In the agony of it he rolled over and over till his body was stopped by the couch that Squire Oxenham had drawn forward from the window. He gripped the lower stretcher of the wood frame with both hands and took the sleeve of his coat between his teeth, as a seaman will clinch his teeth upon a rope’s-end to save himself from screaming when the surgeon’s hot iron sears the stump of a mangled limb. Then he lay on his back, breathing deeply and slowly, his hands tugging at the collar of his shirt as though the band were tight about his throat. His right foot had fallen outward, and when he tried to move the limb there was nothing but a spasm of the muscles and a sense of bone gritting against bone.
XLIII
The days were pleasant enough at Furze Farm, with Barbara gaining in health and color, and in a womanly winsomeness that made even Mrs. Jennifer wonder. It was as though the real soul had come to life in her again, and her heart, that had been a thing of moods and sorrows of old, had warmed into a richer consciousness of life, so that the beautiful shell began to glow with the light of the beautiful spirit within. There was a sweet sparkle of youth in her that began to play over the surface of sadness, and though the past still shadowed her, she stood free from the utter gloom of it and saw the golden rim of the sun. She made friends with little Will Jennifer, played hide-and-seek with the boy, and told him tales in the dusk before he went to bed. She and Mrs. Winnie, too, were busy making up the stuffs from Battle into gowns and petticoats, and though Mrs. Winnie’s craft was simple and somewhat crude, the colors lighted up Barbara’s comeliness, and the very simplicity of the frocks seemed in keeping with that Sussex fireside. She even besought Mrs. Winnie to let her learn the lore of the dairy, the art of butter-making, and the like; for the primitive, busy life of the place seemed good to her, and full of the warmth and fragrance of a home.
John Gore took her riding with him over the winter fields, for he had bought her a quiet saddle-horse in one of the market towns. Yet though the days were magical for lover and beloved, there were the sterner issues of life to be confronted, nor could they forget those clouds that had withdrawn a little toward the horizon. Moreover, John Gore began to feel the very material need of a replenished purse, and an insight into the future that concerned him and his love, even unto the death.
He laid everything before Barbara one evening as they rode homeward toward Furze Farm, with a red, wintry glow in the west, and the hills wrapped in bluish gloom. Riding very close to him, she listened to all his reasonings, accepting things that went against her heart, because she knew that he loved her, and because she felt him to be shrewd and strong.
“Do that which you think best, John,” she said, with an upward look into his face; “I trust you with all that life can hold.”
And so their nags went homeward side by side, so close that the man’s arm was over the girl’s shoulders, and her breathing rising up to him in the keen, clear air like a little cloud of incense.
One morning early in December John Gore took the London road, following the same course that he and Mr. Pepys had taken—by Battle, Lamberhurst, Tunbridge, and Seven Oaks. Nor could he help contrasting the difference of the ways, and the different spirit that inspired him, though the woods were bare now, and the country gray and colorless when no sun shone. His thoughts went back over the Sussex hills to that farm-house with its broad black thatch, its beech-trees, and its uplands, its brick-paved, low-beamed kitchen with the fire red even to the chimney’s throat, and the kindly folk who moved therein. But chiefly he thought of Barbara sitting before that winter fire, her great eyes full of the light and dreams thereof, and her Spanish face betraying new deeps of womanhood because of the suffering she had borne and the spirit of beauty she had won thereby.
John Gore put up at an inn in Southwark, meaning to keep his distance from the precincts of St. James’s, and from that intriguing, cultured, cruel world that had held his own father as a murderer and a paramour. He had heard of grim things in the Spanish Provinces and the Islands, but nothing that had brought home to him the shame of the goddess self in passion as this tragedy in an English home had done. He could only think of the man—his father—with pity, and a kind of revolting of the honorable manhood in him. It was almost a subject beyond the pale of thought; a thing rather to be realized and then—buried.
Now John Gore was innocent of all knowledge of Oates’s Plot and of the wild ferment the City was in, for the news of it had not trickled as yet into the by-ways of Sussex, and he had kept to himself upon the road. His plan was to hunt out Samuel Pepys and hear the news of the surface of things, whether my lord was in town, and whether the Secretary would act for him in receiving and forwarding his Yorkshire moneys. His first visit across the water was to the Admiralty offices, and there, when he had sent his name in, Mr. Pepys came out in person with a mightily solemn face. He took his friend straight to a little private cabinet of his own, locked the door, and pushed John Gore unceremoniously into a chair.