I
In the little music-house in his garden overlooking the Park of St.
James’s, Sir Lionel Purcell—Knight—lay dead, with his cloak half
thrown across his face and one hand still gripping the hilt of his
sword. The door of the music-room stood ajar, giving a glimpse of the
autumn garden, the grass silvered with heavy dew, yellow leaves flaking
it, like splashes of gold on a green shield. The curtains were drawn
across the windows, so that a few stray shafts of light alone streamed
in, giving a sense of some mystery unrevealed as yet, some riddle of
human passion waiting to be read.
The silent room seemed all shadows, save where those Rembrandtesque
strands of sunlight slanted upon the floor. And there, as though touched
by light from another world, the dead man’s forehead gleamed out above
the black folds of his cloak. His sword, a streak of silver, joined him
to the surrounding shadows, a last bond between him and the past.
Without—an autumn morning, with the clocks chiming the hour of six, and
the water-fowl calling from the decoy in the park. A golden mist
swimming in the east; the grass white with dew; the trees still
sleeping, though the yellow leaves fell slowly, softly from the silent
branches overhead. A virginal gray-eyed wonder in the eyes of the day.
Freshness and fragrance everywhere, with the spires of Westminster
striking upward into pearly haze, and the broad river catching the
sunlight that sifted through the ragged vapor.
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. An inquisitive robin came
perking in through the half-shut door, to stand twittering with one
black, beady eye cocked curiously at the motionless figure on the floor.
In one dark corner a harpsichord showed the ivory of its key-board with
something suggestive of a sinister smile.
Had that ingenious connoisseur of feminine beauty—Mr. Pepys—taken an
early stroll in the park that morning, he might have derived infinite
contentment from the sight of a young girl, a “comely black wench,”
standing at her open window with nothing but a red cloak to hide the
whiteness of her night-gear. She was binding her hair, her eyes gazing
over the empty park, a little table at the window beside her full of
ribbons, pins, trinkets, and laces. She was wondering whether her father
would walk early in the park that morning. She had fallen asleep before
he had returned from supping at my Lord Montague’s the night before,
though Mrs. Jael—her mother’s woman, had sat up to watch for the flare
of links along the street.
The garden looked innocent enough in the morning sunlight, with its
gravel walks, sleek grass, and quaint bay-trees trimmed into the
likeness of pinnacles. The music-room, with its diminutive classic
portico, lyre, mask, and trumpets in gilt upon the tympanum, seemed,
with its white pillars, no place where tragedy might watch and wait.
Whatever impulse drew the girl to the music-room that autumn morning,
she had caught no prophetic gleam of the thing that waited to be known.
A few steps across the grass, a moment’s surprise at finding the door
ajar, a startled pause upon the threshold. Then, the lights and shadows
of that Rembrandtesque interior burning themselves in upon the brain,
the limning of that motionless figure in lines of fire against a
background of imperishable memories.
That he was dead, a touch of the hand betrayed without one moment’s
hope. The reason of his death blazoned in gules, with a red rose over
the heart. The face set in a smile of infinite sadness. An overturned
candle with the wax spilled upon the table, a bowl of flowers broken
upon the floor. And in the left hand, held by the stiff fingers, a short
chain of gold with a knot of pearls, for a button, like a loop torn from
a man’s cloak.
It was thus that Barbara Purcell, child that she yet was, found her
father lying dead with a sword-thrust through the heart. He had been a
silent man, no courtier, a man whose life had hoped more from the quiet
corners of the world than from the pageantry of state. He had had no
enemies, so far as the child knew; yet the world might have warned her
that a man may be grudged the possession of a handsome wife. Even the
Bible might have told her that.
As for the short curb of gold with its knot of pearls, she took it from
the dead hand, and hid the thing in her bosom under her dress. To blazon
the truth abroad, to run shrieking into the house, that was not the way
the passion of her grief expressed itself. The curb of gold was the one
link that might join the future to the past. She would show it to no
one. That right should be hers to watch and to discover.