XIII
On the evening of the third day at my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy, Barbara walked alone in the yew alley on the north of the great garden. It was like some dim cloister built for those who fled from the fever of life to cool their hearts in Gothic mysteries. The dark trunks broke, sheaf by sheaf, into groins that crossed in a thousand arches. Its shadowy atmosphere seemed silent and remote, full of an absorbed sadness that spoke of sanctuary.
On the tennis-court beyond the house Stephen Gore and his friends were playing out a match that had been put up for a wager. The women-folk were looking on, ready to hazard a brooch or a scarf on the fortunes of a racquet. Barbara, whose heart was full of a fierce unrest, had slipped away alone into the garden, and even if her mother had missed her, she had pinned a sentimental meaning to her daughter’s mood.
The sun sank low in the west as Barbara walked in the alley of yews, so low that the western arch of the cloister was a panel of ruddy gold. The long shafts of the decline came streaming through and through the criss-cross boughs, splashing the trunks with amber, and weaving a checker of light and shadow upon the path. There was no sound to break the silence save the occasional plash of oars upon the river and the faint voices from the tennis-court beyond the house.
Yet for Barbara the sweet sanctity of the ancient trees had no solace and no shade. She had fled there as to a sanctuary to escape from that most fierce and incomprehensible thing—herself. The desire to be alone had been like the thirst of one in a desert—thirst for quiet waters and the shadow of some great rock.
The girl had come to my Lord Gore’s house with the purpose of three years struggling to be matured. Perhaps she was a little mad, even as a mind that has brooded upon one shadowy memory must lose the sane breadth of noonday for the more vivid contrasts of dawn or twilight. The fanatical Spanish blood in her had taken fire and burned those three years in the deeps of her sombre eyes. For she had loved the man—her father—as she had loved no other living thing on earth. The manner of his death still woke a slow, ominous fury in her—a phase that placid natures might have been unable to understand. Yet the Jews of old were true and elemental in their vengeances and in the vengeance of their God. They understood that flame of fire in the heart that consumes even its own substance till the sacrificial victim has been found.
Yet here was the bitterness of the thing that she should falter before this very sacrifice. It is so easy to strike when the whole heart is in the blow; so difficult when some trick of lovableness makes the courage waver. If only the man had helped her by being gross, arrogant, or contemptible! Yet he was all that she would not have him be, and all that she, as a woman, would have desired had there been no inevitable tragedy urging her on. His very surface, though she rallied herself with cynical distrust, made her incredulous, even afraid. Often she would fling the very suspicion from her with passionate unbelief. And yet in an hour it would flow back again like dark water into a well.
Walking the yew walk in some such mood of doubt and hesitation, she saw a boy’s face looking down at her from overhead—a brown, impudent, snub-nosed face with an intelligent twinkle in the eyes. It was John Gore’s boy, Sparkin, straddling the fork of a yew, the dense vault of foliage overhead casting so deep a shadow that he might have escaped notice like his Majesty in the oak after Worcester fight.
Barbara paused and glanced up at him threateningly, angry at the thought that she had been spied upon.
“What are you doing there?”
“Birds’-nesting,” said the boy, promptly.
“You won’t find any eggs this month of the year.”
“Oh, sha’n’t I!”
“No, the birds are fledged.”
“Some of them sit twice,” quoth Sparkin, determined neither to be corrected nor to be crushed, though he had been caught at such a disadvantage.
There was a stone bench at the western end of the yew alley, and Barbara, leaving Sparkin skied by his own conceit, walked on and sat down on the bench, knowing that the best way to hurt a boy is to ignore him. But Sparkin was out on no vainglorious adventure. He had nearly been tempted to interest himself in his master’s affairs, for it was a new experience for the youngster to watch this king of the quarter-deck dipping his flag to a thing in a petticoat.
Therefore, Sparkin came scuffling down the tree as soon as he discovered that his ambuscade had failed, and, pushing his way between the yews and a high brick wall, disappeared in the direction of the house.
Making a bolt for the doorway leading into the tennis-court, he ran full tilt into a gentleman as he rounded the corner, and that gentleman being none other than Captain Gore himself, he took Master Sparkin playfully by the ear, concluding that the boy had been in mischief, and that vengeance in some shape or form followed at his heels.
“Hallo! what are you running for?”
Sparkin had no excuse for the moment. It would have been useless to explain that he preferred the more vigorous form of exercise.
“I met Mistress Barbara in the yew walk, captain.”
His innocence was sublime. What earthly interest could John Gore take in such a coincidence?
“I was birds’-nesting, and I thought it would be good manners to run away.”
John Gore maintained his hold on Sparkin’s ear, and looked down at him with shrewd amusement. Then he gave him a fillip, and a gesture in the direction of the house, a hint that the boy had the wisdom to accept as final.
The stone bench in the yew walk was set forward a little from the trunks of the trees, and John Gore, as he entered the alley, saw the girl’s figure outlined against the gold of the western sky. This tunnel of shadows seemed to him to lead toward mystery and desire. The figure at the end thereof remained motionless as a statue in black marble set before the entrance to a shrine.
She did not wake to his presence till he was quite near to her, with the sun shining upon his face, and upon the new coat of scarlet cloth that he wore. There may have been some symbolism in the very color of the cloth. The simple richness of it suited his brown skin and the swarthy strength of his clean-shaven face.
“Oh, is it you!”
“You were tired of watching grown men playing with a ball?”
“Perhaps I had other things to think of.”
She moved aside and gathered up her dress so that there was ample room for him upon the bench. Yet, though it was done coldly, imperturbably, without a glimmer of a smile, the man whom she had sworn to kill suspected nothing but habitual melancholy.
“Your boy was here a minute or two ago.”
“Sparkin? I caught him on the run, and gave him a tweak of the ear to last for a week.”
“The child seems very fond of you.”
“Perhaps because I have never spared the rope’s-end when necessary, and perhaps because he has never caught me lying.”
“How did you come by him?”
“A mere chance. He was no man’s child—a kind of wild-cat that haunted the river-side and lived as best it could. It was before I sailed three years ago that I saw the youngster outside a Greenwich tavern. He was standing up in his rags to some big, well-conditioned bully of a school-boy, and thrashing him squarely by sheer pluck.”
“That is how you became friends?”
“I took him to sea with me, and grew fond of the youngster in spite of his insolence, which I chastened like a father. And the humor of it was that after pulling him out of a Greenwich gutter, the boy pulled a ship’s crew out of a Barbary prison. I have told you that tale before.”
Barbara watched his face while he was speaking with an intentness that made him feel the nearness of her eyes.
“A lucky day for the boy.”
“And for me. We are more than quits. I am here in England.” And he glanced at her as though he had meant more than he had said.
Barbara cherished her reserve.
“It was in the autumn of 1675 that you sailed,” she said.
“No, earlier than that.”
“I remember the year well.”
“It was in June, not in the autumn.”
“I remember every month of that year, because it was the year that my father died.”
She spoke calmly, yet he was startled by the expression of her face. It shone white in the half-gloom of the evening under the yews, the eyes gleaming out from it with a dull fire.
“The month was June; I am sure of that.”
“If you say it was June it must have been so. You should know.”
Her wayward strangeness puzzled him. At times he was even tempted to believe that what my Lord Gore had hinted at might some day prove too true. The thought roused in him a shock of rebellion at the heart, and an instinct of strong tenderness that woke a longing to cherish and to protect.
“Are you cold here? There is a mist beginning to rise from the river.”
“They will be wondering what has become of us.”
“Let them wonder. I will fetch you a cloak.”
“No. Let us go in.”
She shivered momentarily and rose from the bench, drawing a little away from him as they walked up the yew alley together. The east was full of a faint crimson splendor; the colder tints had not come as yet.
Neither of them appeared to have a word to say. Yet the silence was tinged with a vague mystery that seemed to catch the spirit of the dying day. To John Gore it seemed that any memory of that fatal year chilled the girl like the breath of a raw November night.
Barbara went to her room with a feeling of infinite loneliness weighing upon her heart, the loneliness of a gray twilight over a gray land. An utter dreariness dulled all feeling in her for the hour. Perfunctorily, almost blindly, she changed her dress, putting on something richer for the wax lights and the music in the state salon. A procession of dim thoughts moved slowly through her brain, their significance hurting her despite her obstinate self-will.
It was inevitable that the man should swear that he had sailed from England before the month of her father’s death.
Had not the voyage itself been a trick to cover the meaning of the past? Neither he nor that other one whom she suspected had betrayed one glimmer of a tragic intimacy. But that, too, was inevitable—a surface hypocrisy that might betray caution, penitence, even a fading of desire.
And yet—and yet!
She stretched her arms out with a kind of anguish of incredulous helplessness, feeling utterly alone in a world of bitterness and horror. Could he be that man whose sword had left her father dead that autumn night?