Part 9

It was Mrs. Jael who came out with a tinder-box and lit the candles in the music-room. Barbara watched her through the window, noticing, almost unconsciously, the woman’s double chin, and loose, lying, voluble mouth. She was watching Mrs. Jael when my lord took her by the elbow playfully and turned her toward the portico.

“Come, Mistress Jet and Ivory, we must see how you fancy Parson Herrick.”

Anne Purcell went in after them, Mrs. Jael standing back as my lady entered.

“You can send the people to bed early, Jael.”

“Yes, my lady,” and the confidential creature passed out.

Yet what she did was to fly up to Mistress Barbara’s room so that her breath came in short wheezes, unlock the coffer, grope therein tentatively, relock it, and hurry down again with a complacent smirk on her fat face. For Mrs. Jael had a sense of the dramatic where self was concerned, and could keep a shut mouth, despite her loquacity, till the occasion should come when she could most magnify herself by opening it. She went out again into the garden, where it was already growing dusk, and, crossing the grass softly, stood at one corner of the music-room where she could wait to hear whether her prophecies were likely to be realized.

My lord had established himself on the settle with the scarlet cushion, and was playing an aria, the rings on his fingers glancing in the candle-light. The mirror had been taken from the wall above the harpsichord. In the window-seat Anne Purcell showed a full-lipped, round-chinned profile ready to be outlined by the rising moon, while on a high-backed chair beside the door sat Barbara, quiet and devout as any novice.

“Sing us that song of Mr. Pepys’s, Stephen.”

“‘Beauty Advance,’ eh? A wicked wag, that Admiralty fellow. I have watched him in church trying to discover which girl in the congregation would make the prettiest beatitude. A dull song, very, for so lively a gossip.”

My lord had a habit of turning his head and looking over his shoulder, as though he never for one moment forgot his audience.

“Well, has Proserpine a word to say?”

Barbara gave him her sombre eyes at noon.

“There are my father’s songs.”

My lord struck a false note on the harpsichord.

“Some old Cavalier ditty, fusty as a buff coat! No, my dear, we have forgotten how to carry a bandolier.”

“Let the girl try something. Teach her one of the playhouse songs.”

Barbara sat with one hand in her bosom.

“There is an old song I remember,” she said, with the far-away look of one calling something to mind.

My lord paused and glanced at her.

“What do you call it?”

She met his eyes.

“‘The Chain of Gold.’”

“The name has slipped my memory. How does it run?”

Barbara leaned against the high back of her chair. She looked steadily at Stephen Gore, every fibre in her tense as the fibres of a yew bow bent by an English arm.

“‘My love has left me a chain of gold.’ That is the first line.”

My lord furrowed his forehead thoughtfully.

“Hum! go on. I catch nothing of it yet.”

“‘My love has left me a chain of gold, With a knot of pearls, for a token. It came from his hand when that hand was cold, And the heart within him broken.’”

There was a short silence in the music-room, the flames of the candles swaying this way and that as though some one moving had sent a draught upon them.

My lord turned with a laugh that had no mirth in it.

“A dreary ditty. Where did you come by the song?”

She answered him with three words.

“In this room.”

My lady’s silks rustled in the window-seat like the sound of trees shivering in autumn.

“What moods the girl has!”

My lord kept his eyes on Barbara.

“Is there any more of that song?”

“There was only one verse to it till I found another.”

“So!”

“For to match that chain—there were three other chains. And they were sewn upon a black cloak with a lining of purple silk, the cloak Captain John wore the night he fought Lord Pembroke.”

My lord pushed back the settle very slowly. His face was in the shadow, but for all that it was not pleasant to behold.

“Has the child these mad fits often?” he asked, with a jerk of the chin. “She will be wishing Jack at Newgate next.”

Barbara would not take her eyes from him to glance in the direction of her mother. Had she looked at Anne Purcell she would have seen a plump, comely woman grown old suddenly, and trying to make anger shine through fear.

“The cloak did not belong to John Gore, my lord. Nor did he know that I have the chain from it that I found in my father’s hand.”

She rose suddenly, and, swinging the chair before her, knelt with one knee on it and steadied her elbow on the back.

“Father lay over there—near the table. There is a stain on the floor still—though Mrs. Jael was set to scrub. It was I who found him. You may remember that.”

They both looked at her askance, cowed and caught at a disadvantage for the moment by this knowledge that she had and by her hardiness in accusing.

“My dear young madam, you had better go to bed.”

Her bleak imperturbability turned my lord’s sneer aside like granite.

“Here is the chain from your cloak. I give it back to you now that it has served its purpose.”

She flung out her hand, and the chain fell close to my Lord Gore’s feet. He did not even trouble to look at it, as though he had no wish to appear seriously concerned.

“We appear to be judge, jury, and witness all in one,” he said. “Come down off that chair, my dear, and don’t be foolish.”

He spoke with an air of amused impatience, but there was something in his eyes that made her know the truth of what she had said.

“You have always thought me a little mad, my lord.”

“No, assuredly not. Only a little strange in your appreciation of a joke. Nan, stay quiet.”

Barbara had put her hands into her bosom, given one glance behind her, and then levelled a pistol at my lord’s breast. The high-backed chair and the settle were scarcely four paces apart.

“I made a promise to myself that I would find out the man who killed my father. When I discovered it I bought these pistols.”

My lady had risen from the window-seat and was standing with her arms spread, her open mouth a black oval, as though she were trying to speak and could not.

“Mother, do not move. I will beseech my Lord of Gore to tell me the truth before I pull the trigger.”

The great gentleman looked at her like a man dumfounded, hardly able to grasp the meaning of that steel barrel and that little circle of shadow that held death in the compass of a thumb’s nail.

“Assuredly I will tell you the truth,” he said, at last.

“Then let me hear it.”

He grappled himself together, gave a glance at my lady, who had sunk again into the window-seat, and then met Barbara eye to eye.

“Since you seek the truth at the pistol’s point, my child, I will tell it you, though no man on earth should have dragged it from me at the sword’s point. Good God!” And he put his hand to his forehead and looked from mother to daughter as though unwilling to speak, even under such compulsion.

Barbara watched him, believing he was gaining leisure to elaborate some lie.

“You are determined to hear everything?”

She nodded.

“Have it then, girl, to your eternal shame! Why should the unclean, disloyal dead make the living suffer? Much good may the truth do all of us, for none are without our sins.”

He spoke out in a few harsh, solemn words—words that were meant to carry the sorrow and the travail and the anger of a great heart. It was the same tale that he had told John Gore, yet emphasized more grimly to suit the moment. And when he had ended it he put his head between his hands and groaned, and then looked up at Barbara as though trying to pity her for the shock of his confession.

“Is that everything?”

She was white and implacable. My lord’s lower lip drooped a little.

“Is it not enough?”

“Of lies—yes.”

He looked in her eyes, and then gave a deep, fierce cry, like the cry of a wild beast taken in the toils. It was done within a flash, before he could cross the space that parted them. He stumbled against the chain that she had thrown down toward him. And as the echoes sped, and the smoke and the draught made the candles flicker, Barbara fell back against the wall, her hand dropping the pistol and going to her bosom for the consummation of it all.

“Mercy of me, my dear, mercy of me, what have you done?”

She found Mrs. Jael clinging to her and holding her arms with all her strength. Barbara tried to shake the woman off, but could not for the moment. Then, quite suddenly, as the smoke cleared, she ceased her striving and leaned against the wall, her eyes staring incredulously over Mrs. Jael’s head as the little woman clung to her and pinioned her with her arms.

For though my Lord Gore had fallen back against the table with a great black blur on his blue coat and the lace thereof smouldering, he stood unhurt, with my lady holding to one arm and looking up with terror into his face.

“Safe, Nan,” he said, very quietly, being a man of nerve and courage; “where the bullet went, God only knows!”

A gray fog came up before Barbara’s eyes. She stood like one dazed, yet feeling the warmth of Mrs. Jael’s bosom as the woman still clung to her. Then her muscles relaxed and her face fell forward on Mrs. Jael’s shoulder.

Stephen Gore put the mother aside, and, striding forward, thrust his hand into Barbara’s bosom. He drew out the second pistol, looked at it with a grim, inquiring smile, and then laid it upon the table.

“The child must be clean mad,” he said, with admirable self-control and a glance full of meaning at my lady and Mrs. Jael.

“Oh, the poor dear! oh, the poor dear! To raise her hand against such a gentleman without cause or quarrel! Her wits must have gone. I’ve feared it many weeks.”

Stephen Gore pondered a moment, looking at Barbara’s bowed head with a look that boded nothing good for her.

“Get her to her room, Nan. Keep the servants out of the way. We don’t want any pother over the child’s madness. Understand me there; for her sake we can hold our tongues.”

Mrs. Jael looked at him as though he were a saint.

“Poor dear, to think of it!”

My lady and the woman took Barbara by either arm. She lifted her head and looked for a moment at my lord, and then went with them meekly, as though dazed and without heart. Whispering together behind her back, they led her across the garden and up the staircase to her own room. When they had locked the door on her, Anne Purcell laid a hand on Mrs. Jael’s arm, and they went together into my lady’s chamber.

XIX

When Anne Purcell returned to the music-room she found my lord waiting for her there, walking to and fro with his hands behind his back and his handsome face lined and shadowed with thought. He looked up quickly when she entered, a look full of infinite meaning, as though he had felt a chill of loneliness and was glad that this woman shared with him what the future might convey.

He closed the door and casements carefully, after walking round the garden to see that no one was lurking there. Anne Purcell’s face still looked white and scared. The horror of a betrayal haunted her as she went to the window-seat, where the moonlight was already glimmering upon the glass.

“Speak softly. I had better draw the curtains.”

He did so, leaning over my Lady Anne, and stooping to kiss her before he drew away. Restlessness seemed in his blood, for he kept walking to and fro as they talked, pausing sometimes as though to think.

“Does the woman Jael know anything of this?”

“She knows everything. It was she who saved your life by tampering with the charges.”

“She knew the girl had pistols?”

“Yes—by watching through the hole in the wainscoting. She saw where Barbara kept them, and found a key to fit the coffer. Jael seemed to have foreseen something, for to-night she found that the pistols were no longer there.”

My lord turned to the table where the steel barrels glistened in the candle-light. He picked them up and looked at them closely, a deep pucker of thought upon his forehead.

“Who would have thought that the girl had so much devil in her! I tell you, Nan, she must have been playing with us all these years, watching and waiting, and pretending to be asleep. And it was a narrow thing, by God! But for that woman of yours, I should be lying there, where—”

He did not complete the sentence, but broke off abruptly, for the conscious shock seemed to strike him more heavily now the intensity of the moment had passed. He looked white about the mouth, and his eyes had a hard, scared wrath in them that made them ugly.

Anne Purcell turned on the window-seat to look at him, and then covered her face with her hand.

“She said that the stain is still there. And it is—”

“Fiddle-faddle! What of that, Nan?” And the evil spirit in him flashed out fiercely. “The girl has cornered us. It is no time for whimpering.”

He recovered his serene and cynical poise almost instantly, and, putting two fingers in the pocket of his embroidered vest, drew out the curb of gold with its knot of pearls.

“This little thing came very near ending everything. I shall give it no second chance. Like the easy fool I am I put that cloak away and forgot it, never suspecting that it had left such a clew behind. Jack turned it out of an old chest when he came home shirtless from sea, and wore it that night at Hortense’s. It was only when we got home that I noticed the thing, and talked him into surrendering it. She must have cross-questioned him. And, by the prophets of Israel, Jack was near having a bullet in his heart! She said she told him nothing. God grant that’s true. Jack’s a man with a tight mouth and a kind of grimness that sails straight in the face of a storm.”

He paused, staring hard at the flame of one of the candles, and tossing the chain up and down in his palm.

“What are you going to do, Stephen?”

“Do?” And his face darkened, although so close to the light. “Keep the Spanish fury out of danger. What can you desire—”

She stretched out an arm to him, her face rigid with dread.

“No, not again, Stephen. I cannot bear it—I will not—”

“There, there,” and he laughed, “how you women leap at conclusions! There is no such serious need. But I value my neck too much, and yours, my dear, to let her run at large.”

“Then how?”

He looked down at her steadily.

“The girl is mad.”

“Barbara!”

“Yes, mad, poor thing, as a March hare. Mad! Drink the word in, and live on it. Mad—mad! This wild scarecrow of a suspicion is nothing but a shadow on the brain, a shadow of distortion and madness brought on by poor Lionel’s death. There are some of us to swear to that, and our words carry more weight and volume than the ravings of a girl. Mrs. Jael must be worth her money. The whole affair will be very simple. Thank Heaven, son Jack is in the country! I can bleed him and doctor him when he returns.”

Anne Purcell watched him with a trace of wonder in her eyes. The man was so many-sided, such an actor, such a cynic.

“Then—”

“She must be treated as one gone mad, yet discreetly and gently, as though the family niceness were to be considered. No idle talking, no news about town. Yet being dangerous, even, perhaps, against herself—mark that, Nan!—she must be put under soft restraint in some quiet corner where she can do no harm.”

He spoke so shrewdly, and with such a meaning between the words that Anne Purcell again looked scared.

“No whips, Stephen, and all those things. I have heard—”

“Tush, my love, am I a fool?”

“But—”

He opened his arms to her, with an impulse of tenderness and strong appeal.

“Now, sweetheart, trust me. We have been too much to each other, you and I. Look at me, Nan; what I am I am because you are what you are. We are on the edge of a cliff. Don’t tell me that I must drag you over.”

He played to the woman in her, yet not without real feeling. She rose to him, and for a moment he had her in his arms.

“There. You understand, Nan, why I want to live. It is for your sake as well as mine, though I shall not see fifty again. We cannot help ourselves. And I tell you the girl is mad. I have said so to others before it came to this.”

My lord put her gently out of his arms, and led her with some majesty back to the window-seat.

“You must know, Nan, that this will be de prerogativa regis—that is to say, it will be the chancellor’s affair, and he is an easy man to manage. As to a private inquiry, we can probably slip by it—with Christian discretion. The point is—that the unfortunate subject is confined in custody under the care of her nearest friends or kinsfolk.”

Anne Purcell began to understand.

“But there may still be danger in it.”

“No; trust me; very little. It can be done quietly. There is your place of Thorn.”

“Thorn! Why, it is half in ruins, and no one ever goes there.”

“Nan, my sweet, are you a fool?”

“No, Stephen; but—”

“The country air and food, and contact with some simple couple—what more could the poor wench wish for? An old house in the deeps of Sussex, seven miles from a town. Why, it is made for such a case.”

She looked at him helplessly, for her selfish worldliness had received a shock that night.

“There is no other way?”

“None, unless you wish to feel a silk rope round your neck, my dear.”

They said little more that night, my lord putting on a cloak to hide his powder-blackened coat, and kissing her very kindly before he went. He gave her a few words of warning, commended Mrs. Jael to her, and spoke of the money that should be forthcoming. Barbara was to see no one but Mrs. Jael and her mother. They were to keep her locked in her room till my lord should bring a physician whom he could trust to inquire into the state of the girl’s mind.

Yet there was one thought that haunted Stephen Gore as he walked home alone by the light of the moon without a single torch to keep him company and scare away footpads: it was possible that the girl might turn against herself. And though he tried not to hanker after the chance, he knew how it would simplify the tangle. Barbara’s window stood some height from the ground, and there were no bars to it. My lord remembered these details before he went to bed. He was careful to show the man Rogers his blackened coat, and to tell him that he had been fired at by some villain, but that the ball had missed him by some mercy of God.

Mrs. Jael came down from her attic next day soon after dawn, her eyes red and suffused, her bosom full of sentimental sighings. She went about the house, blubbering ostentatiously in odd corners, dabbing with her handkerchief, and setting all the servants spying on her.

Yet all she would say was:

“Poor dear, poor sweet! The brain is turned over in her. And so young, too! I always was afeard of it, she took it so to heart. Oh, dear Lord, what a sad world it is, surely! The poor child’s made me ten years older.”

And then she would shuffle away, jerking her fat shoulders and trying to smother sobs, so that every servant in the house knew that something strange had happened, and were ready to hear of anything—and to accept it as an interesting fact.

XX

John Gore, riding over the yellow stubbles with some burly farmer at his side, seemed very far from the stately littlenesses of Whitehall. For, next to the open sea, John Gore had always loved the open country, either moor, field, or forest, so long as the eye could take in some sweeping distance. He loved, also, the smell of the soil, the byres, and the old farm-houses with the scent of the hay and the fragrant breath of cattle at milking-time. Much of his boyhood clung to the memories of it all, where the play of lights and shadows upon the moors made the purples and greens and gold as glorious as the colors of sky and sea at sunset.

John Gore had inherited these Yorkshire lands from his mother, who had been able to will them to him by right of title. Her marriage with Lord Gore had not been a happy one, for he had been too desirous of pleasing all women, while she was a lady of sweet earnestness who would have given her heart’s blood for a man—had he been worthy. Her character appeared to have mastered my lord’s, for her nature ousted his from the soul of their only child—a boy, John Gore. She had died in her Junetide while the lad was schooling at the great school of Winchester, leaving her property in trust for him till he should come of age.

Shirleys, for such was the name of the manor-house and the park, had been leased to a city merchant, a man who had trudged to London as a Yorkshire lad, and driven out of it as Sir Peter in a coach-and-six. The farms and holdings were under the eye of a steward, Mr. Isaac Swindale, a lawyer at Tadcaster. The whole estate was worth a good sum yearly to John Gore, and it was with the money, therefore, that he had bought and fitted out the _Sparhawk_, and sailed in her as gentleman adventurer into strange seas.

John Gore passed some days at Shirleys as Sir Peter Hanson’s guest, for his mother had died in the old house, and he had wished to see the place after the passing of three years. Perhaps his heart went out the more to the memory of that dead mother because she had taught him to reverence women, and given him that most precious thing that a man can have: the power to love deeply and with all the tenderness that makes love stronger even than death. The gardens and the walks were just as in his mother’s day, for John Gore had stipulated that nothing should be meddled with, and the flowering shrubs and the herb borders were there as she had left them.

The spirit of the place seemed full of sympathy for him that September. Its memories had a restfulness that touched him even more than of old. For the thought of his mother bending her pale, serious face over the rose-bushes and the green ferns where the roach pool lay seemed more dear and vivid to him because of that other thing that had taken birth within his heart. He felt that he would have given much to have walked with his mother through those little coppices and the green aisles of the orchard where the Lent-lilies dashed the April winds with gold, and to have talked to her as a son can sometimes talk to a mother, even though he be a grown man with the tan of the wide world upon his face. So near did her spiritual presence seem to him that he would not go to kneel before the stately tomb in the chantry at the church, feeling that she lived in the place that she had loved, and not under that mass of alabaster and of marble that covered the mere dust.

For John Gore had found the one woman in the world who could make the heart grow great with awe in him—as with the awe of unsailed seas. It was sweet even to be so far away from her that he might feel the dream-lure drawing him amid those Yorkshire moors. The memory of his mother shared in the tenderness thereof, as though she had breathed into him at birth that soul of hers that could love even in sadness and regret.

John Gore spent two weeks upon his land, walking in the gardens and the park of Shirleys, and talking to Sir Peter of the great ships and the trade routes, and the doings of the Dutch in the East Indies. Sir Peter and his wife were a grave and homely couple without children, whose simple dignity hurt none of his recollections. Or he would ride over the various farms, finding old friends among the farmers and the men, inquiring into his tenants’ affairs, and ready to sit down and take his dinner in the great kitchens with the country folk and their children. For John Gore was more at home in an ingle-nook, with some little Yorkshire maid on his knee, than idling in his father’s painted salon with a score of somebodies trying to seem more splendid and more witty than either their estates or their brains could justify.