Part 22

What with misery of mind and body, the _malaise_ of the fever, and the utter melancholy of the place, my lord’s manhood and his moral courage were in ruins within a week. He gave way to a sense of panic and to a delirious lust for self-preservation that would have seemed ridiculous but for the very real torment he was in. Whether he was hunted as a conspirator against the state or as a spiller of innocent blood were possibilities that pointed only to the one grim issue. A morbid belief in their having “sinned against the Holy Ghost” has sent superstitious mortals to Bedlam. A morbid dread of death seized on my lord with equal grimness, and in a week he had lost that larger consciousness, that cool sanity and shrewd sense of humor, that give a man power over the chances of life. His intelligence began to drop to the level of the animal that seeks to cover its tracks from possible pursuers. Sagacity gave place to cunning and a blind passion for the annihilation of everything that might betray him.

He sent his horse adrift, driving him out with savage prickings from his sword, so that the beast fled panic-stricken into the woods. As for the dog, he put a pistol bullet through his head, tied a weight to the carcass, and sunk it in the moat. Saddle and harness he buried in the garden, keeping the bar up across the court-yard gate, and going out from the house only at dusk. He even made his fire on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, enduring the smoke and the smarting of his eyes, so that the smoke might leak away through doors and windows and crevices instead of pluming up out of the chimney. He burned all the rough furniture in the place, save the couch and an old stool, and, taking up two of the flagstones in the floor, dug a hole under them to hide the store of food, not realizing, perhaps, that the stuff would be mouldy and rotten in a month. It was his feverish purpose to blot out every trace of life from Thorn, so that should it be raided by the Law there should be no clews. The marvel was that he found such a life worth living for the sake of the life he hoarded. But Stephen Gore was not wholly sane those days, what with the fever, and the sweat of fear in him at night, and the thoughts that haunted him as thirst haunts a straggler in the desert.

Nor was all this cunning of his wasted upon chimerical possibilities and feverish fancies, as the event soon proved. It was the day of John Gore’s ride into Battle Town with Mr. Jennifer, and Stephen Gore had fallen asleep on the couch in the kitchen, for he could sleep in the day if not at night. About two o’clock in the afternoon he awoke to find that the fire had burned itself out, for the erstwhile philosopher had much to learn in the simple matter of building a wood fire so that it should not be out in an hour. He scrambled up rather sourly, and was about to cross the court to the wood-lodge when he heard a faint “halloo” coming from the misty stillness of the wooded slopes of the valley.

Stephen Gore turned back into the kitchen like a man who has escaped walking over a cliff in the dark, and stood listening a moment with his hand to his ear. Then he pushed the couch away toward the window, and, kneeling, swept the ashes of the fire on to the hearth-stone with his hands, thanking Heaven for the providential perverseness of the thing in burning out while he was asleep. Climbing the lower story of the tower, he looked cautiously through the narrow window to see nearly twenty mounted men coming down over the grass-land at a fast trot. My lord’s knees rubbed together as he recognized the red coats of the two troopers, and the more sombre and magisterial look of the gentry who followed.

Days ago Stephen Gore had searched out a hiding-place for himself, and his choice had lighted on nothing cleaner and more distinguished than the chimney in the kitchen. He had climbed up by the chain, despite the soot—he who could hardly wear the same shirt twice in a week—till the throat of the chimney narrowed so that he could use his hands and feet. About fifteen feet from the ground he had discovered a little recess in the brickwork where a man might stand and not be seen by any one looking upward. He had eased the ascent to this possible niche of refuge by knocking in an old nail or two that he had found in one of the out-houses.

A great amount of majestic cant has been written about the stately courage of the Gentleman. There are very few Sir Richard Grenvilles in the world, but far more Falstaffs ready to take refuge in the washing-basket at a pinch. To have played the proper heroic part my lord should have gone out calmly to the gate of Thorn and courteously dared these gentry to take him while he lived, or at least to have awaited them with aristocratic composure and delivered up his arms like a great captain surrendering a fortress that he has no longer the power to hold. Such should have been the picturesque setting of the scene, but the meaner impulses of human nature triumphed, and the gentleman Went up the chimney like any sweep’s boy, barking his knees and elbows, and coloring his dignity with most satanic soot.

Squire Oxenham and his party came to the gate of Thorn, and sent one of the yeoman over it to drop the bar and let the others in. Three men were left to guard the horses and the gate, and two more to patrol the borders of the moat, while magistrate, attorney, king’s rider, and the rest spread themselves abroad to ransack the place, keeping their steel and powder ready in case they might come to grips with desperate men. But for all their bravery and bustle they found nothing but silence and emptiness in Thorn, as though the place had remained lifeless since the old Scotch folk left it in the autumn.

Squire Oxenham and Lawyer Gibbs found their way into the kitchen and went no farther in the man hunt, being content with the work done. The lawyer noticed the discolored stones in the floor and some wood-ash lying in the crevices. And had he touched those stones, instead of staring at them in a perfunctory and superior way, he would have discovered that they were warm, and that a fire had been lit there that very day.

Squire Oxenham, being an old and plethoric man with threatenings of gout in the right foot, sat down on the couch and pulled out a flask of hollands. He and the lawyer began gossiping together, and the Knight of the Chimney could hear every word that passed.

“We shall have an appetite for supper, Thomas, though we may not set eyes on Mr. Shaftesbury’s lord. Deuce take me if I can get my blood hot over the notion of sending some poor devil to the block. What are you staring at the floor for, Thomas?”

“There has been a fire here, Squire.”

“Months old, man; the place where Sandy Macalister smoked his Sabbath clothes before sneaking into heaven without crossing Peter’s palm. Have a drop of spirit, Thomas Gibbs. I wonder what made those Westminster wolves scent out Thorn as the man’s hiding-hole. The fellow Maudesly tells me that the Purcell woman—Halloo, Sacker, my man, have you found anything except owls?”

“Not a thing, your worship.”

“Just as I thought, Mr. Gibbs—just as I thought. Any man of sense with a warrant out against him would have been in France days ago and eating French dinners instead of freezing in a damned rubbish-heap like this. But these Jacks in Office must pretend to know everything. Some noodle at Westminster would be ready to tell me how much to allow my wife’s sisters, and how often my cess-pit ought to be emptied. Well, Mr. Maudesly, have you had enough of Thorn?”

The little man in the big periwig came in looking testy, and not to be trifled with. The men trooped in after him, while the Squire passed his flask round to the gentlemen, and condoled with them satirically on having drawn a “blank.” Stephen Gore in the chimney heard them gossiping there awhile before they tramped out into the court-yard to take horse for Battle Town before dusk fell. The thunder of hoofs went over the timbers of the bridge, and slowly, almost eerily, as the water of a stagnant pool settles over the stone that has been thrown into it, the heavy silence closed again over Thorn.

It was probable that my lord felt some elation over his escape, and that he was not a little eager to be out of so black and draughty a refuge. He was also very stiff and cold from having stood in that narrow recess for over an hour. At all events, he began the descent clumsily and carelessly, and, bearing too much weight on one of the nails that he had driven into the wall, the thing broke away from the rotten mortar, and, though he drove out his knees and elbows in an attempt to wedge himself in the chimney, his weight and bulk carried him heavily to the hearth below. Coming down on his right flank, his right thigh struck one of the iron fire-dogs about a hand’s-breadth below the great trochanter of the hip. And Stephen Gore felt the bone snap as a dead branch snaps across a man’s knee.

In the agony of it he rolled over and over till his body was stopped by the couch that Squire Oxenham had drawn forward from the window. He gripped the lower stretcher of the wood frame with both hands and took the sleeve of his coat between his teeth, as a seaman will clinch his teeth upon a rope’s-end to save himself from screaming when the surgeon’s hot iron sears the stump of a mangled limb. Then he lay on his back, breathing deeply and slowly, his hands tugging at the collar of his shirt as though the band were tight about his throat. His right foot had fallen outward, and when he tried to move the limb there was nothing but a spasm of the muscles and a sense of bone gritting against bone.

XLIII

The days were pleasant enough at Furze Farm, with Barbara gaining in health and color, and in a womanly winsomeness that made even Mrs. Jennifer wonder. It was as though the real soul had come to life in her again, and her heart, that had been a thing of moods and sorrows of old, had warmed into a richer consciousness of life, so that the beautiful shell began to glow with the light of the beautiful spirit within. There was a sweet sparkle of youth in her that began to play over the surface of sadness, and though the past still shadowed her, she stood free from the utter gloom of it and saw the golden rim of the sun. She made friends with little Will Jennifer, played hide-and-seek with the boy, and told him tales in the dusk before he went to bed. She and Mrs. Winnie, too, were busy making up the stuffs from Battle into gowns and petticoats, and though Mrs. Winnie’s craft was simple and somewhat crude, the colors lighted up Barbara’s comeliness, and the very simplicity of the frocks seemed in keeping with that Sussex fireside. She even besought Mrs. Winnie to let her learn the lore of the dairy, the art of butter-making, and the like; for the primitive, busy life of the place seemed good to her, and full of the warmth and fragrance of a home.

John Gore took her riding with him over the winter fields, for he had bought her a quiet saddle-horse in one of the market towns. Yet though the days were magical for lover and beloved, there were the sterner issues of life to be confronted, nor could they forget those clouds that had withdrawn a little toward the horizon. Moreover, John Gore began to feel the very material need of a replenished purse, and an insight into the future that concerned him and his love, even unto the death.

He laid everything before Barbara one evening as they rode homeward toward Furze Farm, with a red, wintry glow in the west, and the hills wrapped in bluish gloom. Riding very close to him, she listened to all his reasonings, accepting things that went against her heart, because she knew that he loved her, and because she felt him to be shrewd and strong.

“Do that which you think best, John,” she said, with an upward look into his face; “I trust you with all that life can hold.”

And so their nags went homeward side by side, so close that the man’s arm was over the girl’s shoulders, and her breathing rising up to him in the keen, clear air like a little cloud of incense.

One morning early in December John Gore took the London road, following the same course that he and Mr. Pepys had taken—by Battle, Lamberhurst, Tunbridge, and Seven Oaks. Nor could he help contrasting the difference of the ways, and the different spirit that inspired him, though the woods were bare now, and the country gray and colorless when no sun shone. His thoughts went back over the Sussex hills to that farm-house with its broad black thatch, its beech-trees, and its uplands, its brick-paved, low-beamed kitchen with the fire red even to the chimney’s throat, and the kindly folk who moved therein. But chiefly he thought of Barbara sitting before that winter fire, her great eyes full of the light and dreams thereof, and her Spanish face betraying new deeps of womanhood because of the suffering she had borne and the spirit of beauty she had won thereby.

John Gore put up at an inn in Southwark, meaning to keep his distance from the precincts of St. James’s, and from that intriguing, cultured, cruel world that had held his own father as a murderer and a paramour. He had heard of grim things in the Spanish Provinces and the Islands, but nothing that had brought home to him the shame of the goddess self in passion as this tragedy in an English home had done. He could only think of the man—his father—with pity, and a kind of revolting of the honorable manhood in him. It was almost a subject beyond the pale of thought; a thing rather to be realized and then—buried.

Now John Gore was innocent of all knowledge of Oates’s Plot and of the wild ferment the City was in, for the news of it had not trickled as yet into the by-ways of Sussex, and he had kept to himself upon the road. His plan was to hunt out Samuel Pepys and hear the news of the surface of things, whether my lord was in town, and whether the Secretary would act for him in receiving and forwarding his Yorkshire moneys. His first visit across the water was to the Admiralty offices, and there, when he had sent his name in, Mr. Pepys came out in person with a mightily solemn face. He took his friend straight to a little private cabinet of his own, locked the door, and pushed John Gore unceremoniously into a chair.

“Well, John, you have come here, have you, with a lighted candle to look for sixpence in a barrel of gunpowder. Where have you been all these weeks?”

Mr. Pepys’s manner was the manner of a man who had some reason for being honestly perturbed.

“Within ten miles of the place you left me at, Sam. I have come up for news and money.”

Mr. Pepys looked at him steadily, yet with a species of alarmed awe.

“News, John! Gracious God, we are shaken in our shoes with fresh news every other day! You have heard of the Plot, of course.”

“Plot! What plot?”

Mr. Pepys’s silent stare expressed infinite things. He stepped forward, tapped John Gore on the chest with his forefinger, then stepped back again, and made him a reverence.

“Can I bow, sir, to a gentleman who has never heard of Titus Oates? Alack, John, I fear me I have many sad and solemn things to tell you! I thought that you had heard everything, and that you were wintering in the country—like a wise man. For it is not flattering at present to bear the name of Gore.”

He saw the sea-captain straighten suddenly in his chair and look up at him keenly.

“What do you mean, Sam?”

“Mean, sir? Did I not warn you that the papists were likely to burn their fingers? And we are in the thick of such fire and fright and fury because of them that we are all afraid to catechize our own souls. News, my good John! The Protestants raging, informers making Ananias seem a simpleton, Catholic peers in the Tower, hundreds in jail, Coleman the Jesuit tried and executed, a warrant out against your father, who has taken to his heels and fled.”

“Good God, Sam! Where?”

“That is what certain people would like to know, sir. I pity your innocence, John, but we are all of us shaking in our shoes. Even the Queen has not been pitied.”

John Gore sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, his eyes looking into the distance. He was silent a moment, while Mr. Pepys fidgeted with his feet and glanced nervously at both door and window.

“I have not seen my—Lord Gore since I left London with you, Sam.”

“No?”

“I have heard nothing of all this. What is more, I have had matters of my own.”

Mr. Pepys stroked his chin.

“There is yet another piece of news, John.”

“Well?”

“Concerning the Purcells.”

The sea-captain looked at him sharply.

“What?”

“Anne Purcell died of the small-pox a month ago.”

“Anne Purcell!”

“Yes; it would have been the talk of the town but for this furious belcher of accusations, even the man Oates.”

John Gore looked at him in silence.

“She was found dead in her bed in her house in Pall Mall. All the servants had fled, and the house had been rifled. But there also appears to be a mystery about the daughter. The lawyers have discovered that she was put away in the autumn for being of unsound mind; and now that all the property seems to have fallen to her, not a living soul knows what has become of the girl.”

The sea-captain smiled very slightly, with a grim light in the eyes.

“Who has the control of the matter?” he asked.

“It has fallen into Chancery.”

“Like the traveller to Jericho, Sam, in the parable. How long is it since my Lord Stephen hoisted sail?”

“Somewhere about a month ago—before I returned from Portsmouth.”

“Did Anne Purcell die before then?”

“Heaven help me if I know, John. But what has that to do with the case?”

“More than you know, my friend—more than you may suspect.”

He had the air of a man who was troubled and perplexed by many difficulties.

“Sam, I want your help and advice. I can trust you.”

Mr. Pepys made him a little bow.

“Where are you staying, John?”

“In Southwark. I had my reasons. Can you give me supper to-night, and an hour’s private talk? I have many things to turn over in my mind before then.”

The Secretary laid a hand upon John Gore’s shoulder.

“A friend’s trust is a friend’s affection, John. Come and sup with me; what I can do I will.”

The Secretary’s wife was feasting with friends that night, and Mr. Pepys and John Gore had the table to themselves. When supper was over, Mr. Samuel took the sea-captain to the library, locked the door, and prepared to play the part of counsellor and friend. For Mr. Pepys was a shrewd, sound man of the world, for all his oddities and love of news—a man who had walked the slippery path of public responsibility, and who knew the world’s deceitfulness, even to the latest lie from the lips of a king.

But even this critic of court scandals, and of the vanities of himself and of mankind at large, was flustered a little by John Gore’s account of his doings, and of the tragedy that had taken place at Thorn. Mr. Pepys could pass over a gay intrigue, but this darker and more sinister affair gripped the manhood in him, and made him understand his friend’s grimness.

“On the Cross of our Lord, Sam, I pledge you to silence over this. I know you are to be trusted where questions of life and death are concerned.”

There was no need to question the intenseness of the Secretary’s sincerity. He was a man of oak whose foibles and frivolities were merely the flutter of leaves in the wind.

“Have no doubt of that, John. But upon my conscience, this is black villany or something marvellous like it. Iago, oh Iago, thou dinest with us and smilest at us in church, thou art not only a thing of the stage!”

John Gore sat thinking, smoking his pipe, and snapping the thumb and middle finger of his right hand.

“It is the girl who has to be considered, Sam. She has borne enough, suffered enough, and from my own flesh and blood; that’s where the rub comes.”

Mr. Pepys sat and considered.

“The Chancery folk are such a dastardly meddlesome lot,” he said.

“I am not afraid of the lawyers, Sam; we can take our chances over the sea, if needs be. But there is this man—this father—to be considered. And, by my hope in Heaven, I will kill him as he killed Lionel Purcell if he meddles further with the girl’s life!”

Mr. Pepys looked a little shocked despite his sympathy. He had been a good son himself, and the word “father” had its true meaning for him.

“Softly, John, softly. There is always the other side of the case; we cannot always see into another man’s heart.”

John Gore stared at the floor grimly.

“What I have said, Sam, I have said; even one’s father is not privileged to seduce and murder as he pleases. I shall put my sword to his breast and say: ‘Sir, no further.’ He has his life in his hand.”

Mr. Pepys looked at him kindly.

“Have you not thought, John, that it may rest with the girl?”

“With her—how?”

“If she chooses not to speak, to play a part.”

John Gore met his friend’s eyes.

“Why should this—this man be shielded? There is blood upon his hands; he has stained the lives of others. Who shall consider him?”

“John, John, you talk like a man who stabs fiercely at a shadow. No man is wholly the devil’s creature, and, say what you will, his loins begot you.”

“The greater the need, Sam, to put aside false sentiment. Still, he is out of our ken at present. We must bide our time—and watch.”

Mr. Pepys rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.

“Do you know what I would have you do, John? Go back to this quiet farm; let the child come by her health and happiness. Keep the lawyers out of it, and marry her, if you can.”

“You are echoing my own thoughts, Sam.”

“Good; very good. See what a seal, my friend, you might set upon the past, if God granted you children and happiness, and the long love of wife and man.”

John Gore understood his meaning.

“The blood-debt might be wiped away, Sam, for the sake of the future.”

“God grant it. And now, John, you will want money.”

“Money! How do you know that?”

“John, my man, when I was in love I was always poor. I know how Dan Cupid picks a man’s pocket. Besides, money is above the law, John, and at a pinch you might find it useful.”

“I have money enough; it needs handling, that is all. There is all my property in Yorkshire.”

“Give me a written authority, John, and I will act for you.”

“Sam, you are a friend.”

“I am a man of business, sir. I can receive and hand on rentals, can I not? And as for the present need, I always keep money in my house. Take what you want; the security is good enough.”

John Gore began to thank him, but Mr. Pepys rose up from his chair and put his two hands on his friend’s shoulders.

“Man John, there may be two or three souls in the wide world whom a man may love without prejudice and without disaster. The friends of a life are few, John, and we find them without forethought. Men come to me for favors, scores of them in the year; most of them are sycophants, rogues, hypocrites; I know it, and there is no deep pleasure in what I do. But there are some men, John, to whom the heart goes out in the game of life. To be a friend to a friend comes not so very often. A man who has seen life will swear to that.”

XLIV

Rain was falling and the wind beating about the chimneys of Furze Farm as the daylight waned toward a gray night like a fog coming up from the sea. Barbara and Mrs. Jennifer were sitting before the kitchen fire, the girl watching the sparks fly upward, the woman’s brown hands busy with thread and needle. Gusts of wind came down the chimney, making the wood-ash shimmer at red heat, even blowing flakes of fire out on to the bricks. Now and again the drippings of the rain fell on the red mass, rousing the fire to spit like an angry cat.