Part 5

Barbara Purcell stood alone by the window, her eyes fixed upon the torches that were spitting and flaring in the rain. The salon had been emptied of its wits and gallants, as though the men had been whirled away into the darkness by the very energy of my Lord Pembroke’s wrath. The women were left alone with the cynical old aristocrat who dabbled in science, and who had not moved from his chair during the brawl. Hortense, who had dreaded bloodshed in her house and the scandal that might follow, was watching from another window, with the three girls and the widow gathered round her. My Lady Purcell appeared to be the most vexed and troubled of them all. She moved restlessly about the room; sat down in a chair beside the cynic; spoke a few words to him, and seemed repelled by the flippancy of his retort; rose again; walked to and fro for a minute, and then, as though driven thither by some spasm of suspense, joined Hortense and the rest at the window.

The Mancini heard my lady’s deep breathing, and, turning to make room for her, was startled by the scared expression of her face. But, being discreet, she ignored her guest’s uneasiness.

“These men, they must be forever quarrelling! As for that mad, irresponsible lord, I am always in dread of murder when he enters my house.”

Anne Purcell leaned against the window-jamb.

“And they must drag in others, too. I suppose Howard and Stephen Gore will be at each other’s throats.”

Hortense eyed her curiously.

“I think they have too much wisdom to cross swords over a lunatic. Who is the little brown man with the broad shoulders and the cool face?”

“John Gore, my lord’s son.”

“Jack Gore; a good name for a gallant swashbuckler. The fellow pleased me; he has a backbone and a keen eye. It was like a scene out of a stage-play. And there is the distressed damsel, your daughter, watching to see her champion do his devoir.”

Anne Purcell glanced at Barbara and gave a shrug of the shoulders.

“If the fool had only had some sense!”

“If—yes—if!”

“The stubborn brat! To shut her eyes to a mere piece of play!”

Hortense looked thoughtful.

“Pardon me, but the girl is no fool; that is my belief. It was no sulky, stupid child that dared my Lord Pembroke to bully her.”

“No?”

“No. But a woman with pride, and a depth of courage in her that could make her dangerous in a quarrel. My Lady Purcell, I could swear that your daughter is cleverer than you imagine.”

Hortense saw the plump woman’s face harden.

“Perhaps,” she retorted, brusquely; “for myself, I have always thought her a little mad.”

As for Barbara, she had no memory for Hortense and the rest. The dim, rain-smirched park, with its pool of stormy light, absorbed all the life in her for the moment. She had seen the torches go tossing out from the gate with a trail of shadowy figures following. The link-boys had headed for a great tree where there would be some shelter from the rain. The torches made a wavering yellow circle about the four chief figures; the rest of the gentlemen gathered in the deeper shadows under the tree. The drifting rain blurred and distorted the details as bad glass distorts the landscape to one at watch behind a window. Yet the four figures with the smoke and flare of the torches seemed vividly distinct to her, two of them stripped of cloaks and coats, so that their white shirts showed up like patches of snow on a distant mountain-side.

Engrossed as she was, she heard one of the watchers at the other window give a sharp cry of relief.

“At last—see—they have begun! My Lord Gore and Howard stand aside.”

It was her mother’s voice, and the words seemed to set some subtle surmise moving in the daughter’s brain. She remained motionless, her eyes on the circle of torches and the faint flicker of steel that was discernible as the two swords crossed.

She heard a short, dry laugh, and turned to find the Fellow of the Royal Society standing at her elbow. He was watching the scene under the tree with eyes that had lost none of their youthful sharpness.

“There is no need for anxiety,” he said, with a friendly glance at Barbara.

They stood side by side in silence for a minute. Then the cynic nodded in the direction of the park.

“That mad jackass stood no chance against Stephen Gore’s son. Just as I thought. That—will keep the fool quiet for a time, at least.”

There was a sudden swaying of the torches, and the circle of figures swept in upon my Lord Pembroke and John Gore as the sea sweeps in on a sinking ship. Nothing was discernible for the moment but the torch-flare and the knot of eager, crowding men. Then the circle parted abruptly, and they could see two friends throwing his coat and cloak over my Lord Pembroke’s shoulders. He was leaning against his second, his sword-arm hanging at his side.

The torches swayed forward and moved in a blot of light from under the tree. John Gore, with his sword set in the grass, was struggling into his coat, his eyes watching the violent fool whom he had wounded in the shoulder. Stephen Gore, distinguishable by his stateliness and his bulk, threw a cloak over his son’s shoulders. The torches moved away, the figures scattered, and the whole scene seemed to melt into nothingness behind the falling rain.

The cynic and Miss Barbara still maintained their silent fellowship at the window, as though they approached to each other by showing an uncompromising front toward the world. Her companion seemed to hint that they had a common interest in the proceedings, when he pointed out to her that a couple of torches were moving back toward the house.

“Here come the gentlemen who will assure us. Had I had the guiding of that young man’s sword, I should have pricked that wind-bag for good and all.”

He continued to talk, as though addressing no one in particular, but only enumerating his own thoughts.

“But then—of course—it would be deucedly inconvenient. It is much wiser to let fashionable fools alone; if you kill them, there will be trouble; if you wing them only, there will still be trouble. It is probable that we shall hear within a month or so that my Lord Gore’s son has been bludgeoned some dark night.”

Barbara glanced at him with a sharp challenge in her eyes.

“Pardon me, it is a very usual method of procedure among gentlemen of fashion. If you have an enemy who is too strong for you, or a man you are afraid to fight, you hire a couple of bullies to ambuscade him—and crack his skull. Both your honor and your spite are thereby greatly relieved.”

The torches were close to the gate of the court-yard, though the watchers at the window could but dimly distinguish the faces of those who were returning.

“I hope to Heaven he is not hurt!”

“Stay there, children! you must not meddle in these men’s affairs.”

Hortense and my Lady Anne had moved by mutual impulse toward the door. The girls, who had wished to follow them, remained talking in undertones near the harpsichord. But Barbara was bound by no such casual regulations. She left the cynic by the window, and followed her mother and Hortense.

From the salon the staircase of the great house ran with broad shallow steps into the hall. The beautiful balustrade was of carved oak, the corner pillars topped with griffins holding gilded shields. French tapestries covered the walls, and from the central boss of the ceiling a great brass lantern hung by a chain.

Hortense paused at the stair’s head, with Anne Purcell at her side. The rain rattled against the windows, with the light of the torches casting wavering shadows over the glass. A servant stood holding the door of the hall open, with the torches making a turmoil of smoke and flame. Barbara, as she came from the salon, was struck by the eager poise of her mother’s figure as she leaned forward slightly over the balustrade.

My Lord Gore and his son came in out of the night with their cloaks aglisten, and rain dropping from their beavers. The vision that greeted them was the vision of two women waiting at the stair’s head in their rich dresses, the light from the lantern throwing their figures into high relief. Hortense, in autumn gold, tall and opulent, crowned by her crown of splendid hair, seemed a figure divine enough to top that great oak stairway with its sweep of shadows. Anne Purcell, leaning forward with one hand on a carved pillar, symbolized watchfulness and secret suspense. While in the background the Spanish swarthiness of her daughter’s face added that mystery and solemn strangeness to the picture that life conveys in its moment of pathos or of passion.

My Lord Gore made straight for the stairway, hat in hand.

“Soyez tranquille, mesdames; a mere pin-prick in the shoulder.”

Hortense glanced past him with interest at the bronzed and imperturbable face of his son.

“Whose was the wound? Not—?”

“No, no, my Jackanapes had the madman at his mercy. May we men of blood ascend? Assuredly the name of Gore seems suited to the occasion!”

He turned his head and smiled over his shoulder at his son.

“Come up, my Jack the Giant-killer! Where is our little mistress, our inspirer of heroics?”

Anne Purcell bent toward him—as though swayed by her woman’s instinct.

“The little fool shall stay at home in future—”

“Psst—beware—!”

My lord gave a forced laugh, and looked upward over my lady’s shoulder. He had caught sight of Barbara standing in the doorway of the salon.

“Behold the inflamer of the peaceful citizens of Westminster! Mistress Barbara, my child, see what an obstinate mouth will do!”

Anne Purcell and Hortense had both turned toward the salon. My Lord Stephen was at the stair’s head, his son a little below him, with the light from the lantern falling full upon his face. But the girl standing in the doorway of the salon seemed the significant and compelling figure of the moment. She was staring at John Gore with a bleak intentness that ignored the three who waited for her to make way.

“Barbara!”

Her mother seized her arm and pushed her—almost roughly—into the salon.

“Where are your wits, girl? Don’t gape like that! On my honor, I think you are mad.”

She suffered her mother’s hectoring with an apathy that betrayed neither resentment nor understanding. Her eyes held John Gore’s for the moment. Then she turned and walked back to the window as though she had no more interest in the affair.

Yet—she had seen on the cloak that John Gore was wearing three short chains of gold, each with a knot of pearls for a button. They were spaced out irregularly, those three strands of gold, as though one had been lost—perhaps torn off in a struggle and never been replaced.

XI

My lord paused abruptly with the wine-decanter in his hand, his eyes fixed in a vacant stare on his son, who was drawing a high-backed chair forward to the table. The rumble of the wheels of the coach that had brought them home from Hortense Mancini’s could be heard dying away along St. James’s.

“Wine, Jack? They should have got Pembroke comfortably to bed by now. The man will be about again in a month—ready to quarrel with his best friend. What made you meddle in the game? A little mockery might do Nan Purcell’s girl some good.”

John Gore was unfastening the curbs of his black cloak. His father watched him, his brows knitted into a sudden frown of uneasiness—the frown of a man surprised by a spasm of pain at the heart.

“You all seemed so ready to make a fool of the child.”

“Tut—tut, sir, you ought to have come by more shrewd sense than to make a pother over such a piece of fun. Where the devil, may I ask, did you get that cloak?”

John Gore glanced down at the garment as though my lord’s tone of contempt might have made the thing shrivel on his shoulders.

“The cloak? You should know it, since it came out of your own wardrobe!”

“Mine! I deny the imputation.”

He laughed with a cynical twist of the mouth, and regarded his son slyly over the rim of his wineglass.

“Well, it came out of your room, sir!”

“Come, come, Jack!”

“My boy Sparkin fished it out of a chest when he was advising me on frills and fashions. The sobriety of the garment suited my inclinations.”

Stephen Gore’s eyes gleamed for the moment with a flash of fierce impatience.

“The meddlesome ape! You must pardon me being tickled by the irony of facts. Since Captain Jack Gore listens to a cook-boy’s opinions on costumes, I am mum.”

The son seemed amused and piqued in turn by his father’s inquisitive and fanatical prejudices. He swung the cloak from his shoulders and held it up with one hand.

“What have you to quarrel with, sir? The refinements of fashion are too deep for me. I shall be landed in Newgate for wearing the wrong kind of buckle on my shoes before the week is out.”

My lord appeared in earnest.

“Pshaw! Quarrel with? Why, the thing is about ten years out of date. Unpardonable! Give it up, Jack; I’ll not countenance you in such a pudding-cloth.”

John Gore broke into a hearty, seafaring laugh.

“Sancta Maria! is the offence so flagrant?”

“You might as well go to the King’s levee with a dirty face, sir. Don’t guffaw; I’m in earnest. Richards has orders to get rid of all the husks.”

The sea-captain fingered the gold tags.

“Being a prodigal, I will put up with such husks as these. I suppose I may be preferred before Tom Richards?”

My lord took the cloak from him casually, as though he had not noticed the gold chains with their knots of pearls.

“Hallo! these are worth saving, after all. I’ll keep them myself, Jack. Give a thing, and take it back again. That is philosophy of a sort, according to Hobbs.”

He laughed, pulled out a silver-handled clasp-knife from a pocket, and cut the gold curbs away from the cloth.

“For what we have saved, let us be thankful. It is not always wise to lend other people either your opinions or your wardrobe, much less your purse.”

John Gore had picked up the cloak again.

“Three, are there? There must have been four once. Look at the tear, there—in the cloth. Curious; I should not have noticed it before.”

My lord took the cloak from him and examined it with a careless air, making use of one corner to hide a yawn.

“The mark of the beast, Jack. Tom Richards’ fingers have been at work here, or I know nothing of human nature. Well, the fellow must have his pickings. If one worries about a small man’s petty pilferings one ought not to have the insolence to be a courtier. We are all sooted by the same chimney. Another glass of wine, Jack? No? Well, let’s to bed.”

They parted with a hand-shake and a light word or two upon the stairs, words that hid in either case the deeper impulses beneath. In my lord’s heart there was something of scorn, something of dismay, and the fierce uneasiness of a man who loves to look only upon the more flattering features of his soul. There seemed nothing in the incident to shake his confidence, and yet it had shaken him as a light wind sways a mighty elm that is rotten at the roots. A cloak, so much mere cloth, which he had hidden away and forgotten! Yet the thing had brought back visions of an autumn night, of betrayal and of anger, of passionate reproaches and of swift violence in the dark. What though he solaced himself with the oath that death had judged between the fortunes of two swords? The sin of treachery had been his. The blood-guilt remained, and no sophistry and no well-wishing to himself could wipe the stain away.

For the son, the happenings of the night had a richer aftermath. He was no self-conscious, strutting righter of wrongs; no chivalrous adventure-hunter launching his lance at the world’s throat. My Lord Pembroke might have kissed most women with impunity as far as John Gore was concerned; for though they might have protested, he knew, as a man of the world, that not one in twenty would have been worth the interference. Any chivalrous fool who had pushed in to a rescue would have merely flattered a coquette with the offer of blood where the other man had only offered kisses.

But that tall girl with the Spanish face had given the scene a different meaning. The uncompromising sincerity of her pride had turned a piece of fantastic fooling into insolence and dishonor. The call of solitary soul to soul is ever something of a riddle, and yet to the man there must be that one woman whose hair has the darkness of night, whose eyes are mysterious, whose face has an alluring sadness near to pain. Out of one thread of pathos or of passion may be woven that scarlet robe that covers the dim white body of Romance. A trick of the voice, a poise of the head, and the sleeper wakes in the world of color and desire. The streaking of the night sky by a falling star is not more swift and strange than that flash of divine wonder across the consciousness of a woman or a man.

The memory of her standing by the window, tall, defiant, aloof, with those cynical fools mocking her, burned with great vividness in John Gore’s brain. He remembered the moment when her eyes had wandered round the room to remain fixed on his. He thrilled still, strong man that he was, at that appeal the girl had given him, as though some instinct had warned her that his manhood was a nobler thing than to suffer her pride to be humbled before them all. Fighting against wild seas and the primeval perils of strange lands had given John Gore the cool and unflurried courage that is steady rather than impetuous. And yet that one glance from the girl’s eyes had drawn an instant and impulsive answer from him, as though all that she held sacred had been trusted to his hands.

And then—her history, this morose, brooding grief that my lord had hinted at! The very shadow of sadness that haunted her added a mystery, an alluring strangeness that beckoned the soul. She was not like other women. What more subtle deification! For strong natures are untaken save by strong contrasts and by keen impressions. The song of the nightingale may have no meaning for the falcon. Nor could the chattering lutes of “court beauties” call to a man who had stood where Cortez stood, gazing from Darien on the ocean limitless toward the burning west.

John Gore stood awhile at the open window of his room, as he had often stood at the rail of his quarter-deck on a southern night. The great silence of the sea seemed once more with him, and the far unutterable splendor of the moon. Then, as by contrast, his thoughts were caught by his father’s furious convictions as to the importance of the proper droop of a feather or the color of a coat. Who remembered such things when the storm-wind was shrieking, like the ghosts of the sea’s dead, through a great ship’s tackle? Yet, after all, it was only the fanaticism of another circle, another world. Your scientific zealot will cut a caper over the discovery of some new bug. It was a mere question of environment, and Father Adam may have strutted vaingloriously in some new-fangled smock of leaves.

Not for John Gore alone had it been a night of impressions. They had proved keen, pitiless, and pathetic so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. She was alone in her room, and at her open window, the human counterpart of John Gore. In her lap lay a little strand of gold, while the moonlight touched the bleak pallor of her face, making the night, like her heart, a contrast of mysterious light and shadow.

With Barbara her impressions were like elemental fire and ice, vivid, distinct, at war with one another. They stood opposed within her mind, hurting her heart by their very enmity. Gratitude and hatred unable to be reconciled; the harsh notes of revenge and the voices of heaven clashing together in the galleries of the brain. She had seen and she had recognized, yet the gross incongruity of it all made her falter for a meaning. The incidents of the night passed and repassed rhythmically before her. The uprising of his manhood in her service; her mother’s strained dismay; the scene at the stair’s head; the glimpse of the three gold curbs upon the cloak. Where were the beginnings and the endings in this tangled skein for her? Had she not looked for exultation in this moment when at last it should come into her life? And now that the truth seemed close to her very heart, she found the near future blurred by a dimness of doubt, of incredulity, even—of dread.

XII

Summer freshness after rain, a splendor of wet shimmering fields and woods, gardens full of a hundred perfumes, a sky changing from azure to opalescent gold on the horizon. The slow sweep of the river through the dream of a summer day. White swans moving over the water; scattered houses with black beams and plaster-work, or warm red walls, lifting their gables amid sleeping trees. Now and again the plash of oars and the sound of voices stealing down some quiet “reach.”

Two boats with cushions and banners at the stern were moving up-stream while the day was still in its April hours. They were nearing Richmond, stately in memories and in trees, and Sheen also, where the last of the Tudors delivered up her queenship unto God. The two boats had pulled out from Whitehall stairs that morning, carrying a river-party to my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy. Discretion and the voice of some “back-stairs friend” had hinted that my lord and his son would discover the country preferable to the town until my Lord of Pembroke’s recovery should be assured. The King had lately assumed a prejudice against brawls, and my lord had left this chance indiscretion in the hands of Hortense, who was—for the while—the King.

Stephen Gore had collected a few especial friends to go by river and spend some days with him at Bushy. His deaf sister from Kensington had been appointed state duenna for the week. With my lord were two gentlemen of the same political tendencies as himself; my Lady Purcell, fresh and fragrant as a Provence rose; a certain Sir Peter Marden’s wife and daughter, blood relatives of the Gores; and Captain John, his son. Moreover, in the same boat as her mother, with a scarlet cushion under her arm, sat Mistress Barbara, solemn, and dark as some Proserpine to whom the breath of the summer day presaged the shadows of a sadder world.

Her mother would probably have left her at the house in Pall Mall had not the girl displayed a sudden tractable cheerfulness that had surprised Lady Anne into searching for motives. Nor had the fertile and intuitive brain of woman far to seek. My Lady Purcell drew her own amused conclusions, nor was she sorry to suspect the girl of such reasonable yet uncharacteristic softness.

It so happened that Barbara and John Gore were not shipped in the same boat, the son having taken charge of the second and smaller of the two, with a cargo of luggage and servants, to say nothing of Master Sparkin, who had scrambled into the bow, and amused himself alternately by tickling the neck of the nearest waterman with a feather and dabbling his hands in the water over gunwale. John Gore’s boat proved the faster of the two, and though she started half a mile behind my lord’s, she had drawn up by the time that they had reached Mortlake, much to the satisfaction of Sparkin, who had urged the men on to a race. For a while they pulled stroke and stroke, John Gore laughing and talking to the guests in his father’s boat.

Stephen Gore was steering, his sister next him on his left, Lady Purcell on his right. And the moment that the two boats had drawn level, Anne Purcell had touched my lord’s knee with hers and glanced meaningly at Barbara, who had been looking back at the flashing oars of John Gore’s boat. Her mother had been on the watch for suggestions. And in such matters the most commonplace incidents may appear significant. Yet Barbara had merely been watching Sparkin’s drolleries, for one cannot always breathe to the rhythm of tragic verse.

“Jack, my boy, when you put to sea with a boat-load of ‘baggage,’ you will find yourself faster than stately dowager-ladened ships.”