Part 24

Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where the mere physical miseries of existence would bring him near to death in body and mind. Pain, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, are grim inquisitors fit to break a man on the rack and tear the very senses from him. John Gore had looked into the hole where his father had kept his food, and had seen meat going putrid and biscuits covered with mould. He remembered, too, very vividly an incident in the Indies when he and his ship’s company had found a man who had been marooned on an island that was little better than a reef. The man was a Norman, and his sojourn there had been but a matter of days. Yet he was skull-faced, parched, abject, and as mad as an idiot child. He had run from them, screaming, when they landed, though his legs had given under him before he had gone fifty yards. And he had died on board John Gore’s ship, and they had buried him at sea, and often afterward at night the sea-captain had fancied that he still heard the man’s wild cry: “J’ai soif, mon Dieu! mon Dieu, j’ai soif!”

Now Stephen Gore had been a proud man, and a man of sentiment after his own ideals. He had had other things to torture and humiliate him besides anguish in the flesh. Proportionately as a man’s physical strength wanes, so the menace of spiritual suffering grows the more quick and poignant. This man had spilled blood and betrayed friends. A well-fed cynic might have put such things under his feet and trampled them. It would be otherwise with a half-starved, memory-haunted, isolated being shivering the nights through, listening and ever listening, while the solitude hung like an eternal silence, and the slightest movement of the body set bone grating against bone. Who could shrug his shoulders through such an ordeal and come forth smiling with an epigram? Would not the very intellect curse itself and die by its own hand? Innocent blood; the betrayal of honor and of friends; lies, inevitable self-salvation. These thoughts would grip such a man, throttle him, spit at his very soul. They would not be conjured or persuaded. They would be awake with him through the winter nights; scoff when some spasm of pain made him curse and set his teeth; watch him with cold eyes when the light of the dawn came in. The same miserable dragging of the days, the same miserable passion-play of the crucified soul. Where would a man’s manhood be at the end of such a chastisement?

The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer, who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a candle.

In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting.

“You have had a long ride, John.”

He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his.

“They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little woman?”

She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who loves him.

“Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.”

He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler.

“I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.”

“John!”

Her voice had a touch of appeal in it.

“This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned with more than I foreshadowed.”

“Where have you been, John?”

“To Thorn.”

“Thorn!”

“Yes.”

She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others rather than himself.

“You are troubled, John. Tell me.”

He looked down at her reflectively, and his eyes seemed to say: “Shall I or shall I not?” Womanwise, she appeared to understand.

“You are afraid for my sake, John.”

“A little.”

“Is it because you cannot trust me?”

Her eyes held his, and for once it was as though she had the greater power of will.

“No. Because I wish worry and care away.”

“John, do you think I shall leave all the burden of life to your shoulders? Are we so little to each other? Am I so selfish?”

She felt his hands tighten on hers.

“Barbe, I have found my father.”

“At Thorn?”

“Yes.”

She shuddered slightly, despite herself, and he saw her eyes darken.

“John, did you speak to him?”

“Without mercy.”

“Does he know?”

“He thinks you dead.”

“Why is he at Thorn?”

“Hiding from the law because of this Plot; hiding from us, a miserable wreck of a man, half starved, almost mad.”

She saw his face grow haggard and stern, the lines deepening about the mouth, his eyes staring fixedly at the fire, as though he were looking upon a thing that revolted him. The instinct in her was one of a strong, pure passion to be of use. He had feared for her courage, perhaps for her magnanimity. Yet it was she who took the torch that evening, and carried it so that the darkness seemed less dark.

“John, my heart, tell me everything.”

She drew him by the hands into the inner room, and shut the world out, save that world at Thorn. He looked down at her, as though wondering at the will in her, and feeling a strength and courage near him that might have the power of turning destiny into providence. She was calm yet infinitely vital, and her face had a radiance that drove scorn and bitterness and malice into the dark. He beheld a transfiguration—love bending toward love, beautiful with the beauty of sacrifice, pity, and desire.

“John, do you fear for me?”

He opened his arms, but paused with a sudden awe of her, and, bowing himself, touched her hands.

“No, not now.”

“Then tell me everything.”

And he told her, sitting in the firelight, with his hands clasped upon his knees.

Silence held them awhile in thrall. Barbara was leaning against the jamb of the chimney, one hand laid along her cheek, her eyes full of the past. It was as though some sharp struggle were passing within her, and for a moment her eyes had a glitter of anger. But the gleam passed from them, and her mouth softened.

She looked down at the man with a mystery of a smile—a smile with no mirth in it, but full of sadness, yearning, and self-reproach.

“John.”

He started, almost as though he had forgotten her.

“Do you love your father?”

The question seemed to stagger him; he frowned at the fire.

“Love that!”

She rested her head upon her arm; his scorn had made the heart leap in her.

“I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!”

“But you—”

“John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I should feel that, even more than you?”

He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man. And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself.

He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her.

Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and then turned to him with a look he would never forget.

“John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.”

“Child!”

“It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.”

He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him, while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness.

“Barbe, you can forgive!”

“Yes.”

“But it is for my sake?”

She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears.

“Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.”

He bent, and kissed her lips.

“Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep you!”

XLVII

For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs. Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar face.

Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive, suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.

John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out momentarily in the midst of his degradation.

“Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.”

But it was a flash in the pan. Even the polite insolence seemed dead in him. He had caught his son’s arm and clung to it pleadingly.

“Think better of me, John. I came here to save the girl: I swear that, before God.”

And then he would show great cunning behind the chatterings of dismay, trying to worm from his son all that he knew, and also how he had come to know it. But John Gore kept a shut mouth and the face of a flint, the heart hard and contemptuous within him when he remembered the look in Barbara’s eyes when she had spoken these words: “I can forgive.” Surely there was no soul here worth forgiving. Better dead. That was the grim judgment his heart uttered.

Such was the first week at Thorn, with the dark rides to and fro along the woodland roads, the mournfulness and dolor of the winter landscape, love by the fireside, retribution amid ruins. Sometimes Barbara would walk out a little way toward Thorn in the hope of meeting John Gore upon the homeward ride. She could not but mark the bitterness in him, a certain questioning look about the eyes that seemed to gaze toward some inevitable end. The riddle would have been baffling enough even if his heart had been in the solving of it. Granted that the past were given to oblivion, his father was a proscribed man; there was some risk even in shielding him; any day he might be discovered and taken.

Nor could he tell Barbara all that he saw at Thorn. It was too sordid, too contemptible; and yet his very reticence led her to understand. Perhaps she had more sympathy, more vision than John Gore that winter. She knew what Thorn could be even to one without guilt, without physical pain, without an eternal dread, and with some one to bring food. This man had gone down into the deeps of misery and degradation. He had been starved and broken. That was her thought.

Once she asked John Gore to let her see him, but he shook his head and would not hear of it.

“He thinks that I am dead, John,” she said.

“Then let him think it. God! Are we to make the thing so easy?”

“John! John!”

His fierceness hurt her a little, seeming to wake a clash of discords in her, as though the brazen gates of that closed tragedy were jarring wide again.

“John, don’t speak like that, dear.”

His tenderness shone through the anger in him.

“Barbe, you may forget; I cannot. When I touch your hand, when I see the life in you, I remember.”

The memory of that night came back, and she shuddered: the dark room, those throttling hands, the violence and horror in the dark. She looked at her lover and understood.

“It is hard for you,” she said, very gently.

For to John Gore at that time it was like pampering a man who had sought to betray the honor of his wife.

The old year had gone; the new was in with white hoar-frost on the grass and the boughs each dawn, and a silvery smoke of mist melting into clear blue mornings. January went plodding on—a heavy, toothless, torpid month, despite the frost and the shimmer of sunlight; for January has little of the likeness of a child; rather it appears as a gray old man laboring in the dusk and the mists of the morning at some task that no man sees. It is a month when gnomes work below the ground, laboring for the mystery of beauty that is to be, touching the hidden seed with fire, breathing into brown roots the colors of the flowers that shall come hereafter.

With January, Stephen Gore’s life seemed to sink to the lowest level of lethargy. Torpor fell upon him till he was like a frost-nipped plant with the sap congealed, the leaves shrivelled and gray. He would sleep for hours, and even when awake lie staring at the beams in the ceiling above him, his face blank and without intelligence. He hardly ever spoke. Even the fever of fear left him. He asked for nothing, not even food. John Gore thought that my lord was dying, and even picked out a place in the garden where he would bring him when he was dead.

Yet it was not death with Stephen Gore, but a stupor that nature had brought upon him even as the winter fields lie inert and frost-crumbled under the sky. Fresh food and the warmth of the bed had a narcotic effect upon the man. The half-starved body seized greedily upon everything and bade the mere mind sleep, and so the mind slept on for many days, as though helping forward the old adage—“_Mens sana in corpore sano._” For the body is but the stem of the tree of the senses, and the sick body is often the cause of the sick mind.

Toward the last week in January John Gore saw a slow and subtle change in his father, a change that came like the first thrusting of growth through the winter soil. The flabbiness melted out of the man’s face; his eyes grew brighter and full of the intelligence of inward life. He was still very silent, but it was the silence of growth, not the silence of paralysis. John Gore would find his father watching him, not with the old, furtive, cringing look, but with a kind of sadness, a mute perplexity that betrayed the mind working behind the eyes. More than once he had made tentative little attempts to show gratitude, always watching his son’s face as though conscious of its imperturbable sternness. His son’s face began to be a dial of destiny to him. He could read the truth about himself in the younger man’s grave eyes.

It became evident that Stephen Gore’s manhood and his self-respect were returning to him slowly as he lay in the kitchen of Thorn. What his thoughts were John Gore could only guess, though he was struck by the change in his father, the indefinable refining and strengthening of the outer and inner man, as though my lord had ceased to be the animal, and had come again to the cognizance of higher things. They seldom spoke to each other, these two, nor did they venture beyond the trivial needs or happenings of the day. Both were conscious of the imminent and dark shadow, and faltered before it, sheltering behind reticence and procrastination. Yet John Gore would see a certain look come into his father’s eyes, as though the man were dumb and were striving to speak.

And the first breaking of the superficial surface of reserve was caused by nothing more dramatic than a beard. My lord’s self-respect seemed intimately married to bodily cleanliness and perfection in dress. Silks and brocades and perfumes were beyond him; perhaps he would not have asked for them even if they had been at hand. But it was with a gleam of his old wit that he desired most humbly to be barbered, and to be deprived of the hair that had grown at Thorn.

John Gore accepted the incident without a smile, brought a razor with him next day, and dutifully shaved my lord’s upper lip and chin. He had done his barbering in silence, with the air of a man who had no care beyond the dexterity of his fingers, when my lord laid a hand on his son’s shoulder.

“You would like to cut my throat, John. Cut it.”

They looked at each other squarely in the eyes. Stephen Gore was the first to glance away.

“Nor should I blame you, my son.”

And that was all that passed between them over the shaving of my lord’s chin.

John Gore told Barbara of the change in Stephen Gore, and she listened with a faint smile hovering about her mouth, as though her intuition gave her some vision of the future.

“Be gentle with him, John,” she said. “I have heard it said that pottery is brittle when it first comes from the furnace.”

“Then you think the clay has been recast, child?”

“Why should it not be so!”

And he could only marvel at the change in her.

So the month went, and my lord’s “grand air” began to flutter out feebly like a faded butterfly on a sunny day in spring. Yet there was a certain humility about him that made John Gore reflect, for his father was very patient now, strangely so for one who had sworn at lackeys. Often the son would catch a troubled shadow darkening the father’s face. He would drop his eyes when they met John Gore’s, yet he watched his son almost hungrily when the son’s back was turned.

It was a day early in February, and John Gore sat on Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool before the fire, and cleaned his pistols that grew foul quickly in the damp winter air. His father had been asleep, and the son believed him still sleeping as he polished the barrels and scoured the powder-pans.

He heard a slight movement behind him, and, turning sharply, found my lord awake and watching him with thoughtful eyes. Both men colored slightly. John Gore turned again, and went on with his work.

Then he heard his father speak.

“John, how long have I been here?”

The son considered.

“Three months—or so,” he answered.

My lord sighed.

“This leg of mine is mending.”

The son said nothing.

“I am wondering whether it is worth the mending. A man must die some day; though it is better that he should die like a man, not like a dog.”

There was a minute’s silence. John Gore could hear his father’s breathing, but he went on doggedly with the cleaning of his pistols.

“John.”

My lord spoke softly, almost pleadingly.

“Yes.”

“Will you answer me a few questions?”

“Ask them.”

Again there was a short pause.

“Have you any news from Westminster?”

“What news?”

“The Catholics, my friends—the rest.”

John Gore laid one pistol down and took up the other.

“Coleman is dead,” he said, curtly.

“Coleman! How?”

“The scaffold.”

He heard his father mutter indistinctly, and the words sounded like the words of a Latin prayer.

“And the rest?”

“Some with Coleman, some in the Tower and the jails, some scattered. London has been calling for blood.”

My lord lay very still. Then he turned slightly, and his eyes were on his son.

“And in Pall Mall?”

“My Lady Purcell?”

“Yes.”

“She died three months ago.”

There was another and a longer pause.

“John.” And he spoke with effort.

“Yes.”

“Why did you save me from dying?”

The son frowned at the fire.

“I do not know,” he said, at last.

“John, you were always honest. Yet—God help me—with the irony of the truth.”

Stephen Gore asked no more questions, but lay staring at the beams above him, his mouth twitching, his eyes glazed with a film of thought. He seemed to forget the presence of his son. The great dim world of the past, and the vast “beyond” that holds the past world in its shadows, engrossed the life in him, and he made no sound.

As for John Gore, his heart was full of a conflict of strong emotions. Nor was his mouth so straight and stern when he turned and glanced at his father over his shoulder. Yet what he beheld moved him more deeply than any words my lord had spoken. For Stephen Gore’s eyes were wet and blurred, and there was the glisten of tears upon his face.

John Gore rose suddenly from before the fire, and, taking his pistols with him, went out without a word. He was half angry and half ashamed, for though pity had welled up like blood into his mouth, a rough and scolding bitterness pointed to the meaner motives of mankind, and the leer of a possible hypocrisy hardened his heart.

He rode home toward Furze Farm, meeting a strong west wind that made the sky move fast and the ash boughs clash in the thickets. And in the woods north of the farm Barbara met him, where a number of old hollies threw up a wall of dense, green gloom.

He dismounted, and kissed her with some of the brusqueness of a man whose eyes seem too shallow, and whose heart is too near his lips. She let the strangeness in him pass, and they walked on side by side, the horse following at their heels. John Gore looked at the grass road before him, Barbara at the sky. And for nearly half a furlong they walked on thus in silence.

“John, you two have spoken.”

He glanced at her sharply, as though wondering how she knew.

“Yes.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Questions. He asked questions.”

“About—”

“His friends; about your mother.”

“What did you tell him, John?”

“I told him the truth.”

“Yes; and then—”

“What could I say to the man? Curse him, he wept!”

She paused a moment, taking her lover’s arm, and holding him back a little as though about to speak. The impulse changed, however, and she walked on again with a light of infinite wisdom in her eyes. For a man’s nature is a proud and contrary thing. She felt what was passing in John Gore’s heart, and she was too tender and too prudent to drag it roughly into the light of day.

XLVIII