“I do not know,” he said, at last.
“John, you were always honest. Yet—God help me—with the irony of the truth.”
Stephen Gore asked no more questions, but lay staring at the beams above him, his mouth twitching, his eyes glazed with a film of thought. He seemed to forget the presence of his son. The great dim world of the past, and the vast “beyond” that holds the past world in its shadows, engrossed the life in him, and he made no sound.
As for John Gore, his heart was full of a conflict of strong emotions. Nor was his mouth so straight and stern when he turned and glanced at his father over his shoulder. Yet what he beheld moved him more deeply than any words my lord had spoken. For Stephen Gore’s eyes were wet and blurred, and there was the glisten of tears upon his face.
John Gore rose suddenly from before the fire, and, taking his pistols with him, went out without a word. He was half angry and half ashamed, for though pity had welled up like blood into his mouth, a rough and scolding bitterness pointed to the meaner motives of mankind, and the leer of a possible hypocrisy hardened his heart.
He rode home toward Furze Farm, meeting a strong west wind that made the sky move fast and the ash boughs clash in the thickets. And in the woods north of the farm Barbara met him, where a number of old hollies threw up a wall of dense, green gloom.
He dismounted, and kissed her with some of the brusqueness of a man whose eyes seem too shallow, and whose heart is too near his lips. She let the strangeness in him pass, and they walked on side by side, the horse following at their heels. John Gore looked at the grass road before him, Barbara at the sky. And for nearly half a furlong they walked on thus in silence.
“John, you two have spoken.”
He glanced at her sharply, as though wondering how she knew.
“Yes.”