My lord appeared in excellent spirits as they walked home together in the dark. His son had a silent mood upon him, and Stephen Gore found nothing in his silence to be reproved.
“Pearls and gold and strange lands. That is Hortense,” he said, suddenly, as they entered the broad street; “a splendid creature, too—in heart as well as in body.”
John Gore walked on with no sound save the crisp beat of his feet upon the stones.
“What was the meaning of it all, sir?” he asked, at last.
“Meaning, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“Why, just what you please, my lad. We choice spirits and good Catholics love to have our gossip, and you can find in it just as much as you wish to know. You must come with me again, and tell the lady more about the pearls and the gold and the strange lands. I tell you, John Gore, there is something for you to discover more mysterious and alluring than anything Cortés and all the Spaniards discovered in the New World over the sea.”
XXV
In the salon of the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall there hung a portrait of the Spanish lady whom the Purcell of Queen Bess’s days had won with the romantic daring of an adventurer’s sword. It was the portrait of a young woman in a quaint stiff dress of black and gold, her dark hair curled loosely about her head, and her black eyes looking down out of a proud and rather peevish face.
The portrait was touched by a ray of sunlight that October morning when John Gore stood beneath it, finding a strange and wistful familiarity in the Spaniard’s face. He was waiting in the salon for my Lady Purcell, being the bearer of a letter from his father, who had ridden suddenly into the eastern counties, giving no other reason than that of business with a friend. These Purcell pictures had been familiar to John Gore from his boyhood, yet they were full of a deeper significance for him now as he searched face after face, but especially that of the lady in black and gold. There was a stretch of landscape in one corner of the picture, the one sunlit space upon the canvas, a scene of meadows and of woodlands, with a mansion of red brick rising from the narrow waters of a moat. John Gore guessed it to be the Purcells’ house of Thorn, now ruinous in a Sussex waste, but once the home of the fair Spaniard with the peevish mouth.