My Lord Gore’s echoing of Biblical pessimism seemed to have lost its appropriateness so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. There was nothing listless about the intense and rather swarthy face that looked down into the garden with its white-pillared music-room and its October memories. It was more the face of some impassioned child of destiny striving to gaze into the mystery of the coming years.
The acting of a part to delude the world, and to make men ignore her as a spiritless girl. The merciless fanaticism of youth watching, and ever watching, behind all that assumption of listlessness and sloth. Then, in those solitary interludes when she had no part to play, the restrained passion in her breaking like lava to the surface, filling her eyes with a species of prophetic fire.
In a little carved cabinet of black oak she kept some of those relics that made for her a ritual of revenge—her father’s shirt stained with blood, some of the dead flowers she had found beside him on the floor, a piece of the cloth that had covered him that autumn morning. Almost nightly she would take these things from their hiding-place, spread them upon her bed, and kneel before them as a papist might kneel before a relic or the symbol of the Sacred Heart. As for the curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she carried it always in her bosom, sewn up in a case of scarlet silk. Distrusting every one, hardly sane in the personal passion of her purpose, she never parted with the talisman, but treasured its possible magic for herself.
Yet what had she discovered all these many months? The knowledge that her mother had put aside her black stuffs gladly, a growing sense of antipathy toward the man who had been her father’s friend. She could remember the time when my Lord Stephen had carried her through the garden on his shoulder; bought her sweetmeats, green stockings, and jessamy gloves; and even served as her valentine with a big man’s playful gallantry toward a child. She had thought him a splendid person then, but now—all had changed for her, and the analysis of her own instinctive repulsion left her obstinately baffled. She had no mandate from the past for hating him; on the contrary, facts might have stood to prove that she was his debtor. She remembered how she had caught him praying beside her father’s coffin, and how he had risen up with a strange spasm of the face and blundered from the room. He had offered money for the discovery of the truth, importuned magistrates, petitioned the King, put his own servants in black. No man could have done more loyally as a friend.
Yet nothing had been discovered. Some unknown sword had passed through Lionel Purcell’s body. The very motive remained concealed. The world had buried him, gossiped awhile, and then forgotten.
But Barbara had a heart that did not know how to forget. She had Southern blood, the passionate heirloom of an Elizabethan wooing. The Spanish wine of her ancestry had given her a flash of fanaticism and the swarthy melancholy of her comely face. And the whole promise of her youth had bent itself, like some dark-eyed zealot—to a purpose that had none of the softer and more sensuous moods of life in view.
Why should she hate this big, bland, stately mortal, this Stephen Gore who had no enemies and many friends? That was a question she often asked herself. Was it because she had been caught by the suspicion that he might console the widow for the husband’s death? There was no palpable sin in the possibility, and yet it angered her, even though she had no great love for her mother. A supersensitive delicacy made her jealous for the dead. The very buxom effulgence of my lord’s vitality seemed to insult the shadow that haunted the house for her.
As she sat at the window looking down upon the garden the sun sank low in the west, throwing a broad radiance under the branches of the trees. Their round boles were bathed in light. The figures that moved about the park were touched with a weird brilliance, so that a red coat shone like a ruby, a blue like a sapphire, a silver-gray like an opal iridescent in the sun. There was much of the charm of one of Watteau’s pictures, yet with a greater significance of light and shadow.
Dusk began to fall. A hand fumbled at the latch of the door, and a figure in black entered bearing a tray. It was Mrs. Jael, her mother’s woman, a stout little body with a florid face and an overpolite way with her that repelled cynics. She had amiable blue eyes that seemed to see nothing, a loose mouth, and a big bosom. Her personality appeared to have soaked itself in sentimentality as a stewed apple soaks itself in syrup.
Barbara did not turn her head.