wrapped in bluish gloom. Riding very close to him, she listened to all
his reasonings, accepting things that went against her heart, because
she knew that he loved her, and because she felt him to be shrewd and
strong.

“Do that which you think best, John,” she said, with an upward look into
his face; “I trust you with all that life can hold.”

And so their nags went homeward side by side, so close that the man’s
arm was over the girl’s shoulders, and her breathing rising up to him in
the keen, clear air like a little cloud of incense.

One morning early in December John Gore took the London road, following
the same course that he and Mr. Pepys had taken—by Battle, Lamberhurst,
Tunbridge, and Seven Oaks. Nor could he help contrasting the difference
of the ways, and the different spirit that inspired him, though the
woods were bare now, and the country gray and colorless when no sun
shone. His thoughts went back over the Sussex hills to that farm-house
with its broad black thatch, its beech-trees, and its uplands, its
brick-paved, low-beamed kitchen with the fire red even to the chimney’s
throat, and the kindly folk who moved therein. But chiefly he thought of
Barbara sitting before that winter fire, her great eyes full of the
light and dreams thereof, and her Spanish face betraying new deeps of
womanhood because of the suffering she had borne and the spirit of
beauty she had won thereby.

John Gore put up at an inn in Southwark, meaning to keep his distance
from the precincts of St. James’s, and from that intriguing, cultured,
cruel world that had held his own father as a murderer and a paramour.
He had heard of grim things in the Spanish Provinces and the Islands,
but nothing that had brought home to him the shame of the goddess self
in passion as this tragedy in an English home had done. He could only
think of the man—his father—with pity, and a kind of revolting of the
honorable manhood in him. It was almost a subject beyond the pale of
thought; a thing rather to be realized and then—buried.

Now John Gore was innocent of all knowledge of Oates’s Plot and of the
wild ferment the City was in, for the news of it had not trickled as yet
into the by-ways of Sussex, and he had kept to himself upon the road.
His plan was to hunt out Samuel Pepys and hear the news of the surface
of things, whether my lord was in town, and whether the Secretary would
act for him in receiving and forwarding his Yorkshire moneys. His first
visit across the water was to the Admiralty offices, and there, when he
had sent his name in, Mr. Pepys came out in person with a mightily
solemn face. He took his friend straight to a little private cabinet of
his own, locked the door, and pushed John Gore unceremoniously into a
chair.

“Well, John, you have come here, have you, with a lighted candle to look
for sixpence in a barrel of gunpowder. Where have you been all these
weeks?”

Mr. Pepys’s manner was the manner of a man who had some reason for being
honestly perturbed.

“Within ten miles of the place you left me at, Sam. I have come up for
news and money.”

Mr. Pepys looked at him steadily, yet with a species of alarmed awe.

“News, John! Gracious God, we are shaken in our shoes with fresh news
every other day! You have heard of the Plot, of course.”

“Plot! What plot?”

Mr. Pepys’s silent stare expressed infinite things. He stepped forward,
tapped John Gore on the chest with his forefinger, then stepped back
again, and made him a reverence.

“Can I bow, sir, to a gentleman who has never heard of Titus Oates?
Alack, John, I fear me I have many sad and solemn things to tell you! I
thought that you had heard everything, and that you were wintering in
the country—like a wise man. For it is not flattering at present to
bear the name of Gore.”

He saw the sea-captain straighten suddenly in his chair and look up at
him keenly.

“What do you mean, Sam?”

“Mean, sir? Did I not warn you that the papists were likely to burn
their fingers? And we are in the thick of such fire and fright and fury
because of them that we are all afraid to catechize our own souls. News,
my good John! The Protestants raging, informers making Ananias seem a
simpleton, Catholic peers in the Tower, hundreds in jail, Coleman the
Jesuit tried and executed, a warrant out against your father, who has
taken to his heels and fled.”

“Good God, Sam! Where?”

“That is what certain people would like to know, sir. I pity your
innocence, John, but we are all of us shaking in our shoes. Even the
Queen has not been pitied.”

John Gore sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, his eyes
looking into the distance. He was silent a moment, while Mr. Pepys
fidgeted with his feet and glanced nervously at both door and window.

“I have not seen my—Lord Gore since I left London with you, Sam.”

“No?”

“I have heard nothing of all this. What is more, I have had matters of
my own.”

Mr. Pepys stroked his chin.

“There is yet another piece of news, John.”

“Well?”

“Concerning the Purcells.”

The sea-captain looked at him sharply.

“What?”

“Anne Purcell died of the small-pox a month ago.”

“Anne Purcell!”

“Yes; it would have been the talk of the town but for this furious
belcher of accusations, even the man Oates.”

John Gore looked at him in silence.

“She was found dead in her bed in her house in Pall Mall. All the
servants had fled, and the house had been rifled. But there also appears
to be a mystery about the daughter. The lawyers have discovered that she
was put away in the autumn for being of unsound mind; and now that all
the property seems to have fallen to her, not a living soul knows what
has become of the girl.”

The sea-captain smiled very slightly, with a grim light in the eyes.

“Who has the control of the matter?” he asked.

“It has fallen into Chancery.”

“Like the traveller to Jericho, Sam, in the parable. How long is it
since my Lord Stephen hoisted sail?”

“Somewhere about a month ago—before I returned from Portsmouth.”

“Did Anne Purcell die before then?”

“Heaven help me if I know, John. But what has that to do with the case?”

“More than you know, my friend—more than you may suspect.”

He had the air of a man who was troubled and perplexed by many
difficulties.

“Sam, I want your help and advice. I can trust you.”

Mr. Pepys made him a little bow.

“Where are you staying, John?”

“In Southwark. I had my reasons. Can you give me supper to-night, and an
hour’s private talk? I have many things to turn over in my mind before
then.”

The Secretary laid a hand upon John Gore’s shoulder.

“A friend’s trust is a friend’s affection, John. Come and sup with me;
what I can do I will.”

The Secretary’s wife was feasting with friends that night, and Mr. Pepys
and John Gore had the table to themselves. When supper was over, Mr.
Samuel took the sea-captain to the library, locked the door, and
prepared to play the part of counsellor and friend. For Mr. Pepys was a
shrewd, sound man of the world, for all his oddities and love of news—a
man who had walked the slippery path of public responsibility, and who
knew the world’s deceitfulness, even to the latest lie from the lips of
a king.

But even this critic of court scandals, and of the vanities of himself
and of mankind at large, was flustered a little by John Gore’s account
of his doings, and of the tragedy that had taken place at Thorn. Mr.
Pepys could pass over a gay intrigue, but this darker and more sinister
affair gripped the manhood in him, and made him understand his friend’s
grimness.

“On the Cross of our Lord, Sam, I pledge you to silence over this. I
know you are to be trusted where questions of life and death are
concerned.”

There was no need to question the intenseness of the Secretary’s
sincerity. He was a man of oak whose foibles and frivolities were merely
the flutter of leaves in the wind.

“Have no doubt of that, John. But upon my conscience, this is black
villany or something marvellous like it. Iago, oh Iago, thou dinest with
us and smilest at us in church, thou art not only a thing of the stage!”

John Gore sat thinking, smoking his pipe, and snapping the thumb and
middle finger of his right hand.

“It is the girl who has to be considered, Sam. She has borne enough,
suffered enough, and from my own flesh and blood; that’s where the rub
comes.”

Mr. Pepys sat and considered.

“The Chancery folk are such a dastardly meddlesome lot,” he said.

“I am not afraid of the lawyers, Sam; we can take our chances over the
sea, if needs be. But there is this man—this father—to be considered.
And, by my hope in Heaven, I will kill him as he killed Lionel Purcell
if he meddles further with the girl’s life!”

Mr. Pepys looked a little shocked despite his sympathy. He had been a
good son himself, and the word “father” had its true meaning for him.

“Softly, John, softly. There is always the other side of the case; we
cannot always see into another man’s heart.”

John Gore stared at the floor grimly.

“What I have said, Sam, I have said; even one’s father is not privileged
to seduce and murder as he pleases. I shall put my sword to his breast
and say: ‘Sir, no further.’ He has his life in his hand.”

Mr. Pepys looked at him kindly.

“Have you not thought, John, that it may rest with the girl?”

“With her—how?”

“If she chooses not to speak, to play a part.”

John Gore met his friend’s eyes.

“Why should this—this man be shielded? There is blood upon his hands;
he has stained the lives of others. Who shall consider him?”

“John, John, you talk like a man who stabs fiercely at a shadow. No man
is wholly the devil’s creature, and, say what you will, his loins begot
you.”

“The greater the need, Sam, to put aside false sentiment. Still, he is
out of our ken at present. We must bide our time—and watch.”

Mr. Pepys rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.

“Do you know what I would have you do, John? Go back to this quiet farm;
let the child come by her health and happiness. Keep the lawyers out of
it, and marry her, if you can.”

“You are echoing my own thoughts, Sam.”

“Good; very good. See what a seal, my friend, you might set upon the
past, if God granted you children and happiness, and the long love of
wife and man.”

John Gore understood his meaning.

“The blood-debt might be wiped away, Sam, for the sake of the future.”

“God grant it. And now, John, you will want money.”

“Money! How do you know that?”

“John, my man, when I was in love I was always poor. I know how Dan
Cupid picks a man’s pocket. Besides, money is above the law, John, and
at a pinch you might find it useful.”

“I have money enough; it needs handling, that is all. There is all my
property in Yorkshire.”

“Give me a written authority, John, and I will act for you.”

“Sam, you are a friend.”

“I am a man of business, sir. I can receive and hand on rentals, can I
not? And as for the present need, I always keep money in my house. Take
what you want; the security is good enough.”

John Gore began to thank him, but Mr. Pepys rose up from his chair and
put his two hands on his friend’s shoulders.

“Man John, there may be two or three souls in the wide world whom a man
may love without prejudice and without disaster. The friends of a life
are few, John, and we find them without forethought. Men come to me for
favors, scores of them in the year; most of them are sycophants, rogues,
hypocrites; I know it, and there is no deep pleasure in what I do. But
there are some men, John, to whom the heart goes out in the game of
life. To be a friend to a friend comes not so very often. A man who has
seen life will swear to that.”

                                  XLIV

Rain was falling and the wind beating about the chimneys of Furze Farm
as the daylight waned toward a gray night like a fog coming up from the
sea. Barbara and Mrs. Jennifer were sitting before the kitchen fire, the
girl watching the sparks fly upward, the woman’s brown hands busy with
thread and needle. Gusts of wind came down the chimney, making the
wood-ash shimmer at red heat, even blowing flakes of fire out on to the
bricks. Now and again the drippings of the rain fell on the red mass,
rousing the fire to spit like an angry cat.

Chris Jennifer’s wife, looking up from time to time at her “little
lady,” could see that Barbara was listening for something beyond the
mere roar of the wind in the chimney and the swish of the beech boughs
in the gathering dusk. The pupils of her eyes would grow large of a
sudden, and she would lift her chin and keep her bosom from breathing,
as though she heard some sound far away in the coming night. Mrs. Winnie
knew well what was passing in the girl’s heart. Nearly a week had gone
since John Gore had ridden for London, and her thoughts were out on the
wet road, wondering whether he were facing the wind and rain.

“I be thinking, my little lady”—and Mrs. Jennifer gave a tug to the
gown she was making—“I be thinking that a bunch of red ribbon would
look just fair for a shoulder-knot to yon scarf. My man Christopher has
a liking for red in the winter, it being the color of the berries, he
says, and warm and comely when there be snow about.”

Barbara only woke to the sense of Mrs. Winnie’s words when the good
woman had come to the middle of her statement.

“Is that why they wear red stockings so much in the country, Mrs.
Winnie?”

“Lor’, my dear, what a fancy! If I thought that about Christopher, I’d
be talking to him with a broomstick. Red stockings for a man to stare at
on market-day! No, my lady, red be a warm and comfortable color, like
holly berries, and that shoulder-knot would just be a touch to t’
green.”

Barbara listened to the wind.

“How heavy the roads must be!” she said.

“Honest mud never harmed nobody, my dear. Lord bless you, we don’t think
anything of mud in Sussex.”

“Are the roads dangerous at night?”

“And what may you mean by dangerous, my lady?”

“Footpads and rough men.”

“London way there be them kind of creatures. Puddles and ruts be our
great trouble, and the mud-holes when the ways be rotten. A horse may
break his leg in one of ’em; but there, God’s providence be powerfuller
nor mud-holes.”

She went on with her stitching, watching a red slipper tapping a little
restlessly on the brick curb about the hearth, as though beating out the
furlongs and the miles. Dusk was falling rapidly, and though the fire
was bright, Mrs. Winnie was thinking of lighting the candles when the
red slipper ceased its tapping, and the figure before her remained
motionless and alert.

“I can hear a horse, Mrs. Winnie.”

Mrs. Jennifer listened.

“It be a loose bough of the old plum-tree clapping against the wall.”

“I am sure it is a horse.”

She rose up and went to the window, and leaned her elbows on the sill.
Mrs. Jennifer gave a nod of the head, as though assuring herself that
youth must have its way. She knew every sound in and about the house
when the wind blew from over the sea.

“I will put a candle in the window, Mrs. Winnie.”

She went and took one from the shelf, lit it, and put it upon the sill.
And she was returning again toward the fire when she paused and stood
listening, her head held a little to one side.

“There, do you hear it?”

Mrs. Winnie stopped her stitching and listened. This time she did hear
something beyond the clapping of a bough against the wall.

“Why, yes, little lady.”

“Listen, there is the farm gate.”

She turned quickly toward the door, opened it, and stood looking out
into the dusk.

Mrs. Winnie put her work aside, gave a glance through the window, smiled
to herself, and then discovered that she had business in the dairy. In
the dusk she had seen a man dismounting from a horse, and her husband
plodding across the yard to welcome the traveller and take his nag to
the stable. Mrs. Winnie was a woman of tact. She caught son William
sneaking in by the back door, and took him with her to inspect the
milk-pans.

Barbara stood framed in the doorway with a warm light playing about her,
and the brown wainscoting, the great beams in the ceiling, and the red
bricks for a background. Yet the impulse of the moment failed in her,
and a shy panic took its place, so that she went and stood before the
fire and turned her head away so as not to see his coming. For there was
something in the intense truth that almost made her afraid, and she
might have fled away to her room but for the thought that he had seen
her at the door and might not understand the whim of a woman.

She heard his footsteps on the path, and when she looked he was on the
threshold, wet and travel-stained, but with eyes that were very bright.
He came and took her hands, but stood a little apart because of his wet
clothes, and also because there was a sense of awe between them. His
eyes searched her face to see whether there were any shadow of pain or
sadness thereon. And now that he was so near to her, her shyness and her
confusion fled, and simple love alone had utterance.

“John, how wet you are! Come to the fire, and let me dry your coat. I
had a feeling that you would come to-night.”

She led him to the fire; yet though the initiative was hers, she went
with his arm about her waist.

“You are looking wondrous well, Barbe!”

“Am I?” And she colored, and hid her eyes from him a moment. “I am glad,
very glad, to have you back, John. I was afraid, with this rough
weather, and the roads so bad, and you riding alone.”

“And yet I was not alone,” he said, touching her hair reverently. “I
shall never be alone again, pray God.”

“Yes, dear, I understand.” And she put her face up for him to kiss her,
her eyelids closed and the lashes shading her cheeks.

Then she made him sit down in the chair before the fire, and, fetching
the rough towel that hung on one of the doors, she rubbed his coat while
he sat patiently and tried not to look amused. For there was something
infinitely quaint and sweet in this ministration to a man who had seen
the wild world in its cups and in its quarrels. He caught the two hands
and kissed them, and looked up into eyes that were full of a mysterious
tremor of light.

“Do you know, child, what you bring into my mind?”

“No, John.”

“All the rough, blasphemous, accursed things that a man must see in this
world, whether he wills it or not. They come to me, dear, as so many
black memories, and I lift up these white hands—so—and I see what is
clean and what is pure.”

She looked at him an instant, and then fell on her knees beside the
chair and hid her face upon his shoulder.

“John, you forget; you make me ashamed when you speak thus; we women are
not angels; we are quick, selfish, passionate things, though we may be
unselfish when we love.”

“Dear, I forget nothing of that,” he said. “Do you think that I would
choose to love a saint?”

“I am nothing of a saint, John.”

“Thank God,” said he.

John Gore told her nothing that night of her mother’s death, for the
evening in that great warm kitchen seemed too goodly and dear a time to
be marred by evil tidings. Perhaps self had some weight, too, with him
that night, for it was a delight to watch the warm blood mantling under
the soft skin, the radiance of her eyes, and the way she would look at
him suddenly and color. John Gore’s eyes could not leave her that
evening as they sat round the fire with Mrs. Winnie busy at her
stitching, and Mr. Christopher smoking his pipe and trying to pretend
that he was half asleep.

The eyes of the day were empty of tears on the morrow, the world full of
winter sunlight, the sky all blue, the woods all purple and gray. John
Gore borrowed Mr. Jennifer’s nag, for his own beast needed a rest, and,
saddling Barbara’s horse, he took her out with him for a canter along
the grass track that wound past Furze Farm and onward into the vague
lands. It was a grass track that might have come down from old Celtic
times, before the Romans spaced out their Itineraries, a highway that
had run south of the great weald that stretched from the marshes of
Portus Lemanis to the plains of Gwent.

John Gore waited till they were on the homeward road and not a mile from
the farm before telling her of Anne Purcell’s death. They were riding
along the ridge of a hill, with Beechy Head a great blue shadow far
away, and the silver bow of the sea bent against the land. Barbara rode
on beside him, with the light gone suddenly from her eyes, and a shocked
silence making her mute. Her mother had borne and bred her, little more;
she had even been ready to sacrifice the child to save her paramour and
herself; and yet Barbara felt a great pity for that poor, gay woman who
would paint her cheeks no more, nor ogle herself in the glass to see how
her eyes beckoned. Barbara’s heart had changed greatly those months. She
had a wider consciousness, more sympathy, more insight. It had become
easier to pity than to hate.

John Gore saw that she was weeping the tears of compassion and of regret
rather than the tears of passion. And he let her weep, pushing his horse
a little ahead of hers to give her privacy, for there are times in life
when every soul must meet its intimate thoughts alone.

They were within view of the farm when he heard her call to him, and her
voice was very gentle, as though there were no malice and anger left in
her.

“Death brings things home to the heart, John,” she said, softly; “it is
like a great silence that compels one to think.”

He looked at her very dearly.

“My life, what can I say to you?”

“Tell me; John, that I was fierce and revengeful, and it would be the
truth. Who are we that we should judge? One cannot gauge another’s
temptations. She may have suffered while I was blind to it.”

John Gore reached for her bridle, and they rode the last furlong side by
side. And compassion for the dead seemed to hallow the love in their
hearts.

John Gore had said little concerning his father, save the news of the
Popish Plot, and my lord’s flight with many others who were concerned.
He was believed to have found refuge in France, and yet at Thorn, not
five miles from Furze Farm, a miserable, maimed thing dragged itself to
and fro like an animal that has been crushed in the jaws of a steel
trap.

A long splint, sand-bags, and six weeks in bed—such should have been
Stephen Gore’s portion; but when a man with a broken thigh is alone in a
ruin he must either crawl or starve by inches. Destiny had hipped him,
and Necessity had him at her mercy. It was with labor and a sweat of
anguish that he went like a worm upon his belly, for the belly hungered
and tortured him with thirst, and the worm still wriggled with a blind
instinct toward life.

December was cold and raw at Thorn, but there was no fire, and the man
lay on the stone floor with nothing under him but the cover and the
padding that he had torn from the couch. There was no drink either in
the kitchen of Thorn, and the quenching of his thirst became an ordeal
that made his flesh quiver. Once a day a miserable, unwashen figure
would go crawling across the court-yard to where the pump stood in a
corner. The face of the thing that crawled resembled the face of a
swimmer who feels a limb seized by the jaws of a shark. Slowly, with
infinite carefulness, and a tremor of the whole body, he would prop
himself against the wall, reach for the pump-handle, and trickle the
water into the leather bottle that he had dragged after him by a strip
of linen. Then he would crawl back again, agonized, cursing the pain of
those grinding splinters as the leg came over the stones, the toe
catching in the grass and weeds. Sometimes the water in the bottle would
last him more than one day, for he husbanded it like a miser, knowing
that each drop meant the sweat of his very blood. The food was an easier
matter, for he had only to drag himself to the hole in the floor. But
from the cold there was no escape. It froze into heart and marrow at
midnight, keeping sleep from him, even making him weep like an idiot
child.

What a change, too, on the surface of things! Hands grimed, nails black,
a stubble of gray hair over the jowl, holes in the cloth over knees and
elbows, the dirt of the court-yard upon his linen. A squalor about his
bed on the stones such as is found in foul jails.

Even the lust for life, such life, would flicker out in him at times,
and he would take his sword as he lay with the broken bone galling him
like hot grit in the flesh, and run his fingers along the blade, and
look at it, and consider. More than once he bared his breast and set the
point of the sword over his heart, feeling for a gap between the ribs so
that the steel should make no error. But the cold pricking of the point
against the skin seemed to frighten even the despair and weariness in
him, and he would lay the sword aside, cover his chest again, and stare
at the beams in the ceiling. He had the blind lust to live, but not the
blind courage to die. For even life in its most squalid misery may seem
better, kinder than the black, unfathomable unknown.

                                  XLV

Though all the gay stuffs, the reds and the greens and the rich
brocades, were put aside for a season, and though Barbara wore a plain
black gown that Mrs. Winnie bought of Mr. Bannister at Battle, they made
ready for Christmas at Furze Farm in country fashion, with a great
abundance of food and liquor, with a yule-log the size of a tub, and
holly boughs gathered out of the woods. Mrs. Winnie would have quieted
the day out of curtesy to her “little lady,” but Barbara would have none
of their pleasure spoiled because she wore a black gown for her mother.
To cheat the living of their good cheer would not comfort the sleeping
dead, and the very kitchen seemed warming itself for the wassail-bowl,
and the beef and the pies, and the women with their ribbons.

Now, Barbara had no money and a great deal of pride despite her love, so
that John Gore, who knew how matters stood with her, had to resort to a
lover’s stratagem to fill her purse. He told her a solemn tale of how
the lord chancellor managed the affairs of the nation, and how she was
her father’s heiress, though the estates were in the lawyers’ hands till
the time came for her to step forward and prove herself a very comely
young woman without a mad whim in her head, save that whim of loving a
sailor. He also related that a very good friend of his had certain
matters in hand, and was likely to receive on her behalf certain moneys
that had been found in the house in Pall Mall. That money might come to
her any day by private messenger, and so it did, though delivered to
John Gore, and greatly to the girl’s secret delight, for she knew
nothing of law, and, believing the lover’s invention, guessed not that
the money was his.

Yet here John Gore wellnigh landed himself in a dilemma. She began to
plead that she owed him money for all the things he had bought at
Battle, nor could he silence her for a long while, and then only by
pretending to be a little hurt. Whereat she dropped the money as though
it had burned her, and went to him and asked his pardon.

The gold pieces had rolled hither and thither over the kitchen floor,
and they gathered them and counted them into little piles. Barbara’s
eyes had begun to dance with a multitude of generous desires, and she
was already planning how to spend it.

“I must go a-shopping, John,” she said, “for Christmas. If we could only
borrow Mr. Jennifer’s wagon.”

“A wagon, sweetheart! Do you want to empty all the shops in the town?”

“No, dear; but I feel that I cannot give enough to these good people
here. It has been a home, and a very dear home, John; I shall not forget
it to the day of my death.”

Now, John Gore talked privately to Mr. Jennifer, and Mr. Jennifer took
counsel privately of his wife, and the result of all this talking was
that Christopher prepared for a day’s jaunt into the county town of
Lewes. He cleaned up his wagon, put straw and bracken in the bottom
thereof, tied his horses’ manes with ribbons, and put out his Sabbath
best. One of his men and his wife came into Furze Farm for the day,
while the household went a-wagoning to Lewes, starting two hours before
dawn because the roads were heavy and the days short. Barbara, Mrs.
Winnie, and son William rode in the wagon, and John Gore on his horse,
while sturdy Kit marched beside his cattle, his whip over his shoulder,
and a sprig of holly in his hat.

Barbara had a radiant face and but little money left by noon that day in
Lewes, for even if the heart has cause for sadness there is joy in
giving others joy. She seemed incarnate womanhood that Christmas-tide,
taking a delight in all the little mysteries and mummeries of the season
and in the revels that were held. John Gore had bought all manner of
merchandise: a new gun for Mr. Christopher; a great family Bible for the
wife; toys, sweetmeats, and oranges for son William and the laborers’
children; a beautiful chain of amethysts for his love. There was much
giving and receiving that Christmas-tide at Furze Farm. The three
laborers came with their wives and youngsters to the state dinner in the
kitchen. Mr. Jennifer brewed punch, got a flushed face, and talked more
than he had talked for a whole year. Little Will nearly fell into the
fire while roasting chestnuts. John Gore played with the Sussex children
till Mrs. Winnie exclaimed at “the gentleman’s good-nature.” Pipes were
smoked in the ingle-nooks. The three countrywomen tried their best
manners, and stared hard yet kindly at “the lady” about whom there was a
mystery that had set their tongues a-clacking. Yet a woman who is sweet
to other women’s children wins a way into the hearts of mothers. “A
gracious lady, surely,” they whispered to one another, and thought the
better of her because she touched their children’s lips. And when
ribbons and blankets and good woollen stuffs came to them from her
hands, they may have regretted the disobedience of Mrs. Winnie’s orders
as to the minding of their own business, for Mrs. Jennifer had forbidden
them to gossip about the “quality biding at Furze Farm.” Yet gossip had
gone abroad, for all Mrs. Winnie’s caution, and even the lazy parson
knew that there were strangers in his parish.

With Christmas fare and festivity questions of the past, and St. Stephen
claiming his day in the calendar, Mr. Jennifer had his cart-horses out
for a gallop to sweat them well before the yearly bleeding, for it was
the custom to give horses a warming and then to bleed them on St.
Stephen’s day. Whether John Gore subscribed to the superstition or not,
he saddled his own beast early and went out alone for a canter, having
the Christmas dinner upon his conscience, and, what was more, a certain
hankering to visit Thorn. For several weeks he had intended riding over
to the place, but Barbara had been nearly always with him, and they had
taken happier and less sinister paths. He desired to see whether there
were signs of folk having been there since that November night when the
horseman whom he had taken for Captain Grylls had ridden back to inquire
after his lost packet.

It was a still and rather misty morning with moisture dropping from the
trees, and the grass wet and boggy. The fog did not hinder him greatly,
for he had learned to pick up his landmarks at every furlong, and the
track was familiar and simple when once known. About ten of the clock he
came into the valley of thorns, and saw the dim mass of the tower
glooming amid the mist. The place seemed infinitely melancholy with the
fog about it, and the dripping thorn-trees and the black, stagnant water
that showed never a ripple. The very ivy looked wet and sodden with the
raw vapor of that December day.

John Gore tethered his horse to one of the thorn-trees, and, finding the
gate open, much as he had left it, he crossed the court-yard where the
mist hung in the air like breath upon a mirror. He saw that the dog was
gone, but, what was more, the kennel also, and this slight detail
puzzled him a little and made him more cautious in his exploring. Going
to the kitchen entry and finding the door ajar, he stood there and
listened. The moisture was pattering down from the ivy leaves all about
the house, yet from the kitchen came a sound that could not be easily
mistaken—the regular, heavy breathing of a man in a deep sleep.

John Gore saw that his sword was loose in its sheath, and, pushing the
door open cautiously, he passed on into the kitchen. The figure of a man
lay upon the floor with nothing between him and the stones but what
appeared to be a tatter of rags. A sword, a leather bottle, and two
mouldy biscuits lay beside him. His head was thrown back and his throat
showing, with the stubble of a beard making the jaw look gray and
slovenly.

John Gore crossed the room softly, and recognized in that ragged,
haggard thing my Lord Gore—his father.

It was well past noon when John Gore mounted his horse again, and rode
away from the mist and shadows of Thorn, with the look of a man who had
spoken, even as Dante spoke, with some soul in the deeps of hell. He was
thinking of an old, yellow-faced man, maimed, dirty, servile, with
clothes worn into holes, and an intelligence that had flapped between
emotional contrition and paroxysms of selfish fear. This thing had been
the mighty man of manners, the serene gentleman of Whitehall and St.
James’s, whose body had smelled of ambergris and whose fine raiment had
shamed the sheen of tropical birds. Pride, vanity, even self-honor, in
the dust and dirt! A white, flaccid, furtive face that had lost all its
buxom boldness, most of its intellect—almost its very reason.

What had they said to each other, those two?

Murderer and adulterer; lover and son.

Yet John Gore had filled the leather bottle for his father that morning,
lit a fire with odd wood gathered from the rotting out-houses, and
brought in an armful of musty straw to soften the sick man’s bed.

And my lord had wept—miserable, senile tears that had no dignity and no
true passion. He had fawned on the man, his son, grovelled to him
without shame, till the son’s manhood had revolted in him, for he would
have welcomed savagery and cursing rather than moral slime. It had been
like a polluted river bringing all manner of drift to the lip of a weir.
And though he had ministered to his father, he had kept an implacable
face and a firm mouth. He had acted as a man who knew everything, and
chosen to let my lord realize that he knew it, even assuming the truth
that Barbara was dead.

                                  XLVI

John Gore rode for Furze Farm with many turbulent thoughts at work in
him, and the raw mist that thickened from over the sea making the wet
woods no more comforting than the degradation he had found at Thorn. He
had been fierce at first with the man whom he called father, till my
lord’s squalid ignominy had become apparent to him, and he had realized
that he was dealing with a creature and not a man. For there had been no
sense of strength opposed to him, no pride, no will, not even savage
passion, nothing to struggle with, nothing to overcome with shame. My
lord was dead in the better sense. Those weeks in Thorn had starved and
frozen the soul out of him, and he had become half a savage, yet a
timid, fawning savage whose consciousness was bounded by elemental
things. At first there had been nothing but abhorrence and disgust for
John Gore. This cringing thing with the face of an imbecile, embracing
his own son’s knees, lying amid his own offal! What could a man say to
this shadow of a self? Where lay the promise of judgment or of appeal?
Good God! He could remember the time when he had stood in some awe of
this same man because of his fine presence and his habit of command.

Yet as John Gore rode through the white mist the impressions and
instincts of the morning began to sift themselves and to piece up a
broader, saner picture. Incidents, acts, details started forward or
receded into clearer, truer perspective. The offensive flavor of the
thing began to prejudice him less. He tried to see the whole untarnished
truth with the sincerity of a man who is not content with mere
impressions.

Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a
lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where
the mere physical miseries of existence would bring him near to death in
body and mind. Pain, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, are grim inquisitors
fit to break a man on the rack and tear the very senses from him. John
Gore had looked into the hole where his father had kept his food, and
had seen meat going putrid and biscuits covered with mould. He
remembered, too, very vividly an incident in the Indies when he and his
ship’s company had found a man who had been marooned on an island that
was little better than a reef. The man was a Norman, and his sojourn
there had been but a matter of days. Yet he was skull-faced, parched,
abject, and as mad as an idiot child. He had run from them, screaming,
when they landed, though his legs had given under him before he had gone
fifty yards. And he had died on board John Gore’s ship, and they had
buried him at sea, and often afterward at night the sea-captain had
fancied that he still heard the man’s wild cry: “J’ai soif, mon Dieu!
mon Dieu, j’ai soif!”

Now Stephen Gore had been a proud man, and a man of sentiment after his
own ideals. He had had other things to torture and humiliate him besides
anguish in the flesh. Proportionately as a man’s physical strength
wanes, so the menace of spiritual suffering grows the more quick and
poignant. This man had spilled blood and betrayed friends. A well-fed
cynic might have put such things under his feet and trampled them. It
would be otherwise with a half-starved, memory-haunted, isolated being
shivering the nights through, listening and ever listening, while the
solitude hung like an eternal silence, and the slightest movement of the
body set bone grating against bone. Who could shrug his shoulders
through such an ordeal and come forth smiling with an epigram? Would not
the very intellect curse itself and die by its own hand? Innocent blood;
the betrayal of honor and of friends; lies, inevitable self-salvation.
These thoughts would grip such a man, throttle him, spit at his very
soul. They would not be conjured or persuaded. They would be awake with
him through the winter nights; scoff when some spasm of pain made him
curse and set his teeth; watch him with cold eyes when the light of the
dawn came in. The same miserable dragging of the days, the same
miserable passion-play of the crucified soul. Where would a man’s
manhood be at the end of such a chastisement?

The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the
shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was
dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like
phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy
silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing
outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden
shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted
heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer,
who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a
candle.

In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest
glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie
was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge
cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly
forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to
themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning
logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting.

“You have had a long ride, John.”

He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its
new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume
after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and
troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his
love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his.

“They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that
I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little
woman?”

She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide
care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who
loves him.

“Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I
went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.”

He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive
frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler.

“I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.”

“John!”

Her voice had a touch of appeal in it.

“This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned
with more than I foreshadowed.”

“Where have you been, John?”

“To Thorn.”

“Thorn!”

“Yes.”

She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in
his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others
rather than himself.

“You are troubled, John. Tell me.”

He looked down at her reflectively, and his eyes seemed to say: “Shall I
or shall I not?” Womanwise, she appeared to understand.

“You are afraid for my sake, John.”

“A little.”

“Is it because you cannot trust me?”

Her eyes held his, and for once it was as though she had the greater
power of will.

“No. Because I wish worry and care away.”

“John, do you think I shall leave all the burden of life to your
shoulders? Are we so little to each other? Am I so selfish?”

She felt his hands tighten on hers.

“Barbe, I have found my father.”

“At Thorn?”

“Yes.”

She shuddered slightly, despite herself, and he saw her eyes darken.

“John, did you speak to him?”

“Without mercy.”

“Does he know?”

“He thinks you dead.”

“Why is he at Thorn?”

“Hiding from the law because of this Plot; hiding from us, a miserable
wreck of a man, half starved, almost mad.”

She saw his face grow haggard and stern, the lines deepening about the
mouth, his eyes staring fixedly at the fire, as though he were looking
upon a thing that revolted him. The instinct in her was one of a strong,
pure passion to be of use. He had feared for her courage, perhaps for
her magnanimity. Yet it was she who took the torch that evening, and
carried it so that the darkness seemed less dark.

“John, my heart, tell me everything.”

She drew him by the hands into the inner room, and shut the world out,
save that world at Thorn. He looked down at her, as though wondering at
the will in her, and feeling a strength and courage near him that might
have the power of turning destiny into providence. She was calm yet
infinitely vital, and her face had a radiance that drove scorn and
bitterness and malice into the dark. He beheld a transfiguration—love
bending toward love, beautiful with the beauty of sacrifice, pity, and
desire.

“John, do you fear for me?”

He opened his arms, but paused with a sudden awe of her, and, bowing
himself, touched her hands.

“No, not now.”

“Then tell me everything.”

And he told her, sitting in the firelight, with his hands clasped upon
his knees.

Silence held them awhile in thrall. Barbara was leaning against the jamb
of the chimney, one hand laid along her cheek, her eyes full of the
past. It was as though some sharp struggle were passing within her, and
for a moment her eyes had a glitter of anger. But the gleam passed from
them, and her mouth softened.

She looked down at the man with a mystery of a smile—a smile with no
mirth in it, but full of sadness, yearning, and self-reproach.

“John.”

He started, almost as though he had forgotten her.

“Do you love your father?”

The question seemed to stagger him; he frowned at the fire.

“Love that!”

She rested her head upon her arm; his scorn had made the heart leap in
her.

“I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!”

“But you—”

“John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s
own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I
should feel that, even more than you?”

He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had
seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man.
And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and
more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself.

He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some
impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her.

Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and
then turned to him with a look he would never forget.

“John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.”

“Child!”

“It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.”

He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She
went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him,
while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were
vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness.

“Barbe, you can forgive!”

“Yes.”

“But it is for my sake?”

She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears.

“Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.”

He bent, and kissed her lips.

“Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep
you!”

                                 XLVII

For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out
from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin
and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with
him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on
each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs.
Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were
folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex
folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good
friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar
face.

Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those
first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of
will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague
glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for
John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the
determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and
none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the
past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned
aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a
man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten
enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn
had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even
in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the
finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive,
suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler
feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex
flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving
the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.

John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and
contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores
and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out
momentarily in the midst of his degradation.

“Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.”

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.

“John, don’t speak like that, dear.”

His tenderness shone through the anger in him.

“Barbe, you may forget; I cannot. When I touch your hand, when I see the
life in you, I remember.”

The memory of that night came back, and she shuddered: the dark room,
those throttling hands, the violence and horror in the dark. She looked
at her lover and understood.

“It is hard for you,” she said, very gently.

For to John Gore at that time it was like pampering a man who had sought
to betray the honor of his wife.

The old year had gone; the new was in with white hoar-frost on the grass
and the boughs each dawn, and a silvery smoke of mist melting into clear
blue mornings. January went plodding on—a heavy, toothless, torpid
month, despite the frost and the shimmer of sunlight; for January has
little of the likeness of a child; rather it appears as a gray old man
laboring in the dusk and the mists of the morning at some task that no
man sees. It is a month when gnomes work below the ground, laboring for
the mystery of beauty that is to be, touching the hidden seed with fire,
breathing into brown roots the colors of the flowers that shall come
hereafter.

With January, Stephen Gore’s life seemed to sink to the lowest level of
lethargy. Torpor fell upon him till he was like a frost-nipped plant
with the sap congealed, the leaves shrivelled and gray. He would sleep
for hours, and even when awake lie staring at the beams in the ceiling
above him, his face blank and without intelligence. He hardly ever
spoke. Even the fever of fear left him. He asked for nothing, not even
food. John Gore thought that my lord was dying, and even picked out a
place in the garden where he would bring him when he was dead.

Yet it was not death with Stephen Gore, but a stupor that nature had
brought upon him even as the winter fields lie inert and frost-crumbled
under the sky. Fresh food and the warmth of the bed had a narcotic
effect upon the man. The half-starved body seized greedily upon
everything and bade the mere mind sleep, and so the mind slept on for
many days, as though helping forward the old adage—“_Mens sana in
corpore sano._” For the body is but the stem of the tree of the senses,
and the sick body is often the cause of the sick mind.

Toward the last week in January John Gore saw a slow and subtle change
in his father, a change that came like the first thrusting of growth
through the winter soil. The flabbiness melted out of the man’s face;
his eyes grew brighter and full of the intelligence of inward life. He
was still very silent, but it was the silence of growth, not the silence
of paralysis. John Gore would find his father watching him, not with the
old, furtive, cringing look, but with a kind of sadness, a mute
perplexity that betrayed the mind working behind the eyes. More than
once he had made tentative little attempts to show gratitude, always
watching his son’s face as though conscious of its imperturbable
sternness. His son’s face began to be a dial of destiny to him. He could
read the truth about himself in the younger man’s grave eyes.

It became evident that Stephen Gore’s manhood and his self-respect were
returning to him slowly as he lay in the kitchen of Thorn. What his
thoughts were John Gore could only guess, though he was struck by the
change in his father, the indefinable refining and strengthening of the
outer and inner man, as though my lord had ceased to be the animal, and
had come again to the cognizance of higher things. They seldom spoke to
each other, these two, nor did they venture beyond the trivial needs or
happenings of the day. Both were conscious of the imminent and dark
shadow, and faltered before it, sheltering behind reticence and
procrastination. Yet John Gore would see a certain look come into his
father’s eyes, as though the man were dumb and were striving to speak.

And the first breaking of the superficial surface of reserve was caused
by nothing more dramatic than a beard. My lord’s self-respect seemed
intimately married to bodily cleanliness and perfection in dress. Silks
and brocades and perfumes were beyond him; perhaps he would not have
asked for them even if they had been at hand. But it was with a gleam of
his old wit that he desired most humbly to be barbered, and to be
deprived of the hair that had grown at Thorn.

John Gore accepted the incident without a smile, brought a razor with
him next day, and dutifully shaved my lord’s upper lip and chin. He had
done his barbering in silence, with the air of a man who had no care
beyond the dexterity of his fingers, when my lord laid a hand on his
son’s shoulder.

“You would like to cut my throat, John. Cut it.”

They looked at each other squarely in the eyes. Stephen Gore was the
first to glance away.

“Nor should I blame you, my son.”

And that was all that passed between them over the shaving of my lord’s
chin.

John Gore told Barbara of the change in Stephen Gore, and she listened
with a faint smile hovering about her mouth, as though her intuition
gave her some vision of the future.

“Be gentle with him, John,” she said. “I have heard it said that pottery
is brittle when it first comes from the furnace.”

“Then you think the clay has been recast, child?”

“Why should it not be so!”

And he could only marvel at the change in her.

So the month went, and my lord’s “grand air” began to flutter out feebly
like a faded butterfly on a sunny day in spring. Yet there was a certain
humility about him that made John Gore reflect, for his father was very
patient now, strangely so for one who had sworn at lackeys. Often the
son would catch a troubled shadow darkening the father’s face. He would
drop his eyes when they met John Gore’s, yet he watched his son almost
hungrily when the son’s back was turned.

It was a day early in February, and John Gore sat on Simon Pinniger’s
three-legged stool before the fire, and cleaned his pistols that grew
foul quickly in the damp winter air. His father had been asleep, and the
son believed him still sleeping as he polished the barrels and scoured
the powder-pans.

He heard a slight movement behind him, and, turning sharply, found my
lord awake and watching him with thoughtful eyes. Both men colored
slightly. John Gore turned again, and went on with his work.

Then he heard his father speak.

“John, how long have I been here?”

The son considered.

“Three months—or so,” he answered.

My lord sighed.

“This leg of mine is mending.”

The son said nothing.

“I am wondering whether it is worth the mending. A man must die some
day; though it is better that he should die like a man, not like a dog.”

There was a minute’s silence. John Gore could hear his father’s
breathing, but he went on doggedly with the cleaning of his pistols.

“John.”

My lord spoke softly, almost pleadingly.

“Yes.”

“Will you answer me a few questions?”

“Ask them.”

Again there was a short pause.

“Have you any news from Westminster?”

“What news?”

“The Catholics, my friends—the rest.”

John Gore laid one pistol down and took up the other.

“Coleman is dead,” he said, curtly.

“Coleman! How?”

“The scaffold.”

He heard his father mutter indistinctly, and the words sounded like the
words of a Latin prayer.

“And the rest?”

“Some with Coleman, some in the Tower and the jails, some scattered.
London has been calling for blood.”

My lord lay very still. Then he turned slightly, and his eyes were on
his son.

“And in Pall Mall?”

“My Lady Purcell?”

“Yes.”

“She died three months ago.”

There was another and a longer pause.

“John.” And he spoke with effort.

“Yes.”

“Why did you save me from dying?”

The son frowned at the fire.

“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.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Questions. He asked questions.”

“About—”

“His friends; about your mother.”

“What did you tell him, John?”

“I told him the truth.”

“Yes; and then—”

“What could I say to the man? Curse him, he wept!”

She paused a moment, taking her lover’s arm, and holding him back a
little as though about to speak. The impulse changed, however, and she
walked on again with a light of infinite wisdom in her eyes. For a man’s
nature is a proud and contrary thing. She felt what was passing in John
Gore’s heart, and she was too tender and too prudent to drag it roughly
into the light of day.

                                 XLVIII

My lord took his first walk in the kitchen of Thorn leaning upon John
Gore’s shoulder, the son’s arm about the father’s body. Any one who had
seen the pair would have judged them to have been the best of friends,
for the son steadied the father’s steps with the grave, patient air of
one whose care was almost a devotion. And the father, who had the look
of a man who had aged very rapidly, what with the white in his hair and
the deep lines upon his face, seemed to lean upon the son with a sense
of confidence and trust. He was wearing a new suit of plain black cloth,
with a white scarf about his throat. Some of his little gestures and
tricks of expression came to him as in the old days, save that they were
less emphatic and less characteristic of the aggressive self.

At the third turn Stephen Gore looked at the window that was lit by the
March sunlight, and a sudden wistfulness swept into his eyes, as though
he were touched by pathetic memories. He paused, leaning his weight upon
his son, for he was feeble and easily out of breath after those weeks
upon his back.

“I should like to go into the open air, John, and sit in the sun.”

John Gore looked at him doubtfully.

“You are safer here,” he said.

My lord gave a shake of the head.

“Are you cautious for my sake, my son? John—John, you do not understand
me yet.”

There seemed a new atmosphere of sympathy enveloping them, for John Gore
answered his father very gently.

“It shall be as you wish.”

“Then put your arm under my shoulders, John—so. What a strong fellow
you are! I can just toddle like a dot of two.”

They went out into the court-yard, Stephen Gore’s right leg dragging
stiffly. He would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, since the
limb that had been broken had been shortened by three inches in the
mending. The son carried Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool in his left
hand. They crossed the court-yard very slowly, and passed through a
doorway into the wilderness of the garden. The green of the spring was
thrusting through a thousand buds; there was the thrill of growth in the
air, and the birds were singing.

Close on the sunny side of a ragged box-tree that was half netted in
brambles a clump of Lent-lilies stood in bloom, swinging their golden
heads over the weeds and grass. There seemed the beauty of symbolism
about these flowers. The sunlight appeared to centre upon them, and to
burnish their golden heads with the warmth of the March day.

My lord’s glance settled on the flowers. He paused before them with a
sudden curious smile.

“Set the stool here, John.”

And he sat down there, with the clump of daffodils at his feet.

John Gore left him there awhile, and strolled on along the rank walks
where primroses glimmered from lush green glooms, and gilliflowers were
beginning to scent the air from the crumbling tops of the old brick
walls. The softness and the glamour of spring seemed everywhere. There
was no wind, hardly a cloud—nothing but the warm shimmer of the
sunlight.

Father and son had come closer to each other those last days, not
through any sentimental outburst of the emotions, but because the father
had become once more a man, and a man whom it was even possible to
respect. “Mea culpa,” he had said, and the dignity of a simple
acceptance of guilt had given him a new impressiveness. It had been
difficult, at first, for John Gore to accept his father’s humility as a
thing born of the heart and the spirit. There was ever the sneer of
possible “play-acting” penitence, the tawdry sentimental epilogue spoken
with a hypocritical leer and a thought of the nearest brothel. John Gore
had distrusted his father, and had watched keenly for the old self to
betray itself. Yet he had still continued to behold a quiet, patient,
and sorrowful old man who seemed grateful for small services, and who
looked at him with watchful and troubled eyes. John Gore distrusted any
religious display in such a man as my lord. And yet he came to
understand by degrees all that was passing in his father’s heart.

He returned presently to where the elder man was seated, and found him
in an attitude of saddened thought. Stephen Gore looked up as his son
joined him, and then turned his head away so that his eyes were on the
tower of Thorn. The place itself must of necessity force the full
meaning of the past upon him. The stones spoke; the very silence of the
place had a message of its own. For my lord still believed Anne
Purcell’s child to be dead, and that thought had survived to haunt him
above all others.

“John.”

“Yes.”

“I have something to say to you as between man and man.”

The son stood back, and leaned against the trunk of an apple-tree.

“You have given me the chance, John, to judge myself, and to discover
the truth with my own eyes. Let us have no parson’s talk—no snivelling.
As a man of the world I fought for myself, and pushed others out of the
path. I blundered immortally over my selfishness, John, and they ought
to hang me for a fool.”

He still looked toward the tower, and John Gore guessed whither his
thoughts tended.

“That was the damnedest thing the self in me ever rushed on, my son. And
yet I tried to alter it at the last—perhaps for my own sake, perhaps
for the mother’s. She was dying then—I have told you that; perhaps that
was why I repented. The heart of a man is a strange, elusive,
treacherous thing, even to its owner, John. Sometimes we can hardly
decide why we do the things we do.”

He sat in silence awhile, with his head bowed down.

“You must have hated me, my son; if you had spat upon me, I should
hardly have questioned it. Words are not life: I cannot give you back
that which I destroyed. And there is where bitterness grips the heart in
a man when he sees what manner of ruin he has made. What are regrets,
despair, protestations? Air—mere air in the brain! When once a man has
fallen into the slough, John, his struggles seem only to carry him
deeper. He may even drag others below the surface or splash foul mud
onto innocent faces. But the awe and the bitterness are in the
knowledge, John, of our own utter, miserable impotence. Things cannot be
wiped out. They last and endure against us till the crack of doom.”

He stared at the grass and knitted his hands together.

“I had thought of giving myself up, my son, and telling the whole truth.
But that—that cannot help the dead. And somehow I have come to shudder
at the thought of throwing shame into the grave of the one woman who
really loved me. And, John, I shall suffer more by living than by dying.
Fools do not always realize that in this world. They tie a man to a
rope, and think that they are even with him for his sins. They would
often get the greater vengeance on him if they only let him live.”

He paused, staring straight before him, his shoulders bent.

“Weeks ago, John, I remember, as in a dream, that I lived in a mad
horror of death. That has passed, I know not quite how. But I leave the
judgment in your hands, my son. Do with me what you please.”

He seemed to grow very weary of a sudden, for his strength was but the
strength of a sick man, and the grim truths of life seemed heavy on him.
His son went to him, and, putting an arm about his father’s body, helped
him to his feet, and led him back to the bed in the kitchen.

“I am not your judge, father,” he said, very gently; “there is another
one who should judge, and from whom forgiveness may have come.”

He was thinking of Barbara, but my lord thought that he spoke of God.

The meadows about Furze Farm were full of the bleating of lambs those
days, and the youngsters skipped and butted one another, galloping to
and fro on their ridiculous legs, while the stupid old dames baaed, each
to its own child. There had been one sick lamb that Christopher Jennifer
had brought home in his arms, and the little beast had been laid upon
hay in a basket beside the fire. There were also two cade-lambs in a pen
in the orchard, and Barbara, who had many hours to herself now that John
Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, had asked Mrs. Winnie to let her have
the tending of the two motherless ones, also the feeding of the early
chicks and the gathering of the eggs. The whole life at the farm was
fresh and quaint to her, and brisk life it was those spring days—a
cackling, bleating, lowing life, with the thrushes singing in the
beech-trees and the blackbirds in the hedgerows. The bloom on the apple
and pear trees in the orchard would soon be pink and white, and there
were daffodils nodding their heads at Furze Farm as well as in the
wilderness of Thorn.

The evening after Stephen Gore’s confession at Thorn, John Gore took his
love away over the uplands where the furze was all a glitter of gold,
with the green slopes of the hills and the brown ploughlands making a
foreground to the distant sea. They desired to be alone that evening, to
feel the spirit of spring in them, and to watch the sun go down and the
twilight creep into the valleys. Their happiness was the greater because
others were not forgotten in the romance of their two selves. Moreover,
the glamour of the morrow had the delight of a plot in it. Mrs. Winnie
alone was suffered to taste the spice in the secret, though the duty
fell to her of sending out for clean rushes, taking down the rosemary
and bay from the beams in the pantry, and gathering flowers to spread
upon the coverlet of the bed.

She smiled to herself very pleasantly when John Gore and the “little
lady” rode out early next morning as though for nothing more solemn than
a morning’s canter. She knew that the gentleman had smoked a pipe in the
parson’s parlor more than a month ago, and Mrs. Winnie was quite wise as
to what was in the wind. There was to be no stir made, and Chris
Jennifer’s wife rather approved of being the solitary holder of such a
secret. Her attitude was quite motherly. She spent the morning sweeping
Barbara’s room, and strewing rushes and flowers about it, and putting
posies of bay and rosemary upon the pillows.

The pair were back at Furze Farm by dinner-time, looking mild and
innocent, even hungry, as though nothing serious had befallen. They
walked into the kitchen just as Mr. Jennifer was settling himself to
carve the meat. John Gore glanced at Mrs. Winnie, who had run forward to
kiss and embrace her “little lady.” That occurred behind Mr. Jennifer’s
back, and son William had too brisk an appetite to trouble about the
emotions of his elders.

“Shall I give you a dump o’ fat, sir?”

And so they sat down to dinner.

They were half through with it when Mrs. Winnie accepted a nod from John
Gore and pushed back her chair, and picking up a wedding-favor from
under a mug on the dresser, she went to her man and held it under his
nose.

Mr. Jennifer stared at the gilded sprigs and the ribbons very gravely.

“I dunno as I be a widower yet,” he said, as his slow brain took in the
nature of the thing, “nor be you a widow, Winnie.”

“Oh, you thick-head, Chris!”

Mr. Jennifer looked at her, and then, with a sudden gleam of the eyes,
at John Gore and the lady.

“Be that so, my dear?”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Winnie, in a whisper.

Then Mr. Jennifer laid a hand to his mug, rose slowly and solemnly, and
stared hard at the bride and bridegroom.

“Ut be a pleasure—”

He paused and reconsidered the beginning.

“Ut be a pleasure—”

John Gore and Barbara looked up at him smilingly, and their eyes seemed
to drive the whole art of oratory out of Mr. Jennifer’s head. He took
refuge in his mug, brandished it toward them, and set it down empty,
with emphasis. Then he looked at his wife with an affectionate grin.

“I be powerful pleased, my dear. Seven years ago—”

“Eight,” interposed the wife, with a shocked glance at son William.

“Eight be ut, then—I dared ut like a man, and I’d dare ut again, please
God.”

“Lor’, Christopher!”

“William, keep t’ gravy off thy breeches. Mr. Gore, sir, you’ll be for
pardoning me, but t’ lady’s face be a good bargain. T’ Bible says
something of vines and fig leaves and olive branches—I dunno as I quite
knows what; but I wish ye all of ut, sir, you—and the lady.”

So Barbara lay in her lover’s arms that night, and they heard the birds
break out with their songs at dawn.

                                  XLIX

The sun was up, the birds making the air quiver, the life of the world
awake with the faint fragrance of a spring morning. Barbara, lying upon
her lover’s arm, looked with shadowy eyes at the casement that caught
the light of the glowing east. And with the first coming of
consciousness she had remembered the refugee at Thorn and the part that
they had set themselves to play that day. The “self” in them was to be
thrust aside on that first morning of their life together.

Barbara, combing her hair at the little glass by the window, could hear
her man walking to and fro in the garden; for he had risen first, and
taken the bar down from the house door before the Jennifers were
stirring. And though he whistled the tune of a love-song, she seemed to
feel a spirit of melancholy and foreboding stealing up through the
spring morning. Nor was her own consciousness without a sense of
shadowiness and vague unrest. Bridal dawns are not always the happiest
dawns, yet it was not the love in Barbara that had suffered pain. The
destiny that she was to fulfil that day brought back a fog of
recollections that chilled the air a little and weakened the sunlight.
This was the aftermath, the second reaping and gathering of memories.

The joy of the night had been sweet, intimate, and wrapped in the
darkness, and perhaps her heart was not ready for the daylight—and
realities. It was a sensitive and sacred hour with her, and almost she
could have desired to spend that day alone. There was so much to
realize, so much to feel, so much to foreshadow. She was no longer
herself; the sacrament had its mysteries; her maidenliness felt a little
shy of the world at first.

She heard John Gore walking below her window, and a sudden rush of
tenderness seized on her. For the moment she felt lonely, even afraid;
for he to whom she had given everything alone could give everything in
return. The sense of surrender was quick in her. She would be utterly
alone in the world, save for this one man. Love was life. And the
wistfulness made her yearn over him as though one day the world might
take him from her.

“John!”

He turned and looked up at the window.

“Halloo, little wife!”

She leaned forward with her comb caught in a tress of her hair, knowing
not what to say to him now that she had called him.

“What a heavy dew there has been!”

“Yes; the grass is gray in the meadows.”

“Is Mrs. Winnie up yet?”

“No; we are the larks this morning.”

She was silent a moment, looking away toward the distant hills. Her
voice had a tremor when she spoke again.

“John!”

“Yes!”

“Come to me; I want you.”

And he went up, to find her weeping.

Man, being a creature of tougher fibre, cannot always comprehend a
woman’s moods. They may seem inexplicable to him, because her
sensitiveness can be as fine as gossamer, and hardly visible against the
coarser background of reality. Even as a man cannot always gauge the
strange, shrinking prides of a shy child, so he may blunder against the
delicate and sacred things of a woman’s soul, unless love, spiritual
love, gives him that intuition that sees beyond the carnal clay.

“Why, Barbe—weeping!”

He looked at her, not a little troubled, searching his own heart
guiltily, yet having no consciousness of having wounded her in any way.
The tears of a woman whom he loves have always a personal issue for a
man. They may pique him if he is vain, challenge him if he be honest.

“Oh, it is nothing, John!”

He did the only thing a man could do, and that was to take her face
between his two hands and kiss her.

“Little wife, no secrets from me. Let us begin life so; we shall never
regret it.”

She closed her eyes, and, putting her hands upon his shoulders, hung her
head a little.

“It was foolish of me, dear. I have been so happy, and sometimes when
one has been very happy—”

“The tears come, little wife.”

“I have never been very happy till now, John. And just now it came into
my heart so suddenly—”

She faltered, and he stood looking down at her as he held her in his
arms.

“Barbara—wife, you felt lonely.”

She darted up a look at him as though surprised that he should know.

“How do I know, child? Because I had something of the same feeling
myself. What a pair of fond fools, eh! No, it is something deeper and
more sacred than that.”

“Yes, John, I know. But do you think—”

“I think a great many things, Barbe.”

“Yes; but that I shall make you happy, that I can fill your life for
you?”

He took her unloosed hair, and put it back from off her forehead.
Perhaps he was learning the familiar truth that no being can be more
fiercely conscientious and self-critical than a good woman newly
married. Fevers of doubt and of introspection rise in her. The surrender
is so final, so utter, and the future seems so precious.

“Barbe, we have been married not quite a day. Yes—yes—I know. It is
the sweet, brave heart in you that is blind to its own worth. Little
wife, look in my eyes and see if you see any shadows there.”

She looked and smiled.

“No, John.”

“Then never look for them, dear heart. One’s imagination may create
curses. Always speak out; never think in. If I ever hurt you—yet God
forbid—tell me so; that can be mended.”

She felt for his hands and held them.

“I will try always not to think of myself, John.”

“Then you will be a very foolish woman, dear, and I shall have to do the
thinking for you.”

“And you will take me to Thorn to-day?”

He looked at her gravely.

“You wish that?”

“I wish it.”

It was still early when John Gore brought the horses to the gate after
breakfast and lifted Barbara into her saddle. She wore a plain black
riding-habit that morning, a black beaver with a black plume curled
round the brim, and a collar of white lace about her throat. The life at
Furze Farm had tinted her skin with a brown, pearly haze. She was never
a girl for much color, but her lips were red and generous, and her
figure more rich in womanliness than of yore.

The shy, introspective mood of the early morning had passed. Hill and
valley bathed in sunlight, the freshness of the woods, the movement, the
sympathy between heart and heart, brought back that happier courage that
is the true boast of health. For it is the brave, clear-eyed woman who
holds the love of a man in this world. Melancholy and helplessness may
please the lover; they do not often hold the husband. Man needs a mate
who can spread her wings with him, whose eyes look trustfully, who has
no trick of selfish tears. And John Gore, riding beside his wife that
morning, felt glad and strong and sure because of her, for generosity
counts with a man almost before all other virtues. Let a woman be pure
and generous, and she will never lack the reverence of men.

When they came to the valley of thorns that morning John Gore drew rein
in the beech thicket that he knew so well. He desired to bring Barbara
into Thorn without my lord suspecting it.

“I will go down first,” he said; “when I am ready I will come into the
court and wave my cloak. Then, little wife, you will follow.”

And it was agreed between them as he said.

My lord was not in the kitchen that morning, and John Gore, seeing that
the stool was gone, guessed that his father was in the garden. Going out
into the court he waved his cloak as a sign to Barbara, and passing on
into the garden he found Stephen Gore sitting in the sunlight with his
sword across his knees. He looked younger by years than he had looked
for many weeks. His eyes had an alertness new to them, and he rose up to
meet his son with the air of an aristocrat and a man.

“Good-morning to you, John; I am making the most of the sunlight.”

The son looked questioningly at the father’s sword. My lord’s manner had
something final, something stately in its tranquillity.

“I had a visitor yesterday, my son; I was glad that you were absent.”

“A visitor? Who?”

“One of those gentlemen, John, who walk through the world with a ladle
full of hot sulphur. He came to spy and to discover. I entertained him.
I assure you that he was mightily exalted.”

John Gore looked grave.

“An informer?”

“Call the creature what you will, my son, he has scented the fox and run
him to earth. He seemed astonished at my urbanity, and sat with a hand
upon his pistol. ‘Good sir,’ said I, ‘I am tired of the country, and
yearn for the city and that noble place where so many good gentlemen are
entertained. Do me the honor of waiting on me to-morrow with a few fiery
Protestant friends; let us fix the hour at noon. I assure you that I
shall not run,’ and I believe the fellow believed me. I shall be taken
to-day, John; I am waiting for them quietly here. What does it matter!
They cannot frighten me; I am beyond that now.”

He spoke simply yet pungently, a quiet pride giving him something of
grandeur and impressiveness. John Gore was listening for the sound of
Barbara’s coming. A clatter of hoofs from the court-yard rose on the
morning air. My lord heard it and smiled, and then held out a hand to
his son.

“Hear them, John! I did not expect the rogues so early. Clear, my lad; I
don’t want you caught in the tangle. Get behind some of yonder bushes.”

John Gore looked hard at his father.

“It is not your friends yet,” he said; “wait here; this is my affair.”

The sunlight shone on Barbara’s face as she met her husband in the
court-yard. He said but one word—“Come”—and led her by the hand into
the garden. A tangle of shrubs hid the place where Stephen Gore waited.
And thus John Gore and Barbara came upon my lord quite suddenly, and
stood before him almost like a pair of runaways returning for a father’s
pardon.

My lord looked at Barbara and went white to the lips. His arms hung
limply. He stooped, and seemed to shrink into himself, his eyes
remaining fixed on her as though unable to look away. For the moment the
old, frightened, fawning expression came back into his eyes. Then he
gave a sudden, inarticulate cry, flung out his hands, and stood groping
almost like one struck blind.

“John, you have deceived me!”

He would probably have fallen had not the son sprung to him and put an
arm about his body.

“John, you have deceived me! My God, are you against me, even at the
last!”

“No, no; it is not that.”

He glanced at Barbara, for Stephen Gore seemed in a kind of agony. He
trembled greatly, leaned heavily upon his son, almost clinging to him as
though stricken with the dread that he had been tricked and condemned
even at the last by the one man whose love was the one thing left to
him.

Barbara answered her husband’s glance; her lips were quivering. This
strong man’s anguish went to her heart.

“John, tell him—”

“It is forgiveness.”

“A blotting out of the past.”

At the sound of her voice Stephen Gore recovered his courage and his
self-control. He stood back from his son, putting John Gore’s arm aside,
as though he had strength enough to stand alone. He looked at Barbara
sadly, yet with thankfulness—the look of a man whose grosser prides
were dead.

“You are alive, child; thank God for that! The truth of this was hid
from me.”

She would have spoken, but he held up his hands as though to beg her
patience.

“You know everything? Does she know the whole truth, John?”

The son nodded and turned his face away. My lord spoke on.

“Child, I did you and yours a great wrong. I cannot justify myself; out
of my own mouth I am judged. These are the words of a man who expects to
die. Yet be it said, child, without pride of heart, that I would have
gladly ended the thing I called my life that I might wipe out all the
past.”

There was silence between the three for several seconds. Then Barbara
looked at John Gore and he at her.

“We have buried the past,” she said, turning to my lord.

Stephen Gore did not move.

“John and I are man and wife. We have put the past away from us. It is
better for us—and for the dead.”

My lord raised his eyes slowly till they rested on Barbara’s face. He
saw nothing there but a mist of tenderness and tears.

“Child, you say this to me?”

She held out her hands generously.

“Out of my heart I say it.”

My lord bowed himself and took her hands, and when he had kissed them he
put them reverently away from him, and stood up bravely, yet with a
twitching face. John Gore had come to stand beside his wife. And the
three looked at each other and were silent.

Then my lord spoke.

“Children, go—and God bless you.”

They looked at him questioningly, but he did not falter.

“John, my son, you understand. They will come for me soon; I am ready; I
shall no longer be ashamed. Go. I would not have you near the fringe of
the slough into which these good Protestants will throw me. You have
your lives to live. It is my desire that no shadow of mine should ever
darken them again.”

Barbara looked at her husband, for she did not understand the meaning of
what was said. My lord smiled at her and pointed toward the distance.
The authority seemed his that day.

“John will tell you the truth. It is for your sakes that I demand this.”

Both husband and wife faltered, but Stephen Gore’s eyes were clear and
unflinching.

“John, if this should be the end of me, what I have is yours, unless the
rogues sequestrate it. Now go, my son, and be happy. It is my last wish,
and you will grant it me.”

And so they left him, sadly, unwillingly, feeling like traitors leaving
a friend to death. For the man had seemed lovable, even great, at that
last moment, and yet they had felt that it would have been graceless to
question his last desire.

Stephen Gore watched them go, following them to the court-yard, and
standing above the moat as they rode slowly away toward the woods. Under
the beech-trees they turned and looked back at Thorn, and saw him
standing there, and waved him a farewell.

“What will it mean?”

Barbara’s eyes asked her love that as he took her bridle and drew away
into the woods.

“They will take him to-day,” he said; “yesterday he was discovered.
Other heads have fallen; so may his.”

She was silent awhile, and then looked at John Gore wistfully.

“And we are leaving him!”

“Wife, it was his wish, his prayer, his penance. I—a man—would not
grudge it him. Can you not understand?”

“Yes, John, I can understand.”

And they rode back to Furze Farm sadly, knowing that it would be wiser
for them to leave the place and seek some other refuge till they saw how
the times promised.

Before noon my lord was taken in Thorn as a Catholic and a conspirator
against the state. He met them calmly, with the fine carriage of the man
of the world, courteous and debonair, ready even with an epigram and a
smile. His face seemed strangely tranquil as he rode with his escort out
of the gate of Thorn.

“May the sins of the fathers rest not upon the children.”

That was the prayer that his heart uttered.

                                THE END

Transcriber’s Notes:

Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. Punctuation
and minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.