Part 20

She looked up at him almost timidly, as though conscious of his nearness and the homage in his eyes. It had been dark at the tower window, but now they saw each other in the light, and a mysterious coyness covered her face.

“I will do all that you wish, John.”

“I shall take you away to-night.”

“Yes, yes; take me away from Thorn.”

Her hands went into his.

“There is a moon, dear, and I have a pillion for you, if you are strong enough.”

“Oh yes, I am quite strong now.”

She made as though to sit up on the couch, but she grew faint instantly, so that John Gore held her with one arm about her shoulders.

“More spirit than strength, Barbe, yet.”

Some of her old obstinacy appeared in her for the moment.

“No, I am only a little giddy.”

“Lie down again.”

“No, I must make a start.”

She dropped her feet in their worn shoes over the edge of the couch, glanced at him a little wilfully, and then looked away with a rush of color and a tremulous flash of the eyes.

“You must try and be patient with me, John.”

“It is not a matter of patience, child, but food and good wine.”

She put a hand to her throat.

“I could not touch anything in this place.”

He looked at her with a smile.

“Not even if it came in my pocket?”

“I will try, John.”

“Of course you will. I have work to do here before we start.”

He brought out a flask from his pocket, and food that Mrs. Winnie had wrapped up in a clean white napkin. There were some little cakes and some baked meat laid in slices between slips of home-made bread. Barbara looked at them, and then gave him a first sad smile.

“It is gross of me, John, but those cakes make me feel hungry.”

“The very best confession, dear.”

“Will you have some?”

He had laid the cloth upon her knees.

“No, child, not yet. Can you bear to be left alone awhile?”

“I am quite brave now, John. But—”

“Well, sweetheart?”

“You are not going far?”

“No. Only into the tower to get the rope which is not mine to leave. Is there anything that you would wish to take?”

She looked down thoughtfully, her dark lashes sweeping her cheeks.

“There is a book, John, bound in red leather. I would not leave it here—because—it has helped me—taught me—almost as much as you have done.”

XXXVIII

John Gore had grim things on his mind that night, and a task before him that he did not wish to come to Barbara’s knowledge. She, poor child, with Mrs. Winnie’s food in her lap—food such as she had not touched for many a day—would have had no heart to eat and drink had she known of the dead on those dark stairs. He wished to spare her the horror of it, for the night had been gross and violent enough, and after all the suffering she had borne he was afraid for her in body and mind.

Taking the lantern, he made his way to the tower, closing the door in the passage that led from the kitchen into the ruined hall. Nance Pinniger lay dead upon the stairs, her mouth open and her hands clinched over the place where the sword had entered, and John Gore shuddered as he looked at her, wishing, for the sake of her womanhood, that he had held his hand. He went higher to where the man lay half doubled against the wall, the cloth that covered his face caught between his teeth in the death spasm. The fellow’s bulk seemed a veritable barrier against burial, and John Gore, hardened as he had been to the rough life of the sea, felt a vital horror of this huddled mass that seemed gross and gluttonous even in death.

Remembering the open pit, he went and held the lantern over the black hole in the floor, but was still unable to fathom its depth. Here was a ready vault if he could but get the dead to it—a pit that seemed to scoff with open mouth at those whom Fate had cheated.

To make short work of a grisly business, even as John Gore did, he took one of the sheets from Barbara’s room, and knotting it about the dead man’s ankles, contrived, thanks to his great strength, to draw the body to the edge of the pit. Unknotting the sheet, he turned Simon Pinniger down into the darkness, handling him daintily so as not to foul his own clothes. For the woman he underwent a like labor, letting the bloody sheet slip after her, and turning the flag down into its place. He had the feelings of a man who had played scavenger to a headsman upon a scaffold, and he still seemed to hear the soughing rush of wind from the pit as those dead things went to their last resting-place in the secret depths of Thorn.

When he had drawn the rope up from the window, unknotted and coiled it, and gathered tools, pistols, and his broken sword, he searched for and found Barbara’s red Bible, and retreated, with all his gear, out of the tower. The memory of the place made his gorge rise, and he was glad of the night air and the light of the moon. He drove his feet through some clumps of grass and weeds, yearning to wipe off every stain of the place before taking this child out into the world.

In the kitchen he found Barbara warming herself before the fire, and the spirit of maidenhood in her, the smooth, virginal contours of her face and figure, filled him with a sense of freshness and of awe. He saw the play and counterplay of shadow and light within her eyes, and held it to be witchcraft miraculously pure and sweet, bringing down God to him, and beauty, and clean living. Somehow he felt that night that he could not go close to her, that he had a butcher’s hands, and that it would be impiety to touch a thing so goodly. Moreover, there was a delight in holding a little aloof from her, in watching all her half-coy sweetness, so fresh and new to him in her altered womanhood. He could mark the shade and sunlight in her glances, the passing gleams of color on her face, the birth of that dear consciousness that strove to smother that which could not be wholly hid.

“How long you have been, John!”

“I had dropped some of my things and had to hunt for them. I found your book.”

He gave it to her, and, throwing the ropes and tools upon the table, he busied himself with reloading the pistol that had sent its lead into Simon Pinniger’s body, having a small ivory powder-horn and a bag of bullets with him.

“I heard such strange sounds, John, while you were away!”

“Oh!” And he seemed intent on ramming home the charge.

“It was like something falling in a cellar under the house.”

“Old houses are full of such sounds,” he said, looking up at her suddenly. “Thorn sheds bricks and plaster most nights in the year, with the ivy working its way everywhere.”

He made so little of it that Barbara did not press him further, for she had no knowledge of the pit that had been opened for her, with its well-like shoot cut in the thickness of the tower wall. John Gore began to gather up all that belonged to him, and, finding a sack in one of the cupboards, he tumbled the tools and rope into it, tying the mouth of the sack with a strip of stuff torn from the quilt of the couch. His own sword was broken in its scabbard, so he took the hanger down that hung over the fireplace, and also the long carbine that had a strap for slinging across the back.

John Gore had brought his horseman’s cloak with him from under the thorn-tree, and he took it and laid it upon Barbara’s shoulders. Moreover, Mrs. Winnie had lent him a woollen scarf and some gloves, which he had stowed away at the bottom of his holsters, and he knew that the girl would need them because of the keen wind.

“I have left the horse in the woods, Barbe. What sort of shoes are you wearing?”

She showed him them, and he did not commend their flimsiness.

“You must let me carry you, child, or you will have your stockings soaked in those boggy meadows, and we shall be somewhile on the road.”

She glanced at the table where the sack and the arms lay, and then gave him an unequivocal smile.

“And you think you can carry me as well as all that, John?”

“It can be done.”

“I am not so selfish as that. I have stolen your cloak already.”

“There is another on the horse.”

“Instead of carrying me, John, give me something to carry.”

He looked at the thin hands she held out to him.

“There is your book.”

“Yes, but I can take more than that.”

“As for that, we will see what the grass is like when we get over the moat.”

They went out together into the court-yard, where the moonlight came down upon the checker of stones outlined and interlaced with grass and weeds. Above them rose the black tower, dark as with mystery, while on every hand dim, silvery hills rose toward the frosty curtain of the sky.

“I had forgotten the dog.”

The mastiff had come out from the old cask that served him as a kennel, and was clanking his chain over the stones and growling.

“Some one will find him, John; they may come back when we have gone.”

But John Gore knew better.

He did not like the thought of leaving the beast chained there to starve, and he was debating whether a pistol bullet would not be the kinder end, when something far more hazardous challenged his attention. The wind was beating about Thorn, shaking the ivy on the walls, while the clank of the dog’s chain had a suggestive ghostliness. Yet beyond these sounds came the dull, rhythmic thud of a horse trotting over stiffening turf, the muffled cadence coming down upon the wind as they stood in the court of Thorn and listened.

“Quick, dear, we must play at hide-and-seek. It is that fellow Grylls riding back again.”

They were close to the open gate at the moment, and John Gore took Barbara by the hand and drew her aside along the wall to where a stunted bush had made roots and grown despite the stones. He pressed Barbara back within its shadow, and stood covering her, a pistol ready and the hanger at his belt should he need cold steel.

“Not a sound, Barbe; be ready to slip away when I take your hand.”

They could hear the steady thud of hoofs over the grass, and even the heavy breathing of the beast, as though he had been pushed and bustled by the spur. John Gore guessed that his rider was skirting along the moat. Then came the sharper clatter of the iron shoes upon the timbers of the bridge. The dog set up a savage barking, and in the moonlight they saw a man ride into the court of Thorn, steam rising from his horse like smoke, so that the beast looked huge and spectral. The man himself, though outlined against the moon, showed nothing but the sweep of a cloak and the droop of a black beaver.

He sat motionless a moment in the saddle, and then, dismounting, led his horse by the bridle toward the mist of light that came from the archway leading into the kitchen. John Gore felt for Barbara’s hand, and they glided along the wall toward the gate, for the man’s back was toward them, while the barking of the dog and his grinding against the chain drowned the sound of their footsteps utterly. They made the gate, and went out hand in hand over the bridge and away over the moonlit grass-land, with the barking of the dog dying down into a hoarse whimper. John Gore had thrust the pistol in his belt and swung the sack over his left shoulder. He put his right arm about Barbara’s body and swept her along by main strength toward the towering beech-trees that shone in the moonlight while the seal of silence seemed over Thorn.

XXXIX

It was Stephen Gore who had ridden that steaming horse into the court-yard of Thorn—Stephen Gore, with jaded, twitching face, and eyes that looked weary with straining and gazing into the deeps of the night.

No man can be constantly and statuesquely selfish through life; the very whims and impulses of human nature are against such a frozen constancy in self-seeking. Nor can a man ever swear to being master either of himself or of his future; the whole gamut of the emotions are arrayed against him; a child may prove his vanquisher or a woman his seducer.

Stephen Gore exchanging epigrams with some princely wit or bending over a pretty woman’s chair was a different creature from Stephen Gore shabby, saddle-sore, jaded to death, riding with an imagined price upon his head and a prophetic mist of blood before his eyes. Throw a man out of his natural environment and he may lose all the genius of self, and even the poise of manhood. Milton seated upon a boat’s thwart in the midst of mad, cursing Jamaica buccaneers would have probably seemed contemptible and a coward. March out a fop in vile clothes, and he may prove a sneaking, cringing, self-shamed thing, for all his soul was in his coat. We are so much the creatures of habit that our habits flatter us like well-trained and obsequious servants, and we lose our dignity and even ourselves without their ministrations.

So it had proved with my Lord of Gore that November night after a reckless, memory-haunted ride from something he feared toward something that he was being taught to fear by the bleak, wind-swept loneliness of wild roads in night and in winter. Nature is powerful to work upon a man’s mind when all the primal instincts of hunter or hunted come again to the surface. All the damned out of hell might have been rushing on him through those gibbering, moaning woods. The very trees had grotesque and sinuous hands stretched out to catch and strangle. There had been the physical weariness of it all, the chafing of the saddle, the stiffness, the lust for speed, the flounderings of a tired horse, the hundred and one vexations that break the heart in a man when it has no inspiration to keep it whole. And as the poise and the self-grip of the colder will had slackened, so the emotions had taken law of license and had scrambled abroad over the man’s consciousness. The cool, eclectic, cynical, civilized gentleman gave place to the credulous, elemental, emotional savage. Primitive instincts came to the surface: an awe of death and the invisible, a dread of the dark.

My Lord Gore’s nerves were as tremulous as the nerves of a coddled boy when he reined in his steaming horse under the shadow of Thorn tower. His face looked flaccid and yet under strain, he had lost that power and precision of movement that is second nature to a man bred among pomps. He nearly fell as he climbed out of the saddle, looking about him with quick, scared glances such as a child might have given in a dark garden at night.

The dog seemed alive enough, and sufficiently lusty to scare away ghosts, but my lord cursed him for the infernal pother he made, being out of heart, and therefore out of temper. He led his horse toward the kitchen entry whence the light of the fire came out, and stood there waiting in the throat of the short passageway, as though expecting some one to come out to him and at least be decently servile. But since no living soul appeared to answer the barking of the dog and the clatter of hoofs on the stones, he hitched the bridle over a hook in the wall and marched in slowly, yet with the slight swagger of a man who has no reason to be proud of his courage, and yet is determined not to be put out of countenance by anything he may see or hear.

But there was nothing tangibly alive in Thorn that night, save the dog in the yard; nothing but the crusts and embers of life, and a silence amid the rush of the wind that made the place seem cold and ominous. A man’s nerve may come back to him again when he has got a grip upon realities, but surmises and conjectures at midnight are apt to run toward emotionalism and panic. There were the blazing fire, the remnants of a meal upon the table, the whining of the hungry dog to prompt him to a conclusion. But my Lord of Gore began to shiver inwardly, and to become conscious of an empty feeling under the heart and of a vague horror that seemed to penetrate the air.

Yet a lust to see the end of it, and a blind impatience that set aside shadows and suspicions, gave him sufficient animal courage to light the lantern his son had left and to go exploring through the ruins. The ways of Thorn seemed known to him, for he went first to the tower; nor did he need to go beyond the first few steps in order to discover the ooze of a tragedy staining the stones. None the less he went on doggedly, as though carried upward by the very ferment of the passions in him, greatly dismayed within himself, yet greatly afraid of missing the whole truth. And so the lantern went jerking upward into the darkness of the tower, its movements seeming to signal some restless, devil-driven quest after unhallowed spoil.

When Stephen Gore came back again into the blaze and warmth of the kitchen he looked shrunken and ashy about the mouth, and he walked in a stooping, hollowchested way like a man huddling into himself because of the cold. He closed both doors, and even the doors of the cupboards, after peering into them, as though he were afraid of the dark and of any dim, unlit corner. Then he drew the couch up close to the fire, spreading his hands to it, and staring at the flames with a vacant, colorless face. The horror of some unseen thing seemed in his eyes, and his lips fell apart and loosened like the lips of a very old and feeble man.

At midnight there had been a moon, but before dawn snow came, a great, gray, shimmering gloom drifting through the vague world. The dry leaves shivered and crackled in the wind as the myriad flakes came sweeping down, ribbing the boughs and the curved fronds of the bracken, piling itself amid the moss at the roots of great trees, and scudding over the open lands with a fierce, withering haste that left the grass tussocks white like stones catching foam from a rushing stream. The dawn came as a mere grayness, with a flocculent, drifting chaos of snow in the air, and a bite in the northwest wind that sent spikelets of ice bearding the fringes of ponds and ditches.

* * * * *

Now Mrs. Winnie had been awake most of the night, and had risen very early full of an instinct that strange things were about to happen, what with such a storm of snow the first week in November. She had lit the fire in the kitchen and was standing at the window watching the snow come down when she heard a horse neigh in the stable, as though the beast had caught the sound of a comrade’s coming. And, sure enough, through the maze of snow she saw something dark draw up toward the gate, and knew in her heart that John Gore had returned.

Going to the door, she lifted the bar and saw the snow come whirling in with a hungry wind that went deep into her bosom. There was the click of the gate, and a man came up the path between the drooping stocks and the withered, swaying rose-bushes with something wrapped in a cloak lying in his arms. Mrs. Winnie went out to meet him, her woman’s nature caught by the spell of such a love tale.

“Mrs. Winnie!”

“Thank God, sir, and you have brought her back.”

The breast of his coat was white with snow, for he had wrapped both the cloaks about Barbara to keep her warm. And he looked down anxiously at the face that lay against his shoulder, as though he feared that the cold had gone to her heart.

“We lost our way, and only luck helped us back again. A warm fire, Mrs. Winnie; she is half frozen.”

Christopher Jennifer’s wife had taken a sly peep at this desired one, but she was as brisk and concerned as John Gore was, and not a woman to talk and dally.

“Come in, sir, out of this wind; it bites into the blood of the child. Such a storm, with autumn only half out of the door! Let me have her, sir; I know what the cold be on these Sussex hills.”

John Gore carried Barbara into the kitchen, for he had ridden with her in his arms to keep her warm, guiding his nag with a touch of the knee. She had fallen asleep with weariness and the cold—a dazed, numb sleep that was not pleasant to consider. Her lips were white and her hands like ice, so that she looked more like a sleeping snow-maiden than a living girl.

Mrs. Winnie had shut the snow and the wind out, drawn her man’s chair forward, and was running and rummaging for pillows, wraps, and blankets. Son William put his head in, and was sent packing with the flick of a flannel across his cheek, much amazed and not a little delighted. Mrs. Winnie wellnigh took Barbara out of John Gore’s arms, as though this was a woman’s affair, and not a matter for a man to meddle with. The wood fire had roared up to a great red mound, and was flinging out such a heat that the very air seemed a-simmer. Mrs. Winnie had Barbara propped up before it, with her head on a pillow and her bosom open to the fire.

“You will find a brick, sir, holding the pantry door open. Put it in the fire to heat.”

John Gore did as she bade him, while she reached for the chain with an iron crook and slung the kettle on it.

“There be the tongs, sir. I’ll wrap the thing in a bit of flannel and put it to the child’s feet. Poor, dear young thing—lady, I mean, sir. Mercy o’ me, her shoes are wet and almost froze!”

She knelt down and stripped off the shoes and stockings, and began chafing the little feet, admiring them in her blunt, frank way, and calling them the feet of a lady of quality. She had noticed the marks on Barbara’s neck, and John Gore, seeing her eyes fixed there, nodded grimly and put a hand to his throat. His eyes held Mrs. Winnie’s, and she understood the need for silence.

“Where be that brick, sir?”

John Gore brought it out with the tongs, and Chris Jennifer’s wife patted it into a piece of flannel and set Barbara’s feet upon it with a smile of satisfaction.

“Now for some hot toddy, sir.” And she went away to mix it.

John Gore bent over Barbara and touched her cheek, for a faint color was creeping back, and he felt that even Mrs. Winnie might be kissed at such a moment. But being a quiet man, he went out to see to his horse, hardly noticing that his own feet were still like frozen clay and that his arms were stiff from carrying his love.

There was a brave breakfast cooking, and the fire was a red, shimmering slope of wood ash when Mr. Jennifer came stumping down the stairs to pause and stare in astonishment at Barbara as he opened the stairway door. She was lying back in the chair with her eyes open, but with no real soul in them as yet, her hands hanging over the chair-rail, her black hair bathing her face.

Mr. Jennifer came in softly and discreetly, and stood about three yards from her, fingering the side seam of his breeches. Then he made a bob and waited, and then a second bob, with a stolid, persistent desire to be proper in the matter of politeness. But though Barbara hardly had sight or hearing for anything as yet, Mr. Jennifer stood stolidly to his convictions, and scraped his feet to make the lady look at him.

Mrs. Winnie caught him at this bobbing and scraping, with a puzzled stare in his eyes and his thick head full of kindness. He glanced at his wife with extreme cunning, and gave her a whisper behind his hands.

“Come ye here, Winnie. What be t’ lady a-staring at? Here be I makin’ a knee to her—”

“Get out with you, you great fool!”

She gave him a cuff across the ear. But Mr. Jennifer still gazed at Barbara.

“She be purty enough. But what be a-terrifying me—be—why she won’t blink them eyes o’ hers.”

“Get along with you, Chris Jennifer, you great booby! Can’t you see she be dazed with t’ cold? And will she be thanking you for standing there and staring like a cow? Go and help the gentleman with his horse.”

“And did them come all on one horse, my dear?”

Mrs. Winnie looked at him, and Mr. Jennifer went.

XL