XLVII

For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs. Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar face.

Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive, suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.

John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out momentarily in the midst of his degradation.

“Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.”