It was thus that Barbara Purcell, child that she yet was, found her father lying dead with a sword-thrust through the heart. He had been a silent man, no courtier, a man whose life had hoped more from the quiet corners of the world than from the pageantry of state. He had had no enemies, so far as the child knew; yet the world might have warned her that a man may be grudged the possession of a handsome wife. Even the Bible might have told her that.
As for the short curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she took it from the dead hand, and hid the thing in her bosom under her dress. To blazon the truth abroad, to run shrieking into the house, that was not the way the passion of her grief expressed itself. The curb of gold was the one link that might join the future to the past. She would show it to no one. That right should be hers to watch and to discover.
II
“Listen!”
She touched his shoulder suddenly, and their eyes met in a questioning stare, the eyes of two people who have some secret to be guarded.
“I heard some one in the gallery.”
“A coach stopped in the yard two minutes ago.”
“It is Barbara come home. The girl moves about like a ghost.”
They drew aside from each other; my lord, bland, buxom, imposing, in periwig, and black coat broidered with gold; my lady, plump, luscious, yet a little furtive about the eyes, her flowered gown in green and blue pleated into a hundred folds over her camlet petticoat. She wore her dark hair low upon her neck, with a rose over the left ear, and a mass of exquisite lace upon her bosom.
Lord Stephen Gore cleared his throat, and began speaking with discreet distinctness on some wholly impersonal topic. The pair were decorously distant when the door of the great parlor opened, the man standing at the window, as though watching the people passing in the street beneath; the woman seated, almost primly, in a high-backed chair, a book in her lap, mild apathy upon her face.