Part 7

“If my Lady Purcell had said that my Lady Marden painted her face, it was no business of her brother’s to repeat it, and that only fools made mischief wantonly.”

And it may be imagined that a few such sweet misapplications of the truth had ruined the tranquillity of her brother’s house.

John Gore and the two gentlemen had ridden over earlier that morning, for the sea-captain had business at Deptford that concerned the men who had lain with him in a Barbary prison. Nor were the three in my lord’s coach sympathetically arranged. There were three angles to the diagram, and though two of them may have been in geometrical agreement, the third spoiled the symmetry of the whole human proposition. For Barbara had never seemed more moody or distraught. She sat like a figure of Fate with her great eyes looking into the distance, and her face blank and impassive to any sallies from my lord. An atmosphere of dreariness and of apathy seemed to emanate from her, an atmosphere so sluggish and sincere that it blighted the two elders, who would have been buxom enough if they had been alone.

The lord and the lady exchanged glances from time to time. They were wise in their generation, nor were they ready to be displeased at the little romance that appeared to be developing under their noses. The girl had an eccentric way of accepting homage. Yet they understood her to be a queer piece of morose comeliness; nor had she the habit of simpering like other women.

Stephen Gore smiled, and looked with surreptitious shrewdness at the mother.

“Pauvre petite!”

“La maladie des femmes.—Jean et Jeanette!”

They laughed and glanced, each of them; out of their respective windows, not noticing the dull gleam in the girl’s dark eyes.

Meanwhile the Don John of their love prophecies had changed his nag for a fast wherry on the Thames, and had landed at Deptford stairs before my lord’s coach had come within sight of the towers of Westminster. Picking his way amid the sea-lumber of the place, he hunted out a tavern known as “The Eight Bells,” a tavern with great tipsy tables, and little windows like blinking eyes, and rough benches along the wall.

Within, a parlor full of tobacco smoke, black beams, and copper-colored faces that seemed to conjure up all the adventuresomeness of the wild life of the sea. It was a corner of the world where men about a winter fire might tell tales of treasure, of sea-fights, and all the coarse, quaint, crudely colored romance of the Spanish seas. The mere words were magical to a roving spirit. Pieces of eight, culverins, great rivers with strange names, treasure-houses full of ingots of gold, the far islands of the buccaneers. There men should tell tales of wine drunk under tropical moons, of mulatto women in bright garments, of Indian girls, of prize-money and the smell of powder, and the salt sweat of the bustling seas. The whole strong perfume of that adventurous life seemed to permeate the shadows of that low-beamed room, with Jasper of the guns turning his hawk’s eyes from man to man, and talking of the days when the captain should sail the ship that they had already seen and coveted.

Ha!—and Jasper’s face grew fierce and happy—they would sweep down the Channel with sails whiter than Dover cliffs, and all their cannon sparkling like ingots of gold! There would be pikes bristling in the arm-racks around the masts; the hissing of the grindstone as the men sharpened their cutlasses. Full sail past Tangier, and a “lookout” in the foretop for any heathen devil that dared show a nose in the open sea. Even a few piratical jests would not come amiss. Jasper had pictured it all to his mates after they had seen and coveted Old Man Hollis’s ship, _The Wolf_, lying at anchor in mid-stream. Just the girl to carry the captain in her lap! They would wipe out the smell of that Barbary prison, and set the brass boys bellowing like bulls of Bashan.

They tumbled up from the benches of “The Eight Bells” when the figure in the red coat showed at the doorway. Jasper, old sea-wolf, with ringed ears and a buckram skin, grinned joyfully, proud with the pride of an old Norse pirate.

There was a chair by the rough table for John Gore. He sat down there, while the men formed a ring round him, while Jasper of the guns said his say.

“We have found you a ship, captain: twenty brass cannon and wings like a sea-gull. All her tackle new as a girl’s stockings after Michaelmas.”

John Gore looked at them all a little sadly, like a man who must speak bad news. He had picked up Jasper’s pipe, and was tracing an imaginary pattern on the table. The sailors would have sworn that it was a love-knot had they been able to see inside the captain’s head.

“Don’t tempt me, Jasper, my man; when you go to sea again, it won’t be under my flag.”

Bluntly, yet with a great kindness for them that could not be hid, he blew to the winds all Jasper’s visions of judgment. Not for a year at least would he sail on a second voyage. The big man regarded him sorrowfully, as though listening to the news of a Dutch victory. The sailors looked at one another and shifted uneasily from foot to foot. A pipe was tapped softly, even dismally, on the heel of a sea-boot. One worthy could find no other method of expression than that of firing a stream of tobacco juice into a pile of sawdust in a corner.

They were like so many dismasted hulks with the spirit out of them, so many disappointed children. Jasper’s enthusiasm broke into a last flare.

“Such a little dancing devil, captain, and her guns all like new pins. She ought to carry you, and no one else.”

The man in the red coat still drew patterns on the table.

“Look you, my men, don’t count on serving under me; I am high and dry for a year or more. You are too tough to rot here in taverns. My business is to see good men of mine afloat in a good ship.”

“That’s like you, captain.”

“We did not fight the _Sparhawk_ for nothing, did we? You served me well; I mean to serve you. Will you go to sea as picked men in a King’s ship?”

Jasper looked at his mates, first over one shoulder and then over the other.

“That’s the next best,” he said, bluntly.

“Well, then, I’ll make it my affair.”

“I can’t keep my fingers off a gun or a rope for long, sir, that’s God’s truth.”

“The smell of the tar sticks, lads? Mr. Pepys and the Duke, if necessary, shall be my men. I would rather see fellows of mine in the best ship that carries the King’s flag than rolling in some dirty ketch between Dover and Dunkirk.”

John Gore called for a tankard of ale, and they pledged healths together in the tavern of “The Eight Bells.” Leaving them a purse of guineas as largesse, he returned to his boat, with Jasper and his mates acting as a kind of state guard to the water-side.

“If God won’t have a man, the devil will! That’s an old proverb, captain, and the King’s a better master than Old Nick.”

With some such philosophy Jasper looked lovingly on John Gore as he stood on the water-steps and took his leave. Far down the stream the masts of Old Man Hollis’s ship seemed to beckon them unavailingly toward the brightness of Spanish seas.

At the Admiralty offices a plump, buxom, bustling gentleman received John Gore with great good-will. Something of a dandy, with protuberant eyes that appeared to have grown weak with straining at everything that was to be seen, Mr. Pepys bundled himself gladly from the multifarious responsibilities of office, and let loose all his heartiness in the service of a friend. It was impossible to be jovial or to enjoy a gossip where so many detestable quills were scratching and scolding over parchment and paper. The dinner-table was the secretary’s inspiration. Mrs. Pepys would be infinitely contented at the thought of an old friend dining off the new silver plate. John Gore and the ubiquitous, but yet lovable, busybody departed dinnerward arm in arm.

At home the fair St. Michel appeared triste and a little out of temper. Her husband’s hospitality was often inconsistently impulsive. There are moments, even in the best households, when the joints are scraggy, and the puddings like country cousins, homely and out of fashion. Mr. Pepys kissed his wife with excellent unction, let fall a hint that he had seen a new gown at the New Exchange, and compelled the domestic sun to shine by the sheer vitality of his good-humor.

Jack Gore praised his sherry, and frankly confessed that he had a favor to ask. Mr. Pepys chuckled. So many people always appeared to be in like case. His sherry was the finest sherry in the three kingdoms on such occasions. Some of these suppliants—well, that was a purely private affair! And he gave a confidential and deliberate wink that suggested that he was popular.

“Most revered Jack,” quoth he, “you throw a request in a man’s face like a twenty-pound shot into a Dutchman’s hull. There is just the polite spark at the touch-hole to give one warning, your urbanity concerning the sherry. None the less, I like it. Candor makes me feel quite fat.”

“You will get these fellows of mine well berthed?”

“All captains and lieutenants in three weeks! I would have you come and see some of the scrofulous schemers who wriggle in and smirk at me—most days of the month. They are so polite, so considerate in suggesting how I may be made a fool and a rogue. And sea-captains, sir, seem to be the fated husbands of pretty wives. It makes a Prometheus of me at times, I assure you. And as for Mrs. Pepys there, somehow she always has a sneaking preference for the mild and simple bachelors!”

The secretary’s wife stared hard at her husband’s embroidered vest. The direction of such a glance is considered disconcerting when applied to gentlemen who are approaching maturity.

“Sam is always a fool where women are concerned,” she said, with an autocratic poise of the head.

“There now, sir—and I married her! How can she speak such truths? Some more pie? Nonsense apart, Jack, I will see these men of yours well placed.”

What with chattering on his own affairs and questioning John Gore on his voyage, Mr. Pepys appeared to forget that there was such an incubus as his Majesty’s business. He suggested a drive in the park. His own coach, so he said, had eclipsed the Mancini’s, as Hortense had eclipsed the Breton Rose. Then there was Nell to be seen in a new play at The King’s, but he would not wink at her. Mrs. Pepys should see to that. And their best bedroom stood empty! A man who had so much cosmopolitan gossip to impart could not be suffered to call a link-boy that night. They could sit out together on the “leads” after supper, and talk till the stars blinked and they both fell a-yawning.

The end of all this amiable bustle was that John Gore slept between Mr. Pepys’s best sheets, and spent a great part of the following day with him, looking at his books and plate, drinking his wine, and hearing his new maid sing one of the secretary’s old songs. For Mr. Pepys was such a bubble of mirth, such a book of shrewd sense, such a register of anecdotes, that his loquacity and his infinite good-fellowship made even romance linger in its onrush for an hour.

Late shadows were floating down the river before John Gore escaped from the secretary’s weak eyes and stalwart tongue. He had some small affairs of his own to attend to in the City and at the New Exchange in the Strand: some new harness at a saddler’s; stockings and shirts at a silk mercer’s; a case of long pistols at a gunsmith’s in a street near the New Exchange. The pistol-stocks were inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, and he left them with the smith for an hour to have his name scrolled upon the barrels. A coffee-house and a _Gazette_ filled up his leisure. And not being a man afraid of carrying a parcel through the public streets, he returned to the gunsmith’s shop, and went westward with the pistols under his arm.

He took some of the quieter ways past Charing Cross, where the city and the fields met in scattered gardens and narrow lanes. Apple boughs, already hung with fruit, drooped alluringly over high brick walls. Here and there came the scent of rosemary and sage, of clove-pinks, marjoram, and lavender. And through the bars of some iron gate you might see great sheaves of sweet-peas in bloom, or torch-lilies stiff and quaint, or rose-trees with the flowers falling and turning brown.

In one of these narrow lanes, with a high wall upon the one side and a thorn-hedge upon the other, John Gore met the last soul on earth he expected to meet at such a moment—Barbara Purcell, alone, not even followed by a servant. However dreamily John Gore’s thoughts may have lingered amid the stately walks of my lord’s house at Bushy, he was surprised to see her before him in the flesh. She was dressed quietly, with a cloak over her shoulders, and the hood turned forward to cover her hair, so that she looked more like a shopkeeper’s daughter than a young madam from the atmosphere of St. James’s.

There was no turning back for either of them in that narrow lane, even if either had desired to escape a meeting. John Gore saw her flush momentarily, with a glitter of something in the eyes wonderfully like anger. How symbolical that hedged-in pathway seemed to her—a pathway where fate could not be eluded, and where death followed her like a shadow!

“I never thought to see you here!”

She looked at him darkly with her sombre eyes—eyes that made him think of watchfulness and waiting.

“Sometimes I come here and walk in the lanes. They are quiet, and one is not stared at.”

“You should not walk here, though, when it is getting dusk.”

“Oh, I am not afraid.”

The unfeigned earnestness of the man betrayed a depth beyond the shallows of mere words.

“Others—may be afraid for you. These paths that seem so sweet and green are often the night tracks of the vermin of the streets.”

Their eyes met and appeared to exchange a challenge.

“I have never been troubled here.”

“God save the chance that you ever should. We can walk back together, now that we have met.”

She had no excuse with which to parry his grave frankness. Had life promised another meaning she might have suffered herself to be touched by the message that his manhood seemed to utter. And to John Gore, walking at her side, the rose-trees that had bloomed in the quaint gardens were budding again into crimson flame. The high hedgerows were full of golden light, caught and held in the mysterious shadow-net of the dusk.

Under his arm were the pistols that he had bought at the gunsmith’s shop in the street near the New Exchange. He little thought that Barbara Purcell had been bound for that very place, where steel barrels glistened row by row in the oak racks against the wall. Chance, and their meeting, had prevented her that day, and her first impulse had been one of anger and impatience. It was not easy to slip away alone and unobserved from the house in Pall Mall. John Gore had marred the first endeavor. She could but pretend tolerance, and hold to that patience that counts upon the morrow.

Yet, when he was leaving her as the dusk fell, she felt like one nearing the grim and incredible climax of a dream. It hurt and oppressed her to be near him, and yet there was an indefinable mystery in his nearness that made her heart cry out against the inevitable doom of all desire.

“Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

She felt that he stood and watched her with those grave eyes of his after she had turned from him along the footway. And the shadow of the coming night seemed more apparent to her soul.

XV

There are few episodes in a man’s life that plunge him into that dim forest world of romance where the woodways are full of whisperings and elfin music, and the gleam of moonlight upon the smooth trunks of mighty trees. In youth romance is a habit; in maturity, a mere digression. The boy is naturally an imaginative creature; he dreams dreams of beauty and strangeness, and of women whose lips suck the blood from the heart. The marriage service sobers him. He ceases his excursions into hypothetical raptures, and becomes the steady, workaday busybody, proud of his house, his table, or his garden, paternally patient with poetical youth. Affection takes the place of that inconvenient thing called passion. To romance he is inert, fuddled—unless one illegitimate fire plays havoc with his respectable tranquillity.

And yet those moments of passion when the heart was all flame, incense, and music, and the world a young world gorgeous with dawns and sunsets, those moments of wistful youth come back dearly with a rush of regret that makes gray reality transiently bright with a faint afterglow. What though it be a cheat and an illusion, it is the finest dream that will ever steal through the gates of day. The man may remember it when he figures at his ledger, and may yearn secretly for that rich, sensuous youth which the cumulative common-sense of years has crushed into a faded, foolish fancy.

There are few lives without one red gleam from the west, one moment of desire when the wind comes with the cry of a lover through midnight forest ways. To feel again that strange stir of mystery many a man has leaped into what the world calls “sin.” It is but Nature’s living voice: the potion of sweet herbs that she presses upon her children, that they may drink and see the sky waving with red banners, and smell the far fragrance of pine woods or wild thyme. For life must beget life, and Nature weaves her mystery about the hearts of mortal men, only snatching the magic veil aside when her witchery has worked its will.

Now my Lord Gore had passed through many such phases, and was as wise as most men who have studied others and themselves. To remain interested in life the man of the world must be piqued continually by some new plot. A dish that can be had for the asking has less spice in it than one that boasts delicacies from strange lands. And my lord was amused by his son’s possible lunacy, even as a man who has been under the table many a night is amused by watching some grave person make a first experiment in the art of self-intoxication.

My Lord Gore and his dear Goddess enjoyed the little drama together, being in such sympathy with each other that they could discuss its subtleties and smile over its innocent blindness. There was some singularity in the case in question. The woman was not what the world would call wooable. As for the man, he was no courtier, and not given to fine phrases. They imagined that much bellows-work would be needed to make such green wood flare up into flame.

My lord and Lady Anne were standing at a window in the main gallery of the house—a window that looked out upon the garden and the music-room. My lord was hiding, almost playfully, behind a curtain, and peering at the mother with inimitable slyness. Anne Purcell stood back a little, so that she could hear without being seen.

“They are not very talkative,” said my lord.

“No.”

“A couple of sphinxes making love to each other without speaking a word! I have no doubt but that Jack will prove a veritable Petruchio. It will be boot and saddle for him to-morrow, and a canter along the road to York to see how his property doth in those parts. A man must be given opportunities of saying good-bye. It is discreet and amiable of us to stand here chuckling in a draughty gallery.”

Anne Purcell held up a hand, a sharp gesture for silence.

“Hark! some one is playing the harpsichord!”

“Not Jack.”

“No one has touched the thing for months.”

“That accounts for the discords. Mistress Barbara is picking up the old fascinations that girls learn at school. Phew! Jack must be a gallant liar if he can swear that he enjoys it!”

“For Heaven’s sake, be quiet, Stephen. I want to listen.”

She bent toward the window, holding her hollowed hand to her ear. My Lord Gore pulled down his ruffles and leaned gracefully against the wainscoting. He winced hypersensitively as the harpsichord notes jangled out of tune.

“Well, madam, if you can make anything out of it—”

“Be still.”

“For five minutes I will have no tongue.”

There was an expression of bleak intentness upon Anne Purcell’s face. More than once her lips moved. My lord watched her with an air of cynical tolerance.

Suddenly she straightened at the hips and swung the lattice to with a clash of impatience.

“Tut—tut!” quoth the gentleman, soothingly.

“Did you hear what the girl is thumbing out?”

“No, on my honor.”

“That song of Sutcliffe’s which the Westminster choir-master set to music! Such things must run in the girl’s brain.”

A frown gathered upon my lord’s debonair and buxom face.

“You are always looking for the snake under the stone, Nan. Why should we worry over such a flick of the memory?”

“Why? Why, indeed! Except that some shadow seems always to strike across my face. You—you should understand.”

He drew a deep breath, and expelled it slowly with a hissing sound between his closed teeth.

“If you believe in omens, Nan, we must transfer the sinister side of it to Captain Jack. Pah! what do either of the young fools know? They will help each other to forget every one and everything on earth save their two sweet selves. That is one of the advantages of the disease. What are parents when a lover appears? He has already roused the girl to some show of spirits, and for that, Nan, you should be thankful.”

There was, however, something false and forced in the energy of his cynicism, and in the flippant way he tossed the past aside. Yet even when they returned to the salon on the other side of the house, the faint, husky voice of the harpsichord followed them like a voice from another world.

XVI

In the music-room a sudden silence had fallen, like the pause between the two stanzas of a song. Barbara, seated on an oak settle with a cushion of crimson velvet, let her hands rest idly on the key-board of the harpsichord. Her eyes were raised as though her thoughts had been carried beyond the four walls of the room by the music her fingers had drawn from the keys. Yet it was not the pose of one who was dreaming, for she was looking into a mirror that hung on the wall above the harpsichord.

In that mirror—she had hung it there with her own hands—she could see the greater part of the room reflected with all the minute brilliance of a Dutch “interior”: the polished floor, the oak table, John Gore’s red coat, the brown wainscoting; even the vivid grass beyond the window, and the massed colors of a bed of summer flowers. John Gore was sitting in the window-seat, and she could watch his face in the mirror on the wall.

He was bending forward and looking at her with an intentness that betrayed his ignorance that she had him at a disadvantage, in that he saw only the curve of a cheek, while Barbara had everything before her. His elbows were on his knees, his hands knitted together between them, his sword lying on the window-seat, the scarf a knot of brilliant color like a great red rose. He was a man in whom even a child would have found great strength, and a kind of quiet sternness that mellowed when he smiled.

John Gore had come to her to say good-bye, and she knew the meaning of his coming, the meaning that had come kindling in those eyes of his since the duel that wet night in June. It was a mere man’s trick to be near her, and to turn a month’s absence to the service of the heart. And they were alone together in that room where she had found her father dead—the room that might prove an altar of sacrifice.