Warwick Deeping

“ My lord opened his cloak and set his hat at a happier angle.
“Come along, Jack; I have business for you to-night.”
Now John Gore carried one matter uppermost in his mind that evening. My lord seemed to read the nature of his son’s thoughts, and dashed any illusion with the candor of a friend.
“No, nothing of that kind, Jack; I had news this morning. She is well in body, but she has not changed greatly yet in soul. Put it behind you, and wait for the best. After all, there are stirring things to be done in the world, and a maid should not make a man’s blood turn to milk.” ”

“ He thought of the long, cold nights in that tower room, the loneliness, the forebodings, the burden of past sorrow. It was easy to understand how the less lovable pride in her had been broken, and how with tears her womanhood had come by its true strength. The very sound of her voice had seemed richer to him; the change in her was a change that no true man would ever quarrel with.
Though mists rose and a frail moon came up to make the dark woods seem more raw and cold, John Gore kept watch all night in the fork of the beech-tree, thinking of Barbara and of the strange things he had discovered. ”

“ Now John Gore seemed suddenly to forget the eighty feet of space below him. His heart had given a great leap and was drumming against his ribs, for the truth that he had discovered went far beyond his dreams. The window was cut in the thickness of the wall, and the stanchions set deeply in it, so that he contrived to drag himself over the sill and wedge himself there with his face close to the bars.
“Thank God,” he said, “that I dared this climb! It was a climb into the dark, dear, but I have found more than ever I sought.” ”

“ John Gore felt himself out of touch with all these people, for after a three years’ voyage a man may be more ignorant of the political passions of the moment than a ploughboy who can catch the village gossip in a tavern. There were causes and interests to be served, and numberless back-stair intrigues to enthrall those who loved crooked pleasures and the mystery of some plot. John Gore realized that his father had plunged both hands into some secret undertaking, yet even the glamour of the Mazarin’s private salon did not lure him to mingle an amour with intrigues. ”

“ 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 call of solitary soul to soul is ever something of a riddle, and yet to the man there must be that one woman whose hair has the darkness of night, whose eyes are mysterious, whose face has an alluring sadness near to pain. Out of one thread of pathos or of passion may be woven that scarlet robe that covers the dim white body of Romance. A trick of the voice, a poise of the head, and the sleeper wakes in the world of color and desire. The streaking of the night sky by a falling star is not more swift and strange than that flash of divine wonder across the consciousness of a woman or a man. ”

“ Dawn may be the egotist’s hour of smug self-congratulation, or the poet’s moment for praising solitude, even though like Thomson he buries his head in a nightcap, and wallows in bed till noon. The dead man had no one as yet to question his quietude, though there was a sense of stirring everywhere—attic windows opening, milk frothing into jugs at kitchen steps, carts lumbering lazily over the cobbles. The sun ascended, the mist began to rise, the sunflowers in a row along the wall had their broad faces made splendid by the day. A couple of thrushes were hopping to and fro over the grass. ”

“ Pepys was such a bubble of mirth, such a book of shrewd sense, such a register of anecdotes, that his loquacity and his infinite good-fellowship made even romance linger in its onrush for an hour.
Late shadows were floating down the river before John Gore escaped from the secretary’s weak eyes and stalwart tongue. He had some small affairs of his own to attend to in the City and at the New Exchange in the Strand: some new harness at a saddler’s; stockings and shirts at a silk mercer’s; a case of long pistols at a gunsmith’s in a street near the New Exchange. ”

“ But John Gore was not so ordinary a fool. His thoughts went deeper into the soil than the thoughts of frailer men. And he had more true manhood in him than to insinuate even to his own heart that because a woman played the will-o’-the-wisp, she was luring him on with the lure of mystery.
It was all so simple, had he but known, as all great secrets seem when they are once discovered. Your astrologist goes weaving grotesque obscurities about man’s destiny and the stars, till one calm brain sets the whole grand and reasonable scheme in order. ”

“ XXXIII If Winnie Jennifer was not in love with John Gore, she was in love with the love in him, for no man could sit and stare so at the fire, and look so quietly grim over such a matter, without winning over a woman’s heart. There was a romance here, and your true woman, be she drudge or madam, has that trick of the fancy that lifts life out of its sordid round and makes her a queen of the fairies, though there be gray in her hair. ”

“ The man was mere carrion, and John Gore sprang up the stairs, finding the lantern still burning, though the grease from the candle had guttered through upon the stones. He picked it up, and was about to push forward into the room when a black square in the flooring caught his eye. A flagstone had been turned upon its side against the wall, uncovering the mouth of some oubliette or pit, and for a moment he bent over it, trying to probe its depths, as though dreading lest that dear body should be lying broken in the darkness beneath. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Gore remembered his father’s innuendos. It had been a pitiable affair for an innocent girl. It would have been even more pitiable had she been confronted with what my lord had hinted to be the truth.
“Does the thrust of a sword hurt? I have often wondered.”
Her eyes were fixed upon him, as though she had discovered the slightest flicker of uneasiness, a length of silence that suggested premeditation.
“Why think of such things?”
“One cannot always help one’s thoughts; they come like the wind through the window.” ”

“ John Gore laughed, for it was Mr. Pepys’s outing and not his, and he suffered his friend to follow his own nose, being amused to know what would be the end of it. They were following a grass track that curled hither and thither through thickets and over scrubby meadows, not a house to be seen anywhere, with the sun at noon, and no dinner threatening.
The track proved kind to them, however, for the woods gave back suddenly, and they saw a red farm-house shelving its thatch under the shelter of a few beech-trees against the clear blue of an October sky. ”

“ Barbara was still lying like one asleep before the fire when he returned, for she had been so near to death that life seemed to steal back softly and slowly as though still afraid. John Gore had never looked thus at his love before, as a man might look at a sleeping child or at some fair valley under a golden dawn. He saw the faint flush upon her cheeks, the shadowy sweep of the long lashes, the little dark curls of hair falling with such a sheen of sweetness over her forehead, the line of the red mouth, the soft warmth of her skin. ”

“ There was a stretch of landscape in one corner of the picture, the one sunlit space upon the canvas, a scene of meadows and of woodlands, with a mansion of red brick rising from the narrow waters of a moat. John Gore guessed it to be the Purcells’ house of Thorn, now ruinous in a Sussex waste, but once the home of the fair Spaniard with the peevish mouth.
He was looking at this picture with some intentness when Anne Purcell came in to him, with cross lines about her mouth, and the strained air of a woman whose temper is not at its best when inconsiderate persons make morning calls. ”

“ He went up silently, for he was in his stockings, but there was more grimness in that swift and silent climb than any clangor and clash that armed men might have made. His blood was up, the devil awake in him, and the spirit of murder howling in his ears. He seemed to see all the gross, smothering horror of the scene above, and he set his teeth as he wondered whether he would come too late.
A quick shuffling sound came down to him in the darkness. A hurrying human thing was close to him, and John Gore challenged and lunged without pity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And Stephen Gore felt the bone snap as a dead branch snaps across a man’s knee.
In the agony of it he rolled over and over till his body was stopped by the couch that Squire Oxenham had drawn forward from the window. He gripped the lower stretcher of the wood frame with both hands and took the sleeve of his coat between his teeth, as a seaman will clinch his teeth upon a rope’s-end to save himself from screaming when the surgeon’s hot iron sears the stump of a mangled limb. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Who remembered such things when the storm-wind was shrieking, like the ghosts of the sea’s dead, through a great ship’s tackle? Yet, after all, it was only the fanaticism of another circle, another world. Your scientific zealot will cut a caper over the discovery of some new bug. It was a mere question of environment, and Father Adam may have strutted vaingloriously in some new-fangled smock of leaves.
Not for John Gore alone had it been a night of impressions. They had proved keen, pitiless, and pathetic so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. ”

“ There were ghosts at Thorn that autumn—but solid, hungry, and most gluttonous ghosts, who seemed to have abundance of good beer and food stowed away in the huge cupboards of the kitchen. The kitchen and the two rooms over it had been made habitable for the MacAlisters, and were now used by the new spirits who haunted Thorn—a big, stocky man, with a back like a flagstone; a comely, broad-hipped woman, with black eyes and a tight, hard face. They had come there suddenly, when the moon was full, walking by the woodland track from a great black coach that had set them down upon the high-road. ”

“ For the son, the happenings of the night had a richer aftermath. He was no self-conscious, strutting righter of wrongs; no chivalrous adventure-hunter launching his lance at the world’s throat. My Lord Pembroke might have kissed most women with impunity as far as John Gore was concerned; for though they might have protested, he knew, as a man of the world, that not one in twenty would have been worth the interference. Any chivalrous fool who had pushed in to a rescue would have merely flattered a coquette with the offer of blood where the other man had only offered kisses. ”