XXXIV
There were two link-boys waiting outside Lord Gore’s house in St. James’s Street when a short, stumpy woman came hurrying along with the hood of her cloak down over her head. The street door of the house was open, and a servant waiting on the step with a fur cloak over one arm and a sword under the other.
His master came out as the woman paused at the steps—a thin, swarthy, sallow man, with alert eyes and a brisk manner. He took the cloak from the servant and swung it over his shoulders, putting his chin up as he fastened the cloak, and making his lower lip protrude beyond the upper. Coming down the steps he looked hard at the woman who was leaning against the railings, a look that was half gallant, half suspicious, and even paused to stare in her face as though he thought she might have some message for him. But since she hung back and waited for him to pass, and was, moreover, woolly and middle-aged, he gave an order to the link-boys for the Savoy, and went away at a good fast stride with the servant following at his heels.
The woman ran up the steps and spoke to Tom Rogers, who was holding the door open and staring curiously after the retreating figure. Her voice was importunate, and even threatening—so much so that he let her in and closed the door, and went about her business without demur, as though knowing that she had some right to hustle.
My lord was in the little library at the back of the house, sorting and looking through a litter of papers on the table with a feverish, irritable air. There was a good fire burning, and charred fragments of paper littered the hearth and fluttered in the draught at the throat of the chimney. My lord had taken a roll of letters, and was thrusting them into the heart of the fire with the tongs when Rogers knocked at the door and entered upon privilege.
His master glanced at him with a gleam of impatient distrust.
“What is it now?”
“My Lady Purcell’s woman, sir.”
“Where?”
“In the hall, my lord. She says that she must speak with you.”
Stephen Gore’s face had the dusky look of a face gorged with blood from drinking.
“Send her in, Rogers. Take warning, I am at home to no one, not even to the King.”
The roll of letters was a black mass spangled over with sparks and corroding lines of fire when Mrs. Jael came in with the hood of her cloak turned back. She waited till Rogers had closed the door, and even then looked at it suspiciously, as though afraid that the fellow might be listening. Stephen Gore understood her meaning. He opened it, found the passage empty, and, closing the door again, stood with his back to it and his hand upon the latch.
“Your message?”
Mrs. Jael fidgeted her arms under her cloak, and looked hot and a little scared.
“My lady has sent me, my lord—”
“Well, well?”
“She must see you to-night; she will take no denial; I am bidden to bring you back.”
Stephen Gore frowned at her didactic tone and the menace in her manner.
“Indeed!”
“She cannot bear it alone, my lord; she must speak with you; we fear that she is dying.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, sir; yes—don’t curl your mouth at me. She bade me say that unless you come to her, she will—”
The expression of my lord’s face so frightened Mrs. Jael that her voice faltered away into an almost inaudible murmur. He stood staring at her, his flushed face seamed with the passions of a man whose courage and patience had already suffered, and on whom all the hazards of life were falling in one and the same hour.
“I will come.”
He pressed back his shoulders, steadied his dignity, and crossed the room to where hat, cloak, and sword lay on a carved chair. His hands fumbled with the tags of the cloak as he fastened them. Mrs. Jael kept her distance as he walked toward the door, for there was a look in my lord’s eyes that night that made her afraid of him. He was as a man driven to bay, and ready to stab at any one who should venture too near his person.
Stephen Gore walked the short distance to Anne Purcell’s house in grim silence, heartily cursing all women, and in no mood to humor a sick sinner. The whole thing was accursedly vexatious and inopportune, and he hardened himself against all sentiment with the savage impatience of a man who is harassed and menaced on every quarter. Mrs. Jael was a snivelling fool, an emotional creature who had helped to froth up her mistress’s panic. Both of them, no doubt, needed ice to their heads, and a couple of gags to keep them quiet.
Yet the great house was so solemn and dim and silent, and the woman’s manner in tragic keeping therewith, that Stephen Gore felt chilled and uneasy as he followed her flickering candle up the stairs. The place seemed ghostly and deserted, full of dark corners, draughts, and mysterious empty rooms. Stephen Gore had come in with his pulses thrumming lustily, and the hot intent to put all this meddlesome nonsense out of his path. But the house had much of the eeriness of a moorland in a fog, with quags ready to suck at a man’s feet, and a strange, vast silence to unnerve him.
Mrs. Jael led him along a gallery, and opened a door at the end thereof. She stood back waiting for him to cross the threshold, and then, as though she had had her orders, she swung the door to and turned the key in the lock.
Stephen Gore turned with a start, hesitated, biting his lip, and then let things take their course. The room was lit by a single candle; the boards and walls were bare, and there was little in it save the four-post bed. A great fire burned on the hearth, and the air felt hot and heavy, and full of the indescribable scent of sickness.
“Stephen!”
He forced back his shoulders, gave a tug to his cravat, and turned toward the bed. The curtains were drawn back, and on the white pillow he saw a dusky, swollen face—a face that might haunt a man till the day of his death.
“Stephen, are you there?”
My lord looked shocked despite himself, as though thinking of the face that he had kissed not many days ago.
“Why, Nan, how is it with you?”
Her breathing was labored, her lips cracked and dry, and the hand that she stretched out to him swung up and down, like a branch in the wind.
“I cannot see you; my eyes are touched.”
He looked at her helplessly, half loathing the thing he saw, and yet unnerved by a blind rush of pity that beat and shook the pedestal of self.
“Stephen, don’t come near me if you are afraid.”
She might have reproached him with the pusillanimous prudence he had shown in keeping away from her until this night. And, vain woman that she had been, she felt that it was the threat alone that had brought him to her. Yet she spoke calmly at first, and feebly, like one who had come to a sense of awe and of the end.
My lord put the best dignity he could upon it, but he felt the heat and the wilfulness in him growing cold.
“You have sent for me, Nan—”
“It is not the first time.”
“I should have come before, but I have been pressed and driven by a hundred things.”
Instinctively she turned her face toward him on the pillow, though she could not see him because the disease had blinded her.
“Let us make no excuses to-night, Stephen. Do you know that I am dying?”
“No, Nan—not that.”
She gave a long sigh, and her hands moved to and fro over the coverlet.
“Yes. I am dying. You know why—I have sent for you.”
“What is your desire?”
He stood looking at her in some astonishment and with unwilling awe, for she whom he had always led seemed mistress of herself under the shadow of death, and not the weeping, pleading, terrified thing that he had thought to find.
“Stephen, you must go to-night.”
He faced up as though to attention.
“Go? Where?”
“Need I tell you that?”
“My heart, you are ill—and distraught.”
She raised herself on the pillow with a sudden energy of passion; her poor marred face could not express it, but her voice had a deep, fierce thrill that came from the heart of the world.
“Man, man, do not play with me to-night, as you have played with me these many years!”
“Anne, if you will listen to me—”
“Listen! What have I to hear? This thing lies in my throat—and stifles me. I cannot bear it, I cannot bear to die with it—smothering my breath.”
He breathed out, and tried to hold himself in hand.
“Nan, it is impossible—”
“No, no.”
“I cannot go to-night. There are matters—affairs that it would be death to me to leave. I tell you, I tell you—my honor is pledged here.”
She held out a rigid arm toward him, her blurred, sightless eyes at gaze.
“Stephen, I warn you—”
“I tell you, you do not understand—”
“Your honor! You weigh your honor against this thing! Stephen, I warn you—”
“For God’s sake, listen: I—”
“No, no. Save the child, I charge you, or before I die I will tell the truth.”
Her hand dropped and then went to her throat, for a spasm of choking seized her, and he could see the muscles straining in her throat and her dry lips praying for air. Stephen Gore thought that death had her that instant, but the strength of her purpose bore her through.
“Stephen, promise me.”
He held out his hands appealingly, helplessly; but the gesture was lost upon her blindness.
“Promise.”
“It is impossible.”
“Man, man, have you ever loved any one but yourself? Have you never stood on the edge of the world—and looked over—over into darkness? I cannot go to it—with this thing stifling me. Stephen, I ask you, if you have ever loved me, do me this last mercy.”
He walked to and fro with a quick, rigid step, and paused at the far end of the room, feeling the air hot and poisonous, and the blood drumming at his temples.
“I am to sacrifice myself, Nan. You ask that?”
She propped herself upon the pillow, her head swaying slightly from side to side.
“I ask you not to face your God, Stephen, with more blood upon your hands.”
He cried out at her with bitterness.
“Woman, woman, what can I do?”
“What I have asked. Ride down to Thorn—to-night. And, Stephen, do not think that I shall die—so soon—that you can play with me—and shirk it. You may wish that I were dead now—and silent.”
He leaned against the wall, spreading his arms against it as though to steady himself.
“Before God, Nan, not that!”
“Stephen, if you have ever loved me, do not stoop to play a coward’s trick upon me now.”
He leaned there against the wall, almost like a man crucified, his face haggard, his forehead agleam with sweat. He had come to temporize, to dissuade, to cheat the truth with a few glib words, and he found the heart plucked out of him, and his self beaten against its anger and its will.
“Nan, I will go.”
“There is time—yet.”
“A night—and a day.”
She held out her hands as though with a piteous sense of loneliness and leave-taking; but though he was humbled, shaken, he could not look into her face.
“Nan, I will go. Let that help you to live. What will come of it God alone can tell.”
She felt instinctively through all the tumult of it that he could not look at her without a shudder, he who had always loved sun and color and richness about him—a soft skin and pleasant lips. Yet she was too near the veil, too close upon the eternal mystery, to cry out over a lost desire.
“Stephen, for God’s sake, go!”
She fell back on the pillow as he turned to the door and shook it, forgetting in the chaos of his thoughts that the woman Jael had turned the key. He beat upon the panels with his fist, and when the door opened for him, pushed past her without a word, and went heavily down the dark stairway to the hall where he had left his cloak and sword.
My Lord Gore was within twenty yards of his own house when a figure that had been loitering in the shadow came slantwise across the road to meet him, and stopped on the footway as he passed. My lord had a glimpse of a pair of shining eyes and the white oval of a man’s face between the drooping brim of a beaver and the upturned collar of a cloak.
“Good-night, my lord—fugax, fugax, solvendo non sumus.”
He was pushing on with nothing more than a low, soft whistle when Stephen Gore caught him by the arm.
“Blake!”
“Softly, for God’s sake, sir; I have loitered here for half an hour to give you the wink and the text.”
My lord still gripped his arm.
“What is it, man?”
“Boot and saddle for me, sir, before midnight, and the godsend of a boat across the Channel. Coleman’s correspondence has been seized.”
“The fool—the Jesuit fool!”
“The poor devil will be in the Protestant purgatory soon, sir. If you are wise, ride—ride. There will be bigger titles than yours, my lord, bumping in the saddle to-night.”
He looked about him uneasily, and then freed himself quietly from Stephen Gore’s grip.
“Your pardon, sir, but the hawks will soon be on the wing for some of us poor popish pigeons. Good-night.”
“Blake, thanks for this.”
“Nonsense, sir; you helped me once, and I am an Irishman. Good-night.”
He went away at a good pace, leaving Stephen Gore standing on the footway, with the wind blowing his periwig about his face. He stood there for half a minute watching a faint shadow melt into the night. Then he seemed to steady himself like a tree between the gusts of a storm, and, turning, walked on slowly toward his house.
But Stephen Gore did not sleep in Westminster that night, for he went alone into the stable when the grooms had gone and the servants were in bed, and saddled and bridled a horse with his own hands. He had thrown his periwig into a corner, put on the oldest clothes he could find, to ride out like a sturdy crop-head of a Britisher daring enough to venture on the roads at such an hour. Pistols, money, and food he took with him, and leading his horse out into the street, went away at a brisk trot into the black chasm of the night. He might be knocked out of the saddle at any corner, but Stephen Gore hazarded the chance, since he might be given an axe or a halter for his badge.