends will thank me if I breathe a pest into all their faces.”
“To-morrow would serve, my lord.”
“I may take your word for that? Good. Are there any cautions you would give me?”
Dr. Hemstruther screwed his face into an expression of intense sagacity.
“I will send you a powder to burn, my lord, and a mild draught to clear you. Sit by an open window, and have all the clothes you go in burned.”
“My thanks. And now, sir, if you will pardon me, my leisure is not my own.”
He unlocked a cabinet, took out a silk purse, and, crossing the room, held the purse out to the physician.
“I am exerting myself in that little affair of yours, Dr. Hemstruther,” he said. “It is a pleasure to labor for one’s friends.”
Both smiled faintly as they looked into each other’s eyes. Dr. Hemstruther put the purse away in an inner pocket and made one of his most courtly bows.
“Your servant, my lord. I trust that I am mindful of all your interests.” And he went out sniffing, to wrinkle up his nose sardonically, like a grinning dog, so soon as he was out of Stephen Gore’s sight.
But if Anne Purcell burned with a fever upon her bed, whimpering and calling continually on Mrs. Jael, who had taken a heavy bribe to bide beside her lady, my Lord Gore was in an equal fever of mind, the fever of a man who has many things to dread. He knew enough of the human heart to remember that the cords of silence char and slacken when Death holds the torch to the secrets of the past. A panic of penitence, the betrayal of others in the mad impulse to make amends, the emotions thirsting for the comfort of the confessional dew. And Stephen Gore was wise as to the gravity of a betrayal, for the man Grylls had ridden into Sussex, and Anne Purcell knew it, and the sealed order that he carried. Moreover, this blood-debt was not the only stain that darkened my lord’s consciousness. He was sunk to the chin in other and wider waters, where the breath from a hired creature’s lips might stir such a storm as should smother death into the mouths of many.
He stood before the fire, staring into it, and turning the rings upon his fingers. For the moment it was all self with him: self, savage, querulous, impatient, driven to that height of fanaticism whence the sorrows and hopes of a man’s fellows seem infinitely small and insignificant. It was the mad, angry self that beats down and tramples on the life instincts of others, crying a savage sacrifice to the Moloch of the ego. And yet this man in the satin coat, so bland, so debonair, so generous on the surface, heard the low clamor of that underworld that every man carries in the deeps of consciousness. He suffered, yet would not countenance his suffering, hardening himself to escape from it with fierce strength and subtlety and anger.
XXXIII
If Winnie Jennifer was not in love with John Gore, she was in love with the love in him, for no man could sit and stare so at the fire, and look so quietly grim over such a matter, without winning over a woman’s heart. There was a romance here, and your true woman, be she drudge or madam, has that trick of the fancy that lifts life out of its sordid round and makes her a queen of the fairies, though there be gray in her hair. And when he looked at Winnie with those deepset eyes of his she knew that he was looking beyond her toward his love, and that the heart in him said: “I must go to her, for she has suffered.”
Therefore, when John Gore rose up from the ingle-nook about three in the afternoon, and asked her whether Mr. Jennifer could lend him several fathoms of good rope, Mrs. Winnie regarded him with a curious glint of the eyes, and felt a delight in meddling in such a matter.
“To be sure, sir, there is a good round of rope hanging on a harness-peg in the stable. Come you—we will see.”
She went out with him, swinging her brown arms and holding her head high, as though proud in her woman’s way of sharing in the adventure, and, opening the stable door, showed him a hank of brown rope hanging from the wood.
“How much would you be wanting, sir?”
“Ten fathoms will do.”
He took the hank down, and, laying it on the floor, began to measure the rope out, yard by yard, coiling it neatly close by Mrs. Winnie’s feet. It was good hemp, unfrayed and unrotted, not too thick and stiff, yet stout enough to carry the weight of three men.
Mrs. Winnie watched him, her eyes inquisitively kind, and her tongue all of a tremble. He was borrowing the rope in the cause of adventure, and she felt flattered in the lending of it, but she wished he would tell her what it was for.
“It is good hemp, sir.”
“I should know a good rope, being a sailor. I shall need it to help me in a bit of a scramble.”
Mrs. Winnie began to think of all the cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood, for John Gore had withheld the name of Thorn.
“I had better get you a wallet full of food, sir; you may be needing it.”
“You think of everything, Mrs. Jennifer. I am going treasure-hunting.” And he laughed.
“Treasure, sir?”
“Yes. In a few days I may bring my treasure-trove back with me.”
Mrs. Winnie understood of a sudden, and her eyes grew full of light.
“No doubt she is all you desire, sir, and I ask no more questions of you. You have told me enough before to make me want to take and comfort her.”
She went away, and returned anon with an extra cloak, a parcel of bread and meat, some apples, and a drop of good hollands in a flask, for the autumn nights were growing raw and cold. John Gore had saddled his horse and hung the rope over one of the holsters. He looked touched by Mrs. Winnie’s simple kindliness, and by the faith she seemed ready to give to him.
“I shall have a heavy debt before long,” he said.
“We don’t count by tallies here, sir.”
And she was quite happy, good soul, in feeling his gratitude pledge its truth. She watched him ride away along the hedge, knowing him for a brave man and a strong one—a man whom a woman instinctively respects.
Now, at Thorn, Simon Pinniger sat on a tree-stump in an out-house lazily splitting billets of wood with the axe edge of a pick. It was growing dusk, and a pile of white wood lay beside him, with here and there the pink core of an old apple trunk amid the billets of oak and ash. Simon Pinniger was tired of the job, and, filling a basket with split logs, he shouldered it and crossed the court-yard into the kitchen, and dumped the basket down beside the hearth with the air of a man whose day’s work was done.
The woman Nance was at the table, peeling apples for a pie, her lips pressed intently together, and three hard lines running across her forehead. The man looked at her a little furtively, and then went to draw some beer from a cask that stood in the corner. He put the jug on the floor under the tap, so that the ale should have a head on it, and stood there watching the liquor flow with the stupid slouching pose of a man whose body was too big for his brain.
“Sim!”
The sharp rasp of the woman’s voice brought him round as though she had clouted him on the ear.
“What are you thinking of, man?”
The red-lidded eyes behind the eyelet-holes in the linen looked capable of expressing nothing but fleshly things.
“Supper,” he said, curtly.
“Well, you’ll wait for it. Quick, you fool, the liquor’s running over.”
He turned and put a hand to the spigot, muttering as a rivulet of good ale curled across the floor.
“All your tongue, as usual.”
“It’s always my tongue, Sim, and never your lumpishness. Wipe that slop up; I’m not going to soil my shoes in it.”
He obeyed her, and then sat himself on the three-legged stool before the fire, taking the jug with him, and standing it on the hearth.
“There’s comfort in the stuff,” he said, sullenly.
The woman gave a sharp laugh.
“Courage, you mean, you six feet and a half of fat and folly! You would run away from it all but for me.”
“Run!”
“Yes, you.”
“You want a week of the branks, my dear. Give me my money and my liquor, and I’m the bully for any man.”
“Oh, you’re a fine fat falcon—you! Keep a little courage in the cask, Sim, till the business comes. Three days’ grace and no countermand. What’s it to be—a mattress, or a fathom of rope, or a soft scarf? What are you looking so sulky about?”
For the man had bunched himself over the fire, and was rocking backward and forward on two legs of the stool.
“Let it alone, you fool,” he said; “it don’t do a man good to think of such things.”
She looked up mockingly, and threw a half-rotten apple at him.
“Oh, you soft head!—you piece of pulp! You’re no better than a great girl—you, who pulled Adam Naylor’s windpipe out and broke in that Frenchman’s chest. You, to make such a blubber over this!”
“Who’s afraid?” he asked, savagely.
“My sweet conscience! Oh, dear, good saints! I’m a poor sinner, a poor snivelling sinner—”
“Nance, shut your trap!” And he opened his chest and roared at her with sudden fury.
She took it with a laugh.
“Better, Sim, better. Put a little temper into it. I’ll give you a pint of hollands when the night comes, and smack you across the face with a firebrand to make you mad.”
And she filled her apron with the apple-peelings, and came and tossed them into the fire.
A west wind blew fitfully about the tower of Thorn. The ivy rustled, leaf tapping against leaf; and the clouds passed slowly across the stars. An owl was beating up and down the edge of a neighboring wood, hooting as he went, now strangely near, now faint in the distance. From the court-yard came the dull “burr” of the dog’s chain as he fidgeted in his kennel.
Barbara had been at war with herself all day—distraught, troubled, afraid to believe that which she most desired. And with the dusk her uneasiness and her wavering suspense had deepened, heralding an anguish of self-hatred and humiliation that shirked the ordeal of another meeting. She dreaded lest John Gore should come, and yet listened for his coming, fearing and longing for him in one breath, the past and present fighting for her desire. Twice she rolled up the sheets to succor him in his climb, and twice unrolled them with a fever of indecision. Her heart labored with the secret that it held, striving against the untellable, yet trying to beat out nothing but the truth. There was that eternal blood-debt between them, lurid to her, now that the night had come, like the glare of a fire reddening the sky.
Barbara walked to and fro awhile, and then stood listening, leaning against the wall. Nor had she been long motionless when there was a faint rustling of the ivy, a sound as of something moving, of something drawing near to her in the darkness. She climbed the bed and put her hands to the bars. A faint whisper came up to her out of the sibilant shiver of the leaves.
“Barbara!”
The fever of doubt and of fear left her suddenly.
“John!”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes; wait.”
She was down instantly, rolling the sheets and knotting them into a rope. The strands of her hair were under the pillow. She took them and wound them round the knots, and, making them fast to a bar, threw the end thereof out of the window. But the rope would not run by its own weight, and she had to thrust it out foot by foot, standing on the bed and leaning her bosom against the wall.
The rope tightened, the knot straining at the bar. Then a shadow blotted out the window.
“Dear heart!”
She stretched out her hands to him, and then drew them with a sharp sob into her bosom, bending down her head and feeling the old despair taking possession of her heart.
“Barbe!”
He had forced himself into the stone framing of the window, and she could hear him breathing hard with the grimness of the climb.
“Where are you, child?”
He lay there with his face to the bars, and heard nothing but sudden passionate weeping. The sound of it went through him to the heart. He stretched out an arm and was able to touch her hair.
“Dear heart, what is it?”
She shivered and drew away.
“You should not have come—”
“No, no.”
“John, you should not—”
“My life, child—come, speak to me—I cannot bear to hear you weep.”
She knew that he was trying to touch her, to be nearer to her, even with all the deep tenderness of his manhood. It was so easy and yet so difficult, so sweet and yet so full of torment. She felt that she could not bear out against him; and yet—how could she tell?
He spoke again.
“Barbara!”
And then:
“Dear heart, do you not trust me?”
Something seemed to break within her, and she thrust up her hands to him with a cry as of one drowning.
“John, I am afraid! John, I am afraid!”
“There, my life.”
“Take my hands—hold them—keep me; I am afraid, John! Dear God, what can I say!”
Her courage and her will had gone, and a storm of trembling shook her. John Gore felt the quivering of her body coming along her arms to him. Her hands strained at his, as though he were the one sure thing left to her in the anguish of it all.
“Barbara!”
He drew her as close to him as bars and wall would suffer.
“Tell me, child, everything.”
“I can’t, John! oh, I can’t!”
“Dear, do you think there is not one heart in the world? Look up, and tell me; I cannot let you go!”
She was silent a moment, still trembling greatly.
“John, you will hate me!”
“No! no! no!”
“Your father—”
His hands tightened on hers.
“My life, courage!”
“Your father killed my father, John!”
“Child!”
“And I—I tried to win revenge.”
She buried her face upon her arms, and then lifted it suddenly toward him in the dark, as though in an agony to know what he was thinking. His hands still had hold of hers, and there was no slackening of his fingers.
“John!”
“Dear heart!”
He bent his head, and drawing her hands to him, pressed his lips to them. Below him he could see the dim, appealing whiteness of her face.
“Barbe, you should have told me.”
“I was mad.”
“Who shall judge us, dear? You should have told me. I might have spared you much.”
He drew her hands close into his bosom, and she leaned there, letting the tears flow silently and the sorrow in her take refuge in his strength.
“You will not condemn me, John—you?”
“I! What am I, child, to condemn you?”
“But I have learned and I have suffered, and, John, in the long, silent nights I have prayed to God that He would be merciful to me—that I in turn might be more merciful.”
He kissed her hands again.
“God is with us, child, here and now.”
“How good you are, John! If I could only tell him—and my mother.”
“Dear heart, let that rest awhile. It is you I pray for—you that I remember.”
He was silent awhile, like a man waking to life from some strange dream. Then he pressed her hands in his, and spoke very dearly through the bars to her.
“Barbe, I must get you away from here. I would do it without violence for your sake—for the sake of every one. It would be easy for me to kill that man, but I would not have blood with the memory of this.”
She looked up at him and sighed.
“Listen: you can trust me. I have a rope here round my body; take it, when I am gone, and hide it in your bed. I will come again to-morrow and file these bars through. Do you know how the door is fastened?”
“With lock and bar.”
“A tough customer. Do they leave you alone the whole night?”
“Yes.”
“Time, an auger, and a good knife will serve then. I have a place to take you to. You will trust me in this?”
“John, need you ask that?”
“Dear heart of mine, no, no. Now for a rope’s-end. When I am safe below I will give three twitches to the rope. Draw it up, dear, and hide it in your bed.”
“Yes.”
“And, child, if you are in danger, or fear anything, tear off a piece of linen and tie it to one of the bars. I shall storm in then without by your leave or welcome, and deal with those gentry at the point of the sword.”
He kissed her fingers, hung there a moment, and then unwound the rope from about his body. Fastening it, he touched her hands through the bars of the window and went down into the night.
XXXIV
There were two link-boys waiting outside Lord Gore’s house in St. James’s Street when a short, stumpy woman came hurrying along with the hood of her cloak down over her head. The street door of the house was open, and a servant waiting on the step with a fur cloak over one arm and a sword under the other.
His master came out as the woman paused at the steps—a thin, swarthy, sallow man, with alert eyes and a brisk manner. He took the cloak from the servant and swung it over his shoulders, putting his chin up as he fastened the cloak, and making his lower lip protrude beyond the upper. Coming down the steps he looked hard at the woman who was leaning against the railings, a look that was half gallant, half suspicious, and even paused to stare in her face as though he thought she might have some message for him. But since she hung back and waited for him to pass, and was, moreover, woolly and middle-aged, he gave an order to the link-boys for the Savoy, and went away at a good fast stride with the servant following at his heels.
The woman ran up the steps and spoke to Tom Rogers, who was holding the door open and staring curiously after the retreating figure. Her voice was importunate, and even threatening—so much so that he let her in and closed the door, and went about her business without demur, as though knowing that she had some right to hustle.
My lord was in the little library at the back of the house, sorting and looking through a litter of papers on the table with a feverish, irritable air. There was a good fire burning, and charred fragments of paper littered the hearth and fluttered in the draught at the throat of the chimney. My lord had taken a roll of letters, and was thrusting them into the heart of the fire with the tongs when Rogers knocked at the door and entered upon privilege.
His master glanced at him with a gleam of impatient distrust.
“What is it now?”
“My Lady Purcell’s woman, sir.”
“Where?”
“In the hall, my lord. She says that she must speak with you.”
Stephen Gore’s face had the dusky look of a face gorged with blood from drinking.
“Send her in, Rogers. Take warning, I am at home to no one, not even to the King.”
The roll of letters was a black mass spangled over with sparks and corroding lines of fire when Mrs. Jael came in with the hood of her cloak turned back. She waited till Rogers had closed the door, and even then looked at it suspiciously, as though afraid that the fellow might be listening. Stephen Gore understood her meaning. He opened it, found the passage empty, and, closing the door again, stood with his back to it and his hand upon the latch.
“Your message?”
Mrs. Jael fidgeted her arms under her cloak, and looked hot and a little scared.
“My lady has sent me, my lord—”
“Well, well?”
“She must see you to-night; she will take no denial; I am bidden to bring you back.”
Stephen Gore frowned at her didactic tone and the menace in her manner.
“Indeed!”
“She cannot bear it alone, my lord; she must speak with you; we fear that she is dying.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, sir; yes—don’t curl your mouth at me. She bade me say that unless you come to her, she will—”
The expression of my lord’s face so frightened Mrs. Jael that her voice faltered away into an almost inaudible murmur. He stood staring at her, his flushed face seamed with the passions of a man whose courage and patience had already suffered, and on whom all the hazards of life were falling in one and the same hour.
“I will come.”
He pressed back his shoulders, steadied his dignity, and crossed the room to where hat, cloak, and sword lay on a carved chair. His hands fumbled with the tags of the cloak as he fastened them. Mrs. Jael kept her distance as he walked toward the door, for there was a look in my lord’s eyes that night that made her afraid of him. He was as a man driven to bay, and ready to stab at any one who should venture too near his person.
Stephen Gore walked the short distance to Anne Purcell’s house in grim silence, heartily cursing all women, and in no mood to humor a sick sinner. The whole thing was accursedly vexatious and inopportune, and he hardened himself against all sentiment with the savage impatience of a man who is harassed and menaced on every quarter. Mrs. Jael was a snivelling fool, an emotional creature who had helped to froth up her mistress’s panic. Both of them, no doubt, needed ice to their heads, and a couple of gags to keep them quiet.
Yet the great house was so solemn and dim and silent, and the woman’s manner in tragic keeping therewith, that Stephen Gore felt chilled and uneasy as he followed her flickering candle up the stairs. The place seemed ghostly and deserted, full of dark corners, draughts, and mysterious empty rooms. Stephen Gore had come in with his pulses thrumming lustily, and the hot intent to put all this meddlesome nonsense out of his path. But the house had much of the eeriness of a moorland in a fog, with quags ready to suck at a man’s feet, and a strange, vast silence to unnerve him.
Mrs. Jael led him along a gallery, and opened a door at the end thereof. She stood back waiting for him to cross the threshold, and then, as though she had had her orders, she swung the door to and turned the key in the lock.
Stephen Gore turned with a start, hesitated, biting his lip, and then let things take their course. The room was lit by a single candle; the boards and walls were bare, and there was little in it save the four-post bed. A great fire burned on the hearth, and the air felt hot and heavy, and full of the indescribable scent of sickness.
“Stephen!”
He forced back his shoulders, gave a tug to his cravat, and turned toward the bed. The curtains were drawn back, and on the white pillow he saw a dusky, swollen face—a face that might haunt a man till the day of his death.
“Stephen, are you there?”
My lord looked shocked despite himself, as though thinking of the face that he had kissed not many days ago.
“Why, Nan, how is it with you?”
Her breathing was labored, her lips cracked and dry, and the hand that she stretched out to him swung up and down, like a branch in the wind.
“I cannot see you; my eyes are touched.”
He looked at her helplessly, half loathing the thing he saw, and yet unnerved by a blind rush of pity that beat and shook the pedestal of self.
“Stephen, don’t come near me if you are afraid.”
She might have reproached him with the pusillanimous prudence he had shown in keeping away from her until this night. And, vain woman that she had been, she felt that it was the threat alone that had brought him to her. Yet she spoke calmly at first, and feebly, like one who had come to a sense of awe and of the end.
My lord put the best dignity he could upon it, but he felt the heat and the wilfulness in him growing cold.
“You have sent for me, Nan—”
“It is not the first time.”
“I should have come before, but I have been pressed and driven by a hundred things.”
Instinctively she turned her face toward him on the pillow, though she could not see him because the disease had blinded her.
“Let us make no excuses to-night, Stephen. Do you know that I am dying?”
“No, Nan—not that.”
She gave a long sigh, and her hands moved to and fro over the coverlet.
“Yes. I am dying. You know why—I have sent for you.”
“What is your desire?”
He stood looking at her in some astonishment and with unwilling awe, for she whom he had always led seemed mistress of herself under the shadow of death, and not the weeping, pleading, terrified thing that he had thought to find.
“Stephen, you must go to-night.”
He faced up as though to attention.
“Go? Where?”
“Need I tell you that?”
“My heart, you are ill—and distraught.”
She raised herself on the pillow with a sudden energy of passion; her poor marred face could not express it, but her voice had a deep, fierce thrill that came from the heart of the world.
“Man, man, do not play with me to-night, as you have played with me these many years!”
“Anne, if you will listen to me—”
“Listen! What have I to hear? This thing lies in my throat—and stifles me. I cannot bear it, I cannot bear to die with it—smothering my breath.”
He breathed out, and tried to hold himself in hand.
“Nan, it is impossible—”
“No, no.”
“I cannot go to-night. There are matters—affairs that it would be death to me to leave. I tell you, I tell you—my honor is pledged here.”
She held out a rigid arm toward him, her blurred, sightless eyes at gaze.
“Stephen, I warn you—”
“I tell you, you do not understand—”
“Your honor! You weigh your honor against this thing! Stephen, I warn you—”
“For God’s sake, listen: I—”
“No, no. Save the child, I charge you, or before I die I will tell the truth.”
Her hand dropped and then went to her throat, for a spasm of choking seized her, and he could see the muscles straining in her throat and her dry lips praying for air. Stephen Gore thought that death had her that instant, but the strength of her purpose bore her through.
“Stephen, promise me.”
He held out his hands appealingly, helplessly; but the gesture was lost upon her blindness.
“Promise.”
“It is impossible.”
“Man, man, have you ever loved any one but yourself? Have you never stood on the edge of the world—and looked over—over into darkness? I cannot go to it—with this thing stifling me. Stephen, I ask you, if you have ever loved me, do me this last mercy.”
He walked to and fro with a quick, rigid step, and paused at the far end of the room, feeling the air hot and poisonous, and the blood drumming at his temples.
“I am to sacrifice myself, Nan. You ask that?”
She propped herself upon the pillow, her head swaying slightly from side to side.
“I ask you not to face your God, Stephen, with more blood upon your hands.”
He cried out at her with bitterness.
“Woman, woman, what can I do?”
“What I have asked. Ride down to Thorn—to-night. And, Stephen, do not think that I shall die—so soon—that you can play with me—and shirk it. You may wish that I were dead now—and silent.”
He leaned against the wall, spreading his arms against it as though to steady himself.
“Before God, Nan, not that!”
“Stephen, if you have ever loved me, do not stoop to play a coward’s trick upon me now.”
He leaned there against the wall, almost like a man crucified, his face haggard, his forehead agleam with sweat. He had come to temporize, to dissuade, to cheat the truth with a few glib words, and he found the heart plucked out of him, and his self beaten against its anger and its will.
“Nan, I will go.”
“There is time—yet.”
“A night—and a day.”
She held out her hands as though with a piteous sense of loneliness and leave-taking; but though he was humbled, shaken, he could not look into her face.
“Nan, I will go. Let that help you to live. What will come of it God alone can tell.”
She felt instinctively through all the tumult of it that he could not look at her without a shudder, he who had always loved sun and color and richness about him—a soft skin and pleasant lips. Yet she was too near the veil, too close upon the eternal mystery, to cry out over a lost desire.
“Stephen, for God’s sake, go!”
She fell back on the pillow as he turned to the door and shook it, forgetting in the chaos of his thoughts that the woman Jael had turned the key. He beat upon the panels with his fist, and when the door opened for him, pushed past her without a word, and went heavily down the dark stairway to the hall where he had left his cloak and sword.
My Lord Gore was within twenty yards of his own house when a figure that had been loitering in the shadow came slantwise across the road to meet him, and stopped on the footway as he passed. My lord had a glimpse of a pair of shining eyes and the white oval of a man’s face between the drooping brim of a beaver and the upturned collar of a cloak.
“Good-night, my lord—fugax, fugax, solvendo non sumus.”
He was pushing on with nothing more than a low, soft whistle when Stephen Gore caught him by the arm.
“Blake!”
“Softly, for God’s sake, sir; I have loitered here for half an hour to give you the wink and the text.”
My lord still gripped his arm.
“What is it, man?”
“Boot and saddle for me, sir, before midnight, and the godsend of a boat across the Channel. Coleman’s correspondence has been seized.”
“The fool—the Jesuit fool!”
“The poor devil will be in the Protestant purgatory soon, sir. If you are wise, ride—ride. There will be bigger titles than yours, my lord, bumping in the saddle to-night.”
He looked about him uneasily, and then freed himself quietly from Stephen Gore’s grip.
“Your pardon, sir, but the hawks will soon be on the wing for some of us poor popish pigeons. Good-night.”
“Blake, thanks for this.”
“Nonsense, sir; you helped me once, and I am an Irishman. Good-night.”
He went away at a good pace, leaving Stephen Gore standing on the footway, with the wind blowing his periwig about his face. He stood there for half a minute watching a faint shadow melt into the night. Then he seemed to steady himself like a tree between the gusts of a storm, and, turning, walked on slowly toward his house.
But Stephen Gore did not sleep in Westminster that night, for he went alone into the stable when the grooms had gone and the servants were in bed, and saddled and bridled a horse with his own hands. He had thrown his periwig into a corner, put on the oldest clothes he could find, to ride out like a sturdy crop-head of a Britisher daring enough to venture on the roads at such an hour. Pistols, money, and food he took with him, and leading his horse out into the street, went away at a brisk trot into the black chasm of the night. He might be knocked out of the saddle at any corner, but Stephen Gore hazarded the chance, since he might be given an axe or a halter for his badge.