My lord assumed an alarmed look and held up a silencing hand.
“My dear Kate,” he shouted in her ear, “do not ask embarrassing questions.”
His sister’s face betrayed a sudden gleam of shocked intelligence that made my lord’s fooling appear more piquant. Deafness had developed a habit of irritability in her, and she was accustomed to blurt out her opinions in a voice that she probably intended for a whisper.
“You don’t say so, Stephen! I am astonished that your son should have the effrontery. But these sailors—”
The other ladies began to giggle. My lord nudged his sister vigorously with his knee.
“Jack brought the boy home from America with him.”
“Why don’t you speak louder, Stephen? What did you say her name was?”
But as she discovered that they were trying to hide their laughter behind fans and coat-sleeves, Mistress Catharine Gore gave her brother one stare, and relapsed into a silence that was not altogether amiable.
Nor did John Gore look the complaisant son smiling at his father’s waggery. He nodded to his men, who quickened at the oars, making the boat forge ahead of my lord’s galley. Barbara’s eyes met the sea-captain’s as he glanced back for a moment to look at something, perhaps at her. She was glad and yet sorry that they were not together, for the secret that she concealed made his nearness a martyrdom and a season of suspense. How could she keep the consciousness of that grim blood-debt before her soul, with the beat of the ripples against the boat and the flash of the sunlight on the water? She felt too close to humanity to be able to look into her own haunted heart. These laughing, chattering women, these mercurial, pleasure-loving men! She could only sit there in a silence as in a trance, and let the shores and the tide of life glide by, until she could wake in the tragic loneliness of solitude—and of self.
The garden of my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy came down to the river with a sweep of perfect sward. There was a stone boat-house with quaint copper dragons on the recessed gable ends, and a gilded vane shaped like a ship in sail. The steps that led up from the river had statues of fauns and wood-nymphs upon their pillars, and along the bank weeping-willows trailed their boughs in the brown water of the shallows.