“Yes, sir; yes—don’t curl your mouth at me. She bade me say that unless you come to her, she will—”
The expression of my lord’s face so frightened Mrs. Jael that her voice faltered away into an almost inaudible murmur. He stood staring at her, his flushed face seamed with the passions of a man whose courage and patience had already suffered, and on whom all the hazards of life were falling in one and the same hour.
“I will come.”
He pressed back his shoulders, steadied his dignity, and crossed the room to where hat, cloak, and sword lay on a carved chair. His hands fumbled with the tags of the cloak as he fastened them. Mrs. Jael kept her distance as he walked toward the door, for there was a look in my lord’s eyes that night that made her afraid of him. He was as a man driven to bay, and ready to stab at any one who should venture too near his person.
Stephen Gore walked the short distance to Anne Purcell’s house in grim silence, heartily cursing all women, and in no mood to humor a sick sinner. The whole thing was accursedly vexatious and inopportune, and he hardened himself against all sentiment with the savage impatience of a man who is harassed and menaced on every quarter. Mrs. Jael was a snivelling fool, an emotional creature who had helped to froth up her mistress’s panic. Both of them, no doubt, needed ice to their heads, and a couple of gags to keep them quiet.
Yet the great house was so solemn and dim and silent, and the woman’s manner in tragic keeping therewith, that Stephen Gore felt chilled and uneasy as he followed her flickering candle up the stairs. The place seemed ghostly and deserted, full of dark corners, draughts, and mysterious empty rooms. Stephen Gore had come in with his pulses thrumming lustily, and the hot intent to put all this meddlesome nonsense out of his path. But the house had much of the eeriness of a moorland in a fog, with quags ready to suck at a man’s feet, and a strange, vast silence to unnerve him.
Mrs. Jael led him along a gallery, and opened a door at the end thereof. She stood back waiting for him to cross the threshold, and then, as though she had had her orders, she swung the door to and turned the key in the lock.
Stephen Gore turned with a start, hesitated, biting his lip, and then let things take their course. The room was lit by a single candle; the boards and walls were bare, and there was little in it save the four-post bed. A great fire burned on the hearth, and the air felt hot and heavy, and full of the indescribable scent of sickness.
“Stephen!”
He forced back his shoulders, gave a tug to his cravat, and turned toward the bed. The curtains were drawn back, and on the white pillow he saw a dusky, swollen face—a face that might haunt a man till the day of his death.