John Gore

“ 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. ”

“ John Gore’s boat, half a mile ahead of my lord’s galley, disembarked first at the steps, so that the servants were able to clear the baggage into the house and help in preparing that most essential of all incidents—dinner. John Gore sent Sparkin off to the kitchen, and passed the time pacing the gravel walks, with the river before him and the air sweet with the perfumes of the herbs. The stateliness of the place, its repose and opulence, had a strong charm for the man after rough years of voyaging and the squalid loneliness of prison. ”

“ The spirit of unrest that seemed in the blood of every man that year might well have entered into John Gore’s mood as he wandered without purpose in the park after leaving my Lady Anne to Mrs. Jael’s ministrations. To a man who had led an active and adventurous life the court world seemed a trivial world, unless he were a libertine, a gambler, or a dabbler in ambitious schemes. ”

“ For John Gore had found the one woman in the world who could make the heart grow great with awe in him—as with the awe of unsailed seas. It was sweet even to be so far away from her that he might feel the dream-lure drawing him amid those Yorkshire moors. The memory of his mother shared in the tenderness thereof, as though she had breathed into him at birth that soul of hers that could love even in sadness and regret. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Gore leaned his head upon his hand, his fingers tugging at his hair, much like a school-boy baffled by a pile of figures. Man of action, and of the world that he was, his ways were often quaintly boyish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ For John Gore was more at home in an ingle-nook, with some little Yorkshire maid on his knee, than idling in his father’s painted salon with a score of somebodies trying to seem more splendid and more witty than either their estates or their brains could justify. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A house rose before them amid the trees, its windows dark save for one in the first story, and that dim with the shadow of drawn curtains. John Gore recognized it as the house of Hortense. They were crossing the ground where he had fought my Lord Pembroke that wet night in summer.
“Is your call there, sir?”
Stephen Gore glanced this way and that, and then laid a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Yes. Join with me, Jack; there are nobler prizes to be won here than you will ever take at sea.” ”

“ XXXI John Gore made his retreat from Thorn with nothing more threatening in the way of a betrayal than a low, querulous growl from the mastiff chained in the yard. He scaled the gate, and made his way back to the thorn-tree where he had left his heavier clothes and his sword.
Now the sea-captain’s brain might have been a Spanish treasure-ship, and the happenings of the night so many buccaneers by the way they stormed in and put everything to confusion. There were a hundred questions to be asked and answered, and many of them were the worst of riddles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Had life promised another meaning she might have suffered herself to be touched by the message that his manhood seemed to utter. And to John Gore, walking at her side, the rose-trees that had bloomed in the quaint gardens were budding again into crimson flame. The high hedgerows were full of golden light, caught and held in the mysterious shadow-net of the dusk. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ XVII John Gore rode for Yorkshire the next day, mounted on a good gray nag, with pistols in his holsters, and a servant with a blunderbuss, and a valise strapped on the saddle of a stout brown cob. Travellers had to take their chance of meeting rough gentry on the road, and many a nervous countryman, weighing sixteen stone, made out his will before he did so desperate a thing as travel forty miles. The sea-captain was not a man with jumpy nerves, and his thoughts went to and fro between rentals and harvestings and the ways of women as though he sat smoking at home in a padded chair. ”

“ John Gore walked on in silence, his father humming a tune that sounded very much like a chant. For my Lord Stephen was a papist, though the conversion had not come till his maturer years, and whether it had been a question of conscience or of statecraft none but a Jesuit could have explained.
“Who was the man you were talking with by the Pool?”
“Grylls? A poor, willing kind of rogue who has learned to make himself of use. Small fry, Jack, to float in shallow streams. I have deeper waters for you, sir, with all your guns and tackle.” ”

“ He thrilled still, strong man that he was, at that appeal the girl had given him, as though some instinct had warned her that his manhood was a nobler thing than to suffer her pride to be humbled before them all. Fighting against wild seas and the primeval perils of strange lands had given John Gore the cool and unflurried courage that is steady rather than impetuous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Gore carried the child into the farm kitchen, and, laying him in a blanket almost upon the hearth-stone, rubbed and kneaded him till the skin began to redden. A loud sneeze was the first greeting that he gave them. His mother went down on her knees instantly and huddled him to her bosom, the blanket trailing across the brick floor.
“You be for terrifying me, you God-forsaken little rascal! Playing these tricks on us, with the good gentleman here wet to the skin and his stockings all mud! Won’t I smack ye when ye can bear a hand on a spot where a hand can’t do much harm!” ”

“ John Gore had thrust the pistol in his belt and swung the sack over his left shoulder. He put his right arm about Barbara’s body and swept her along by main strength toward the towering beech-trees that shone in the moonlight while the seal of silence seemed over Thorn.
XXXIX It was Stephen Gore who had ridden that steaming horse into the court-yard of Thorn—Stephen Gore, with jaded, twitching face, and eyes that looked weary with straining and gazing into the deeps of the night.
No man can be constantly and statuesquely selfish through life ”

“ It is nature’s business, and man, unless he happens to be a psychologist, leaves it as such and thinks about his dinner.
John Gore, jogging along at a good pace, with the fields and woods all silver under the rising sun, looked back at the hours of yesterday with more thoroughness than the majority of lovers. An ordinary egotist might have drawn some flattering inference from the strange melting of the girl’s reserve and her eagerness to escape him. He would have reminded his own conceit that a woman cries, “Shame, sir!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Even my lord’s grooms were making familiar with plush and scarlet cloth and stamped leather, with their heavy stable-boots planted where a satin slipper or a silver-buckled shoe alone had the right of repose.
The impudent roguery of it so tickled John Gore that he gave the two men at the near window a gruff “Goodevening,” coarsening his voice so that they should think him one of themselves.
“Hallo! Be that you, Sam Gibbs?”
“Samuel it is, old codger. Liquor going?”
“A hogshead full. Come inside; there’s room for a porker.”
John Gore laughed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To forego such plunder for a sulky girl whose mouth did not seem to be made for kisses! My lord’s worldliness scoffed at the chance. Hortense would disenchant him for any such sickly whim, and with a pout of her red lips or a touch of the hand, turn him aside from stupid melancholy. Yet Stephen Gore misunderstood the nature of the man, for though the vicissitudes of life make most folk fickle, there are some fanatics who grow more obstinate when threatened by fate.
John Gore passed by the Duke of Albemarle’s rooms, and entered the street by Holbein’s Gate. ”