Mad Barbara

XLIV XLIV R ain was falling and the wind beating about the chimneys of Furze Farm as the daylight waned toward a gray night like a fog coming up from the sea. Barbara and Mrs. Jennifer were sitting before the kitchen fire, the girl watching the sparks fly upward, the woman’s brown hands busy with thread and needle. Gusts of wind came down the chimney, making the wood-ash shimmer at red heat, even blowing flakes of fire out on to the bricks. Now and again the drippings of the rain fell on the red mass, rousing the fire to spit like an angry cat. Chris Jennifer’s wife, looking up from time to time at her “little lady,” could see that Barbara was listening for something beyond the mere roar of the wind in the chimney and the swish of the beech boughs in the gathering dusk. The pupils of her eyes would grow large of a sudden, and she would lift her chin and keep her bosom from breathing, as though she heard some sound far away in the coming night. Mrs. Winnie knew well what was passing in the girl’s heart. Nearly a week had gone since John Gore had ridden for London, and her thoughts were out on the wet road, wondering whether he were facing the wind and rain. “I be thinking, my little lady”—and Mrs. Jennifer gave a tug to the gown she was making—“I be thinking that a bunch of red ribbon would look just fair for a shoulder-knot to yon scarf. My man Christopher has a liking for red in the winter, it being the color of the berries, he says, and warm and comely when there be snow about.” Barbara only woke to the sense of Mrs. Winnie’s words when the good woman had come to the middle of her statement. “Is that why they wear red stockings so much in the country, Mrs. Winnie?” “Lor’, my dear, what a fancy! If I thought that about Christopher, I’d be talking to him with a broomstick. Red stockings for a man to stare at on market-day! No, my lady, red be a warm and comfortable color, like holly berries, and that shoulder-knot would just be a touch to t’ green.” Barbara listened to the wind. “How heavy the roads must be!” she said. “Honest mud never harmed nobody, my dear. Lord bless you, we don’t think anything of mud in Sussex.” “Are the roads dangerous at night?” “And what may you mean by dangerous, my lady?” “Footpads and rough men.” “London way there be them kind of creatures. Puddles and ruts be our great trouble, and the mud-holes when the ways be rotten. A horse may break his leg in one of ’em; but there, God’s providence be powerfuller nor mud-holes.” She went on with her stitching, watching a red slipper tapping a little restlessly on the brick curb about the hearth, as though beating out the furlongs and the miles. Dusk was falling rapidly, and though the fire was bright, Mrs. Winnie was thinking of lighting the candles when the red slipper ceased its tapping, and the figure before her remained motionless and alert. “I can hear a horse, Mrs. Winnie.” Mrs. Jennifer listened. “It be a loose bough of the old plum-tree clapping against the wall.” “I am sure it is a horse.” She rose up and went to the window, and leaned her elbows on the sill. Mrs. Jennifer gave a nod of the head, as though assuring herself that youth must have its way. She knew every sound in and about the house when the wind blew from over the sea. “I will put a candle in the window, Mrs. Winnie.” She went and took one from the shelf, lit it, and put it upon the sill. And she was returning again toward the fire when she paused and stood listening, her head held a little to one side. “There, do you hear it?” Mrs. Winnie stopped her stitching and listened. This time she did hear something beyond the clapping of a bough against the wall. “Why, yes, little lady.” “Listen, there is the farm gate.” She turned quickly toward the door, opened it, and stood looking out into the dusk. Mrs. Winnie put her work aside, gave a glance through the window, smiled to herself, and then discovered that she had business in the dairy. In the dusk she had seen a man dismounting from a horse, and her husband plodding across the yard to welcome the traveller and take his nag to the stable. Mrs. Winnie was a woman of tact. She caught son William sneaking in by the back door, and took him with her to inspect the milk-pans. Barbara stood framed in the doorway with a warm light playing about her, and the brown wainscoting, the great beams in the ceiling, and the red bricks for a background. Yet the impulse of the moment failed in her, and a shy panic took its place, so that she went and stood before the fire and turned her head away so as not to see his coming. For there was something in the intense truth that almost made her afraid, and she might have fled away to her room but for the thought that he had seen her at the door and might not understand the whim of a woman. She heard his footsteps on the path, and when she looked he was on the threshold, wet and travel-stained, but with eyes that were very bright. He came and took her hands, but stood a little apart because of his wet clothes, and also because there was a sense of awe between them. His eyes searched her face to see whether there were any shadow of pain or sadness thereon. And now that he was so near to her, her shyness and her confusion fled, and simple love alone had utterance. “John, how wet you are! Come to the fire, and let me dry your coat. I had a feeling that you would come to-night.” She led him to the fire; yet though the initiative was hers, she went with his arm about her waist. “You are looking wondrous well, Barbe!” “Am I?” And she colored, and hid her eyes from him a moment. “I am glad, very glad, to have you back, John. I was afraid, with this rough weather, and the roads so bad, and you riding alone.” “And yet I was not alone,” he said, touching her hair reverently. “I shall never be alone again, pray God.” “Yes, dear, I understand.” And she put her face up for him to kiss her, her eyelids closed and the lashes shading her cheeks. Then she made him sit down in the chair before the fire, and, fetching the rough towel that hung on one of the doors, she rubbed his coat while he sat patiently and tried not to look amused. For there was something infinitely quaint and sweet in this ministration to a man who had seen the wild world in its cups and in its quarrels. He caught the two hands and kissed them, and looked up into eyes that were full of a mysterious tremor of light. “Do you know, child, what you bring into my mind?” “No, John.” “All the rough, blasphemous, accursed things that a man must see in this world, whether he wills it or not. They come to me, dear, as so many black memories, and I lift up these white hands—so—and I see what is clean and what is pure.” She looked at him an instant, and then fell on her knees beside the chair and hid her face upon his shoulder. “John, you forget; you make me ashamed when you speak thus; we women are not angels; we are quick, selfish, passionate things, though we may be unselfish when we love.” “Dear, I forget nothing of that,” he said. “Do you think that I would choose to love a saint?” “I am nothing of a saint, John.” “Thank God,” said he. John Gore told her nothing that night of her mother’s death, for the evening in that great warm kitchen seemed too goodly and dear a time to be marred by evil tidings. Perhaps self had some weight, too, with him that night, for it was a delight to watch the warm blood mantling under the soft skin, the radiance of her eyes, and the way she would look at him suddenly and color. John Gore’s eyes could not leave her that evening as they sat round the fire with Mrs. Winnie busy at her stitching, and Mr. Christopher smoking his pipe and trying to pretend that he was half asleep. The eyes of the day were empty of tears on the morrow, the world full of winter sunlight, the sky all blue, the woods all purple and gray. John Gore borrowed Mr. Jennifer’s nag, for his own beast needed a rest, and, saddling Barbara’s horse, he took her out with him for a canter along the grass track that wound past Furze Farm and onward into the vague lands. It was a grass track that might have come down from old Celtic times, before the Romans spaced out their Itineraries, a highway that had run south of the great weald that stretched from the marshes of Portus Lemanis to the plains of Gwent. John Gore waited till they were on the homeward road and not a mile from the farm before telling her of Anne Purcell’s death. They were riding along the ridge of a hill, with Beechy Head a great blue shadow far away, and the silver bow of the sea bent against the land. Barbara rode on beside him, with the light gone suddenly from her eyes, and a shocked silence making her mute. Her mother had borne and bred her, little more; she had even been ready to sacrifice the child to save her paramour and herself; and yet Barbara felt a great pity for that poor, gay woman who would paint her cheeks no more, nor ogle herself in the glass to see how her eyes beckoned. Barbara’s heart had changed greatly those months. She had a wider consciousness, more sympathy, more insight. It had become easier to pity than to hate. John Gore saw that she was weeping the tears of compassion and of regret rather than the tears of passion. And he let her weep, pushing his horse a little ahead of hers to give her privacy, for there are times in life when every soul must meet its intimate thoughts alone. They were within view of the farm when he heard her call to him, and her voice was very gentle, as though there were no malice and anger left in her. “Death brings things home to the heart, John,” she said, softly; “it is like a great silence that compels one to think.” He looked at her very dearly. “My life, what can I say to you?” “Tell me; John, that I was fierce and revengeful, and it would be the truth. Who are we that we should judge? One cannot gauge another’s temptations. She may have suffered while I was blind to it.” John Gore reached for her bridle, and they rode the last furlong side by side. And compassion for the dead seemed to hallow the love in their hearts. John Gore had said little concerning his father, save the news of the Popish Plot, and my lord’s flight with many others who were concerned. He was believed to have found refuge in France, and yet at Thorn, not five miles from Furze Farm, a miserable, maimed thing dragged itself to and fro like an animal that has been crushed in the jaws of a steel trap. A long splint, sand-bags, and six weeks in bed—such should have been Stephen Gore’s portion; but when a man with a broken thigh is alone in a ruin he must either crawl or starve by inches. Destiny had hipped him, and Necessity had him at her mercy. It was with labor and a sweat of anguish that he went like a worm upon his belly, for the belly hungered and tortured him with thirst, and the worm still wriggled with a blind instinct toward life. December was cold and raw at Thorn, but there was no fire, and the man lay on the stone floor with nothing under him but the cover and the padding that he had torn from the couch. There was no drink either in the kitchen of Thorn, and the quenching of his thirst became an ordeal that made his flesh quiver. Once a day a miserable, unwashen figure would go crawling across the court-yard to where the pump stood in a corner. The face of the thing that crawled resembled the face of a swimmer who feels a limb seized by the jaws of a shark. Slowly, with infinite carefulness, and a tremor of the whole body, he would prop himself against the wall, reach for the pump-handle, and trickle the water into the leather bottle that he had dragged after him by a strip of linen. Then he would crawl back again, agonized, cursing the pain of those grinding splinters as the leg came over the stones, the toe catching in the grass and weeds. Sometimes the water in the bottle would last him more than one day, for he husbanded it like a miser, knowing that each drop meant the sweat of his very blood. The food was an easier matter, for he had only to drag himself to the hole in the floor. But from the cold there was no escape. It froze into heart and marrow at midnight, keeping sleep from him, even making him weep like an idiot child. What a change, too, on the surface of things! Hands grimed, nails black, a stubble of gray hair over the jowl, holes in the cloth over knees and elbows, the dirt of the court-yard upon his linen. A squalor about his bed on the stones such as is found in foul jails. Even the lust for life, such life, would flicker out in him at times, and he would take his sword as he lay with the broken bone galling him like hot grit in the flesh, and run his fingers along the blade, and look at it, and consider. More than once he bared his breast and set the point of the sword over his heart, feeling for a gap between the ribs so that the steel should make no error. But the cold pricking of the point against the skin seemed to frighten even the despair and weariness in him, and he would lay the sword aside, cover his chest again, and stare at the beams in the ceiling. He had the blind lust to live, but not the blind courage to die. For even life in its most squalid misery may seem better, kinder than the black, unfathomable unknown. XLV T hough all the gay stuffs, the reds and the greens and the rich brocades, were put aside for a season, and though Barbara wore a plain black gown that Mrs. Winnie bought of Mr. Bannister at Battle, they made ready for Christmas at Furze Farm in country fashion, with a great abundance of food and liquor, with a yule-log the size of a tub, and holly boughs gathered out of the woods. Mrs. Winnie would have quieted the day out of curtesy to her “little lady,” but Barbara would have none of their pleasure spoiled because she wore a black gown for her mother. To cheat the living of their good cheer would not comfort the sleeping dead, and the very kitchen seemed warming itself for the wassail-bowl, and the beef and the pies, and the women with their ribbons. Now, Barbara had no money and a great deal of pride despite her love, so that John Gore, who knew how matters stood with her, had to resort to a lover’s stratagem to fill her purse. He told her a solemn tale of how the lord chancellor managed the affairs of the nation, and how she was her father’s heiress, though the estates were in the lawyers’ hands till the time came for her to step forward and prove herself a very comely young woman without a mad whim in her head, save that whim of loving a sailor. He also related that a very good friend of his had certain matters in hand, and was likely to receive on her behalf certain moneys that had been found in the house in Pall Mall. That money might come to her any day by private messenger, and so it did, though delivered to John Gore, and greatly to the girl’s secret delight, for she knew nothing of law, and, believing the lover’s invention, guessed not that the money was his. Yet here John Gore wellnigh landed himself in a dilemma. She began to plead that she owed him money for all the things he had bought at Battle, nor could he silence her for a long while, and then only by pretending to be a little hurt. Whereat she dropped the money as though it had burned her, and went to him and asked his pardon. The gold pieces had rolled hither and thither over the kitchen floor, and they gathered them and counted them into little piles. Barbara’s eyes had begun to dance with a multitude of generous desires, and she was already planning how to spend it. “I must go a-shopping, John,” she said, “for Christmas. If we could only borrow Mr. Jennifer’s wagon.” “A wagon, sweetheart! Do you want to empty all the shops in the town?” “No, dear; but I feel that I cannot give enough to these good people here. It has been a home, and a very dear home, John; I shall not forget it to the day of my death.” Now, John Gore talked privately to Mr. Jennifer, and Mr. Jennifer took counsel privately of his wife, and the result of all this talking was that Christopher prepared for a day’s jaunt into the county town of Lewes. He cleaned up his wagon, put straw and bracken in the bottom thereof, tied his horses’ manes with ribbons, and put out his Sabbath best. One of his men and his wife came into Furze Farm for the day, while the household went a-wagoning to Lewes, starting two hours before dawn because the roads were heavy and the days short. Barbara, Mrs. Winnie, and son William rode in the wagon, and John Gore on his horse, while sturdy Kit marched beside his cattle, his whip over his shoulder, and a sprig of holly in his hat. Barbara had a radiant face and but little money left by noon that day in Lewes, for even if the heart has cause for sadness there is joy in giving others joy. She seemed incarnate womanhood that Christmas-tide, taking a delight in all the little mysteries and mummeries of the season and in the revels that were held. John Gore had bought all manner of merchandise: a new gun for Mr. Christopher; a great family Bible for the wife; toys, sweetmeats, and oranges for son William and the laborers’ children; a beautiful chain of amethysts for his love. There was much giving and receiving that Christmas-tide at Furze Farm. The three laborers came with their wives and youngsters to the state dinner in the kitchen. Mr. Jennifer brewed punch, got a flushed face, and talked more than he had talked for a whole year. Little Will nearly fell into the fire while roasting chestnuts. John Gore played with the Sussex children till Mrs. Winnie exclaimed at “the gentleman’s good-nature.” Pipes were smoked in the ingle-nooks. The three countrywomen tried their best manners, and stared hard yet kindly at “the lady” about whom there was a mystery that had set their tongues a-clacking. Yet a woman who is sweet to other women’s children wins a way into the hearts of mothers. “A gracious lady, surely,” they whispered to one another, and thought the better of her because she touched their children’s lips. And when ribbons and blankets and good woollen stuffs came to them from her hands, they may have regretted the disobedience of Mrs. Winnie’s orders as to the minding of their own business, for Mrs. Jennifer had forbidden them to gossip about the “quality biding at Furze Farm.” Yet gossip had gone abroad, for all Mrs. Winnie’s caution, and even the lazy parson knew that there were strangers in his parish. With Christmas fare and festivity questions of the past, and St. Stephen claiming his day in the calendar, Mr. Jennifer had his cart-horses out for a gallop to sweat them well before the yearly bleeding, for it was the custom to give horses a warming and then to bleed them on St. Stephen’s day. Whether John Gore subscribed to the superstition or not, he saddled his own beast early and went out alone for a canter, having the Christmas dinner upon his conscience, and, what was more, a certain hankering to visit Thorn. For several weeks he had intended riding over to the place, but Barbara had been nearly always with him, and they had taken happier and less sinister paths. He desired to see whether there were signs of folk having been there since that November night when the horseman whom he had taken for Captain Grylls had ridden back to inquire after his lost packet. It was a still and rather misty morning with moisture dropping from the trees, and the grass wet and boggy. The fog did not hinder him greatly, for he had learned to pick up his landmarks at every furlong, and the track was familiar and simple when once known. About ten of the clock he came into the valley of thorns, and saw the dim mass of the tower glooming amid the mist. The place seemed infinitely melancholy with the fog about it, and the dripping thorn-trees and the black, stagnant water that showed never a ripple. The very ivy looked wet and sodden with the raw vapor of that December day. John Gore tethered his horse to one of the thorn-trees, and, finding the gate open, much as he had left it, he crossed the court-yard where the mist hung in the air like breath upon a mirror. He saw that the dog was gone, but, what was more, the kennel also, and this slight detail puzzled him a little and made him more cautious in his exploring. Going to the kitchen entry and finding the door ajar, he stood there and listened. The moisture was pattering down from the ivy leaves all about the house, yet from the kitchen came a sound that could not be easily mistaken—the regular, heavy breathing of a man in a deep sleep. John Gore saw that his sword was loose in its sheath, and, pushing the door open cautiously, he passed on into the kitchen. The figure of a man lay upon the floor with nothing between him and the stones but what appeared to be a tatter of rags. A sword, a leather bottle, and two mouldy biscuits lay beside him. His head was thrown back and his throat showing, with the stubble of a beard making the jaw look gray and slovenly. John Gore crossed the room softly, and recognized in that ragged, haggard thing my Lord Gore—his father. It was well past noon when John Gore mounted his horse again, and rode away from the mist and shadows of Thorn, with the look of a man who had spoken, even as Dante spoke, with some soul in the deeps of hell. He was thinking of an old, yellow-faced man, maimed, dirty, servile, with clothes worn into holes, and an intelligence that had flapped between emotional contrition and paroxysms of selfish fear. This thing had been the mighty man of manners, the serene gentleman of Whitehall and St. James’s, whose body had smelled of ambergris and whose fine raiment had shamed the sheen of tropical birds. Pride, vanity, even self-honor, in the dust and dirt! A white, flaccid, furtive face that had lost all its buxom boldness, most of its intellect—almost its very reason. What had they said to each other, those two? Murderer and adulterer; lover and son. Yet John Gore had filled the leather bottle for his father that morning, lit a fire with odd wood gathered from the rotting out-houses, and brought in an armful of musty straw to soften the sick man’s bed. And my lord had wept—miserable, senile tears that had no dignity and no true passion. He had fawned on the man, his son, grovelled to him without shame, till the son’s manhood had revolted in him, for he would have welcomed savagery and cursing rather than moral slime. It had been like a polluted river bringing all manner of drift to the lip of a weir. And though he had ministered to his father, he had kept an implacable face and a firm mouth. He had acted as a man who knew everything, and chosen to let my lord realize that he knew it, even assuming the truth that Barbara was dead. XLVI J ohn Gore rode for Furze Farm with many turbulent thoughts at work in him, and the raw mist that thickened from over the sea making the wet woods no more comforting than the degradation he had found at Thorn. He had been fierce at first with the man whom he called father, till my lord’s squalid ignominy had become apparent to him, and he had realized that he was dealing with a creature and not a man. For there had been no sense of strength opposed to him, no pride, no will, not even savage passion, nothing to struggle with, nothing to overcome with shame. My lord was dead in the better sense. Those weeks in Thorn had starved and frozen the soul out of him, and he had become half a savage, yet a timid, fawning savage whose consciousness was bounded by elemental things. At first there had been nothing but abhorrence and disgust for John Gore. This cringing thing with the face of an imbecile, embracing his own son’s knees, lying amid his own offal! What could a man say to this shadow of a self? Where lay the promise of judgment or of appeal? Good God! He could remember the time when he had stood in some awe of this same man because of his fine presence and his habit of command. Yet as John Gore rode through the white mist the impressions and instincts of the morning began to sift themselves and to piece up a broader, saner picture. Incidents, acts, details started forward or receded into clearer, truer perspective. The offensive flavor of the thing began to prejudice him less. He tried to see the whole untarnished truth with the sincerity of a man who is not content with mere impressions. Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where the mere physical miseries of existence would bring him near to death in body and mind. Pain, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, are grim inquisitors fit to break a man on the rack and tear the very senses from him. John Gore had looked into the hole where his father had kept his food, and had seen meat going putrid and biscuits covered with mould. He remembered, too, very vividly an incident in the Indies when he and his ship’s company had found a man who had been marooned on an island that was little better than a reef. The man was a Norman, and his sojourn there had been but a matter of days. Yet he was skull-faced, parched, abject, and as mad as an idiot child. He had run from them, screaming, when they landed, though his legs had given under him before he had gone fifty yards. And he had died on board John Gore’s ship, and they had buried him at sea, and often afterward at night the sea-captain had fancied that he still heard the man’s wild cry: “J’ai soif, mon Dieu! mon Dieu, j’ai soif!” Now Stephen Gore had been a proud man, and a man of sentiment after his own ideals. He had had other things to torture and humiliate him besides anguish in the flesh. Proportionately as a man’s physical strength wanes, so the menace of spiritual suffering grows the more quick and poignant. This man had spilled blood and betrayed friends. A well-fed cynic might have put such things under his feet and trampled them. It would be otherwise with a half-starved, memory-haunted, isolated being shivering the nights through, listening and ever listening, while the solitude hung like an eternal silence, and the slightest movement of the body set bone grating against bone. Who could shrug his shoulders through such an ordeal and come forth smiling with an epigram? Would not the very intellect curse itself and die by its own hand? Innocent blood; the betrayal of honor and of friends; lies, inevitable self-salvation. These thoughts would grip such a man, throttle him, spit at his very soul. They would not be conjured or persuaded. They would be awake with him through the winter nights; scoff when some spasm of pain made him curse and set his teeth; watch him with cold eyes when the light of the dawn came in. The same miserable dragging of the days, the same miserable passion-play of the crucified soul. Where would a man’s manhood be at the end of such a chastisement? The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer, who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a candle. In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting. “You have had a long ride, John.” He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his. “They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little woman?” She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who loves him. “Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.” He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler. “I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.” “John!” Her voice had a touch of appeal in it. “This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned with more than I foreshadowed.” “Where have you been, John?” “To Thorn.” “Thorn!” “Yes.” She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others rather than himself. “You are troubled, John. Tell me.” He looked down at her reflectively, and his eyes seemed to say: “Shall I or shall I not?” Womanwise, she appeared to understand. “You are afraid for my sake, John.” “A little.” “Is it because you cannot trust me?” Her eyes held his, and for once it was as though she had the greater power of will. “No. Because I wish worry and care away.” “John, do you think I shall leave all the burden of life to your shoulders? Are we so little to each other? Am I so selfish?” She felt his hands tighten on hers. “Barbe, I have found my father.” “At Thorn?” “Yes.” She shuddered slightly, despite herself, and he saw her eyes darken. “John, did you speak to him?” “Without mercy.” “Does he know?” “He thinks you dead.” “Why is he at Thorn?” “Hiding from the law because of this Plot; hiding from us, a miserable wreck of a man, half starved, almost mad.” She saw his face grow haggard and stern, the lines deepening about the mouth, his eyes staring fixedly at the fire, as though he were looking upon a thing that revolted him. The instinct in her was one of a strong, pure passion to be of use. He had feared for her courage, perhaps for her magnanimity. Yet it was she who took the torch that evening, and carried it so that the darkness seemed less dark. “John, my heart, tell me everything.” She drew him by the hands into the inner room, and shut the world out, save that world at Thorn. He looked down at her, as though wondering at the will in her, and feeling a strength and courage near him that might have the power of turning destiny into providence. She was calm yet infinitely vital, and her face had a radiance that drove scorn and bitterness and malice into the dark. He beheld a transfiguration—love bending toward love, beautiful with the beauty of sacrifice, pity, and desire. “John, do you fear for me?” He opened his arms, but paused with a sudden awe of her, and, bowing himself, touched her hands. “No, not now.” “Then tell me everything.” And he told her, sitting in the firelight, with his hands clasped upon his knees. Silence held them awhile in thrall. Barbara was leaning against the jamb of the chimney, one hand laid along her cheek, her eyes full of the past. It was as though some sharp struggle were passing within her, and for a moment her eyes had a glitter of anger. But the gleam passed from them, and her mouth softened. She looked down at the man with a mystery of a smile—a smile with no mirth in it, but full of sadness, yearning, and self-reproach. “John.” He started, almost as though he had forgotten her. “Do you love your father?” The question seemed to stagger him; he frowned at the fire. “Love that!” She rested her head upon her arm; his scorn had made the heart leap in her. “I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!” “But you—” “John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I should feel that, even more than you?” He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man. And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself. He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her. Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and then turned to him with a look he would never forget. “John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.” “Child!” “It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.” He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him, while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness. “Barbe, you can forgive!” “Yes.” “But it is for my sake?” She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears. “Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.” He bent, and kissed her lips. “Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep you!” XLVII F or three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs. Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar face. Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive, suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk. John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out momentarily in the midst of his degradation. “Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.” But it was a flash in the pan. Even the polite insolence seemed dead in him. He had caught his son’s arm and clung to it pleadingly. “Think better of me, John. I came here to save the girl: I swear that, before God.” And then he would show great cunning behind the chatterings of dismay, trying to worm from his son all that he knew, and also how he had come to know it. But John Gore kept a shut mouth and the face of a flint, the heart hard and contemptuous within him when he remembered the look in Barbara’s eyes when she had spoken these words: “I can forgive.” Surely there was no soul here worth forgiving. Better dead. That was the grim judgment his heart uttered. Such was the first week at Thorn, with the dark rides to and fro along the woodland roads, the mournfulness and dolor of the winter landscape, love by the fireside, retribution amid ruins. Sometimes Barbara would walk out a little way toward Thorn in the hope of meeting John Gore upon the homeward ride. She could not but mark the bitterness in him, a certain questioning look about the eyes that seemed to gaze toward some inevitable end. The riddle would have been baffling enough even if his heart had been in the solving of it. Granted that the past were given to oblivion, his father was a proscribed man; there was some risk even in shielding him; any day he might be discovered and taken. Nor could he tell Barbara all that he saw at Thorn. It was too sordid, too contemptible; and yet his very reticence led her to understand. Perhaps she had more sympathy, more vision than John Gore that winter. She knew what Thorn could be even to one without guilt, without physical pain, without an eternal dread, and with some one to bring food. This man had gone down into the deeps of misery and degradation. He had been starved and broken. That was her thought. Once she asked John Gore to let her see him, but he shook his head and would not hear of it. “He thinks that I am dead, John,” she said. “Then let him think it. God! Are we to make the thing so easy?” “John! John!” His fierceness hurt her a little, seeming to wake a clash of discords in her, as though the brazen gates of that closed tragedy were jarring wide again. “John, don’t speak like that, dear.” His tenderness shone through the anger in him. “Barbe, you may forget; I cannot. When I touch your hand, when I see the life in you, I remember.” The memory of that night came back, and she shuddered: the dark room, those throttling hands, the violence and horror in the dark. She looked at her lover and understood. “It is hard for you,” she said, very gently. For to John Gore at that time it was like pampering a man who had sought to betray the honor of his wife. The old year had gone; the new was in with white hoar-frost on the grass and the boughs each dawn, and a silvery smoke of mist melting into clear blue mornings. January went plodding on—a heavy, toothless, torpid month, despite the frost and the shimmer of sunlight; for January has little of the likeness of a child; rather it appears as a gray old man laboring in the dusk and the mists of the morning at some task that no man sees. It is a month when gnomes work below the ground, laboring for the mystery of beauty that is to be, touching the hidden seed with fire, breathing into brown roots the colors of the flowers that shall come hereafter. With January, Stephen Gore’s life seemed to sink to the lowest level of lethargy. Torpor fell upon him till he was like a frost-nipped plant with the sap congealed, the leaves shrivelled and gray. He would sleep for hours, and even when awake lie staring at the beams in the ceiling above him, his face blank and without intelligence. He hardly ever spoke. Even the fever of fear left him. He asked for nothing, not even food. John Gore thought that my lord was dying, and even picked out a place in the garden where he would bring him when he was dead. Yet it was not death with Stephen Gore, but a stupor that nature had brought upon him even as the winter fields lie inert and frost-crumbled under the sky. Fresh food and the warmth of the bed had a narcotic effect upon the man. The half-starved body seized greedily upon everything and bade the mere mind sleep, and so the mind slept on for many days, as though helping forward the old adage—“ Mens sana in corpore sano. ” For the body is but the stem of the tree of the senses, and the sick body is often the cause of the sick mind. Toward the last week in January John Gore saw a slow and subtle change in his father, a change that came like the first thrusting of growth through the winter soil. The flabbiness melted out of the man’s face; his eyes grew brighter and full of the intelligence of inward life. He was still very silent, but it was the silence of growth, not the silence of paralysis. John Gore would find his father watching him, not with the old, furtive, cringing look, but with a kind of sadness, a mute perplexity that betrayed the mind working behind the eyes. More than once he had made tentative little attempts to show gratitude, always watching his son’s face as though conscious of its imperturbable sternness. His son’s face began to be a dial of destiny to him. He could read the truth about himself in the younger man’s grave eyes. It became evident that Stephen Gore’s manhood and his self-respect were returning to him slowly as he lay in the kitchen of Thorn. What his thoughts were John Gore could only guess, though he was struck by the change in his father, the indefinable refining and strengthening of the outer and inner man, as though my lord had ceased to be the animal, and had come again to the cognizance of higher things. They seldom spoke to each other, these two, nor did they venture beyond the trivial needs or happenings of the day. Both were conscious of the imminent and dark shadow, and faltered before it, sheltering behind reticence and procrastination. Yet John Gore would see a certain look come into his father’s eyes, as though the man were dumb and were striving to speak. And the first breaking of the superficial surface of reserve was caused by nothing more dramatic than a beard. My lord’s self-respect seemed intimately married to bodily cleanliness and perfection in dress. Silks and brocades and perfumes were beyond him; perhaps he would not have asked for them even if they had been at hand. But it was with a gleam of his old wit that he desired most humbly to be barbered, and to be deprived of the hair that had grown at Thorn. John Gore accepted the incident without a smile, brought a razor with him next day, and dutifully shaved my lord’s upper lip and chin. He had done his barbering in silence, with the air of a man who had no care beyond the dexterity of his fingers, when my lord laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “You would like to cut my throat, John. Cut it.” They looked at each other squarely in the eyes. Stephen Gore was the first to glance away. “Nor should I blame you, my son.” And that was all that passed between them over the shaving of my lord’s chin. John Gore told Barbara of the change in Stephen Gore, and she listened with a faint smile hovering about her mouth, as though her intuition gave her some vision of the future. “Be gentle with him, John,” she said. “I have heard it said that pottery is brittle when it first comes from the furnace.” “Then you think the clay has been recast, child?” “Why should it not be so!” And he could only marvel at the change in her. So the month went, and my lord’s “grand air” began to flutter out feebly like a faded butterfly on a sunny day in spring. Yet there was a certain humility about him that made John Gore reflect, for his father was very patient now, strangely so for one who had sworn at lackeys. Often the son would catch a troubled shadow darkening the father’s face. He would drop his eyes when they met John Gore’s, yet he watched his son almost hungrily when the son’s back was turned. It was a day early in February, and John Gore sat on Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool before the fire, and cleaned his pistols that grew foul quickly in the damp winter air. His father had been asleep, and the son believed him still sleeping as he polished the barrels and scoured the powder-pans. He heard a slight movement behind him, and, turning sharply, found my lord awake and watching him with thoughtful eyes. Both men colored slightly. John Gore turned again, and went on with his work. Then he heard his father speak. “John, how long have I been here?” The son considered. “Three months—or so,” he answered. My lord sighed. “This leg of mine is mending.” The son said nothing. “I am wondering whether it is worth the mending. A man must die some day; though it is better that he should die like a man, not like a dog.” There was a minute’s silence. John Gore could hear his father’s breathing, but he went on doggedly with the cleaning of his pistols. “John.” My lord spoke softly, almost pleadingly. “Yes.” “Will you answer me a few questions?” “Ask them.” Again there was a short pause. “Have you any news from Westminster?” “What news?” “The Catholics, my friends—the rest.” John Gore laid one pistol down and took up the other. “Coleman is dead,” he said, curtly. “Coleman! How?” “The scaffold.” He heard his father mutter indistinctly, and the words sounded like the words of a Latin prayer. “And the rest?” “Some with Coleman, some in the Tower and the jails, some scattered. London has been calling for blood.” My lord lay very still. Then he turned slightly, and his eyes were on his son. “And in Pall Mall?” “My Lady Purcell?” “Yes.” “She died three months ago.” There was another and a longer pause. “John.” And he spoke with effort. “Yes.” “Why did you save me from dying?” The son frowned at the fire. “I do not know,” he said, at last. “John, you were always honest. Yet—God help me—with the irony of the truth.” Stephen Gore asked no more questions, but lay staring at the beams above him, his mouth twitching, his eyes glazed with a film of thought. He seemed to forget the presence of his son. The great dim world of the past, and the vast “beyond” that holds the past world in its shadows, engrossed the life in him, and he made no sound. As for John Gore, his heart was full of a conflict of strong emotions. Nor was his mouth so straight and stern when he turned and glanced at his father over his shoulder. Yet what he beheld moved him more deeply than any words my lord had spoken. For Stephen Gore’s eyes were wet and blurred, and there was the glisten of tears upon his face. John Gore rose suddenly from before the fire, and, taking his pistols with him, went out without a word. He was half angry and half ashamed, for though pity had welled up like blood into his mouth, a rough and scolding bitterness pointed to the meaner motives of mankind, and the leer of a possible hypocrisy hardened his heart. He rode home toward Furze Farm, meeting a strong west wind that made the sky move fast and the ash boughs clash in the thickets. And in the woods north of the farm Barbara met him, where a number of old hollies threw up a wall of dense, green gloom. He dismounted, and kissed her with some of the brusqueness of a man whose eyes seem too shallow, and whose heart is too near his lips. She let the strangeness in him pass, and they walked on side by side, the horse following at their heels. John Gore looked at the grass road before him, Barbara at the sky. And for nearly half a furlong they walked on thus in silence. “John, you two have spoken.” He glanced at her sharply, as though wondering how she knew. “Yes.” “What did he say to you?” “Questions. He asked questions.” “About—” “His friends; about your mother.” “What did you tell him, John?” “I told him the truth.” “Yes; and then—” “What could I say to the man? Curse him, he wept!” She paused a moment, taking her lover’s arm, and holding him back a little as though about to speak. The impulse changed, however, and she walked on again with a light of infinite wisdom in her eyes. For a man’s nature is a proud and contrary thing. She felt what was passing in John Gore’s heart, and she was too tender and too prudent to drag it roughly into the light of day.

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