XX
John Gore, riding over the yellow stubbles with some burly farmer at his side, seemed very far from the stately littlenesses of Whitehall. For, next to the open sea, John Gore had always loved the open country, either moor, field, or forest, so long as the eye could take in some sweeping distance. He loved, also, the smell of the soil, the byres, and the old farm-houses with the scent of the hay and the fragrant breath of cattle at milking-time. Much of his boyhood clung to the memories of it all, where the play of lights and shadows upon the moors made the purples and greens and gold as glorious as the colors of sky and sea at sunset.
John Gore had inherited these Yorkshire lands from his mother, who had been able to will them to him by right of title. Her marriage with Lord Gore had not been a happy one, for he had been too desirous of pleasing all women, while she was a lady of sweet earnestness who would have given her heart’s blood for a man—had he been worthy. Her character appeared to have mastered my lord’s, for her nature ousted his from the soul of their only child—a boy, John Gore. She had died in her Junetide while the lad was schooling at the great school of Winchester, leaving her property in trust for him till he should come of age.
Shirleys, for such was the name of the manor-house and the park, had been leased to a city merchant, a man who had trudged to London as a Yorkshire lad, and driven out of it as Sir Peter in a coach-and-six. The farms and holdings were under the eye of a steward, Mr. Isaac Swindale, a lawyer at Tadcaster. The whole estate was worth a good sum yearly to John Gore, and it was with the money, therefore, that he had bought and fitted out the Sparhawk, and sailed in her as gentleman adventurer into strange seas.
John Gore passed some days at Shirleys as Sir Peter Hanson’s guest, for his mother had died in the old house, and he had wished to see the place after the passing of three years. Perhaps his heart went out the more to the memory of that dead mother because she had taught him to reverence women, and given him that most precious thing that a man can have: the power to love deeply and with all the tenderness that makes love stronger even than death. The gardens and the walks were just as in his mother’s day, for John Gore had stipulated that nothing should be meddled with, and the flowering shrubs and the herb borders were there as she had left them.
The spirit of the place seemed full of sympathy for him that September. Its memories had a restfulness that touched him even more than of old. For the thought of his mother bending her pale, serious face over the rose-bushes and the green ferns where the roach pool lay seemed more dear and vivid to him because of that other thing that had taken birth within his heart. He felt that he would have given much to have walked with his mother through those little coppices and the green aisles of the orchard where the Lent-lilies dashed the April winds with gold, and to have talked to her as a son can sometimes talk to a mother, even though he be a grown man with the tan of the wide world upon his face. So near did her spiritual presence seem to him that he would not go to kneel before the stately tomb in the chantry at the church, feeling that she lived in the place that she had loved, and not under that mass of alabaster and of marble that covered the mere dust.
For John Gore had found the one woman in the world who could make the heart grow great with awe in him—as with the awe of unsailed seas. It was sweet even to be so far away from her that he might feel the dream-lure drawing him amid those Yorkshire moors. The memory of his mother shared in the tenderness thereof, as though she had breathed into him at birth that soul of hers that could love even in sadness and regret.
John Gore spent two weeks upon his land, walking in the gardens and the park of Shirleys, and talking to Sir Peter of the great ships and the trade routes, and the doings of the Dutch in the East Indies. Sir Peter and his wife were a grave and homely couple without children, whose simple dignity hurt none of his recollections. Or he would ride over the various farms, finding old friends among the farmers and the men, inquiring into his tenants’ affairs, and ready to sit down and take his dinner in the great kitchens with the country folk and their children. For John Gore was more at home in an ingle-nook, with some little Yorkshire maid on his knee, than idling in his father’s painted salon with a score of somebodies trying to seem more splendid and more witty than either their estates or their brains could justify.
Now John Gore dreamed a quaint dream the last night that he lay at Shirleys in the very room where his mother had died. He dreamed that he was at sea again, and sitting in the stern-sheets of a boat that was being rowed in toward an unknown shore. It was all vivid and real to him—the heave of each billow under the boat, the dash through the surf, the men leaping out and dragging the boat up on the sand. He crossed the beach alone, drawing toward a little grove of palms whose green plumes were clear and breathless against a tropical sky. And as he neared the grove a woman came out from among the straight boles of the palm-trees, and that woman was his mother.
There is no astonishment in dreams, and John Gore went toward her as though she had not known death, and as though there was nothing strange in finding her there where palm-trees grew in lieu of elms and birches.
But she held up her hands to him, and cried:
“Go back—go back!”
Then there was the sound like the ringing shot of a carbine, and he woke in the room at Shirleys, wondering whether there were thieves in the house, and whether the old merchant knight had used a musket or a pistol upon the marauders.
Yet though believers in dreams might have sworn that his brain had caught an echo of some tragedy that concerned him deeply, how little John Gore thought of the dream may be judged by the fact that he went back to bed, after sallying forth with a candle and a horse-pistol to reconnoitre, and slept till the servant drew back the curtains to let in the sun. For the episode of Barbara Purcell’s expiation had become a thing of the past by the time John Gore reached Shirleys.
The day following the affair in the music-room, Stephen Gore drove a jaundice-faced old gentleman in his coach to the house in Pall Mall. They talked gravely together on the road, the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles compelling them to mouth their words almost in each other’s ears. The old gentleman wore a white periwig, and a kind of gown or cassock of black silk, beneath which protruded a very thin pair of legs ending in clumsy square-toed shoes. The top of his long cane was made to carry snuff, and the whole front of his silk gown appeared blotched with the powder. His long nose prying out from his shrewd face gave one the impression that the habit of snuff-taking had lengthened it abnormally. The skin over either cheek-bone was mottled with small blue veins, and his mouth, long and curved like a half-moon, made one wonder whether he was smiling or sneering.
My lord had explained the nature of the case to Dr. Hemstruther, adopting a tone of paternal and chivalrous concern that he contradicted on several occasions by a majestic wink. The physician was a quaint character, for he combined in himself two vices that might have been considered mutually opposed. Yet the resulting energy that arose from the friction between these two passions, the love of precious stones and the love of the eternal feminine, inspired Dr. Hemstruther with a lust to grab every gold Carolus he could lay his fingers to. He was a man of great repute, and had made money out of “back-stairs secrets,” though the apothecaries and the midwives hated him, swearing that he knew more than a mere physician should.
Now this shrewd, snuffy, peaky-faced little man was ushered about twelve o’clock into Barbara Purcell’s room, with my lady and Mrs. Jael to act as guards. The curtains were drawn, and Barbara, dressed in simple black, with her hair upon her shoulders, was lying, in the dim light, on her bed. She sat up and looked at them with her large eyes as they entered—heavy, languid eyes, that seemed to have been empty of sleep.
Dr. Hemstruther made a little bow to her, handed his hat and cane to Mrs. Jael, tossed back one of the curtains, and drew a chair up toward the bed. He sat down, keeping his eyes fixed on Barbara’s face, and sniffing from time to time as though he missed his snuff.
“So you are not feeling in good health, my dear young lady.”
He had a soft, silky voice, easy to swallow as good wine. Barbara, seated on the bed, stared at him and said nothing. It was easy to see that the girl had suffered greatly, either in mind or body, for the youth seemed to have left her face, leaving it blanched, lined, and very weary. Her eyes looked doubly big because of the shadows under them, and her lips were no longer firmly pressed together. The strain of her sacrifice had broken the heart in her, and she had fallen into a stupor like one whose brain has been numbed by frost.
Dr. Hemstruther considered her with his clever eyes.
“Can you sleep, my dear?” he asked her, at last.
“No.”
She was only dimly conscious that her mother and Mrs. Jael were in the room, and who the little man was she hardly had the will to wonder.
“What is it that keeps you from sleep at night?”
“Oh, thoughts—and other things.”
“Perhaps you hear voices?”
She looked at him vaguely.
“Yes, voices.”
“And they talk to you?”
“Sometimes. There are often voices with one, are there not?”
Dr. Hemstruther rubbed his hands together, forgetting to sniff for a minute or more, a lapse that the sentimental Jael mended.
“Are they the voices of people whom you know?”
“Sometimes.”
“And perhaps you hear bells ringing, and other such sounds? Do you ever see the people who talk to you at night?”
She maintained an indolent yet questioning silence. Dr. Hemstruther repeated the question.
“Yes, I have fancied it,” she answered; “one can fancy so many things in the dark.”
Dr. Hemstruther gave a jerk of the chin as though to emphasize this as a fact worth noting. He drew his chair nearer, and, taking her hand, looked at it attentively, rubbing the skin with his thumb-nail. Then he asked her a few more questions, keeping his eyes on hers, and watching her with the alertness of a hawk.
My lady and Mrs. Jael saw the girl’s eyelids begin to quiver. When Dr. Hemstruther spoke to her she did not answer him, but sat rigid, like a cataleptic, her face betraying no feeling and no intelligence. She remained in some such posture till the old man rose and pushed back his chair. Then a deep breath seemed to come from her with a great sigh, and the lashes closed over her eyes so that she appeared asleep.
Dr. Hemstruther watched her for a while, and then turned to Anne Purcell with an expression of sympathetic gravity upon his face.
“She is best left alone, madam, at present.”
And he marched out at my lady’s heels, Mrs. Jael following and carrying his hat and cane.
Dr. Hemstruther had satisfied a pliant conscience with regard to the nature of the case. He sat—much at his ease—in one of the leather-seated chairs in the room that had been Lionel Purcell’s library, and declared his conviction that the girl was of unsound mind.
“I can understand, madam,” he said, with a courtly little bob of the wig to my lady, “how much exercised you are in mind over your daughter’s sanity. At present it is the calm after the storm, the cool dew after the fire of noon. The pulse is depressed, the brain almost torpid, and she did not even hear some of the things I said. Then you heard her confess to hearing voices; that is a very common and significant symptom. My experience goes to prove that some of these cases are the most dangerous and distressing.”
He nodded his head, took snuff with emotion, and looked under half-lowered eyelids at my lord.
“The young gentlewoman must be most carefully watched. It would be expedient to have non compos mentis proven. That gives her guardians the very necessary power to have her cared for and restrained in some safe place.”
He was merely advising what he knew Stephen Gore desired in the matter of advice. There was sufficient on which to swear that the girl’s mental state was not healthy. Young gentlewomen who fired pistols and made wild accusations against old and honorable friends could scarcely be regarded as either sane or safe.
“Then you advise us to apply for powers of custody and restraint.”
“Assuredly, my lord, for the patient’s sake. She cannot be trusted not to turn against herself. I would suggest that you send her into the country and put her in charge of some capable relative—some sensible maiden aunt, let us say.” And his mouth curved with huge self-satisfaction.
“You prefer the country?”
“Far away from all distractions and all cares. Perfect rest, and a convent life. Then I may hope that God’s grace will heal her.” And he rose with a bow to my lady.
Stephen Gore touched him on the shoulder.
“Supposing that one of those violent fits should occur? A dose of soothing physic, eh?”
“Certainly, my lord, certainly. I will have it compounded and despatched to you without delay.”
That same afternoon Stephen Gore drove out in his two-horse coach, and called on no less a person than Sir Heneage Finch, the Keeper of the Great Seal. My lord and the chancellor happened to be well disposed toward each other for the moment, and Stephen Gore approached him as a friend with an air of grief and of concern. He spoke most movingly about “the child.” It was a sad affair, and might have been far sadder but for the mercy of God. Dr. Hemstruther had seen Mistress Barbara Purcell that morning, and given it as his opinion that she was of unsound mind. He had advised immediate seclusion and restraint, warning them that unless she was watched and guarded she might do some damage to herself.
My lord’s sympathies were importunate and appealing. It would be less humiliating for both the mother and the daughter if the thing could be done quietly, and without noise or scandal. The chancellor, being an amiable man, and not proof against sentiment on occasions, declared himself ready to agree. Yet since it was a question of the King’s prerogative, his Majesty would have the matter laid before him quietly; that was the only formality that would be needed, and no very serious one, for the King was grateful to people who took business off his hands, provided they did not relieve him also of the perquisites.
In three days the whole affair was settled, thanks to my lord’s briskness and influence—and his ability to pay. On the third evening he was carried in a sedan to the house in Pall Mall, and spent more than an hour with my lady in her salon. He had made his plans, and all that the mother had to do was to agree with him and to commend him for his ingenuity.
“We had better travel at once,” he said, when they had talked over every detail; “we can take her in a closed coach. And the nurse and her man can come with us; they are both trustworthy people. You say that there are only a gardener and his wife at Thorn? They must be pensioned and discharged.”
“Yes, no one else.”
“We must have the girl mewed up before Jack comes back. I shall be able to deal with him. He must not know where we have hidden her.”
“No; but should he—”
“Prove obstinate! We must find a substitute, or pack him off to sea again. The man has a roving disposition. But listen—in your ear, Nan: I have discovered some one who has taken a sudden liking to Captain John.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Not poor Barbara—she does not count.”
“No, no; but Hortense.”
My lady looked at him with open eyes.
“Hortense! Why, she has only seen him perhaps twice in her life. And then—?”
“His Majesty? Oh, Mr. Charles is—well, her banker. It would be like Hortense; it is the blood, and the southern fire in her.”
“But how do you know this?”
He flipped her playfully on the chin.
“How long have I lived in the world, Nan, and how much do I know about women?”