Had Lady Purcell, herself unseen, followed her daughter to her room,
she would have been astonished by the sudden transformation that swept
over her so soon as the door closed. The apathetic figure straightened
into keen aliveness; the look of vacuity vanished from the face. It was
like a sudden transition from damp, listless November to the starlit
brilliance of a frosty night.
“Dust and ashes at two-and-twenty!”
My Lord Gore’s echoing of Biblical pessimism seemed to have lost its
appropriateness so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. There was
nothing listless about the intense and rather swarthy face that looked
down into the garden with its white-pillared music-room and its October
memories. It was more the face of some impassioned child of destiny
striving to gaze into the mystery of the coming years.
The acting of a part to delude the world, and to make men ignore her as
a spiritless girl. The merciless fanaticism of youth watching, and ever
watching, behind all that assumption of listlessness and sloth. Then, in
those solitary interludes when she had no part to play, the restrained
passion in her breaking like lava to the surface, filling her eyes with
a species of prophetic fire.
In a little carved cabinet of black oak she kept some of those relics
that made for her a ritual of revenge—her father’s shirt stained with
blood, some of the dead flowers she had found beside him on the floor, a
piece of the cloth that had covered him that autumn morning. Almost
nightly she would take these things from their hiding-place, spread them
upon her bed, and kneel before them as a papist might kneel before a
relic or the symbol of the Sacred Heart. As for the curb of gold with
its knot of pearls, she carried it always in her bosom, sewn up in a
case of scarlet silk. Distrusting every one, hardly sane in the personal
passion of her purpose, she never parted with the talisman, but
treasured its possible magic for herself.
Yet what had she discovered all these many months? The knowledge that
her mother had put aside her black stuffs gladly, a growing sense of
antipathy toward the man who had been her father’s friend. She could
remember the time when my Lord Stephen had carried her through the
garden on his shoulder; bought her sweetmeats, green stockings, and
jessamy gloves; and even served as her valentine with a big man’s
playful gallantry toward a child. She had thought him a splendid person
then, but now—all had changed for her, and the analysis of her own
instinctive repulsion left her obstinately baffled. She had no mandate
from the past for hating him; on the contrary, facts might have stood to
prove that she was his debtor. She remembered how she had caught him
praying beside her father’s coffin, and how he had risen up with a
strange spasm of the face and blundered from the room. He had offered
money for the discovery of the truth, importuned magistrates, petitioned
the King, put his own servants in black. No man could have done more
loyally as a friend.
Yet nothing had been discovered. Some unknown sword had passed through
Lionel Purcell’s body. The very motive remained concealed. The world had
buried him, gossiped awhile, and then forgotten.
But Barbara had a heart that did not know how to forget. She had
Southern blood, the passionate heirloom of an Elizabethan wooing. The
Spanish wine of her ancestry had given her a flash of fanaticism and the
swarthy melancholy of her comely face. And the whole promise of her
youth had bent itself, like some dark-eyed zealot—to a purpose that had
none of the softer and more sensuous moods of life in view.
Why should she hate this big, bland, stately mortal, this Stephen Gore
who had no enemies and many friends? That was a question she often asked
herself. Was it because she had been caught by the suspicion that he
might console the widow for the husband’s death? There was no palpable
sin in the possibility, and yet it angered her, even though she had no
great love for her mother. A supersensitive delicacy made her jealous
for the dead. The very buxom effulgence of my lord’s vitality seemed to
insult the shadow that haunted the house for her.
As she sat at the window looking down upon the garden the sun sank low
in the west, throwing a broad radiance under the branches of the trees.
Their round boles were bathed in light. The figures that moved about the
park were touched with a weird brilliance, so that a red coat shone like
a ruby, a blue like a sapphire, a silver-gray like an opal iridescent in
the sun. There was much of the charm of one of Watteau’s pictures, yet
with a greater significance of light and shadow.
Dusk began to fall. A hand fumbled at the latch of the door, and a
figure in black entered bearing a tray. It was Mrs. Jael, her mother’s
woman, a stout little body with a florid face and an overpolite way with
her that repelled cynics. She had amiable blue eyes that seemed to see
nothing, a loose mouth, and a big bosom. Her personality appeared to
have soaked itself in sentimentality as a stewed apple soaks itself in
syrup.
Barbara did not turn her head.
“Why, dear heart, all in the dusk! Here’s a little dish or two.”
“Set them down on the table.”
“You’ll get your death chill—there, sitting at that window—”
The woman fidgeted officiously about the room, as though trying to
insinuate her sympathy betwixt the girl’s silence and reserve. Her
dilatory habit only roused Barbara’s impatience. Mrs. Jael’s sly,
succulent motherliness had lost its power of deceiving, so far as Anne
Purcell’s daughter was concerned.
“Light the candles.”
She remained motionless while the woman bustled to and fro.
“Thanks. You can leave me, Jael.”
The tire-woman could meet a snub with the most obtuse good temper.
“Should you be tired, Mistress Barbara, I can come and put you to bed,
my dear, while my lady is at the playhouse.”
“I am old enough to put myself to bed, am I not?”
Mrs. Jael laughed as though bearing with a peevish miss of twelve.
“Dear life, of course you are.” And she broke into a fat giggle as
though something had piqued her sense of humor.
Barbara’s face remained turned toward the window.
“You can go, Jael.”
The woman curtesied and obeyed.
Her face lost its good-humor, however, as quickly as a buffoon’s loses
its stage grin when he has turned his back upon the audience. She stood
outside the door a moment, listening, and then went softly down the
passage to my lady’s room, with its stamped leather hangings in green
and gold, its great carved bed and Eastern rugs.
Anne Purcell was seated before her mirror, her long, brown hair, of
which she was mightily proud, falling about her almost to the ground.
She had a stick of charcoal in her hand, and was leaning forward over
the dressing-table, crowded with its trinkets, scent-flasks, and
pomade-boxes, staring at her face in the glass as she heightened the
expressiveness of her eyes.
Her glance merely shifted from the reflection of her own face to that of
Mrs. Jael’s figure as she entered the room. They were not a little
alike, these two women, save that the one boasted more grace and polish;
the other more pliability and unctuousness, and perhaps more cunning.
“Get me my red velvet gown from the cupboard, Jael.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Have you seen the girl?”
Mrs. Jael’s head and shoulders had disappeared into the depths of the
carved-oak wardrobe. Her voice came muffled as from a cave.
“Yes, my lady.”
“What was she doing with herself?”
“Sitting at her window, poor dear, and looking very low and sulky.”
Anne Purcell turned her head to and fro as she scrutinized herself
critically in the glass. She still looked young, with her high color and
her sleek skin, her large eyes and full red mouth. Her style of
comeliness seemed suited to the times, plump and pleasurable, full and
free in outline and expression. My Lord of Gore had no reason to feel
displeased at the prospect of possessing such a widow.
“What do you make of the girl, Jael?”
The tire-woman had turned from the wardrobe with the gown of red velvet
over her arm.
“The child is strange, my lady, and out of health. You might say that
she had been moon-struck, or that she was watching for a ghost.”
Anne Purcell moved restlessly in her chair.
“Sometimes, Jael, I think that Barbara is a little mad. I am ready for
you to dress my hair.”
Mrs. Jael spread the gown upon the bed.
“She doesn’t seem to have a spark of life in her, poor dear. I’m half
scared often that she should do herself some harm.”
My lady was watching the woman’s face in the mirror.
“Oh—”
“She’s always moping by herself like a sick bird. It often makes me
wonder, my lady—”
“Well?”
“What Mistress Barbara does all those hours when she is alone. I have
tried looking—”
“Through the key-hole, Jael?”
“Your pardon, but it is my concern for the child. I’ve started awake at
night thinking I heard her cry out, and I have dreamed of seeing her in
her shroud.”
A flash of cynicism swept across Anne Purcell’s face. But she did not
rebuke the woman for her sentimental canting.
“The girl ought to be watched.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“She will not have Betty to sleep with her.”
A sly suggestive smile on the face above hers in the mirror warned her
that Mrs. Jael understood her in every detail.
“What were you going to say, Jael? There is no need for us to beat about
the bush.”
“There is the little closet, my lady.”
“Yes, next to Mistress Barbara’s room.”
“It used to have a door—leading to the bedroom. But Sir Lionel—poor
gentleman—had it filled in.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Only with double panelling, my lady, and the woodwork has shrunk a
little. I happened to notice it last night when I went in there in the
dark to get a blanket, and Mistress Barbara’s candle was burning.”
The eyes of the two women met in the looking-glass. Mrs. Jael’s face
gave forth a sunny, insinuating smile.
“It is not my nature, my lady, to spy and shuffle, but—”
“If you scraped a little of the wood away with a knife?”
“I don’t feel happy about Mistress Barbara, my lady. And if—”
“Be careful, Jael, you are pulling my hair.”
“A hundred pardons, my lady.”
“If you should see anything strange, it is well that I should know.”