XXXV
Chris Jennifer was too busy a man to worry his slow brain greatly over other people’s affairs, for when a man farms for the children who shall come after him he can give all the daylight to the land, and trudge home to feed and sleep without much communion with the philosophers and poets. There is always work upon a farm, save for those who have sore heels and a chronic thorn in the forefinger. For these autumn and winter months ploughing, hedging, ditching, carting fagots and stacking them for the winter, spreading the muck abroad, taking odd carpentering jobs in hand, to say nothing of the feeding and tending of sheep and cattle, the fattening of pigs and bullocks for Christmas, the trapping of vermin, and the netting of the accursed cony. Chris Jennifer’s most luminous moment was after a rat-hunt about the barns and out-houses. To take by the tail the carcasses of sundry strapping rats and heap them in a funeral pile was an act that made Mr. Jennifer feel that Satan can be confounded in this world and his imps punished for stealing a farmer’s com. For if Chris Jennifer hated anything it was a rat, and next to the rat he hated couch-grass, while the purple-polled thistle came in a bad third.
When Mrs. Winnie’s husband went to bed he slept the deep, sonorous sleep of a round-headed peasant whose lungs had been breathing in clean air all the day. And not even the facts that John Gore had borrowed his best rope and that his wife was dabbling her hands in affairs that did not concern her could keep Master Christopher awake and talking. All he had deigned to hope was that “us be not goin’ agen the law,” and that “this fine gentleman ben’t feedin’ on hot pie-crust.” Then he drew his nightcap down, turned on his right side, and went to sleep with the ease of a dog.
Mrs. Winnie, being a woman, and more impressionable and imaginative, remained very wakeful all that night, thinking of all manner of strange adventures, and not a little afraid of John Gore’s neck. She had banked the kitchen hearth up with logs, left some supper on the table, and the door unbarred, so that there should be some welcome for him if he came home after bedtime. Yet in spite of all this satisfying forethought she kept awake to listen, and even when she dropped away toward Christopher’s oblivion Mrs. Winnie came to with a start, thinking that she had heard sounds.
Daylight came, with a west wind swishing in the beech-trees and making a low murmur in the chimney, and the adventurer had not returned. Mrs. Winnie jerked an elbow into her man’s back, rose up, and began to dress. She was down and at work in the kitchen getting the fire alight before Chris Jennifer got a very stout pair of legs out of the bed.
Mrs. Winnie had piled up the fire, lit the dry brushwood under it, and was kneeling to help the blaze with the bellows, when the door swung open, and John Gore walked in. He looked muddy as to the boots and breeches, and rather white about the face, like a man who has been out long in the cold, though his eyes had a quiet steadfastness that proved he had no pallor at the heart.
Winnie Jennifer twisted round on her knees.
“Body of me, sir, you are here at last! I’ve been kep’ awake most of the night through thinking of ye, and listening.”
He smiled down at her, and when he smiled the mystery that was in him seemed to glow and to exult in a way that made Mrs. Winnie hanker after her own days of being courted.
“You should not have troubled your head about me, Mrs. Jennifer.”
The fire was blazing now, making a brave crackle, and John Gore looked at it as though he were cold and empty and dead tired. Mrs. Winnie was up and bustling in an instant.
“Sit you down, sir. Why, bless my heart, you must be cold and damp as a dish-clout! I’ll fetch Chris down to see to your horse.”
“I have seen to him myself, Mrs. Winnie.”
She pushed forward the great box of a chair that was padded with horsehair and leather, and had been polished to a rare sheen by her husband’s breeches.
“Just you pull off your boots, sir, and rub yourself dry. I’ll have something hot in ten minutes, and a dish of bacon and some eggs.”
She was bustling with curiosity as well as with good-will, for there was something in the man’s manner that told of mystery and of strange things accomplished, and perhaps of looking deep into other eyes. He sat down obediently before the fire, and, pulling off his boots, spread himself to the blaze. Overhead they could hear the stumping of Chris Jennifer’s feet as he tumbled into his clothes with decent circumlocutions.
Mrs. Winnie came to hang the kettle on the chain, and while she was bending forward with the firelight on her face John Gore sat forward in his chair and laid a hand upon her shoulder.
“I am giving you a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Jennifer,” he said.
“Dear life, no, sir.”
“Can I ask you to do something more for me?”
She knelt and looked around at him, her honest, comely face perfectly trustful.
“To be sure, sir.”
“Then I must make my terms with you.”
“You can talk of them, sir, though I may not be for listening to them when you have told me what you wish.”
John Gore sat back in the chair again, his eyes on the fire.
“Mrs. Jennifer, I want some one whom I can trust. I want to bring her to you here, away from people who wish her out of the world.”
Mrs. Winnie took up the poker and made a thrust or two at the fire.
“It’s good of you, sir, to give me the honor—”
“There shall be no danger to you or yours, I can promise that.”
“There, sir, I was not thinking of any such thing! We are only farming folk, and the lady may have prettier notions than—”
He bent forward suddenly and looked into her face.
“She would bless you, Mrs. Winnie, as I should, for the very warmth of a fire. She has not felt the warmth of a fire this month or more, and she is half starved into the bargain.”
Mrs. Jennifer opened her eyes with indignation.
“What! not a stick of fire! Who be they who have the caring for her? And no victuals!”
“Then you will let me bring her here—if I can?”
“Dear heart, sir, yes. I’ll have my best blankets out, and make cakes and pasties. And perhaps she would like a nice young pullet, sir. We will put her in the parlor ingle-nook, and melt her heart, and give her stuff to make the color come.”
John Gore held out a hand.
“You do not know how I thank you for this. But there are my terms to be considered.”
“Oh, get along, sir.”
“I shall pass over to you three gold pieces a week.”
Mrs. Winnie looked ready to scoff and laugh.
“Three sixpences would be nearer the mark, sir. Why, Jem and Sam and Nicholas, our men, wouldn’t eat and drink a third of that in seven whole days.”
“Never mind your men, Mrs. Jennifer.”
“Not mind them! And where should we be in six months, the lazy loons! No, I tell you, sir.”
John Gore tried her on another quarter.
“Very well, Mrs. Winnie, take the money and put it in a stocking for your boy.”
“But, sir—”
“Take it, or turn me out of the door. I hold to your good-will and your trust with all my heart, but live on you I will not, just because I happened to pull the youngster out of the pond.”
The woman gave the fire three more pokes.
“I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, sir.”
“Then you will put the money aside for the child’s sake.”
Mr. Christopher Jennifer had had great faith in his wife’s wisdom ever since she had elected to marry him in preference to a gay sprig of a harness-maker at Lewes, a gallant who could write verses after the fashion of a gentleman, and had deigned to dazzle both with dress and address. Chris Jennifer in his courting days and season of rivalry had fallen violently foul of this same harness man for the love of Mrs. Winnie. Chris, who had never been a quarrelsome man, had put his bristles up at last under the provocation of his rival’s genteel and foppish impertinence. He had led the harness man by the ear into the back-yard of Mrs. Winnie’s father’s house, and there had smitten him, and in the smiting had won his way to Winnie’s heart. For she was a woman who must have strength of a kind in a man, and silence and shrewd sense, nor could she abide a ranter or a puff-bag, nor a fellow who was always talking big about the gentry, and telling how he had dined at the justice’s table. Men with long tongues were not after her fancy, seeing that length of tongue generally goes with a league of silly vanity and boasting, and that men who talk much are still talking while your quiet man has ploughed his furrow.
Therefore, when Mrs. Winnie threw out a downright hint to her man that Gentleman John was likely to bring his lady-loveto Furze Farm, and insisted upon putting sundry gold pieces into son William’s pocket, Mr. Jennifer humphed and nodded, and supposed there would be no harm in it “if t’ parson be not left out in t’ cold.” Mrs. Winnie snubbed him for his sneaking prudery, and protested that he had no wits in him to see when a gentleman was of clean, brave blood and the very stock of honor.
“The lad’s in love, Chris, as a lad should be, though he be past thirty by the set of his jaw and mouth. He ben’t one of your gilliflower gentlemen, prancing along and tweaking his chin to and fro to see how the women fall to him. It be none of my business to spy and to speculate, but the woman he be after, Chris, must be a woman worth winning.”
Mr. Jennifer was heaving a couple of fagots into the wood-shed while his wife dropped these suggestions into his ear. Son William had been sent out with a basket to pick blackberries, and the men were down in the fields.
“I hope it be nothing agen t’ law, Winnie.”
“Go on, you great coward!”
“Woa, my dear!”
“When ye smacked Peter Tinsel on the mouth that day for love of me, did ye think of the law, Chris?”
He stood and looked at her with a slow, broadening grin, as though he were proud of her cleverness and her courage.
“T’ law be damned; that were what I told Peter Tinsel.”
Mrs. Winnie stuck out her elbows as though to express the word “exactly.” But her husband came up to her and kissed her on the mouth with a manly vigor that swept away any sense of superiority on her part.
Mrs. Jennifer was busy over many things that day, seeing that Furze Farm might be turned into a refuge for romance, and that she had people of quality to cook for. Yet she found time to have a short gossip or two with John Gore over the parlor fire, and that which struck her most was the grim foreshadowing of something in his eyes, as though he had an enemy to meet or a debt to wipe out in the cause of honor. Had Mrs. Winnie been able to read his thoughts as he sat before the fire and cleaned his pistols after sending the bullets splashing into the pond, she would have hugged her bosom and have understood that grim look about his eyes and mouth. For in the silence of the night, and amid the wet, black woods where he had seen the dawn gather, John Gore had suffered a revelation that would have made any man’s heart heavy and ashamed. He had never greatly loved his father, nor had they ever trusted each other with the inner intimacies of life, yet a son cannot lay bare his begetter’s true nature without recoiling from it when he beholds rottenness and hidden sores. The tragedy was so plain to him, so terribly simple now that the scattered rays of his conjectures had been gathered by the burning-glass of truth. And John Gore had ridden into Furze Farm that morning with the cold raw air of the wet woods in his blood and the heart numb in him but for the thought of Barbara. The warmth of the fire and a tankard of ale had driven some of the poisonous taste from under his tongue, but the truth galled him like a bone in the throat, filling him with wrath and shame and pity.
Mrs. Winnie found herself called upon to provide more tools for him that day, and after some rummaging in an oak locker in the harness-room she found him what he needed—namely, a file and a half-inch auger. He also borrowed the pillion on which Christopher Jennifer took his wife to market at Battle, Hailsham, or Robertsbridge. By reason of these details Mrs. Winnie understood that the romance was deepening to a crisis, and though she kept her tongue to herself in the matter of asking questions, she cordially commended John Gore in his prison-breaking, having a hearty contempt for authority when true sentiment was threatened.
While John Gore rode through the woods when the evening mists began to dim the splendor of the trees so that they were like shrines of gold seen through the drift of incense, Simon Pinniger sat in the kitchen at Thorn drinking to get his temper up and his blood hot and muddled against the night. He would spread out his great hands before the fire and look at them with a kind of sottish pride, keeping an uneasy eye upon the woman Nance, who in turn kept a keen eye on him.
“What is it to be, Sim?” she asked, with the air of one who must keep a surly dog in good temper with himself.
The man drew off a great red neckerchief that he was wearing, made a loop, and, putting one fist through it, drew the ends tight with his teeth and the other hand.
“That’s my trick,” he said, dropping the end from his mouth; “them Spaniards have a liking for it, and Spaniards are particular in the playing of such tricks.”
XXXVI
There was to be a moon that night, and the thickets were black at sunset against the cold yellow of a winter sky. Frost hung in the air, with a gusty, arid northeast wind that came sweeping south with a sense of coming snow, while great purple cloudbanks loomed slowly into the north. The grass was already stiffening, and the leaves made a dry thin rattle as John Gore drew up in the beech-thicket over against Thorn. He had brought an extra cloak with him, and a loin-cloth for his horse, and after some searching he found a little hollow where dead bracken stood, and where the beast would be sheltered from the wind. He buckled the bridle about a young ash whose black buds and branches stood out against the sky.
John Gore took his sword, pistols, and tools into Thorn with him that night, tying them up in the end of a red scarf, and swinging them after him as he straddled the gate. He hid the sword and one pistol in the ivy at the foot of the tower, and set out on a reconnoissance, holding close under the deep shadow of the walls, and keeping a long knife ready in case the dog should be loose and on the prowl. There was a faint silvery glow low down in the eastern sky, but no moon as yet, and John Gore, meeting the keen north wind, thought of Barbara in that cold room, and felt his heart warm to her, and to Mrs. Winnie as he remembered the blazing kitchen at Furze Farm.
Probing about in the dusk, he found the doorway that led into the ruined hall, and in the corner of the hall the rough stone stair and door that gave access to the tower. It might have seemed simpler to have set to work straightway upon that door, but he chose the safer, slower method of forcing the window and then working from within.
The rope was dangling from within reach when John Gore returned to the foot of the tower, and he went up it hand over hand with the tools slung behind him by the scarf. He was soon under Barbara’s window, where the rope ran taut over the sill, and, reaching in for a grip of the bars, he called to her in a whisper.
“I am here, John, waiting.”
He felt the wind on his back, and guessed how miserably cold that room must be.
“Poor heart, the blood must be numb in you.”
“No, John, not quite.”
“Let me have your hands, dear.”
He lay in on the window-ledge with his face against the bars, and stretched his arms in. His hands groped for hers and found them, and of a truth they were like ice.
“Why, my life, you are all a-shiver!”
She was shuddering a little—half with the cold, half with a deep thrill from within.
“No, it is not only the cold, John.”
“No?”
“It is all so strange—and hazardous.”
He held her hands between his, and then began to chafe them to get them warm.
“We will soon have you out of this. I have found a warm nest for you, where they pile the wood half-way up the chimney, and look glum if one does not eat more than one needs. You must rest there, Barbe, and forget everything for a while, and let the past die, dear, if you can. I suppose the folk below will not meddle to-night?”
“No. Yet it is strange, John, they have brought me no food to-day.”
“No food, child! Why?”
“Oh, I had a little bread left.”
“The brutes! And here am I chattering like a starling instead of getting to work.”
He drew up the scarf, and unfastening the knot about the tools and pistol, laid them before him on the sill. Then he made a loop in the rope, so that the end should not be left dangling near the ground and betray him in case the man Pinniger were in a vigilant mood. He had brought a rag with a slip of lard in it, and he greased the bar with the fat where the file was to work, so that the tool should make less sound. The steady “burr” of the steel teeth soon told of their bite upon the rusty metal. The three bars were as thick as John Gore’s forefinger, but they had rusted away more at the lower ends, where the damp gathered and the rain had stood in tiny pools. A strong arm would be able to thrust them in after an hour or so’s steady filing.
Barbara stood on the bed, leaning her arms against the wall and listening to the stubborn rasping of the file. There was a sweetness even in that rough, shrill sound to her, for life and desire were breaking in with strong arms and the beat of a man’s heart. She no longer felt the cold, but stood there conscious only of the dearness and mystery of it all, letting a sense of infinite peace steal in. She fell almost into a dreamy, wandering mood like one near to the edge of sleep, hearing him speak to her from time to time. Now and again he would stop and rest, and stretch a hand in between the bars, and she felt him once take a strand of her hair and lay it across his lips.
John Gore had filed through one bar and bent it back, when a sudden, clear, ringing sound came up to them out of the silence of the tower, like the clash of something metallic upon stone. Barbara woke from her stupor of dreams like a frightened sentinel, and put up a hand as though in warning.
“John! Did you hear that?”
He had heard it, and hung there with every sense upon the alert, hating the wind that made the ivy rustle. Barbara had stepped down from the bed and crossed the room to the door. She knelt and laid her ear to the lock, holding her breath, her lips parted, her eyes at gaze.
A vague suggestion of movement came to her from the dark well of the tower stair—a dull, slow, scraping sound that came up and up with moments of silence in between. There was no glimmer of light as she looked through the key-hole, nothing but that slow, cautious sound like some big thing crawling in a dark and narrow place.
Shivering, her skin a-prickle as with cold, she went back to the window, climbed the bed, and gave the man a whisper.
“John, there is some one coming up the stair.”
“Lie down on the bed, child; I will slip out and wait.”
She heard the rope chafe slightly against the window-ledge as John Gore lowered himself cautiously so as to be out of view. He hung there as a sailor can, with feet and knees gripping the rope, and one hand on the butt of the pistol that he had thrust into his belt. He had left the tools on the window-sill, and no one would see them or the knotted rope about the bar, unless they climbed up from the bed to look.
Hanging there, with the wind shaking the ivy, he could hear no sound in the tower and see no glimmer of light coming from the squints. The rising moon was beginning to throw gleams down into the valley, but the western quarter of the tower was as dark as a well. It was a moment when a man may feel scared by some vague, indefinite peril invisible to him in the darkness. Or he may clinch his teeth and keep his right hand ready, knowing, if he be a man who has had his share of adventure-hunting, that his own imagination may be far more sinister than any living thing on earth or sea.
There was a sudden faint click like the twist of a turned lock, a sound that made John Gore lift his chin heavenward and listen with both his ears. Then came a slow whine, as though an unoiled hinge were turning. The door of Barbara’s room had been opened; he had no doubt of that. Probably she was feigning sleep, thinking that one of my lord’s creatures had come to see that all was safe. A harsh gust of wind shook the ivy on the wall, making John Gore curse the leaves for setting up such a flutter.
But above the rustling of the ivy he heard an abrupt and half-smothered cry, and then the sound as of people struggling. The bed creaked; there was an inarticulate choking as of some one striving to call for help through the smothering folds of a cloak. The black room within seemed full of movement, of piteous effort, of hoarse, savage whisperings that made his mane bristle like a furious dog’s.
He gave one shout as a challenge and a warning, and then slid down the rope without heeding how it chafed his hands. Plucking out his sword and pistol from the ivy at the foot of the tower, he ran for the doorway that led from the terrace into the hall, his face meeting the moonlight that poured down through a broken window.
XXXVII
The door at the foot of the tower stood open, and John Gore plunged in with his sword forward and his pistol at the cock. The place was as dark as a pit, and he thrust out right and left with the sword, the point ringing against the walls till he found where the gap of the stairs opened. He went up silently, for he was in his stockings, but there was more grimness in that swift and silent climb than any clangor and clash that armed men might have made. His blood was up, the devil awake in him, and the spirit of murder howling in his ears. He seemed to see all the gross, smothering horror of the scene above, and he set his teeth as he wondered whether he would come too late.
A quick shuffling sound came down to him in the darkness. A hurrying human thing was close to him, and John Gore challenged and lunged without pity. There was a hard sob, and a dim shadow of a figure dragged down his sword’s point in its fall. He freed the blade and went on with hardly a thought, as a stormer pushes on over the bodies in the throat of a “breach.” A sudden gleam of light slanted down the stair, and he heard the tread of heavy feet and a harsh shout of “Nance! Nance!” Rounding the last twist of the stair, John Gore came upon a man with a white cloth over his face, standing on the landing outside Barbara’s room and holding a shaded lantern in his hand.
There was no parleying between those two, and Simon Pinniger, caught without arms, lifted up the lantern as though to dash it in John Gore’s face. The sea-captain flung up his left arm, and firing straight into the man’s body, saw him go lurching back, the lantern falling at his feet. John Gore sprang up with his sword ready, thinking for the moment that the bully had it in his heart. But Simon Pinniger’s ribs were tough enough to turn a pistol-bullet, and he recovered himself and came at the rescuer like a bull.
He tried to beat the sword aside with a sweep of the arm, but the lantern still burned upon the floor, and John Gore was too grim a gentleman to be tricked so easily. He avoided the blow with a backward step and a swift back swing of the right arm. The point was still to the fore, and lunging with the whole weight of arm and shoulder, he felt the blade grate between the fellow’s ribs. Then he was caught full face, like a bluff ship by an ocean roller, and knocked backward down the stairs by the mass and impact of the man’s charge.
The sword broke a foot from the guard, but John Gore held to the hilt, even while the brute bulk of the man was grinding over him down the steps. Twisting free, he slipped aside against the wall, only to feel a hand grasping at his throat, and the sound of hoarse, wet breathing mingling with savage curses. He struck out with the hilt of the sword, broke the man’s grip, and came up top dog despite Simon Pinniger’s brute, plunging fury. It was like the death-thrashing of a leviathan amid blood and spray. They struggled, clawed, and smote for a moment, till a chance stab went deep into the fellow’s eye. He crumpled down into the darkness; John Gore heard his head strike the wall, and the breath come out of him like the wind out of a stabbed “float.”
The man was mere carrion, and John Gore sprang up the stairs, finding the lantern still burning, though the grease from the candle had guttered through upon the stones. He picked it up, and was about to push forward into the room when a black square in the flooring caught his eye. A flagstone had been turned upon its side against the wall, uncovering the mouth of some oubliette or pit, and for a moment he bent over it, trying to probe its depths, as though dreading lest that dear body should be lying broken in the darkness beneath.
A glance through the open door of the room showed him Barbara lying upon the floor, with the bedclothes half covering her as she lay. He was down beside her with a cold sweat of fear on him as the light from the lantern fell upon her face. A red scarf had been wound about her neck, and her two hands were still straining at it, pathetic in their impotence to let in life and breath. John Gore set the lantern down, caught her up and unwound the thing, cursing as he did so the marks where the white throat had been bruised by brutal hands. There was froth on her lips and dusky shadow covering her face, yet the lips were warm when he pressed his cheek to them, and, putting an ear to her bosom, he found that her heart still throbbed.
An inarticulate “Thank God!” came from him, but the cry of the moment was “Air! air!” Taking her in his arms, he bent for the lantern, and swinging it by the ring from one finger, he started down the stairs. He hardly heeded the two bodies lying there, save to step over them, and so, with all his manhood praying and striving for the life in her, he came out into the cold night air and the pale gleam of the moon.
Now John Gore remembered a trick that an old buccaneer surgeon had taught him at Port Royal—a trick that had saved men who had been cut down from the gallows or pulled out senseless from the sea. He laid Barbara on the wet grass that grew in the old hall, and, kneeling at her head, took her two arms at the wrists and began to move them gently from the shoulders, spreading them wide, and then crossing them with slight pressure upon her bosom. Nor did man ever thank God more than did John Gore when she began to breathe feebly of her own sweet self, and the rise and fall of her bosom showed that the tide of life had turned. He bent over her and wiped her lips, touched her bruised throat tenderly with his fingers, and then leaned back and looked at the moon, as though that broad, white, heavenly face could understand what all this meant to him.
He lifted her up again in his arms, and seeing a yellow glow beating along the passage that led from the hall into the kitchen, he made for it and found a huge fire blazing on the hearth, the light from it making the place far brighter than in the day. There was a rough sort of couch under the window, and John Gore laid Barbara upon it, and drew the thing up before the fire so that the warmth should hearten the life in her. And then, for the first time, he took notice of the swelter he himself was in, his shirt hanging open and showing his chest, blotches of crimson staining it, his very stockings soaked from the blood of the two dead creatures upon the stairs. A man in such a war tackle was not a savory thing to meet the eyes of a frightened girl.
John Gore bent over her a moment and saw a faint pink flush creeping into her cheeks, while her breath came and went steadily with a quiet sighing. There was an oak chest in the kitchen, and John Gore found some clothes in it: a rough shirt that had belonged to the dead man and some woollen hose. He went out into the yard where the dog was rattling his chain and making a great whimpering, as though calling for his supper, and, knowing that there was a pump by the stable, he stripped himself to the waist, washed, and put on clean gear. Then he unbarred the gate, and brought in his coat and riding-boots from under the thorn-tree, so that he should seem something of a gentleman, and not a ragged scoundrel hardly fit to touch a woman’s hand.
Barbara was still lying like one asleep before the fire when he returned, for she had been so near to death that life seemed to steal back softly and slowly as though still afraid. John Gore had never looked thus at his love before, as a man might look at a sleeping child or at some fair valley under a golden dawn. He saw the faint flush upon her cheeks, the shadowy sweep of the long lashes, the little dark curls of hair falling with such a sheen of sweetness over her forehead, the line of the red mouth, the soft warmth of her skin. She looked thin, poor child, frail and tragical, and yet the suffering that she had borne had shed a glamour over her that made her more lovable and more womanly than of old. His heart went out to her with all the awe of a man’s desire as he stood and watched the coming of life—and love.
There was a fluttering of the shadowy lashes, a long-drawn breath, a movement of the hands, and then the low cry of one waking to some revolting memory. John Gore bent over her and took her hands in his.
“There is nothing to fear, dear heart.”
A shudder ran through her as she looked at him, and some moments passed before light and understanding swept the shadows from her eyes. But the look that came into them when her soul awoke made John Gore long to take her in his arms and to hold her close to him, so that he could feel the beating of her heart.
“John—is it you?”
She spoke huskily, from the bruising of her throat by Simon Pinniger’s murderous hands.
“It is all over, Barbe. We are king and queen of the castle.”
He wished to hide all the grimness of the night’s work from her, seeing that her great eyes were ready to grow frightened and full of fear, showing that she had borne too much already in body and soul.
“John, I remember it all now—they were smothering me in the dark!”
He took her face between his two hands, and looked dearly into her eyes.
“Barbara, you are in my keeping; try and forget all that, dear heart. I came in time to scare those wolves into the night. Now you must suffer me to have my way.”
She looked up at him almost timidly, as though conscious of his nearness and the homage in his eyes. It had been dark at the tower window, but now they saw each other in the light, and a mysterious coyness covered her face.
“I will do all that you wish, John.”
“I shall take you away to-night.”
“Yes, yes; take me away from Thorn.”
Her hands went into his.
“There is a moon, dear, and I have a pillion for you, if you are strong enough.”
“Oh yes, I am quite strong now.”
She made as though to sit up on the couch, but she grew faint instantly, so that John Gore held her with one arm about her shoulders.
“More spirit than strength, Barbe, yet.”
Some of her old obstinacy appeared in her for the moment.
“No, I am only a little giddy.”
“Lie down again.”
“No, I must make a start.”
She dropped her feet in their worn shoes over the edge of the couch, glanced at him a little wilfully, and then looked away with a rush of color and a tremulous flash of the eyes.
“You must try and be patient with me, John.”
“It is not a matter of patience, child, but food and good wine.”
She put a hand to her throat.
“I could not touch anything in this place.”
He looked at her with a smile.
“Not even if it came in my pocket?”
“I will try, John.”
“Of course you will. I have work to do here before we start.”
He brought out a flask from his pocket, and food that Mrs. Winnie had wrapped up in a clean white napkin. There were some little cakes and some baked meat laid in slices between slips of home-made bread. Barbara looked at them, and then gave him a first sad smile.
“It is gross of me, John, but those cakes make me feel hungry.”
“The very best confession, dear.”
“Will you have some?”
He had laid the cloth upon her knees.
“No, child, not yet. Can you bear to be left alone awhile?”
“I am quite brave now, John. But—”
“Well, sweetheart?”
“You are not going far?”
“No. Only into the tower to get the rope which is not mine to leave. Is there anything that you would wish to take?”
She looked down thoughtfully, her dark lashes sweeping her cheeks.
“There is a book, John, bound in red leather. I would not leave it here—because—it has helped me—taught me—almost as much as you have done.”
XXXVIII
John Gore had grim things on his mind that night, and a task before him that he did not wish to come to Barbara’s knowledge. She, poor child, with Mrs. Winnie’s food in her lap—food such as she had not touched for many a day—would have had no heart to eat and drink had she known of the dead on those dark stairs. He wished to spare her the horror of it, for the night had been gross and violent enough, and after all the suffering she had borne he was afraid for her in body and mind.
Taking the lantern, he made his way to the tower, closing the door in the passage that led from the kitchen into the ruined hall. Nance Pinniger lay dead upon the stairs, her mouth open and her hands clinched over the place where the sword had entered, and John Gore shuddered as he looked at her, wishing, for the sake of her womanhood, that he had held his hand. He went higher to where the man lay half doubled against the wall, the cloth that covered his face caught between his teeth in the death spasm. The fellow’s bulk seemed a veritable barrier against burial, and John Gore, hardened as he had been to the rough life of the sea, felt a vital horror of this huddled mass that seemed gross and gluttonous even in death.
Remembering the open pit, he went and held the lantern over the black hole in the floor, but was still unable to fathom its depth. Here was a ready vault if he could but get the dead to it—a pit that seemed to scoff with open mouth at those whom Fate had cheated.
To make short work of a grisly business, even as John Gore did, he took one of the sheets from Barbara’s room, and knotting it about the dead man’s ankles, contrived, thanks to his great strength, to draw the body to the edge of the pit. Unknotting the sheet, he turned Simon Pinniger down into the darkness, handling him daintily so as not to foul his own clothes. For the woman he underwent a like labor, letting the bloody sheet slip after her, and turning the flag down into its place. He had the feelings of a man who had played scavenger to a headsman upon a scaffold, and he still seemed to hear the soughing rush of wind from the pit as those dead things went to their last resting-place in the secret depths of Thorn.
When he had drawn the rope up from the window, unknotted and coiled it, and gathered tools, pistols, and his broken sword, he searched for and found Barbara’s red Bible, and retreated, with all his gear, out of the tower. The memory of the place made his gorge rise, and he was glad of the night air and the light of the moon. He drove his feet through some clumps of grass and weeds, yearning to wipe off every stain of the place before taking this child out into the world.
In the kitchen he found Barbara warming herself before the fire, and the spirit of maidenhood in her, the smooth, virginal contours of her face and figure, filled him with a sense of freshness and of awe. He saw the play and counterplay of shadow and light within her eyes, and held it to be witchcraft miraculously pure and sweet, bringing down God to him, and beauty, and clean living. Somehow he felt that night that he could not go close to her, that he had a butcher’s hands, and that it would be impiety to touch a thing so goodly. Moreover, there was a delight in holding a little aloof from her, in watching all her half-coy sweetness, so fresh and new to him in her altered womanhood. He could mark the shade and sunlight in her glances, the passing gleams of color on her face, the birth of that dear consciousness that strove to smother that which could not be wholly hid.
“How long you have been, John!”
“I had dropped some of my things and had to hunt for them. I found your book.”
He gave it to her, and, throwing the ropes and tools upon the table, he busied himself with reloading the pistol that had sent its lead into Simon Pinniger’s body, having a small ivory powder-horn and a bag of bullets with him.
“I heard such strange sounds, John, while you were away!”
“Oh!” And he seemed intent on ramming home the charge.
“It was like something falling in a cellar under the house.”
“Old houses are full of such sounds,” he said, looking up at her suddenly. “Thorn sheds bricks and plaster most nights in the year, with the ivy working its way everywhere.”
He made so little of it that Barbara did not press him further, for she had no knowledge of the pit that had been opened for her, with its well-like shoot cut in the thickness of the tower wall. John Gore began to gather up all that belonged to him, and, finding a sack in one of the cupboards, he tumbled the tools and rope into it, tying the mouth of the sack with a strip of stuff torn from the quilt of the couch. His own sword was broken in its scabbard, so he took the hanger down that hung over the fireplace, and also the long carbine that had a strap for slinging across the back.
John Gore had brought his horseman’s cloak with him from under the thorn-tree, and he took it and laid it upon Barbara’s shoulders. Moreover, Mrs. Winnie had lent him a woollen scarf and some gloves, which he had stowed away at the bottom of his holsters, and he knew that the girl would need them because of the keen wind.
“I have left the horse in the woods, Barbe. What sort of shoes are you wearing?”
She showed him them, and he did not commend their flimsiness.
“You must let me carry you, child, or you will have your stockings soaked in those boggy meadows, and we shall be somewhile on the road.”
She glanced at the table where the sack and the arms lay, and then gave him an unequivocal smile.
“And you think you can carry me as well as all that, John?”
“It can be done.”
“I am not so selfish as that. I have stolen your cloak already.”
“There is another on the horse.”
“Instead of carrying me, John, give me something to carry.”
He looked at the thin hands she held out to him.
“There is your book.”
“Yes, but I can take more than that.”
“As for that, we will see what the grass is like when we get over the moat.”
They went out together into the court-yard, where the moonlight came down upon the checker of stones outlined and interlaced with grass and weeds. Above them rose the black tower, dark as with mystery, while on every hand dim, silvery hills rose toward the frosty curtain of the sky.
“I had forgotten the dog.”
The mastiff had come out from the old cask that served him as a kennel, and was clanking his chain over the stones and growling.
“Some one will find him, John; they may come back when we have gone.”
But John Gore knew better.
He did not like the thought of leaving the beast chained there to starve, and he was debating whether a pistol bullet would not be the kinder end, when something far more hazardous challenged his attention. The wind was beating about Thorn, shaking the ivy on the walls, while the clank of the dog’s chain had a suggestive ghostliness. Yet beyond these sounds came the dull, rhythmic thud of a horse trotting over stiffening turf, the muffled cadence coming down upon the wind as they stood in the court of Thorn and listened.
“Quick, dear, we must play at hide-and-seek. It is that fellow Grylls riding back again.”
They were close to the open gate at the moment, and John Gore took Barbara by the hand and drew her aside along the wall to where a stunted bush had made roots and grown despite the stones. He pressed Barbara back within its shadow, and stood covering her, a pistol ready and the hanger at his belt should he need cold steel.
“Not a sound, Barbe; be ready to slip away when I take your hand.”
They could hear the steady thud of hoofs over the grass, and even the heavy breathing of the beast, as though he had been pushed and bustled by the spur. John Gore guessed that his rider was skirting along the moat. Then came the sharper clatter of the iron shoes upon the timbers of the bridge. The dog set up a savage barking, and in the moonlight they saw a man ride into the court of Thorn, steam rising from his horse like smoke, so that the beast looked huge and spectral. The man himself, though outlined against the moon, showed nothing but the sweep of a cloak and the droop of a black beaver.
He sat motionless a moment in the saddle, and then, dismounting, led his horse by the bridle toward the mist of light that came from the archway leading into the kitchen. John Gore felt for Barbara’s hand, and they glided along the wall toward the gate, for the man’s back was toward them, while the barking of the dog and his grinding against the chain drowned the sound of their footsteps utterly. They made the gate, and went out hand in hand over the bridge and away over the moonlit grass-land, with the barking of the dog dying down into a hoarse whimper. John Gore had thrust the pistol in his belt and swung the sack over his left shoulder. He put his right arm about Barbara’s body and swept her along by main strength toward the towering beech-trees that shone in the moonlight while the seal of silence seemed over Thorn.