Part 6

My lord’s second cousin, my Lady Marden, a fat, happy woman eternally on the verge of laughter, shook the large green fan that ladies used then in the place of a parasol.

“Dowagers, indeed! I am sure we look younger than our daughters.”

“That is always the case,” said one of my lord’s friends.

“I would venture it that Captain John would rather be in our boat,” and she glanced at Barbara as though for confirmation.

Anne Purcell’s daughter gazed at the far bank over the lady’s shoulder.

“Even a boat-load of aunts and cousins may be duller than a Barbary prison,” quoth my lord, with a play upon words that no one understood.

“And even a weevily biscuit better than none—when you’re empty,” said Sparkin, who seemed to consider himself perfectly justified in airing his wit. But seeing that the venture drew a sharp and ominous glance from the great gentleman in the other boat, Sparkin became suddenly oblivious to its presence, and returned to tickling the brown neck of the man who pulled the bow oar—an act that stamped him as the meanest of opportunists, seeing that the man could not express himself in the presence of “quality.”

The boats were still moving side by side when Mistress Catharine Gore, the deaf duenna, began asking questions in her shrill, aggressive voice.

“Who’s that boy, Stephen?”

My lord assumed an alarmed look and held up a silencing hand.

“My dear Kate,” he shouted in her ear, “do not ask embarrassing questions.”

His sister’s face betrayed a sudden gleam of shocked intelligence that made my lord’s fooling appear more piquant. Deafness had developed a habit of irritability in her, and she was accustomed to blurt out her opinions in a voice that she probably intended for a whisper.

“You don’t say so, Stephen! I am astonished that your son should have the effrontery. But these sailors—”

The other ladies began to giggle. My lord nudged his sister vigorously with his knee.

“Jack brought the boy home from America with him.”

“Why don’t you speak louder, Stephen? What did you say her name was?”

But as she discovered that they were trying to hide their laughter behind fans and coat-sleeves, Mistress Catharine Gore gave her brother one stare, and relapsed into a silence that was not altogether amiable.

Nor did John Gore look the complaisant son smiling at his father’s waggery. He nodded to his men, who quickened at the oars, making the boat forge ahead of my lord’s galley. Barbara’s eyes met the sea-captain’s as he glanced back for a moment to look at something, perhaps at her. She was glad and yet sorry that they were not together, for the secret that she concealed made his nearness a martyrdom and a season of suspense. How could she keep the consciousness of that grim blood-debt before her soul, with the beat of the ripples against the boat and the flash of the sunlight on the water? She felt too close to humanity to be able to look into her own haunted heart. These laughing, chattering women, these mercurial, pleasure-loving men! She could only sit there in a silence as in a trance, and let the shores and the tide of life glide by, until she could wake in the tragic loneliness of solitude—and of self.

The garden of my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy came down to the river with a sweep of perfect sward. There was a stone boat-house with quaint copper dragons on the recessed gable ends, and a gilded vane shaped like a ship in sail. The steps that led up from the river had statues of fauns and wood-nymphs upon their pillars, and along the bank weeping-willows trailed their boughs in the brown water of the shallows.

The garden itself had all that quaint formalism, that stately simplicity that was part of the lives of some of the Old-World gentry. A great stretch of grass cut into four squares by gravel paths, with closely clipped bays and yews set rhythmically along the walks. On the north, an ancient yew alley, a gallery of green gloom. On the south, a broad flower border, full of roses, pinks, and stocks, and all manner of flowers and herbs. On the west, the stone terrace of the house, with orange-trees in tubs ranged behind the balustrade. In the centre of all, where the four walks met, a fountain playing, throwing a plume of spray from the bosom of a river-god.

John Gore’s boat, half a mile ahead of my lord’s galley, disembarked first at the steps, so that the servants were able to clear the baggage into the house and help in preparing that most essential of all incidents—dinner. John Gore sent Sparkin off to the kitchen, and passed the time pacing the gravel walks, with the river before him and the air sweet with the perfumes of the herbs. The stateliness of the place, its repose and opulence, had a strong charm for the man after rough years of voyaging and the squalid loneliness of prison. He contrasted it with the weird brilliance and fragmental beauty of the countries of the Crescent. Nothing could seem more rich to him than those splendid lawns, like green samite spread without seam or wrinkle. Even the gilded vane on the boat-house had memories, for he could remember coveting it as a child, and the thing may have suggested the life of those who go down to the sea in ships.

John Gore saw in season the flash of my lord’s oars, the bluff bow of the galley pushing the ripples aside, the banner floating over the stern. Going to the water-steps, he stood there and waited, hat in hand, the quiet dignity of such a man seeming in keeping with such a scene. With one foot on the gunwale, he gave a hand in turn to my lord’s guests, while the rowers held the boat in place by using their oars as poles.

The character of the different women might have been guessed by the way each accepted the curtesy of the man upon the steps. Anne Purcell smiled in his face with a full-blown and fragrant vanity. Mrs. Catharine Gore gave him a severe stare. My Lady Marden might have melted his dignity with her good-humor; her daughter faltered with assumed shyness, looking at her feet and not into John Gore’s eyes. As for Barbara, she ignored his hand unconcernedly, gazing straight before her with a straight mouth and a passionless face.

The gentlemen followed, John Gore leaving them to their own legs. He had turned and climbed the steps close on Barbara’s heels, noticing, as a man does, the poise of her head and the proud youth in her figure. A high-born and imperious spirit seemed proper from one who walked between those stiff and stately trees. John Gore would not have wished for a hoyden in such a setting.

The party moved up the central walk toward the house, my Lady Marden verbosely pleased with everything that she saw. “But there were no peacocks! Surely that sweet terrace should have been a proper place for the birds to show their tails! But perhaps my Lord Gore did not like their voices?” My lord replied that he saw so many peacocks at Whitehall that there was nothing singular or distinctive about having such commonplace birds on show. He would send for a barge-load if my Lady Marden would promise to imitate a pea-hen in her dress. Anne Purcell looked tried by the fat woman’s excessive and loquacious amiability. She had Mrs. Catharine Gore for a stimulating “cup of bitters,” Mrs. Kate, whose wood billet of a figure looked fit only for a great wheel farthingale. My lord’s two gentlemen friends were walking one on either side of my Lady Marden’s daughter, who pretended to be embarrassed, and was not. She had a black patch at the corner of a very suggestive mouth, and a figure that did not promise prudery. For the rest, John Gore and Barbara Purcell were left pacing side by side like two grave and staid strangers walking up the aisle of a church.

The party dined in the long salon whose windows opened upon the terrace with its row of orange-trees. My Lady Marden careered in her conversation like a fat mare turned out to grass. My lord alone appeared inclined to keep step with her. After dinner there were wines and fruit: wines of Spain and Burgundy; peaches, nectarines, apricots, and grapes. After the fruit and wine, those who desired could steal a siesta, for the river air is fresh after rain, and mature appetites minister at the altar of Morpheus.

The two gentlemen were amusing themselves by making hot love to the younger Marden, and watching the expression of keen curiosity and chagrin on Mrs. Catharine Gore’s face. To be able to see so many suggestive things, and to hear nothing! What more tantalizing position for a duenna, and a spinster! John Gore could not keep back a smile as he watched the drama. He rose, and went and stood by Barbara’s chair with the quiet simplicity of a man who was not self-conscious.

“Do you remember the old place? I suppose you have been here—often—since I was last here.”

“No, not for a long while.”

“Would you like to see the garden?”

She glanced up at him and rose.

“Yes.”

And that was all they said to each other for fully three minutes.

Probably their interest in glass houses, herb beds, and flowers was a wholly subordinate affair, yet it served the purpose of bringing two people together who desired to be near each other for very different reasons. John Gore may have thought the girl curiously reserved and silent. Yet he did not wish her otherwise, preferring her swarthy, pale-skinned aloofness to red-faced and commonplace good temper. Men who have seen the world have little use of people who let their insignificant souls bolt from their mouths like a mouse out of a hole. Hearts easily won are easily lost. The open field has no lure for the imagination; high walls and a mass of dusky trees pretend to hide all manner of mystery.

Neither of them referred to the brawl of the other night—Barbara, for reasons known to her own heart; John Gore, from a sense of delicacy and chivalrous understanding. He began to talk to her of the days when they had been mere children, and the subject served to sweep away some of the reserve that chilled the air between them.

They were in the fruit-garden, with its high, red-brick walls, when John Gore recalled to her an incident of their irresponsible youth.

“Do you remember old Jock, the head gardener?”

She looked at him with a slight frown of thought.

“Jock, the Scotchman?”

“The old fellow with the bandy legs, and the head that lolled to and fro when he walked. It was just here I played that trick on him. You were standing there—by the door; I was behind a bush with the squirt. I can see you laughing now, and the flick of your green skirt as you bolted into the yew alley.”

She smiled, but her face grew grave again abruptly, as though reproved by some power within.

“How long ago it seems! We have changed so much! And you have been nearly over the whole world!”

He glanced at her as she spoke, finding by instinct in her a sense of something to be overcome. It might be the natural strength of reserve in her. Yet she appeared to him like a girl brought up in some fanatical home where laughter was a sign of carnal inclinations. Her heart might begin to smile, but some habit of self-repression stifled the impulse before it could mature.

“You will tell me about your voyages?”

“If they are of any interest to you.”

Her eyes met his, and then swerved away with a flash of wayward feeling that puzzled him.

“I should like to hear everything. It has an interest for me. And then—you were in a Moorish prison?”

He looked into the distance with the air of a man ready to speak of his very self.

“Prison. That is an experience that grinds the folly out of the heart. A man is walled up with that strange riddle of a thing—himself. It made me learn to understand those old hermits in the deserts. For the devils who tempted them, and whom they fought and cast out into the night, were the devils a man carried about with him in his own heart. Prison makes a man a wild beast—or a philosopher.”

“More often a beast, Jack,” said my lord, who appeared at the gate leading into the yew walk, fanning himself with a big fan that he had borrowed from Anne Purcell.

XIII

On the evening of the third day at my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy, Barbara walked alone in the yew alley on the north of the great garden. It was like some dim cloister built for those who fled from the fever of life to cool their hearts in Gothic mysteries. The dark trunks broke, sheaf by sheaf, into groins that crossed in a thousand arches. Its shadowy atmosphere seemed silent and remote, full of an absorbed sadness that spoke of sanctuary.

On the tennis-court beyond the house Stephen Gore and his friends were playing out a match that had been put up for a wager. The women-folk were looking on, ready to hazard a brooch or a scarf on the fortunes of a racquet. Barbara, whose heart was full of a fierce unrest, had slipped away alone into the garden, and even if her mother had missed her, she had pinned a sentimental meaning to her daughter’s mood.

The sun sank low in the west as Barbara walked in the alley of yews, so low that the western arch of the cloister was a panel of ruddy gold. The long shafts of the decline came streaming through and through the criss-cross boughs, splashing the trunks with amber, and weaving a checker of light and shadow upon the path. There was no sound to break the silence save the occasional plash of oars upon the river and the faint voices from the tennis-court beyond the house.

Yet for Barbara the sweet sanctity of the ancient trees had no solace and no shade. She had fled there as to a sanctuary to escape from that most fierce and incomprehensible thing—herself. The desire to be alone had been like the thirst of one in a desert—thirst for quiet waters and the shadow of some great rock.

The girl had come to my Lord Gore’s house with the purpose of three years struggling to be matured. Perhaps she was a little mad, even as a mind that has brooded upon one shadowy memory must lose the sane breadth of noonday for the more vivid contrasts of dawn or twilight. The fanatical Spanish blood in her had taken fire and burned those three years in the deeps of her sombre eyes. For she had loved the man—her father—as she had loved no other living thing on earth. The manner of his death still woke a slow, ominous fury in her—a phase that placid natures might have been unable to understand. Yet the Jews of old were true and elemental in their vengeances and in the vengeance of their God. They understood that flame of fire in the heart that consumes even its own substance till the sacrificial victim has been found.

Yet here was the bitterness of the thing that she should falter before this very sacrifice. It is so easy to strike when the whole heart is in the blow; so difficult when some trick of lovableness makes the courage waver. If only the man had helped her by being gross, arrogant, or contemptible! Yet he was all that she would not have him be, and all that she, as a woman, would have desired had there been no inevitable tragedy urging her on. His very surface, though she rallied herself with cynical distrust, made her incredulous, even afraid. Often she would fling the very suspicion from her with passionate unbelief. And yet in an hour it would flow back again like dark water into a well.

Walking the yew walk in some such mood of doubt and hesitation, she saw a boy’s face looking down at her from overhead—a brown, impudent, snub-nosed face with an intelligent twinkle in the eyes. It was John Gore’s boy, Sparkin, straddling the fork of a yew, the dense vault of foliage overhead casting so deep a shadow that he might have escaped notice like his Majesty in the oak after Worcester fight.

Barbara paused and glanced up at him threateningly, angry at the thought that she had been spied upon.

“What are you doing there?”

“Birds’-nesting,” said the boy, promptly.

“You won’t find any eggs this month of the year.”

“Oh, sha’n’t I!”

“No, the birds are fledged.”

“Some of them sit twice,” quoth Sparkin, determined neither to be corrected nor to be crushed, though he had been caught at such a disadvantage.

There was a stone bench at the western end of the yew alley, and Barbara, leaving Sparkin skied by his own conceit, walked on and sat down on the bench, knowing that the best way to hurt a boy is to ignore him. But Sparkin was out on no vainglorious adventure. He had nearly been tempted to interest himself in his master’s affairs, for it was a new experience for the youngster to watch this king of the quarter-deck dipping his flag to a thing in a petticoat.

Therefore, Sparkin came scuffling down the tree as soon as he discovered that his ambuscade had failed, and, pushing his way between the yews and a high brick wall, disappeared in the direction of the house.

Making a bolt for the doorway leading into the tennis-court, he ran full tilt into a gentleman as he rounded the corner, and that gentleman being none other than Captain Gore himself, he took Master Sparkin playfully by the ear, concluding that the boy had been in mischief, and that vengeance in some shape or form followed at his heels.

“Hallo! what are you running for?”

Sparkin had no excuse for the moment. It would have been useless to explain that he preferred the more vigorous form of exercise.

“I met Mistress Barbara in the yew walk, captain.”

His innocence was sublime. What earthly interest could John Gore take in such a coincidence?

“I was birds’-nesting, and I thought it would be good manners to run away.”

John Gore maintained his hold on Sparkin’s ear, and looked down at him with shrewd amusement. Then he gave him a fillip, and a gesture in the direction of the house, a hint that the boy had the wisdom to accept as final.

The stone bench in the yew walk was set forward a little from the trunks of the trees, and John Gore, as he entered the alley, saw the girl’s figure outlined against the gold of the western sky. This tunnel of shadows seemed to him to lead toward mystery and desire. The figure at the end thereof remained motionless as a statue in black marble set before the entrance to a shrine.

She did not wake to his presence till he was quite near to her, with the sun shining upon his face, and upon the new coat of scarlet cloth that he wore. There may have been some symbolism in the very color of the cloth. The simple richness of it suited his brown skin and the swarthy strength of his clean-shaven face.

“Oh, is it you!”

“You were tired of watching grown men playing with a ball?”

“Perhaps I had other things to think of.”

She moved aside and gathered up her dress so that there was ample room for him upon the bench. Yet, though it was done coldly, imperturbably, without a glimmer of a smile, the man whom she had sworn to kill suspected nothing but habitual melancholy.

“Your boy was here a minute or two ago.”

“Sparkin? I caught him on the run, and gave him a tweak of the ear to last for a week.”

“The child seems very fond of you.”

“Perhaps because I have never spared the rope’s-end when necessary, and perhaps because he has never caught me lying.”

“How did you come by him?”

“A mere chance. He was no man’s child—a kind of wild-cat that haunted the river-side and lived as best it could. It was before I sailed three years ago that I saw the youngster outside a Greenwich tavern. He was standing up in his rags to some big, well-conditioned bully of a school-boy, and thrashing him squarely by sheer pluck.”

“That is how you became friends?”

“I took him to sea with me, and grew fond of the youngster in spite of his insolence, which I chastened like a father. And the humor of it was that after pulling him out of a Greenwich gutter, the boy pulled a ship’s crew out of a Barbary prison. I have told you that tale before.”

Barbara watched his face while he was speaking with an intentness that made him feel the nearness of her eyes.

“A lucky day for the boy.”

“And for me. We are more than quits. I am here in England.” And he glanced at her as though he had meant more than he had said.

Barbara cherished her reserve.

“It was in the autumn of 1675 that you sailed,” she said.

“No, earlier than that.”

“I remember the year well.”

“It was in June, not in the autumn.”

“I remember every month of that year, because it was the year that my father died.”

She spoke calmly, yet he was startled by the expression of her face. It shone white in the half-gloom of the evening under the yews, the eyes gleaming out from it with a dull fire.

“The month was June; I am sure of that.”

“If you say it was June it must have been so. You should know.”

Her wayward strangeness puzzled him. At times he was even tempted to believe that what my Lord Gore had hinted at might some day prove too true. The thought roused in him a shock of rebellion at the heart, and an instinct of strong tenderness that woke a longing to cherish and to protect.

“Are you cold here? There is a mist beginning to rise from the river.”

“They will be wondering what has become of us.”

“Let them wonder. I will fetch you a cloak.”

“No. Let us go in.”

She shivered momentarily and rose from the bench, drawing a little away from him as they walked up the yew alley together. The east was full of a faint crimson splendor; the colder tints had not come as yet.

Neither of them appeared to have a word to say. Yet the silence was tinged with a vague mystery that seemed to catch the spirit of the dying day. To John Gore it seemed that any memory of that fatal year chilled the girl like the breath of a raw November night.

Barbara went to her room with a feeling of infinite loneliness weighing upon her heart, the loneliness of a gray twilight over a gray land. An utter dreariness dulled all feeling in her for the hour. Perfunctorily, almost blindly, she changed her dress, putting on something richer for the wax lights and the music in the state salon. A procession of dim thoughts moved slowly through her brain, their significance hurting her despite her obstinate self-will.

It was inevitable that the man should swear that he had sailed from England before the month of her father’s death.

Had not the voyage itself been a trick to cover the meaning of the past? Neither he nor that other one whom she suspected had betrayed one glimmer of a tragic intimacy. But that, too, was inevitable—a surface hypocrisy that might betray caution, penitence, even a fading of desire.

And yet—and yet!

She stretched her arms out with a kind of anguish of incredulous helplessness, feeling utterly alone in a world of bitterness and horror. Could he be that man whose sword had left her father dead that autumn night?

XIV

My Lord of Gore’s coach carried Anne Purcell and her daughter back to Westminster, for the gathering at the house at Bushy had dispersed prematurely, owing to sundry regrettable differences of opinion that had arisen between the three elder women. My lord himself travelled cityward with the Purcells, as though discountenancing Mrs. Catharine Gore, who had been spirited by Lady Marden and her daughter away in her coach to Kensington. For the quarrel, such as it was, had originated in Mrs. Kate’s deafness and her utter lack of reasonable discretion, since her loud and irritable tongue had not only set the two elder ladies by the ears, but had driven even her stately brother to a tempestuous ruffling of his dignity. The repartee had verged on coarseness, for Mrs. Catharine Gore was the most exasperating person to argue with on the face of God’s earth. Her deafness, exaggerated for the occasion, made her impregnable both against weight of metal and sharpness of wit. And she could retaliate in the most violent and acrid fashion, pretending all the time that she had mistaken the rival disputant’s meaning.

Thus when my lord had persisted with some heat and an impressive dogmatism that his sister painted her prejudices too vividly, Mrs. Kate had seized the chance of flinging an explosive retort into the midst of the party.