Part 17

John Gore put the ring upon his finger, mounted his horse, and made for the main road. He needed a place where he could lie quiet, and people whom he could trust, and Furze Farm was such a place. He made for it that morning, guided by the shouts of a man whom he found ploughing in a field, and before noon he rode down the grass track that Mr. Pepys had followed, and saw the red farm-house, the dark thatch, the yellow stacks, and the golden beeches against a breezy sky. As he came riding by Chris Jennifer’s orchard he saw Mrs. Winnie hanging linen out to dry, while white-polled Will paddled round the pond, and surreptitiously threw sticks at the white ducks thereon.

Mrs. Winnie’s blue petticoat was blowing merrily, and she had a clothes-peg in her mouth when John Gore called to her over the hedge. She dropped the peg suddenly, while the wind blew an apron across her face.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Jennifer.”

“Drat the clothes! Who be it this time of the morning? And me with a short petticoat on!”

She flicked the apron aside, settled her skirts, and came round under a great apple-tree, with a few pullets running at her heels.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Jennifer.”

“Sakes alive! is it you, sir?”

“Yes, come to ask you a favor. You had better keep an eye on that boy of yours. He still seems in love with the pond.”

She moved along the hedge, smoothing her brown hair down, and showing the muscles in her big brown arms.

“Come in, sir, and be welcome. Will, Will, you little frummet, what be you doing there, terrifying all of us with puddling round in the mud?”

She opened the gate for John Gore and gave him a curtesy, for Winnie Jennifer had served as woman in a great house, and her manners and her speech were less quaint that Mr. Christopher’s.

“Come in, sir; my man will be up from the ploughland soon. Dinner will be coming, though it be only rough stuff.”

John Gore dismounted, and made Mrs. Winnie a slight bow.

“You offered me your good-will,” he said, frankly, “and I have come to take it—as a friend.”

He led his horse toward the stable while Chris Jennifer’s wife bustled into the house, putting washing-day behind her with good-natured patience. John Gore found her going into the little old parlor with an apron full of sticks, but he protested that the kitchen ingle-nook would do for him, and that he liked the smell of dinner. So he sat himself down in the nook under the hood of the great fireplace, stretching his legs out to the fire, and wondering what he would say to Christopher Jennifer’s wife.

There was a pot boiling over the fire, and Mrs. Winnie began to gather her flour and things upon the table for the making of a pudding. She took a great pot of preserves from a cupboard, and set to work very sensibly in her practical, brown-armed way.

“If I had known, sir, I wouldn’t have put an old one in the pot.”

“Old one?”

“One of the old hens, sir; they’re not so bad when you boil ’em. I’ll make up some herb sauce to help the old lady down.”

Now whether it was the warmth of the fire, or the frank freshness of Mrs. Winnie’s manner, John Gore found himself telling her enough of the truth to set the woman in her heartily at his service. She forgot her pudding in her sympathy, even so far as to stir the air with a wooden spoon and to spill jam upon the table. John Gore had come to the pith of the matter when he saw her flourish the spoon threateningly in the direction of the back-yard door.

“Will, you little spying rogue, get you out and look for the eggs.”

“There ain’t none,” came the retort; “t’ birds be moultin’.”

“Don’t answer me, young man; do what I tell ye.” And she made a step forward that sent the youngster running for fear of the spoon.

Mrs. Winnie turned to her pudding, casting a look now and again at the grim, brown-faced man in the ingle-nook.

“You move me—powerful, sir. As sure as I love my man, sir, coming to him as a clean maid as I did, with all my linen and my savings, if it be no liberty on my part—I’ll ask to serve you—as you please. Come into this house as yours, sir; come and go, and we’ll ask no questions. My man and I will thank God for it, that we can give you service for what you did.”

John Gore felt that he could trust her, and Mrs. Winnie had no less trust in him. She was a shrewd woman, with some knowledge of the world in her own blunt way, and more sentiment and warmth in her than one would have guessed by the masterfulness of her manner.

“I shall be very grateful to you,” said, the man, simply.

“Why, there, sir, it’s little enough. There sha’n’t be any poking of noses round Furze Farm, I can tell you that. I have a tongue—and a tongue, and my man is a man o’ sense. Order your own goings, sir, and we’ll just mind our business.”

She could not have shown her good-sense or her honor better than by taking the matter as she did. But when John Gore spoke of his more tangible debt to her, she stirred the pudding hard, and would have none of his protests.

“No, sir, we have got good crops in, three milking-cows, a yard full of pullets, all stuff off our own ground. It’s just our own stuff, and we shall thank you to eat of it, though it be a bit rough, and not puffed up for a gentleman’s table. Charge you sixpence when we kill a chicken, or a penny when I take a bowl of apples down out of the attic? Dear life, sir, not me! My hands aren’t made that way.”

Chris Jennifer came in about dinner-time, heralding his approach by kicking his muddy boots against the stone step at the yard door. He came in, and received John Gore and his wife’s orders without so much as a blink of surprise. He stared hard at his guest for half a minute or so, and then took a big jug from a shelf over the fireplace.

“I’ll tap t’ new cask,” he said, as though that would be his warmest welcome. “Put some apples t’ sizzle, my dear. Suppose thee’ll be airin’ t’ best sheets.”

“Go on with you,” said his wife, bluntly; “do you think I be one to forget such a thing?”

Mr. Jennifer lumbered round to her, stood by her solemnly a moment, and then gave her a very deliberate dig under the arm.

“T’ woman stole gentleman Adam’s rib; mindings be mendings.” And he went off with a chuckle toward the pantry, leaving John Gore to disentangle the meaning of so solemn a jest.

XXXII

Little Dr. Hemstruther, in his rusty clothes, came out from my Lady Purcell’s house and entered the “chair” that was in waiting for him, telling the men to carry him to my Lord Gore’s, in St. James’s Street. He took snuff vigorously as the two chairmen swung along over the cobbles, patted his chest, and beat his hands together to keep them warm. His unwholesome face had a beaky, bird-like alertness, and he appeared cynically amused by something, for Dr. Hemstruther delighted in the quaint inconsistencies of human nature, and had a fanatical hatred of all altruism and the sentiment of religion. Like many sour old men, he was hugely pleased when he had discovered anything mean and scandalous. And yet he was to be trusted in the keeping of a secret, his cynical temper helping him to cover up the follies of those who filled his purse. He merely jeered and mocked at them in philosophic privacy, taking their money, and mocking his own self for being the creature of such hire.

The chairmen stopped before the house in St. James’s Street, Dr. Hemstruther waiting in the chair till the house door opened, for a keen northwest wind was sweeping the street. Toddling in at last—a shrewd, meagre figure, his long nose poking forward between the curls of his huge wig—he was shown by the man Rogers into a little room at the back of the house where Stephen Gore kept his books and papers.

Dr. Hemstruther was warming his hands at the fire when my lord came in to him, his florid cheerfulness struggling to shine through a cloud of anxiety and unrest. His suit of sky-blue satin, the lace ruffles at his wrists, the very rings upon his fingers, seemed part of a radiance that was wilfully assumed. A keen eye could detect a certain hollowness in the face, a bagginess beneath the eyes, some slackness of the muscles about the mouth. The silky gloss of his fine manner betrayed through the very beauty of its texture the darker moods and thoughts beneath.

Dr. Hemstruther noted and commented on all this as he bowed his lean little body, and rubbed his hands for fear of chilblains; and Dr. Hemstruther despised my lord, though he covered up his sneers with subserviency and unction. For my Lady Purcell had fallen sick of the small-pox some days ago, and in her panic and distress of soul was sending my lord messages, which he—brave gentleman—put discreetly to one side.

“Well, sir, what news to-day?”

Dr. Hemstruther carried a very solemn face for the occasion.

“Great peril, my lord—great peril.”

“What! No better?”

“A threatening of malignancy, my lord.”

A flash of impatience escaped from Stephen Gore.

“What is your experience worth, Dr. Hemstruther, if you cannot handle a woman with a fever? The greater part of our earthly wisdom is a mere matter of words.”

He walked to the window and opened it.

“Poor Nan Purcell, to have escaped so long with a clean skin! There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth and covering up of mirrors.”

The petulance in his voice betrayed his resentment at the lack of improvement in her affairs. Her sickness was infinitely mischievous at such a moment, and inspired him with an uneasy and savage impatience. He flung down into a chair, with all his sweet loftiness in peril of toppling into a snarl of unseemly temper. Dr. Hemstruther appeared to be intent upon brushing some of the snuff from his coat.

“The danger is not skin deep, sir,” he said.

“You find yourself quite helpless, Dr. Hemstruther, eh? There, pardon my peevishness—”

“I would not venture the weight of a feather either way, my lord. And she is a bad patient, mens turbida in corpore ægro.”

He sniffed, smoothed his wig, and looked deferentially at his shoes.

“My Lady Purcell is asking for you, my lord.”

“Then she is conscious—of everything?”

“Conscious to the quick, in spite of the heat of the fever. If I may be pardoned—”

His eyes met my lord’s, and Stephen Gore was the more embarrassed of the two.

“You think that I should do her good?”

“More good, my lord—”

“Than all your draughts and bleedings!”

Dr. Hemstruther bowed, and hid a smile with the obeisance.

“My Lord Gore might find some words to soothe the lady.”

“But you forget, man, that—”

He did not complete the sentence, for even his egotism stumbled at the confession of the instinct of cowardice and self-love. Dr. Hemstruther understood him, and mocked inwardly at the great man’s prudence.

“There is some danger, my lord; but still I would advise—”

“As a matter of policy?”

“As a matter of policy.”

Stephen Gore pushed back his chair and stood at his full height, as though he felt the need of feeling himself taller than this little crab of a man who knew so much, and whose authority was so obsequious and yet so strong.

“Women have no patience, sir, and will scream ‘fire’ when a log falls on the hearth. I am up to my eyes in a rush of affairs to-day. And my friends will thank me if I breathe a pest into all their faces.”

“To-morrow would serve, my lord.”

“I may take your word for that? Good. Are there any cautions you would give me?”

Dr. Hemstruther screwed his face into an expression of intense sagacity.

“I will send you a powder to burn, my lord, and a mild draught to clear you. Sit by an open window, and have all the clothes you go in burned.”

“My thanks. And now, sir, if you will pardon me, my leisure is not my own.”

He unlocked a cabinet, took out a silk purse, and, crossing the room, held the purse out to the physician.

“I am exerting myself in that little affair of yours, Dr. Hemstruther,” he said. “It is a pleasure to labor for one’s friends.”

Both smiled faintly as they looked into each other’s eyes. Dr. Hemstruther put the purse away in an inner pocket and made one of his most courtly bows.

“Your servant, my lord. I trust that I am mindful of all your interests.” And he went out sniffing, to wrinkle up his nose sardonically, like a grinning dog, so soon as he was out of Stephen Gore’s sight.

But if Anne Purcell burned with a fever upon her bed, whimpering and calling continually on Mrs. Jael, who had taken a heavy bribe to bide beside her lady, my Lord Gore was in an equal fever of mind, the fever of a man who has many things to dread. He knew enough of the human heart to remember that the cords of silence char and slacken when Death holds the torch to the secrets of the past. A panic of penitence, the betrayal of others in the mad impulse to make amends, the emotions thirsting for the comfort of the confessional dew. And Stephen Gore was wise as to the gravity of a betrayal, for the man Grylls had ridden into Sussex, and Anne Purcell knew it, and the sealed order that he carried. Moreover, this blood-debt was not the only stain that darkened my lord’s consciousness. He was sunk to the chin in other and wider waters, where the breath from a hired creature’s lips might stir such a storm as should smother death into the mouths of many.

He stood before the fire, staring into it, and turning the rings upon his fingers. For the moment it was all self with him: self, savage, querulous, impatient, driven to that height of fanaticism whence the sorrows and hopes of a man’s fellows seem infinitely small and insignificant. It was the mad, angry self that beats down and tramples on the life instincts of others, crying a savage sacrifice to the Moloch of the ego. And yet this man in the satin coat, so bland, so debonair, so generous on the surface, heard the low clamor of that underworld that every man carries in the deeps of consciousness. He suffered, yet would not countenance his suffering, hardening himself to escape from it with fierce strength and subtlety and anger.

XXXIII

If Winnie Jennifer was not in love with John Gore, she was in love with the love in him, for no man could sit and stare so at the fire, and look so quietly grim over such a matter, without winning over a woman’s heart. There was a romance here, and your true woman, be she drudge or madam, has that trick of the fancy that lifts life out of its sordid round and makes her a queen of the fairies, though there be gray in her hair. And when he looked at Winnie with those deepset eyes of his she knew that he was looking beyond her toward his love, and that the heart in him said: “I must go to her, for she has suffered.”

Therefore, when John Gore rose up from the ingle-nook about three in the afternoon, and asked her whether Mr. Jennifer could lend him several fathoms of good rope, Mrs. Winnie regarded him with a curious glint of the eyes, and felt a delight in meddling in such a matter.

“To be sure, sir, there is a good round of rope hanging on a harness-peg in the stable. Come you—we will see.”

She went out with him, swinging her brown arms and holding her head high, as though proud in her woman’s way of sharing in the adventure, and, opening the stable door, showed him a hank of brown rope hanging from the wood.

“How much would you be wanting, sir?”

“Ten fathoms will do.”

He took the hank down, and, laying it on the floor, began to measure the rope out, yard by yard, coiling it neatly close by Mrs. Winnie’s feet. It was good hemp, unfrayed and unrotted, not too thick and stiff, yet stout enough to carry the weight of three men.

Mrs. Winnie watched him, her eyes inquisitively kind, and her tongue all of a tremble. He was borrowing the rope in the cause of adventure, and she felt flattered in the lending of it, but she wished he would tell her what it was for.

“It is good hemp, sir.”

“I should know a good rope, being a sailor. I shall need it to help me in a bit of a scramble.”

Mrs. Winnie began to think of all the cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood, for John Gore had withheld the name of Thorn.

“I had better get you a wallet full of food, sir; you may be needing it.”

“You think of everything, Mrs. Jennifer. I am going treasure-hunting.” And he laughed.

“Treasure, sir?”

“Yes. In a few days I may bring my treasure-trove back with me.”

Mrs. Winnie understood of a sudden, and her eyes grew full of light.

“No doubt she is all you desire, sir, and I ask no more questions of you. You have told me enough before to make me want to take and comfort her.”

She went away, and returned anon with an extra cloak, a parcel of bread and meat, some apples, and a drop of good hollands in a flask, for the autumn nights were growing raw and cold. John Gore had saddled his horse and hung the rope over one of the holsters. He looked touched by Mrs. Winnie’s simple kindliness, and by the faith she seemed ready to give to him.

“I shall have a heavy debt before long,” he said.

“We don’t count by tallies here, sir.”

And she was quite happy, good soul, in feeling his gratitude pledge its truth. She watched him ride away along the hedge, knowing him for a brave man and a strong one—a man whom a woman instinctively respects.

Now, at Thorn, Simon Pinniger sat on a tree-stump in an out-house lazily splitting billets of wood with the axe edge of a pick. It was growing dusk, and a pile of white wood lay beside him, with here and there the pink core of an old apple trunk amid the billets of oak and ash. Simon Pinniger was tired of the job, and, filling a basket with split logs, he shouldered it and crossed the court-yard into the kitchen, and dumped the basket down beside the hearth with the air of a man whose day’s work was done.

The woman Nance was at the table, peeling apples for a pie, her lips pressed intently together, and three hard lines running across her forehead. The man looked at her a little furtively, and then went to draw some beer from a cask that stood in the corner. He put the jug on the floor under the tap, so that the ale should have a head on it, and stood there watching the liquor flow with the stupid slouching pose of a man whose body was too big for his brain.

“Sim!”

The sharp rasp of the woman’s voice brought him round as though she had clouted him on the ear.

“What are you thinking of, man?”

The red-lidded eyes behind the eyelet-holes in the linen looked capable of expressing nothing but fleshly things.

“Supper,” he said, curtly.

“Well, you’ll wait for it. Quick, you fool, the liquor’s running over.”

He turned and put a hand to the spigot, muttering as a rivulet of good ale curled across the floor.

“All your tongue, as usual.”

“It’s always my tongue, Sim, and never your lumpishness. Wipe that slop up; I’m not going to soil my shoes in it.”

He obeyed her, and then sat himself on the three-legged stool before the fire, taking the jug with him, and standing it on the hearth.

“There’s comfort in the stuff,” he said, sullenly.

The woman gave a sharp laugh.

“Courage, you mean, you six feet and a half of fat and folly! You would run away from it all but for me.”

“Run!”

“Yes, you.”

“You want a week of the branks, my dear. Give me my money and my liquor, and I’m the bully for any man.”

“Oh, you’re a fine fat falcon—you! Keep a little courage in the cask, Sim, till the business comes. Three days’ grace and no countermand. What’s it to be—a mattress, or a fathom of rope, or a soft scarf? What are you looking so sulky about?”

For the man had bunched himself over the fire, and was rocking backward and forward on two legs of the stool.

“Let it alone, you fool,” he said; “it don’t do a man good to think of such things.”

She looked up mockingly, and threw a half-rotten apple at him.

“Oh, you soft head!—you piece of pulp! You’re no better than a great girl—you, who pulled Adam Naylor’s windpipe out and broke in that Frenchman’s chest. You, to make such a blubber over this!”

“Who’s afraid?” he asked, savagely.

“My sweet conscience! Oh, dear, good saints! I’m a poor sinner, a poor snivelling sinner—”

“Nance, shut your trap!” And he opened his chest and roared at her with sudden fury.

She took it with a laugh.

“Better, Sim, better. Put a little temper into it. I’ll give you a pint of hollands when the night comes, and smack you across the face with a firebrand to make you mad.”

And she filled her apron with the apple-peelings, and came and tossed them into the fire.

A west wind blew fitfully about the tower of Thorn. The ivy rustled, leaf tapping against leaf; and the clouds passed slowly across the stars. An owl was beating up and down the edge of a neighboring wood, hooting as he went, now strangely near, now faint in the distance. From the court-yard came the dull “burr” of the dog’s chain as he fidgeted in his kennel.

Barbara had been at war with herself all day—distraught, troubled, afraid to believe that which she most desired. And with the dusk her uneasiness and her wavering suspense had deepened, heralding an anguish of self-hatred and humiliation that shirked the ordeal of another meeting. She dreaded lest John Gore should come, and yet listened for his coming, fearing and longing for him in one breath, the past and present fighting for her desire. Twice she rolled up the sheets to succor him in his climb, and twice unrolled them with a fever of indecision. Her heart labored with the secret that it held, striving against the untellable, yet trying to beat out nothing but the truth. There was that eternal blood-debt between them, lurid to her, now that the night had come, like the glare of a fire reddening the sky.

Barbara walked to and fro awhile, and then stood listening, leaning against the wall. Nor had she been long motionless when there was a faint rustling of the ivy, a sound as of something moving, of something drawing near to her in the darkness. She climbed the bed and put her hands to the bars. A faint whisper came up to her out of the sibilant shiver of the leaves.

“Barbara!”

The fever of doubt and of fear left her suddenly.

“John!”

“Can you help me?”

“Yes; wait.”

She was down instantly, rolling the sheets and knotting them into a rope. The strands of her hair were under the pillow. She took them and wound them round the knots, and, making them fast to a bar, threw the end thereof out of the window. But the rope would not run by its own weight, and she had to thrust it out foot by foot, standing on the bed and leaning her bosom against the wall.

The rope tightened, the knot straining at the bar. Then a shadow blotted out the window.

“Dear heart!”

She stretched out her hands to him, and then drew them with a sharp sob into her bosom, bending down her head and feeling the old despair taking possession of her heart.

“Barbe!”

He had forced himself into the stone framing of the window, and she could hear him breathing hard with the grimness of the climb.

“Where are you, child?”

He lay there with his face to the bars, and heard nothing but sudden passionate weeping. The sound of it went through him to the heart. He stretched out an arm and was able to touch her hair.

“Dear heart, what is it?”

She shivered and drew away.

“You should not have come—”

“No, no.”

“John, you should not—”

“My life, child—come, speak to me—I cannot bear to hear you weep.”

She knew that he was trying to touch her, to be nearer to her, even with all the deep tenderness of his manhood. It was so easy and yet so difficult, so sweet and yet so full of torment. She felt that she could not bear out against him; and yet—how could she tell?

He spoke again.

“Barbara!”

And then:

“Dear heart, do you not trust me?”

Something seemed to break within her, and she thrust up her hands to him with a cry as of one drowning.

“John, I am afraid! John, I am afraid!”

“There, my life.”

“Take my hands—hold them—keep me; I am afraid, John! Dear God, what can I say!”