XVIII
My Lord Gore came to the supper-table in the best of tempers, welding fatherliness, gallantry, and wit into one and the same humor. After a glance at his debonair and handsome face the veriest nighthawk out of Newgate might have declared him a great gentleman, a pillar of the state, and upholder of all chivalry. No man could be more gracious when the wine had no sour edge to it. He could dance a child to the ceiling, laugh like a boy, and make the majority of young maids fall in love with him with a tremor of romance.
In the world it is too often self that is served, and the gallant courtier may be a bear at home. My Lord Gore was a man charmed with his own charm. It pleased him to shine upon people, to radiate warmth, to be looked upon as generous and splendid by men of duller manners. Yet he could act generously, and not always with an eye to personal effect. The plague came when his own comfort or his self-love were menaced. Then the great gentleman, the classic courtier, showed the crust of Cain beneath silks and velvets and coats of arms. Cross him, and Stephen Gore’s stateliness became a power to crush instead of to propitiate. He could be brutal with a courtly, sneering facility that was more dangerous than the blundering anger of a rough and clumsy nature. For though every man with the normal passions in him may be a potential Cain, it is chiefly in the two extremes of brutishness and luxurious refinement that one meets with that savage intolerance of the rights of others. And it must be confessed that in the matter of sheer selfishness the poet has often eclipsed the boor.
At the supper-table Anne Purcell spoke of Barbara’s singing. Who was considered the best master, and did my lord prefer the Italian manner?
“For a man, yes,” he answered, quickly, “if he has a bull’s chest on him. But give me a Frenchman to teach a woman to sing love-songs. That is the fashion for Proserpine, eh, when Master Pluto has gone a-farming?”
He winked at Barbara over his wine, looking very bland and fatherly, with his lips rounded as though he were saying “Oporto” to his own comfort.
“You might try the girl’s voice after supper, Stephen.”
My lord was very ready. He had a bass of rich compass, like the voice of a popish priest chanting in some glorious choir.
“Herrick should be the man for Barbara. Soft, delicate lyrics, with an amorous droop of the eyelids. Poor Lionel was too fond of the old Cavalier ditties.”
Barbara looked at him with sombre, widely opened eyes. It was not often of late that she had heard him speak her father’s name. And that night it woke a flare of exultant anger in her, because of the touch of patronage, as though the dead could always be safely pitied.
“Well, then, let us go to the music-room,” said her mother. “I will ring to have candles lit.”
My lord wiped his mouth daintily and laughed.
“Next month there will be no lights needed, but chaste Diana peeping through the casements and wishing she was not cursed with so prudish a reputation.”
They wandered out into the garden, where a great slant of golden light came over the trees and made the grass vivid, even to violet in the shadows. Barbara walked a little apart, like one whose thoughts went silently to meet the night. Now and again she glanced at my lord, when his eyes were off her, with an earnestness that might have puzzled him had he noticed it.
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.