Had not the voyage itself been a trick to cover the meaning of the past? Neither he nor that other one whom she suspected had betrayed one glimmer of a tragic intimacy. But that, too, was inevitable—a surface hypocrisy that might betray caution, penitence, even a fading of desire.
And yet—and yet!
She stretched her arms out with a kind of anguish of incredulous helplessness, feeling utterly alone in a world of bitterness and horror. Could he be that man whose sword had left her father dead that autumn night?
XIV
My Lord of Gore’s coach carried Anne Purcell and her daughter back to Westminster, for the gathering at the house at Bushy had dispersed prematurely, owing to sundry regrettable differences of opinion that had arisen between the three elder women. My lord himself travelled cityward with the Purcells, as though discountenancing Mrs. Catharine Gore, who had been spirited by Lady Marden and her daughter away in her coach to Kensington. For the quarrel, such as it was, had originated in Mrs. Kate’s deafness and her utter lack of reasonable discretion, since her loud and irritable tongue had not only set the two elder ladies by the ears, but had driven even her stately brother to a tempestuous ruffling of his dignity. The repartee had verged on coarseness, for Mrs. Catharine Gore was the most exasperating person to argue with on the face of God’s earth. Her deafness, exaggerated for the occasion, made her impregnable both against weight of metal and sharpness of wit. And she could retaliate in the most violent and acrid fashion, pretending all the time that she had mistaken the rival disputant’s meaning.
Thus when my lord had persisted with some heat and an impressive dogmatism that his sister painted her prejudices too vividly, Mrs. Kate had seized the chance of flinging an explosive retort into the midst of the party.
“If my Lady Purcell had said that my Lady Marden painted her face, it was no business of her brother’s to repeat it, and that only fools made mischief wantonly.”
And it may be imagined that a few such sweet misapplications of the truth had ruined the tranquillity of her brother’s house.
John Gore and the two gentlemen had ridden over earlier that morning, for the sea-captain had business at Deptford that concerned the men who had lain with him in a Barbary prison. Nor were the three in my lord’s coach sympathetically arranged. There were three angles to the diagram, and though two of them may have been in geometrical agreement, the third spoiled the symmetry of the whole human proposition. For Barbara had never seemed more moody or distraught. She sat like a figure of Fate with her great eyes looking into the distance, and her face blank and impassive to any sallies from my lord. An atmosphere of dreariness and of apathy seemed to emanate from her, an atmosphere so sluggish and sincere that it blighted the two elders, who would have been buxom enough if they had been alone.
The lord and the lady exchanged glances from time to time. They were wise in their generation, nor were they ready to be displeased at the little romance that appeared to be developing under their noses. The girl had an eccentric way of accepting homage. Yet they understood her to be a queer piece of morose comeliness; nor had she the habit of simpering like other women.