“What does mother want with me?”
“Go and see, my dear mistress,” quoth the woman, with an air of motherliness and mystery.
Barbara passed up the gallery without locking the door after her, since Mrs. Jael made a pretence of going down the stairs. Yet the woman was back again, with a briskness that did her years credit, so soon as she had heard the closing of my lady’s door. Mrs. Jael appeared wise as to what to do in Barbara’s room, probably because of that peep-hole in the wainscoting of the wall. She went straight to the table where the oak coffer stood, pulled out a bunch of keys from her pocket, and, choosing one marked with a tag of red ribbon, unlocked the coffer and lifted the lid.
Mrs. Jael showed no surprise at seeing the pistols lying therein half concealed by the green scarf. She ran a knitting-needle, which she drew from her stocking, down each barrel in turn, holding the pistol close to her ear and listening as she probed it. Then she examined the powder-pans, smiled to herself sweetly, and, putting the pistols back just as she had found them, relocked the coffer and sidled out of the room.
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.