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.”