But it was a flash in the pan. Even the polite insolence seemed dead in him. He had caught his son’s arm and clung to it pleadingly.
“Think better of me, John. I came here to save the girl: I swear that, before God.”
And then he would show great cunning behind the chatterings of dismay, trying to worm from his son all that he knew, and also how he had come to know it. But John Gore kept a shut mouth and the face of a flint, the heart hard and contemptuous within him when he remembered the look in Barbara’s eyes when she had spoken these words: “I can forgive.” Surely there was no soul here worth forgiving. Better dead. That was the grim judgment his heart uttered.
Such was the first week at Thorn, with the dark rides to and fro along the woodland roads, the mournfulness and dolor of the winter landscape, love by the fireside, retribution amid ruins. Sometimes Barbara would walk out a little way toward Thorn in the hope of meeting John Gore upon the homeward ride. She could not but mark the bitterness in him, a certain questioning look about the eyes that seemed to gaze toward some inevitable end. The riddle would have been baffling enough even if his heart had been in the solving of it. Granted that the past were given to oblivion, his father was a proscribed man; there was some risk even in shielding him; any day he might be discovered and taken.
Nor could he tell Barbara all that he saw at Thorn. It was too sordid, too contemptible; and yet his very reticence led her to understand. Perhaps she had more sympathy, more vision than John Gore that winter. She knew what Thorn could be even to one without guilt, without physical pain, without an eternal dread, and with some one to bring food. This man had gone down into the deeps of misery and degradation. He had been starved and broken. That was her thought.
Once she asked John Gore to let her see him, but he shook his head and would not hear of it.
“He thinks that I am dead, John,” she said.
“Then let him think it. God! Are we to make the thing so easy?”
“John! John!”
His fierceness hurt her a little, seeming to wake a clash of discords in her, as though the brazen gates of that closed tragedy were jarring wide again.