XLIV
Rain 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.