Part 1

MAD BARBARA

BY

WARWICK DEEPING

AUTHOR OF “BERTRAND OF BRITTANY” “A WOMAN’S WAR” “THE SLANDERERS” ETC. ETC.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY CHRISTOPHER CLARK, R. I.

NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMIX

Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ Published February, 1909.

MAD BARBARA

I

In the little music-house in his garden overlooking the Park of St. James’s, Sir Lionel Purcell—Knight—lay dead, with his cloak half thrown across his face and one hand still gripping the hilt of his sword. The door of the music-room stood ajar, giving a glimpse of the autumn garden, the grass silvered with heavy dew, yellow leaves flaking it, like splashes of gold on a green shield. The curtains were drawn across the windows, so that a few stray shafts of light alone streamed in, giving a sense of some mystery unrevealed as yet, some riddle of human passion waiting to be read.

The silent room seemed all shadows, save where those Rembrandtesque strands of sunlight slanted upon the floor. And there, as though touched by light from another world, the dead man’s forehead gleamed out above the black folds of his cloak. His sword, a streak of silver, joined him to the surrounding shadows, a last bond between him and the past.

Without—an autumn morning, with the clocks chiming the hour of six, and the water-fowl calling from the decoy in the park. A golden mist swimming in the east; the grass white with dew; the trees still sleeping, though the yellow leaves fell slowly, softly from the silent branches overhead. A virginal gray-eyed wonder in the eyes of the day. Freshness and fragrance everywhere, with the spires of Westminster striking upward into pearly haze, and the broad river catching the sunlight that sifted through the ragged vapor.

Dawn may be the egotist’s hour of smug self-congratulation, or the poet’s moment for praising solitude, even though like Thomson he buries his head in a nightcap, and wallows in bed till noon. The dead man had no one as yet to question his quietude, though there was a sense of stirring everywhere—attic windows opening, milk frothing into jugs at kitchen steps, carts lumbering lazily over the cobbles. The sun ascended, the mist began to rise, the sunflowers in a row along the wall had their broad faces made splendid by the day. A couple of thrushes were hopping to and fro over the grass. An inquisitive robin came perking in through the half-shut door, to stand twittering with one black, beady eye cocked curiously at the motionless figure on the floor. In one dark corner a harpsichord showed the ivory of its key-board with something suggestive of a sinister smile.

Had that ingenious connoisseur of feminine beauty—Mr. Pepys—taken an early stroll in the park that morning, he might have derived infinite contentment from the sight of a young girl, a “comely black wench,” standing at her open window with nothing but a red cloak to hide the whiteness of her night-gear. She was binding her hair, her eyes gazing over the empty park, a little table at the window beside her full of ribbons, pins, trinkets, and laces. She was wondering whether her father would walk early in the park that morning. She had fallen asleep before he had returned from supping at my Lord Montague’s the night before, though Mrs. Jael—her mother’s woman, had sat up to watch for the flare of links along the street.

The garden looked innocent enough in the morning sunlight, with its gravel walks, sleek grass, and quaint bay-trees trimmed into the likeness of pinnacles. The music-room, with its diminutive classic portico, lyre, mask, and trumpets in gilt upon the tympanum, seemed, with its white pillars, no place where tragedy might watch and wait.

Whatever impulse drew the girl to the music-room that autumn morning, she had caught no prophetic gleam of the thing that waited to be known. A few steps across the grass, a moment’s surprise at finding the door ajar, a startled pause upon the threshold. Then, the lights and shadows of that Rembrandtesque interior burning themselves in upon the brain, the limning of that motionless figure in lines of fire against a background of imperishable memories.

That he was dead, a touch of the hand betrayed without one moment’s hope. The reason of his death blazoned in gules, with a red rose over the heart. The face set in a smile of infinite sadness. An overturned candle with the wax spilled upon the table, a bowl of flowers broken upon the floor. And in the left hand, held by the stiff fingers, a short chain of gold with a knot of pearls, for a button, like a loop torn from a man’s cloak.

It was thus that Barbara Purcell, child that she yet was, found her father lying dead with a sword-thrust through the heart. He had been a silent man, no courtier, a man whose life had hoped more from the quiet corners of the world than from the pageantry of state. He had had no enemies, so far as the child knew; yet the world might have warned her that a man may be grudged the possession of a handsome wife. Even the Bible might have told her that.

As for the short curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she took it from the dead hand, and hid the thing in her bosom under her dress. To blazon the truth abroad, to run shrieking into the house, that was not the way the passion of her grief expressed itself. The curb of gold was the one link that might join the future to the past. She would show it to no one. That right should be hers to watch and to discover.

II

“Listen!”

She touched his shoulder suddenly, and their eyes met in a questioning stare, the eyes of two people who have some secret to be guarded.

“I heard some one in the gallery.”

“A coach stopped in the yard two minutes ago.”

“It is Barbara come home. The girl moves about like a ghost.”

They drew aside from each other; my lord, bland, buxom, imposing, in periwig, and black coat broidered with gold; my lady, plump, luscious, yet a little furtive about the eyes, her flowered gown in green and blue pleated into a hundred folds over her camlet petticoat. She wore her dark hair low upon her neck, with a rose over the left ear, and a mass of exquisite lace upon her bosom.

Lord Stephen Gore cleared his throat, and began speaking with discreet distinctness on some wholly impersonal topic. The pair were decorously distant when the door of the great parlor opened, the man standing at the window, as though watching the people passing in the street beneath; the woman seated, almost primly, in a high-backed chair, a book in her lap, mild apathy upon her face.

My lord at the window turned on his heel abruptly, as though he had just become aware of the presence of a third person in the room. He was a man of poise, of genial aplomb, one of those complacent gods who are never out of countenance or at loss for a trick of the tongue.

The girl’s eyes seemed to sweep from one to the other with a momentary gleam of distrust. She still wore her mourning, a gown of plain black velvet with a circle of lace at the throat. The expression on her face was one of tired nonchalance. But for that evanescent gleam of the eyes she might have passed as a bloodless and languid girl whose vitality lacked the stimulus of perfect health.

My lord met her with a bow that expressed unnecessary condescension. He had reached an age when it is possible to be fatherly, and even officious in a frank, twinkling, stately fashion.

“And how is my Proserpine? Still in the pensive droops? And yet Mr. Herrick preaches the gathering of roses!”

He put forward a chair for her with the tolerance of an amiable gentleman of the world. She took it without thanking him, her cold, colorless face masking an instinctive repulsion, an impatience that his urbanity seemed fated to inspire.

The lord and the lady exchanged glances. It was as though the girl had brought a frost with her into the midst of June. Her silence and her almost sullen apathy embarrassed them. It was like being in the presence of a statue that had eyes and ears but no tongue.

Anne Purcell clapped her book to, and jerked it aside on to an oak table.

“Where did you drive—in the park?”

“Drive?”

“Good lack! girl, are you torpid? I could swear you have not noticed the color of a gown or the set of a hat. One might as well send out a mummy.”

She glanced unconcernedly at the buckles on my lord’s shoes.

“The park? Yes. A great business there, to see—and to be seen. Enough dust to stifle one; and too many people.”

The words were the perfunctory words of one who would rather have remained silent. Her face seemed vacant and expressionless. My lord drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and regarded her with philosophic pity.

“Eheu, holy Gemini, dust and ashes—at two-and-twenty!”

He nodded his head benignantly, yet with a cynical curving of the mouth, while the plump, well-complexioned mother studied her bantling with irritable contempt. There was some inherent antipathy between these two. Their attitude was one of vague distrust, as though the sun and the moon found themselves in miraculous juxtaposition at mid-day.

“You had better go to bed, girl; you look tired enough.”

She met her mother’s hard, inquisitive stare, and seemed to stiffen at it with a sensitive hatred of being watched.

“No, I am not tired.”

“Fiddlesticks!”

My lord held up a bland white hand ruffled in Mechlin, immaculate to the finger-tips.

“Let her alone, Anne. These feather moods need a south wind.”

His lofty compunction repelled her more than her mother’s brusque contempt. The atmosphere of the room seemed overburdened with a sensuous flavor. The very roses suggested a rank and vivid worldliness, a fulsomeness of the flesh gotten of meat and wine.

She rose, pushing back her chair, with a languid drooping of the lids.

“Tell Jael to have supper sent to my room. Shall you be late to-night?”

Her face was turned toward her mother, as though the gentleman in the periwig were a mere negligible shadow.

“Go to bed, child, and don’t trouble your head about healthy people. Nell is at The King’s to-night. I wish you could catch some of the wench’s devil.”

“Oh—the Drury Lane woman! I have seen her at her window in her night-dress shouting at Moll Davis in the next house. She looked something of a drab with her hair done up in papers. Do the candles make such a difference?”

She looked listlessly over her shoulder at my lord, her lassitude giving her an air of tired vacuity. And the smile he gave her might have been the smile he would have given to a credulous child.

“We are all moths, coz, when the candles are lit. Which is a riddle that you need not be bothered with.”

Her going relieved the two worldlings from an uncongenial feeling of oppression, and yet some uneasiness of spirit remained to trouble both. Miss Barbara had chilled the room for them with her wraithlike and sinister sickliness. The sleek self-content of the well-fed animal had been disturbed by impressions and by thoughts that neither cared to analyze. My Lord of Gore stood at the window, stroking his periwig with some such dissatisfaction on his face as he might have betrayed at the first hint that he was growing old.

“The girl looks ill.”

Madam made a _moue_.

“Oh—that is nothing; she is always the color of sour cream. Lord, but I think I hate the child; she drags things into my mind that make me miserable.”

The angles of the man’s mouth twitched slightly.

“By the plague, Nan, why let yourself be overshadowed?”

“Why—indeed! We might understand that, you and I.”

He turned to her sharply with a gleam of impatience in his eyes.

“Why not be rid of the little blight?”

“Yes, no doubt—and how? Are you ingenious enough to suggest a method?”

“Get her married.”

“Lord! And who would have her?”

“She is something of a bargain—in movables. There are plenty of debtors and fools.”

“The persuading would lie elsewhere. The girl has a sort of sullen stubbornness that is worse than temper.”

Stephen Gore shook his periwig with the action of an impatient horse shaking its mane.

“I suppose these mopes were put on with her mourning. The girl wants the merry devil in her rousing. Jove, Nan, but she’s your child; there must be blood somewhere.”

Anne Purcell picked up a fan, spread it with an impatient whisk of the hand, and glanced uneasily at the closed door. She started up brusquely, crossed the room, flung the door open suddenly, and looked down the long gallery as though to prove that they were not being spied upon. Then she returned to her tapestried chair.

“Well, have you any plan?”

My lord licked his upper lip, a sly smile spreading over his healthy face.

“Will she go out with you?”

“Sometimes. To the old, dull houses where they wear starched aprons and have the servants in to prayers.”

“And judge of godliness by the length of the jowl. Poor people! No—that is not the elixir, the juice of crab-apples. Take her to the Mancini, that witch who turns dross into sunshine. The woman would wake the merry devil in a Quaker. She has old Rowley kissing her very slippers.”

“Hortense?”

“Who else, Nan? It is life, blood, mischief that the girl needs.”

My lady’s eyes flashed up at him mistrustfully for the moment. He caught the look and the significance thereof, and laughed.

“Oh, she is not my fortune, Nan! I am too old a moth for that candle. The woman is like a conduit of red wine let loose in the garden of White Hall. She makes all but the abstemious—drunk. And the marvel is that she is just as magical with women, is Hortense. Ask my Lord Sussex how he likes the transfiguration of his wife.”

“Castlemaine’s stupid brat!”

“Little whey face all turned into dimples, roguery, and mischief. She twinkles round the Mancini like a little Mercury with feathers at her heels. I will speak with Hortense; she has some sort of sisterly good-will to me, and a kind of pride in making sulky people merry. She’ll set the girl’s blood spinning, or I’m a fool.”

Anne Purcell leaned back in her chair as though tired.

“Anything to get rid of that sour face. But it’s her mawkishness, her squeamy, ‘pray-with-me-or-I-shall-die’ look, that makes me doubtful.”

The gentleman nodded understandingly.

“Leave that to Hortense. The Italian has a veneer of softness; she is not like a Nell Gwyn. It is a question of subtleties. Nell would swear the girl into a fit in three minutes. The Mancini has a trick of seeming a saint—when necessary. If the Italian makes no romp out of her, then I will dub her nothing but a petticoated Hamlet.”

My lady stretched her arms with a gesture of impatient ennui.

“Well we can try. Let us forget the ghost to-night. I feel I must laugh, or I shall have wrinkles round my mouth.”

“Nell shall do that for you. You will come in my coach?”

“And the proprieties?”

He laughed with the true sardonic gayety of the Restoration.

“Sister Kate shall see to them. Though she is stone deaf she likes to see the dresses and the candles. There is one mistake that Mr. Milton made in that he did not tell us that the devil is deaf in one ear.”

III

Had Lady Purcell, herself unseen, followed her daughter to her room, she would have been astonished by the sudden transformation that swept over her so soon as the door closed. The apathetic figure straightened into keen aliveness; the look of vacuity vanished from the face. It was like a sudden transition from damp, listless November to the starlit brilliance of a frosty night.

“Dust and ashes at two-and-twenty!”

My Lord Gore’s echoing of Biblical pessimism seemed to have lost its appropriateness so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. There was nothing listless about the intense and rather swarthy face that looked down into the garden with its white-pillared music-room and its October memories. It was more the face of some impassioned child of destiny striving to gaze into the mystery of the coming years.

The acting of a part to delude the world, and to make men ignore her as a spiritless girl. The merciless fanaticism of youth watching, and ever watching, behind all that assumption of listlessness and sloth. Then, in those solitary interludes when she had no part to play, the restrained passion in her breaking like lava to the surface, filling her eyes with a species of prophetic fire.

In a little carved cabinet of black oak she kept some of those relics that made for her a ritual of revenge—her father’s shirt stained with blood, some of the dead flowers she had found beside him on the floor, a piece of the cloth that had covered him that autumn morning. Almost nightly she would take these things from their hiding-place, spread them upon her bed, and kneel before them as a papist might kneel before a relic or the symbol of the Sacred Heart. As for the curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she carried it always in her bosom, sewn up in a case of scarlet silk. Distrusting every one, hardly sane in the personal passion of her purpose, she never parted with the talisman, but treasured its possible magic for herself.

Yet what had she discovered all these many months? The knowledge that her mother had put aside her black stuffs gladly, a growing sense of antipathy toward the man who had been her father’s friend. She could remember the time when my Lord Stephen had carried her through the garden on his shoulder; bought her sweetmeats, green stockings, and jessamy gloves; and even served as her valentine with a big man’s playful gallantry toward a child. She had thought him a splendid person then, but now—all had changed for her, and the analysis of her own instinctive repulsion left her obstinately baffled. She had no mandate from the past for hating him; on the contrary, facts might have stood to prove that she was his debtor. She remembered how she had caught him praying beside her father’s coffin, and how he had risen up with a strange spasm of the face and blundered from the room. He had offered money for the discovery of the truth, importuned magistrates, petitioned the King, put his own servants in black. No man could have done more loyally as a friend.

Yet nothing had been discovered. Some unknown sword had passed through Lionel Purcell’s body. The very motive remained concealed. The world had buried him, gossiped awhile, and then forgotten.

But Barbara had a heart that did not know how to forget. She had Southern blood, the passionate heirloom of an Elizabethan wooing. The Spanish wine of her ancestry had given her a flash of fanaticism and the swarthy melancholy of her comely face. And the whole promise of her youth had bent itself, like some dark-eyed zealot—to a purpose that had none of the softer and more sensuous moods of life in view.

Why should she hate this big, bland, stately mortal, this Stephen Gore who had no enemies and many friends? That was a question she often asked herself. Was it because she had been caught by the suspicion that he might console the widow for the husband’s death? There was no palpable sin in the possibility, and yet it angered her, even though she had no great love for her mother. A supersensitive delicacy made her jealous for the dead. The very buxom effulgence of my lord’s vitality seemed to insult the shadow that haunted the house for her.

As she sat at the window looking down upon the garden the sun sank low in the west, throwing a broad radiance under the branches of the trees. Their round boles were bathed in light. The figures that moved about the park were touched with a weird brilliance, so that a red coat shone like a ruby, a blue like a sapphire, a silver-gray like an opal iridescent in the sun. There was much of the charm of one of Watteau’s pictures, yet with a greater significance of light and shadow.

Dusk began to fall. A hand fumbled at the latch of the door, and a figure in black entered bearing a tray. It was Mrs. Jael, her mother’s woman, a stout little body with a florid face and an overpolite way with her that repelled cynics. She had amiable blue eyes that seemed to see nothing, a loose mouth, and a big bosom. Her personality appeared to have soaked itself in sentimentality as a stewed apple soaks itself in syrup.

Barbara did not turn her head.

“Why, dear heart, all in the dusk! Here’s a little dish or two.”

“Set them down on the table.”

“You’ll get your death chill—there, sitting at that window—”

The woman fidgeted officiously about the room, as though trying to insinuate her sympathy betwixt the girl’s silence and reserve. Her dilatory habit only roused Barbara’s impatience. Mrs. Jael’s sly, succulent motherliness had lost its power of deceiving, so far as Anne Purcell’s daughter was concerned.

“Light the candles.”

She remained motionless while the woman bustled to and fro.

“Thanks. You can leave me, Jael.”

The tire-woman could meet a snub with the most obtuse good temper.

“Should you be tired, Mistress Barbara, I can come and put you to bed, my dear, while my lady is at the playhouse.”

“I am old enough to put myself to bed, am I not?”

Mrs. Jael laughed as though bearing with a peevish miss of twelve.

“Dear life, of course you are.” And she broke into a fat giggle as though something had piqued her sense of humor.

Barbara’s face remained turned toward the window.

“You can go, Jael.”

The woman curtesied and obeyed.

Her face lost its good-humor, however, as quickly as a buffoon’s loses its stage grin when he has turned his back upon the audience. She stood outside the door a moment, listening, and then went softly down the passage to my lady’s room, with its stamped leather hangings in green and gold, its great carved bed and Eastern rugs.

Anne Purcell was seated before her mirror, her long, brown hair, of which she was mightily proud, falling about her almost to the ground. She had a stick of charcoal in her hand, and was leaning forward over the dressing-table, crowded with its trinkets, scent-flasks, and pomade-boxes, staring at her face in the glass as she heightened the expressiveness of her eyes.

Her glance merely shifted from the reflection of her own face to that of Mrs. Jael’s figure as she entered the room. They were not a little alike, these two women, save that the one boasted more grace and polish; the other more pliability and unctuousness, and perhaps more cunning.

“Get me my red velvet gown from the cupboard, Jael.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Have you seen the girl?”

Mrs. Jael’s head and shoulders had disappeared into the depths of the carved-oak wardrobe. Her voice came muffled as from a cave.

“Yes, my lady.”

“What was she doing with herself?”

“Sitting at her window, poor dear, and looking very low and sulky.”

Anne Purcell turned her head to and fro as she scrutinized herself critically in the glass. She still looked young, with her high color and her sleek skin, her large eyes and full red mouth. Her style of comeliness seemed suited to the times, plump and pleasurable, full and free in outline and expression. My Lord of Gore had no reason to feel displeased at the prospect of possessing such a widow.

“What do you make of the girl, Jael?”

The tire-woman had turned from the wardrobe with the gown of red velvet over her arm.

“The child is strange, my lady, and out of health. You might say that she had been moon-struck, or that she was watching for a ghost.”

Anne Purcell moved restlessly in her chair.

“Sometimes, Jael, I think that Barbara is a little mad. I am ready for you to dress my hair.”

Mrs. Jael spread the gown upon the bed.

“She doesn’t seem to have a spark of life in her, poor dear. I’m half scared often that she should do herself some harm.”

My lady was watching the woman’s face in the mirror.

“Oh—”

“She’s always moping by herself like a sick bird. It often makes me wonder, my lady—”

“Well?”