XVII
John Gore rode for Yorkshire the next day, mounted on a good gray nag, with pistols in his holsters, and a servant with a blunderbuss, and a valise strapped on the saddle of a stout brown cob. Travellers had to take their chance of meeting rough gentry on the road, and many a nervous countryman, weighing sixteen stone, made out his will before he did so desperate a thing as travel forty miles. The sea-captain was not a man with jumpy nerves, and his thoughts went to and fro between rentals and harvestings and the ways of women as though he sat smoking at home in a padded chair. Put a man in the saddle on a summer morning, when the dawn is coming up, and all the hedgerows are dashed with dew, and he will be moved to sing, and to think well of the world, for the fresh kisses of the dawn leave no stain upon the mouth.
John Gore was thinking of Barbara Purcell; and the mistake a man so often makes is to accuse a woman of whims when he does not understand her, it being easier to call a thing by a name than to investigate its properties. Man is the creature of a superstition in this respect, and if a cow kicks the milk-pail over he calls her “a cussed beast,” and as such she is branded. For man, taking himself so solemnly, cannot stay in his stride to find out why a woman has her silks or her worsteds in a tangle. If she weeps, his great solatium is a sweep of the arm and a kiss. If she seems sulky, it is just her perversity, and it is no more use for him to trouble his wise head about her vapors than to ask a February morning cloud why it shows such a sour face. It is nature’s business, and man, unless he happens to be a psychologist, leaves it as such and thinks about his dinner.
John Gore, jogging along at a good pace, with the fields and woods all silver under the rising sun, looked back at the hours of yesterday with more thoroughness than the majority of lovers. An ordinary egotist might have drawn some flattering inference from the strange melting of the girl’s reserve and her eagerness to escape him. He would have reminded his own conceit that a woman cries, “Shame, sir!” and thinks what she will wear for the wedding. But John Gore was not so ordinary a fool. His thoughts went deeper into the soil than the thoughts of frailer men. And he had more true manhood in him than to insinuate even to his own heart that because a woman played the will-o’-the-wisp, she was luring him on with the lure of mystery.
It was all so simple, had he but known, as all great secrets seem when they are once discovered. Your astrologist goes weaving grotesque obscurities about man’s destiny and the stars, till one calm brain sets the whole grand and reasonable scheme in order. Men wrote with prodigious pomposity about a pump. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” quoth they. And Nature, like a misunderstood woman, laughed in her sleeve, knowing that the larger a wise man’s words are, the less he knows.
That Lionel Purcell’s death had left a great void in the girl’s life, and that she still brooded over the violent mystery of it, of these things John Gore felt assured. He could put no clear meaning to the mood of yesterday, save that much grieving had left, as it were, an open wound upon the brain, and that memory, touching it, would not suffer it to heal. She had never given him one glimpse of the real purpose that she cherished. Yet probably John Gore’s nag would have leaped forward under a sudden slash of his rider’s spurs had the man been told what Barbara had kept hidden from him in her bosom. As it was, her past life appeared to him suffused with a wistful glow of infinite sadness, infinite regret. Her face rose before him dim with a mist of autumn melancholy. Her crown was a crown of scarlet berries woven and interwoven amid the dark peril of her hair.
As for Barbara, she had fallen into a strange mood that day when John Gore rode northward out of her life. She rose early, and walked alone in the garden, showing an untroubled face to her mother when my lady descended after taking breakfast in bed. Barbara, to appear occupied, had a basket on her arm, and a pair of scissors with which she was cutting off the dead flowers along the border.
Anne Purcell was a lady who had never bent her back over such a hobby. “Such things were for maiden ladies with round shoulders and no bosoms.” And the mother was a little inquisitive that morning, for John Gore’s face had told her nothing the night before. Her wishes were all for an understanding between the two, and she was not squeamish. The grip of a man’s arm would hug the mopes out of the girl. Barbara needed hot blood to teach her to live and to enjoy. My lady was wise in all these matters.
“It is a new thing for you to touch the harpsichord, Barbe,” she said, with that kindness that comes easily when people seemed inclined to shape themselves to one’s wishes. “I will send Rogers to the City and have a man out to tune the wires.”
Barbara reached for a dead flower, showing off her figure finely as she leaned over the border—but there was no man there to see.
“You can have a singing-master again, if you wish for it, so that you can sing to some one when he comes riding back from the North.”
She laughed and looked at her daughter with motherly archness. It was good, at least, to see the girl busying herself even over such things as dead flowers.
“My voice is not worth training.”
“What! When some one is ready to sit in the dusk and hear you sing?”
Barbara looked at her mother innocently enough. She was all meek guile that morning.
“My Lord Gore is a good judge.”
“Why, to be sure, he shall give you a lesson or two. We must get you some new songs pricked. The old ones are too chirrupy and out of date.”
Thus my lady imagined that she had discovered much of the truth, and perhaps she had discovered some small portion of it beneath that placid surface. Dead flowers! Anne Purcell had no prophetic instinct in such matters. And Barbara was glad when she was gone, and the garden empty of all thought save the thought of expiation. She was neither happy nor sad, but possessed by a strange tranquillity, like the first sense of coming sleep to one who has been in pain. She might have been surprised at her own calmness had she been in a mood to be surprised at anything. It was as though bitterness and doubt had been swept out of her path, leaving the way easy toward the inevitable end.
Barbara went into the music-room, and, lifting the lid of the harpsichord, let her fingers go idly to and fro over the notes. So few hours had passed, and yet the passionate voice of yesterday had died down to a distant whisper. She was glad, quietly glad now, that he had gone out of her life innocent and unharmed. There was still the blood-debt between them, and in the consummation of her purpose she would leave him a memory that could retain but little tenderness.
It was a strange yet very natural mood, the mood of one going calmly to the scaffold with all the fears and yearnings of yesterday drugged into stoical sleep. Her one wonder was that she had been so blind, and that she should have overlooked the grim simplicity of the riddle of three years. Now, everything seemed as apparent and real to her as the reflection of her own face in the mirror upon the wall. Her whole insight had seized upon the discovery and accepted it with swift conviction, even as a man in doubt and trouble seizes on the text that answers his appeal. She could have laughed at her own blindness, had laughter been possible over such a hazard.
My Lord Gore was to sup with them at six o’clock that evening. Barbara looked calmly toward the hour, as though her heart had emptied itself of all emotion. There was no anger in her, no haste, no clash of horror and regret. “I shall kill him to-night,” she said to herself, quite quietly, as though there could be no other ending to that three years’ vigil. Judged by the ordinary sentiment of life, men would have called her utterly callous, execrably vindictive, a thing without any heart in her to feel or fear. Yet fireside judgments are shallow things. No man knows what a hanging is like till he happens to drive in the tumbrel to Tyburn, and the imagination looks for lurid lights where everything may be as calm and cold as snow. It is easy for a man to sit as judge with the stem of a pipe between his teeth and a good dinner inside him. He has no more knowledge of what love and desire and vengeance and death may be than a plum-pudding can know the thoughts inside the head of the woman who stirred it in the making.
At noon Barbara dined with her mother, and in a Venetian vase upon the table there were some late roses sent from my Lord Gore’s garden at Bushy. The subtle scent of the flowers remained with the memory of that day like the perfume from censers before a sacrifice. After dinner she dressed herself, and, taking the girl who waited on her as maid, walked in the park and down past Whitehall toward the river. The girl with her noticed nothing strange, save that she was very silent, and seemed not to see the people who went by.
Leaning over the parapet of the river-walk, Barbara saw a barge moored near in, and a couple of brown children sitting at the top of the cabin steps and blowing bubbles from broken clay pipes. The soapy water in the porringer between them would not have been wasted had it been used upon their faces. But they were so brown and healthy and happy watching the bubbles sail and burst that Barbara turned away from the water-side with the first pang of the heart that she had felt that day.
Coming back past Whitehall a troop of the King’s guard came by with drums beating and trumpets blowing, and all the pomp of the Palace in their red coats and burnished steel. The girl with Barbara stopped to stare; but Barbara walked on under Hans Holbein’s gate, letting a crowd of boys rush past her to see the redcoats and hear the trumpets.
She would liked to have wandered into the fields beyond Charing village, but time was passing, and there were things to be remembered. She went straight to her room on reaching home, and, locking the door, opened an oak coffer of which she kept the key. Lying there on a green silk scarf were two pretty little flintlocks, their barrels damascened and the stocks set with silver. She took them out and, sitting on her bed, held them in her lap while she ran the ramrod down the barrels to see that the charges were safely there. The scattering of powder in the pan from the ivory powder-flask should be left till the last moment.
Barbara was putting the pistols back in the coffer when she heard voices at the far end of the gallery. It was her mother and Mrs. Jael talking together. Their footsteps came down the gallery, and a hand knocked at the door.
“Yes. Who is it?”
Mrs. Jael’s voice answered, bland and sweet:
“Mistress Barbara, my dear, my lady wishes to see you in her room.”
Barbara closed the lid of the coffer, put the keys in her bosom, and went to the door. Mrs. Jael curtesied, never forgetting her good manners.
“Will you please go to my lady’s room?”
“What does mother want with me?”
“Go and see, my dear mistress,” quoth the woman, with an air of motherliness and mystery.
Barbara passed up the gallery without locking the door after her, since Mrs. Jael made a pretence of going down the stairs. Yet the woman was back again, with a briskness that did her years credit, so soon as she had heard the closing of my lady’s door. Mrs. Jael appeared wise as to what to do in Barbara’s room, probably because of that peep-hole in the wainscoting of the wall. She went straight to the table where the oak coffer stood, pulled out a bunch of keys from her pocket, and, choosing one marked with a tag of red ribbon, unlocked the coffer and lifted the lid.
Mrs. Jael showed no surprise at seeing the pistols lying therein half concealed by the green scarf. She ran a knitting-needle, which she drew from her stocking, down each barrel in turn, holding the pistol close to her ear and listening as she probed it. Then she examined the powder-pans, smiled to herself sweetly, and, putting the pistols back just as she had found them, relocked the coffer and sidled out of the room.