Part 10

Now John Gore dreamed a quaint dream the last night that he lay at Shirleys in the very room where his mother had died. He dreamed that he was at sea again, and sitting in the stern-sheets of a boat that was being rowed in toward an unknown shore. It was all vivid and real to him—the heave of each billow under the boat, the dash through the surf, the men leaping out and dragging the boat up on the sand. He crossed the beach alone, drawing toward a little grove of palms whose green plumes were clear and breathless against a tropical sky. And as he neared the grove a woman came out from among the straight boles of the palm-trees, and that woman was his mother.

There is no astonishment in dreams, and John Gore went toward her as though she had not known death, and as though there was nothing strange in finding her there where palm-trees grew in lieu of elms and birches.

But she held up her hands to him, and cried:

“Go back—go back!”

Then there was the sound like the ringing shot of a carbine, and he woke in the room at Shirleys, wondering whether there were thieves in the house, and whether the old merchant knight had used a musket or a pistol upon the marauders.

Yet though believers in dreams might have sworn that his brain had caught an echo of some tragedy that concerned him deeply, how little John Gore thought of the dream may be judged by the fact that he went back to bed, after sallying forth with a candle and a horse-pistol to reconnoitre, and slept till the servant drew back the curtains to let in the sun. For the episode of Barbara Purcell’s expiation had become a thing of the past by the time John Gore reached Shirleys.

The day following the affair in the music-room, Stephen Gore drove a jaundice-faced old gentleman in his coach to the house in Pall Mall. They talked gravely together on the road, the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles compelling them to mouth their words almost in each other’s ears. The old gentleman wore a white periwig, and a kind of gown or cassock of black silk, beneath which protruded a very thin pair of legs ending in clumsy square-toed shoes. The top of his long cane was made to carry snuff, and the whole front of his silk gown appeared blotched with the powder. His long nose prying out from his shrewd face gave one the impression that the habit of snuff-taking had lengthened it abnormally. The skin over either cheek-bone was mottled with small blue veins, and his mouth, long and curved like a half-moon, made one wonder whether he was smiling or sneering.

My lord had explained the nature of the case to Dr. Hemstruther, adopting a tone of paternal and chivalrous concern that he contradicted on several occasions by a majestic wink. The physician was a quaint character, for he combined in himself two vices that might have been considered mutually opposed. Yet the resulting energy that arose from the friction between these two passions, the love of precious stones and the love of the eternal feminine, inspired Dr. Hemstruther with a lust to grab every gold Carolus he could lay his fingers to. He was a man of great repute, and had made money out of “back-stairs secrets,” though the apothecaries and the midwives hated him, swearing that he knew more than a mere physician should.

Now this shrewd, snuffy, peaky-faced little man was ushered about twelve o’clock into Barbara Purcell’s room, with my lady and Mrs. Jael to act as guards. The curtains were drawn, and Barbara, dressed in simple black, with her hair upon her shoulders, was lying, in the dim light, on her bed. She sat up and looked at them with her large eyes as they entered—heavy, languid eyes, that seemed to have been empty of sleep.

Dr. Hemstruther made a little bow to her, handed his hat and cane to Mrs. Jael, tossed back one of the curtains, and drew a chair up toward the bed. He sat down, keeping his eyes fixed on Barbara’s face, and sniffing from time to time as though he missed his snuff.

“So you are not feeling in good health, my dear young lady.”

He had a soft, silky voice, easy to swallow as good wine. Barbara, seated on the bed, stared at him and said nothing. It was easy to see that the girl had suffered greatly, either in mind or body, for the youth seemed to have left her face, leaving it blanched, lined, and very weary. Her eyes looked doubly big because of the shadows under them, and her lips were no longer firmly pressed together. The strain of her sacrifice had broken the heart in her, and she had fallen into a stupor like one whose brain has been numbed by frost.

Dr. Hemstruther considered her with his clever eyes.

“Can you sleep, my dear?” he asked her, at last.

“No.”

She was only dimly conscious that her mother and Mrs. Jael were in the room, and who the little man was she hardly had the will to wonder.

“What is it that keeps you from sleep at night?”

“Oh, thoughts—and other things.”

“Perhaps you hear voices?”

She looked at him vaguely.

“Yes, voices.”

“And they talk to you?”

“Sometimes. There are often voices with one, are there not?”

Dr. Hemstruther rubbed his hands together, forgetting to sniff for a minute or more, a lapse that the sentimental Jael mended.

“Are they the voices of people whom you know?”

“Sometimes.”

“And perhaps you hear bells ringing, and other such sounds? Do you ever see the people who talk to you at night?”

She maintained an indolent yet questioning silence. Dr. Hemstruther repeated the question.

“Yes, I have fancied it,” she answered; “one can fancy so many things in the dark.”

Dr. Hemstruther gave a jerk of the chin as though to emphasize this as a fact worth noting. He drew his chair nearer, and, taking her hand, looked at it attentively, rubbing the skin with his thumb-nail. Then he asked her a few more questions, keeping his eyes on hers, and watching her with the alertness of a hawk.

My lady and Mrs. Jael saw the girl’s eyelids begin to quiver. When Dr. Hemstruther spoke to her she did not answer him, but sat rigid, like a cataleptic, her face betraying no feeling and no intelligence. She remained in some such posture till the old man rose and pushed back his chair. Then a deep breath seemed to come from her with a great sigh, and the lashes closed over her eyes so that she appeared asleep.

Dr. Hemstruther watched her for a while, and then turned to Anne Purcell with an expression of sympathetic gravity upon his face.

“She is best left alone, madam, at present.”

And he marched out at my lady’s heels, Mrs. Jael following and carrying his hat and cane.

Dr. Hemstruther had satisfied a pliant conscience with regard to the nature of the case. He sat—much at his ease—in one of the leather-seated chairs in the room that had been Lionel Purcell’s library, and declared his conviction that the girl was of unsound mind.

“I can understand, madam,” he said, with a courtly little bob of the wig to my lady, “how much exercised you are in mind over your daughter’s sanity. At present it is the calm after the storm, the cool dew after the fire of noon. The pulse is depressed, the brain almost torpid, and she did not even hear some of the things I said. Then you heard her confess to hearing voices; that is a very common and significant symptom. My experience goes to prove that some of these cases are the most dangerous and distressing.”

He nodded his head, took snuff with emotion, and looked under half-lowered eyelids at my lord.

“The young gentlewoman must be most carefully watched. It would be expedient to have non compos mentis proven. That gives her guardians the very necessary power to have her cared for and restrained in some safe place.”

He was merely advising what he knew Stephen Gore desired in the matter of advice. There was sufficient on which to swear that the girl’s mental state was not healthy. Young gentlewomen who fired pistols and made wild accusations against old and honorable friends could scarcely be regarded as either sane or safe.

“Then you advise us to apply for powers of custody and restraint.”

“Assuredly, my lord, for the patient’s sake. She cannot be trusted not to turn against herself. I would suggest that you send her into the country and put her in charge of some capable relative—some sensible maiden aunt, let us say.” And his mouth curved with huge self-satisfaction.

“You prefer the country?”

“Far away from all distractions and all cares. Perfect rest, and a convent life. Then I may hope that God’s grace will heal her.” And he rose with a bow to my lady.

Stephen Gore touched him on the shoulder.

“Supposing that one of those violent fits should occur? A dose of soothing physic, eh?”

“Certainly, my lord, certainly. I will have it compounded and despatched to you without delay.”

That same afternoon Stephen Gore drove out in his two-horse coach, and called on no less a person than Sir Heneage Finch, the Keeper of the Great Seal. My lord and the chancellor happened to be well disposed toward each other for the moment, and Stephen Gore approached him as a friend with an air of grief and of concern. He spoke most movingly about “the child.” It was a sad affair, and might have been far sadder but for the mercy of God. Dr. Hemstruther had seen Mistress Barbara Purcell that morning, and given it as his opinion that she was of unsound mind. He had advised immediate seclusion and restraint, warning them that unless she was watched and guarded she might do some damage to herself.

My lord’s sympathies were importunate and appealing. It would be less humiliating for both the mother and the daughter if the thing could be done quietly, and without noise or scandal. The chancellor, being an amiable man, and not proof against sentiment on occasions, declared himself ready to agree. Yet since it was a question of the King’s prerogative, his Majesty would have the matter laid before him quietly; that was the only formality that would be needed, and no very serious one, for the King was grateful to people who took business off his hands, provided they did not relieve him also of the perquisites.

In three days the whole affair was settled, thanks to my lord’s briskness and influence—and his ability to pay. On the third evening he was carried in a sedan to the house in Pall Mall, and spent more than an hour with my lady in her salon. He had made his plans, and all that the mother had to do was to agree with him and to commend him for his ingenuity.

“We had better travel at once,” he said, when they had talked over every detail; “we can take her in a closed coach. And the nurse and her man can come with us; they are both trustworthy people. You say that there are only a gardener and his wife at Thorn? They must be pensioned and discharged.”

“Yes, no one else.”

“We must have the girl mewed up before Jack comes back. I shall be able to deal with him. He must not know where we have hidden her.”

“No; but should he—”

“Prove obstinate! We must find a substitute, or pack him off to sea again. The man has a roving disposition. But listen—in your ear, Nan: I have discovered some one who has taken a sudden liking to Captain John.”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“Not poor Barbara—she does not count.”

“No, no; but Hortense.”

My lady looked at him with open eyes.

“Hortense! Why, she has only seen him perhaps twice in her life. And then—?”

“His Majesty? Oh, Mr. Charles is—well, her banker. It would be like Hortense; it is the blood, and the southern fire in her.”

“But how do you know this?”

He flipped her playfully on the chin.

“How long have I lived in the world, Nan, and how much do I know about women?”

XXI

A blustering, cheerless wind beat up over the hills as John Gore rode the last five miles of a three days’ journey, and saw the vague glimmer of the distant city clinging to the loops of the river Thames. Scudding clouds made the sky cold and full of a gray hurrying unrest, though it was splashed toward the west with stormy gouts of gold.

John Gore rode over the heathlands, with the furze-bushes shivering as the wind swished through them; and the sandy road was dry and adrift with dust, although the sky looked so wet and sullen. The servant behind him on the cob kept a sharp eye cocked on the hollows of the heath and the knolls of furze, and nursed his blunderbuss for comfort, though his face looked as red and as round as the sunny side of an apple. Here and there clumps of stunted hollies jostled each other, their whisperings making the evening seem doubly gray and dreary. An unhallowed dusk was creeping over the landscape—an unhallowed dusk that made travellers imagine footpads lurking behind the thorn-bushes or the furze.

As they trotted downhill a solitary horseman came creeping up a side track, with his cloak blowing about him and his beaver over his nose. John Gore had a hand ready for a pistol, and the man Tom began to nudge the butt of his blunderbuss against his knee. Yet the stranger appeared more scared of them than they of him, for he went skimming like a swallow into the dusk, itching for his own chimney glow and the warm side of a safely barred door.

John Gore had come by an instinctive distrust of the man Tom’s forefinger. He pulled up, and sent him ahead.

“I shall be safer at your back, Tom, with that tool of yours ready to roar like a boy at the sight of the birch.”

Tom obeyed him with rather a shamefaced grin, for thirty miles south of Shirleys his blunderbuss had exploded at two in the afternoon, the road running through a wood with a stray cow pushing through the hazel-bushes. A scattering of slugs and buckshot had pattered into the grass beside John Gore’s horse; for Tom’s forefinger had a habit of crooking itself for comfort round the trigger when the road wound into shady bottoms. And if an owl screeched at dusk along a hedge-row, Thomas would give such a start in the saddle that it was a mere turn of the coin whether the flint would come sparking on the powder in the pan.

It was growing very gray in the west when they came by Edgeware toward Hyde Park, and soon saw the spires of Westminster like faint streaks against a fainter sky. The lights that were looking up in the gathering twilight had a heartening, warming twinkle. Tom slung his blunderbuss by a strap over his shoulder, and began to look buxom and bold enough—as though he already sniffed a hot supper and felt the ale-mug tickling his beard. They came without event toward St. James’s, Charing Village, and Whitehall, and all that sweet savor of courtliness where great gentlemen and roguish “maids of honor” drank wine and let the warmth thereof mount into their eyes.

To John Gore the whole purlieu of the palaces had a mystic glow—a glow that the romance of the heart throws out like a June sun over an Old-World garden. His thoughts were very different from those of red-faced Tom, who may have associated the ogle of a pair of merry eyes with the glint of a pewter pot; for John Gore forgot a twenty-mile hunger at a glimpse of the dim trees of St. James’s and the imagined gleam of Rosamond’s Pool. And hunger in a strong man is an earnest pleader. Therefore, romance had the greater glory, and even so the queen thereof—a girl in a black dress, with white bosom and white arms, and eyes so sombre that the sorrow of the world might have sunk therein.

The lower windows of my Lord Gore’s house were aglow as John Gore and his man rode up St. James’s Street with a homeward clatter over the stones. The iron gates leading into the court-yard at the side of the house stood open, and in the yard itself several coaches were standing without their horses, and a couple of sedan-chairs in one corner with the poles piled against the wall. Yet though there was as much talking going on as in the parlor of a river-side tavern, there was not such a thing as a servant to be seen.

As John Gore rolled out of the saddle, being a little stiff after three days’ riding, a couple of red faces were poked out of the near window of one of the coaches. The postilions and footmen had taken their master’s places, issued invitations to the chairmen and the grooms, and were all much at their ease with the beer-mugs passing round, and one of my lord’s cook-boys playing “powder-monkey,” and running round from coach to coach with a great can and an apron full of bread and cheese. In one of the carriages that was upholstered in orange and blue a fat chairman had stuck a farthing candle on the prong of a dung-fork, and so arranged the primitive candle-stand by leaning it against the door that the company within had a light to drink by, though the upholsterings might suffer from the droppings of the tallow. Even my lord’s grooms were making familiar with plush and scarlet cloth and stamped leather, with their heavy stable-boots planted where a satin slipper or a silver-buckled shoe alone had the right of repose.

The impudent roguery of it so tickled John Gore that he gave the two men at the near window a gruff “Goodevening,” coarsening his voice so that they should think him one of themselves.

“Hallo! Be that you, Sam Gibbs?”

“Samuel it is, old codger. Liquor going?”

“A hogshead full. Come inside; there’s room for a porker.”

John Gore laughed. It was dark in the yard, and the men could not recognize him.

“Whose coach?” he asked.

“This ’ere? Old Porteus Panter’s. And pant he would, the liquoring old scoundrel, if he knew what honest fellows were warming his cushions. Come along in, lad. Skin o’ my eyes, where’s that damned boy with the beer?”

“I’ll go and clap the horses in, and come and clink mugs.”

He walked toward the stables, leading his horse by the bridle. Catching the man Tom while he was still staring at the dim but vociferous vehicles in the yard, he slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Keep mum, Tom, my lad. There is some fun here. Put the horses in, and swing your heels on the manger for half an hour.”

John Gore managed to slip into the house by the garden entry, and making his way along a passage, reached the door of the dining-room without meeting any of my lord’s servants. Supper was over, and the gentlemen were at their wine, and talking so hard that a company of carol-singers might have struck up in the court-yard without being noticed. John Gore turned the handle and walked in—top-boots, riding-cloak, and all, dusty, and a little hot. His father sat with his back to him at the head of the long table, with some dozen guests talking and drinking on either side hereof.

Seated on Stephen Gore’s right hand was one of the gentlemen who had been at Bushy those few days in the summer. He was the first to recognize the intruder, and welcomed him with a laugh and an upraised glass of wine.

“All hail, John Gore! Here are we, all on the right side of the table—as yet!”

John Gore’s eyes were fixed upon his father. He saw him turn sharply with the look of a man who sees in a mirror the face of an enemy behind his chair. He was on his feet almost instantly, his buxom face pleasant as a glass goblet full of Spanish wine.

“Jack, my lad, this is well timed! We are all friends here, or should be. Gentlemen, my son, Captain John Gore, just out of the saddle from Yorkshire. Never mind your boots, boy. You have a hungry look, and a dry look. Pull the bell-rope, Launce, and I’ll thank you. Supper is the song that a man wants to hear after a hard day’s ride.”

A boy in a pink velvet coat, and with the grand airs of a lord chamberlain, rose and offered John Gore his chair. The sea-captain bowed to the youngster in turn, though the child’s attitude of condescension was vastly quaint to a man who had dared more adventures in one year than the young fop would meet in a lifetime.

“You seem to have left a great many of your friends outside in the cold, gentlemen,” he said, still standing, and looking down the long table; “my father has enough chairs, and more than enough liquor.”

His coming had brought a momentary lull with it, and not a few of the gentry at the table were staring with some curiosity at a man who had seen the inside of a Barbary prison.

My lord caught his son’s words.

“What’s that you are saying, Jack?”

“These gentlemen have left some of their friends outside in their coaches. Sir Porteus, sir,” and he bowed to an apoplectic old fellow with a fringe of white hair and a tonsure like a monk’s, “there are people in your carriage. I trust you have not been too modest.”

The baronet stared boozily across the table.

“People in my coach, sir?”

“Certainly. And drinking small-beer when they should be drinking sherry.”

John Gore had such a stern and serious way with him at times that casual acquaintances might have set him down as a Puritan, with none of the sly, jesting spirit behind his swarthy and imperturbable face.

“I assure you, sir, there were gentlemen seated inside your coach. My father’s house is not so niggardly—”

Stephen Gore caught his son’s eye and twinkled. A servant came in at the same opportune moment, having taken fully three minutes to answer the bell.

“Here, Jeremy, sirrah, Sir Porteus has left some gentlemen to wait in his coach. Desire them to join us; my table is big enough.”

The man stared, and then appeared in a great hurry to go about his master’s business. But my lord hindered him.

“Jeremy, you rascal, come here. Pardon me, Porteus”—and my lord assumed his most impressive manner—“perhaps you had better call these friends of yours in to us.”

“I should recommend the other gentlemen to do likewise,” said John Gore, gravely; “Sir Porteus is not the only culprit. The more the merrier.”

The curiosity of the whole room appeared piqued. Several of my lord’s guests pushed their chairs back and made toward the door. But what Sir Porteus and the rest of them said when they poked their heads into the windows of their respective coaches no one but a hostler could possibly confess. The tallow dip on the pitchfork was knocked over by a judicious fist, but not before it had gutted all down the cushions of the door. There was a sudden exodus of stable boots and small clothes into the dark, and from the whistling and hissing in the stable any innocent man might have imagined that horses had never been so carefully rubbed down after a two-mile drive. The boy with the beer-can was the only thing captured, and most unjustly cuffed because his ears happened to be at the right level for the easy exercise of a gentleman’s hand.

It was well after midnight before Stephen Gore and his son were left alone in the great dining-room, with the air thick with the fumes of tobacco and of wine. John Gore opened the windows that faced the street. His father was standing by the Jacobean fireplace, with one elbow on the ledge of the carved oak over-mantel and the stump of a little brown cigarro between his fingers. He was frowning to himself, and looking at the dying fire upon the irons, for a log fire had been burning, though it was still September.

John Gore pulled out a short clay pipe and a tortoise-shell box from a pocket. He filled the pipe leisurely, and lit it with a splinter of burning wood that he picked up with the tongs.

“Well, Johnny, how is Yorkshire?”

My lord, like a father, showed no discretion or sense of proportion either in the diminutives or in the vernacular renderings of his son’s name. Moreover, the Yorkshire moors were very far away, and a more vivid vista blotted them into the distance.

“Shirleys has changed very little. They have a new pump in the village. All the farms are in good fettle. Swindale seems as honest as such men ever are.”

My lord appeared distraught and preoccupied.

“How are old Peter Hanson and his woman? Does she still wear a farthingale?”

“Well—as ever, like the solid north country folk they are. I have no news, save that the new pump’s leaden snout was cut off the first week it was put up, and that a couple of deer were shot at Shirleys three days afterward. How have things passed here—in the world?”