XVI
In the music-room a sudden silence had fallen, like the pause between the two stanzas of a song. Barbara, seated on an oak settle with a cushion of crimson velvet, let her hands rest idly on the key-board of the harpsichord. Her eyes were raised as though her thoughts had been carried beyond the four walls of the room by the music her fingers had drawn from the keys. Yet it was not the pose of one who was dreaming, for she was looking into a mirror that hung on the wall above the harpsichord.
In that mirror—she had hung it there with her own hands—she could see the greater part of the room reflected with all the minute brilliance of a Dutch “interior”: the polished floor, the oak table, John Gore’s red coat, the brown wainscoting; even the vivid grass beyond the window, and the massed colors of a bed of summer flowers. John Gore was sitting in the window-seat, and she could watch his face in the mirror on the wall.
He was bending forward and looking at her with an intentness that betrayed his ignorance that she had him at a disadvantage, in that he saw only the curve of a cheek, while Barbara had everything before her. His elbows were on his knees, his hands knitted together between them, his sword lying on the window-seat, the scarf a knot of brilliant color like a great red rose. He was a man in whom even a child would have found great strength, and a kind of quiet sternness that mellowed when he smiled.
John Gore had come to her to say good-bye, and she knew the meaning of his coming, the meaning that had come kindling in those eyes of his since the duel that wet night in June. It was a mere man’s trick to be near her, and to turn a month’s absence to the service of the heart. And they were alone together in that room where she had found her father dead—the room that might prove an altar of sacrifice.
Barbara’s white face seemed near to tragedy as she gazed steadily into the mirror on the wall. Every fibre of her heart had been strung to a tenseness that made each heart-beat hard and perceptible. She had put pity from her with the dry cold eyes of a fatalist and the fierce apathy of one driven onward by force of fate. She had faltered too long, clung too treacherously to an incredulous caution. Life had become a dull misery for her, full of infinite doubt and sudden passionate impulses that carried her to the edge of the unknown. Only to grasp the truth, to tear aside the veil of sentiment, to end the uncertainty of it, even if it should be forever! Her heart was emptying of the power to hate. She had begun to distrust herself. She had to scourge herself with memories, as a fanatic uses a knotted whip upon the flesh.
“Is that the end?”
The silence had seemed a silence of hours instead of moments, and she started at the sound of his voice, pressing a hand over her bosom with an involuntary spasm of swift consciousness. She was wearing a loose gown with a mass of lace over the breasts. There was something more tangible hidden there than a memory.
“I have no voice to sing; I shall only remind you of a missel-thrush.”
“But the harpsichord?”