Part 11

My lord put his cigarro to his lips, drew a deep breath, and expelled the smoke slowly, watching it curve under the hood of the chimney.

“Oh, somewhat sadly. I have a thing to tell you, Jack.”

John Gore’s face darkened perceptibly.

“News?”

“Yes. After all, it may not concern you much—at least—I trust not. We all have our little impulses, our chance inclinations. Do you remember, Jack, something I said to you in this very room the night you fought Phil Pembroke?”

John Gore remembered that something very keenly. His eyes betrayed as much.

“Does it concern Barbara Purcell?”

My lord gave him one look, and then threw the stump of his cigarro into the fire.

“It does, poor child. She has gone stark mad. There’s the blunt truth, Jack. If I have hit you hard, take it in the face like a man—and forget.”

XXII

John Gore asked few questions that night, but went to his room with a silent and impenetrable air that refused to betray any inward bleeding of the heart. His reserve challenged my lord to decide whether the son was really unconcerned, or whether he hid what he might feel beneath a casual surface. For Stephen Gore had spoken with great pathos of this “maid’s tragedy,” and had tempted his son with a display of sympathy to make some sentimental confession of faith.

But John Gore had knocked his pipe out against the hood of the fireplace, pulled off his heavy boots, and pretended that he was sleepy after a forty-mile ride and a good supper. He had taken one of the candles from the table and gone to his room, leaving his father no wiser as to what the son felt or what he knew.

John Gore did not sleep that night, despite the September wind over the open country and the dust that had been blown into his eyes. He had left my lord that he might be alone, and escape that parental curiosity and concern that grated upon the raw surface of his consciousness. For, strong man that he was, he had felt sick at heart over the news of the girl’s madness; it had come as a shock at the end of a day of dreams; sudden as a musket-ball lodged beneath the ribs, making him faint with the pain of it and with an inward flow of blood. In those few seconds, when his father had spoken to him, he had realized how deeply he had pledged himself to that mystery of mysteries. It had laid bare the truth to him as a knife lays bare the bleeding heart of a pomegranate.

John Gore left the candle burning and sat at the open window, his arms crossed upon the window-ledge. It was the attitude of one whose eyes gazed out into the night with sadness and great awe, while the soul went down into the deeps to drink bitterness bravely to the dregs and gain new strength thereby. He was still there, fully dressed, when the candle guttered in the candlestick, throwing up spasmodic gleams of light before dying into the dark. The dawn came up and found him there, like one who has kept watch all night on the deck of a great ship before a battle.

With men who live the life of action the coming of each new day brings a fresh impulse and fresh inspiration. John Gore seemed to throw off the stupor of the night as the grayness of the dawn deepened into bands of blue and gold across the east. He shook himself, dashed cold water over his head and face, and, putting on fresh linen and new clothes, went down into the house before a servant so much as stirred. Opening the street door, he met the dewy breath of the morning and all the silent and gradual glamour of the dawn. He was not the man to mope and write sonnets in a corner, or to surrender a strenuous will to feeble speculation. Wandering down to the river, he hired a waterman who happened to be industriously early with a pot of paint down by Charing Stairs, and, making the man row him into mid-stream, he stripped and plunged, and swam a good half-mile with the tide, feeling the fitter for it in body and heart.

Returning, he breakfasted alone, and, inquiring from the man Rogers, learned that my lord had rung for his morning cup of chocolate, which he always drank in bed. He heard also the account of how Sparkin had been sent to school some days ago, for John Gore had entered the youngster as a boarder at St. Paul’s. He had been packed off, as Mr. Rogers described it, like a pressed man to a king’s ship, swearing that he would desert at the first chance, and cut the servant’s throat who had had the insolence to drag him schoolward by the collar. But Rogers, who had been sent by my lord to inquire after the child, confessed that he had found Sparkin more resigned to his fate. He had fought three fights in as many days, and been royally licked in the last encounter. Defeat seemed to have decided Mr. Sparkin to remain, in order to be avenged as honor and the prestige of the past demanded.

My lord was luxuriously at his ease, leaning against a pile of pillows in the four-post bed, when his son paid him a morning call. He lost a little of his dignity in a silk nightcap and a black velvet bed-gown as elaborately belaced as some priestly vestment. But Stephen Gore was still the great gentleman, the man of affairs, the dispenser of favors, as the litter on the quilt testified—letters, pamphlets, a needy poet’s new book of poems, bills, petitions, and what not. The man Rogers was laying out shirts, stockings, and silk underwear—preparing for that most solemn ceremonial, the sacrament of the toilet.

“You can leave us, Rogers, for half an hour. If any of my people call, keep them waiting till I ring.”

John Gore had opened the window, and stood looking down into the little garden at the back of the house.

“My dear Johann, I am not seasoned, like you, to sea breezes. Please pity my gray hairs, my son. I allow no draughts till I have gotten me my periwig. Hum—ha, what’s this! Will your honor put such and such a matter before the Duke of York? Yes, of course, dirty work, as usual. Let it bide. I hope you have got rid of the saddle-ache, Jack, my fellow. My business hour—this; look at all this infernal paper; it is an amazing pity that so many people should learn to write.”

He was picking up letters and papers, and tossing them aside, stopping now and again to scribble notes upon his tablets.

“I had a secretary, Jack, for a year, but I distrust the tribe. I find that they are always selling one’s secrets behind one’s back. Is this a filial visit, or am I to include it among my business?”

John Gore was watching his father with those dark, intent eyes of his.

“I want to speak to you about Barbara Purcell.”

My lord threw his tablets upon the bed, and looked at his son with questioning keenness. It was still of vital interest to him to discover whether this sea-rover had lost his heart or no.

“Tell me one thing first, Jack. Had you any strong fancy for the girl?”

“It is four months since I smelled the sea, sir.”

“Then she had some flavor for you—beyond the mere scent of a petticoat?”

“Yes, a good deal more than that.”

His father regarded him with sympathetic solemnity. Yet my lord’s attitude betrayed the fact that even a clever man of the world may prove shallowly pompous in dealing with a son.

“I gave you all the information I have, Jack, last night. If you care to see the pistol-mark the poor child made on me, the coat is hanging in that cupboard.”

John Gore kept his place.

“You said, sir, that she believed that you knew the name of her father’s murderer.”

“Some such madness, Jack. But I can assure you that it was a most unholy, startling incident. I can see her now standing like a young figure of Fate, with a pistol in her hand and her eyes like two live coals. I told her to go to bed, and then she fired at me. Southern blood—Southern blood! Not that I bear any malice against the poor thing, John, though she was so near sending me to my account with all my sins upon my head. What more do you want to know?”

“Where she is.”

My lord pushed some of the papers aside with a trace of impatience.

“Safe, and well cared for, Jack. Dr. Hemstruther’s commands. We applied to the Chancery—”

“Where, sir, did you say?”

“The child has everything that can make life easy.”

“You have not told me yet, sir, where she is.”

My lord swung to one side of the bed, and, putting an arm round the carved corner-post, looked straight into his son’s face.

“You want to know the one thing, Jack, that I have not the least intention of telling you.”

“And why not, sir?”

“Why not!” And Stephen Gore threw himself back again upon the pillows with some of the dramatic action that he could make appear so natural. “Look you, most obstinate of bulkheads, do you care one brass culverin for the girl? Answer me that.”

There was no need for the answer; my lord galloped on.

“Do you want her to come by her reason and her right mind again? You will protest that you do. Of course. Once more, John, my son, would you like to see your love making mouths at you, gnawing her bib, and perhaps shouting like a fish-wife? You will protest, perhaps, that you do not.”

John Gore stood very still about two paces from his father’s bed. His eyes had a gleam of fierceness in them, for even the possible truth filled him with an impulse to strike the man who uttered it. My lord, who was watching him as a swordsman watches his enemy’s eye, changed his tactics abruptly, and held out an appealing hand like an orator pleading for a reasonable understanding.

“Don’t glare at me, Jack, my boy, as though I had called some one a bona roba. If I have struck hard, it is for your good. Understand that I am not an old fool, and that I have some sense. You are one of those men who love a woman with the same headlong fierceness with which you would board an enemy’s ship. Look at the matter through my eyes. You would only harm the girl by seeing her, for, by God’s providence, she may recover if we rest her as we rest inflamed eyes in the dark. It would only hurt your heart, Jack, if you were to see her as she is now. That is why I am minded to keep temptation out of your way.”

He threw himself back again upon the pillows, for he had been leaning forward like a preacher over a pulpit rail.

“You must trust me, my son. Some day you may thank me for this. I may be pardoned for wishing the best in life for you, for though you may think me a wild old worldling, even a courtier, Jack, may have a heart.”

He spoke with such a burst of manliness and emotion that John Gore bent over his father’s hand.

“You are in the right, sir, and I thank you.”

And he went out from my lord’s room touched to the heart, and awed a little by the sudden fervor of this great gentleman of the court whose flippant splendor had so much of the simpler, braver manhood.

Yet so strange and mercurial a thing is temperament that Stephen Gore lay back upon his pillows when his son had gone with the drawn look of a man caught by some spasm of a faltering heart. He forgot for the moment to ring for Rogers, but sat staring straight before him, his hands moving amid the papers on the quilt. For my Lord Gore, like many a man embarked on crooked courses, was very human, as such men often are. He could not forever be callous in hypocrisy, and a touch of tenderness lurks like a faint red glow amid the cold embers of every heart.

Stephen Gore felt a sudden pity for his son that morning. Something drew him toward that silent, brown-faced man, so strong and yet so simple—so wise, and yet so ready to believe. Yet what was the use of soliloquizing over broken pitchers and squandered wine? He had entered an alley in which there was no turning, and those who hindered him must be brushed aside. To hesitate would only plunge all those concerned into bitterer complexities, and perhaps into deeper guilt. And yet he could not forget that look in his son’s eyes, for the man trusted him, and the man was his own son.

“Crooked corners are best left crooked,” he said to himself, at last, as he reached out a hand toward the bell-rope. “After all, he need not make an Arabella Stewart of the girl; there are handsomer and better-tempered women by the score.—Come along, Rogers; I am late as it is. Put my plum-colored suit out. And have you stropped those razors properly? They were beginning to bite like files.”

Rogers bustled forward with hot water, scented napkins, and a phial of perfumes.

“Yes, sir, they are as sharp as your own wit, sir.”

“Give me the glass, Rogers. I feel yellow this morning. Do I look it?”

“A little tired, sir, perhaps. Nothing more.”

XXIII

They will tell you in those parts how Waller, the parliamentarian, battered with his cannon the Purcells’ house of Thorn, leaving it half ruinous, as a warning to all royalists who felt tempted to trust in the breadth of their moats or the stoutness of their walls. Be the woodland legend what it may, the Purcells were poor after the long war, and Thorn had been for thirty years a haunt of owls and jackdaws—a strange, dim place set in the midst of stagnant water, far from a high-road, and hidden by wastes and woods. From broken gable ends and tottering battlements a red-brick tower and a few twisted chimneys rose against the blue. Even in those short years ivy had climbed up over the walls, pouring over the stone sills of the windows, and growing knotty and stout of stem even up to the leaden water-spouts of the tower. When the wind blew from the southwest the whole house seemed to shake and glimmer with the movements of those myriad leaves. And through the windows of roofless rooms you could see the sky redden or grow gold at dawn or sunset.

As for the moat, it was a checker of black and green, with moor-hens swimming on it and water-rats making rippling tracks from wall to wall, while here and there great rambling roses, that had not felt the knife for many a year, poured over the brick parapet, and hung in summer-like banners of green flowered with crimson and gold. The crown of the bridge had been broken, and several tree-trunks, ranged side to side and banked with earth and brushwood, filled up the gap. The court-yard gate, a new one since Waller’s day, seemed the only unruined thing about the place; but the court-yard itself was knee-deep with grass and weeds at hay-time. In the garden there were stretches of turf that had once been lawns, paths that were no longer visible, roses and shrubs growing as they listed, for a corner of the vegetable-garden alone had been kept in cultivation. The out-houses and stables in the kitchen court were crumbling and falling in—a quaint medley of ragged thatch and gaunt roof timber, falling plaster, and lichened brick.

Yet the old thorns that grew in the grass-land beyond the moat, thorn-trees that had given the house a name and were outliving it, stretched out their flat tops like so many pleading and appealing hands. They were white each spring above the green rushes, the brown mole-heaps, and the dew-wet grass. And in the winter the birds flocked to them and fed upon the red berries, welcome, indeed, when the turf was frost-bound or when the snow lay deep. So the old thorns lived on as they had lived for generations, while “Thorn” crumbled brick by brick, and the ivy, as though yearning to hide its nakedness, made it dim with glimmering green.

Thorn had its ghost, and no Sussex churl would come within half a mile of it when dusk began to fall. An old Scotch gardener and his wife had lived there some ten years, warm and snug in the rain-proof kitchen, daring the devil and all spirits and insects with a handful of good sulphur. MacAlister and his dame had been given their quittance that autumn, and had been packed off into some distant county, no man knew why or where, and no man cared. The owls might fledge their broods, the jackdaws build in the chimneys, and the place be given up to all manner of mystery and ghostliness. None had troubled in those parts about Thorn, save one farmer who had needed a new barn, and had driven a wagon over to thieve bricks, and come away with such a scaring that every one believed him when he swore the place was cursed.

There were ghosts at Thorn that autumn—but solid, hungry, and most gluttonous ghosts, who seemed to have abundance of good beer and food stowed away in the huge cupboards of the kitchen. The kitchen and the two rooms over it had been made habitable for the MacAlisters, and were now used by the new spirits who haunted Thorn—a big, stocky man, with a back like a flagstone; a comely, broad-hipped woman, with black eyes and a tight, hard face. They had come there suddenly, when the moon was full, walking by the woodland track from a great black coach that had set them down upon the high-road.

One evening in October, as the dusk was falling, the figure of a man, a burly blotch of darkness in the half light of the yard, came across from an out-building that was used as a wood-shed with an apron full of oak blocks for the fire. Farmer Knapp, he who had come to steal bricks, had told how he had come to the gate of Thorn and had seen through the grill, not a foot from his own eyes, a great white face as big as the moon when full. Farmer Knapp had not taken a second look, and, although it was only three in the afternoon, he had jumped into his wagon and driven off with his cart-horses lumbering at a canter. Now the man who crossed the court-yard, carrying his billets of wood, had a piece of white cloth covering his face, tied under the chin and about the forehead, with two holes for the eyes and a slit where the mouth should be.

The huge calves of the man’s legs rubbed together as he walked, and under the brim of his beaver his pate was as bald as the ivory knob of a gentleman’s cane. He went down into the kitchen by three steps and a short passageway, and tumbled his wood into a corner of the open hearth.

At the table the woman was stirring something in a basin. A big black pot hung on a rack and chain over the fire, and on the bricks before the hearth lay a dog of the mastiff breed, who lifted his head and blinked when the man entered.

“Supper ready?”

“Throw some more wood on, Sim, will ye?”

The man tossed two or three blocks into the red heart of the fire, pulled a rough settle forward with one foot, and sat down and stared at the pot. The firelight glittered on the eyes behind the white cloth, showing up the red lids unshaded by the trace of an eyelash.

“Lord, what a dull hole this is, or I’m saved!”

The woman had her sleeves turned up, and her big forearms were brown and comely.

“Dull,” said the man, “when there’s plenty to eat?”

“And drink, Sim?”

“Better than Tyburn or Newgate, anyway. Only there ain’t nothing to lay one’s fist to; not so much as a dog for old Blizzard to take by the throat.”

“Turn smuggler, my dear, if you want to let blood.”

The man sniffed at the pot.

“Smuggler? No, thank ye; we don’t want none of those gentry inside Thorn. Stodging about the country for a keg of liquor when we can have it for going to the cupboard! This deuced viz of mine smarts like hot Hollands to-night.”

He untied the strings and turned the mask up, but the woman did not look at him, it being near supper-time and food upon the table. They were not Sussex folk, nor even country people, by their speech, but gentry whose childhood had been passed within hail of Southwark or the Savoy.

“Who’s going to carry the girl’s food up to-night?”

The man took an oil flask and a piece of linen from the long shelf above the open fireplace. Over the shelf hung a long gun and a couple of heavy pistols, also a seaman’s cutlass and a pair of iron wristlets. He dropped some of the oil on the rag, and began to dab his face with it, blinking his red lids like an owl.

“Take it up yourself, Nance; I’m tired.”

She looked at him with a shrewish lift of the chin.

“Tired, you great hulk! Dang those rickety stairs, they make my knees ache; a bat put the candle out last night. Mother of God! I wouldn’t be here another week but for the doubloons! Think of the smell of the sausage shops and the snug little taverns Southwark way! I would give a gold Jacobus to sniff the river mud at low water. They might take us for papists from St. Omer; as for the girl—Black Babs, she’s no more mad than I am.”

The woman had a certain air of culture—the culture, perhaps, of a bold and clever orange girl who had caught some of the courtliness of the playhouses and the gardens.

“So we are papists,” quoth the man, still dabbing his face, “and to say whether a wench is mad or not is none of our business.”

“It’s my business, Sim, to see no one drops a noose over my neck.”

“Noose be damned! When a great gentleman opens his purse, you slut, wise folk ask no questions.”

“P’r’aps not. Lift the pot off. My Lord Pomposity wishes the girl mad, I gather, and mad she will be in six months, with the winter coming—or, maybe, stiff as a frozen bird. Then it will be old Drury and Whitefriars again.”

“As likely as not. Captain Grylls will be black-guarding it this way with orders before long. They must get us fresh supplies sent in before December.”

“That’s the real business of life, Sim, to be sure. There’s the girl’s bread and dripping. Run up with it like a good lad, or I shall spoil the pudding. You had better take the lantern; the old tower is full of bats and draughts.”

The man put the oil flask on the shelf, and, dropping the white cloth over his face, took down a horn lantern from a beam and lit the candle in it with a burning brand from the fire. He trod on the dog’s paw in the doing of it, and gave the beast his boot in the ribs because he presumed to snarl at him.

“Anything to wash it down?”

“I filled the jug this morning.”

Simon Pinniger picked up the pewter plate and marched off swinging the lantern. From the kitchen a passage led to what had been the hall, now rafterless, with the stars blinking between ivied walls. A flight of steps led to a door that opened into the lower story of the tower. Simon put the lantern down, pulled out a key, and, unlocking the door, picked up the lantern again and began to climb the interminable stair. Thud, thud, thud, up into the darkness, with the light from the lantern swinging this way and that, and the raw cold of the autumn night breathing in at the open squints, and through the shot-holes that could be seen here and there in the walls. Simon Pinniger climbed sixty steps or so, passing two narrow landings before he came to a door with a bar across it. He put down the lantern, unlocked the door, lifted the bar that worked upon a pin, and, opening the door about a foot, pushed the plate in with the toe of his boot.

“Supper,” was all he said.

Then, after the turning of the lock and the creaking of the bar, the thud, thud died down again into the darkness of the stair.

Only one thing moved for the moment in the tower-room, and that a mouse, who came out boldly to nibble at the bread on the pewter plate. A single window, high up in the wall and closed with stanchions, let in the brown gloom of the dusk and the glitter of a star. There was no fire, no furniture to speak of, and nothing that could be broken and used as an edge to cut and wound.

In one corner stood a truckle-bed, and sitting thereon a still, shadowy figure whose face showed a gray oval in the darkness. The place seemed far above all sound, though the wind might moan there and shake the ivy on the wall.

The figure rose from the bed and moved toward the door. It went on its knees there, and with cold hands began to crumble some of the rough bread. A tiny shadow crept up toward the white fingers and took crumbs. It was so little a thing, too small to be caressed, yet it had grown tame in one short month, and, above all, it was alive.