My Lord Gore came to the supper-table in the best of tempers, welding
fatherliness, gallantry, and wit into one and the same humor. After a
glance at his debonair and handsome face the veriest nighthawk out of
Newgate might have declared him a great gentleman, a pillar of the
state, and upholder of all chivalry. No man could be more gracious when
the wine had no sour edge to it. He could dance a child to the ceiling,
laugh like a boy, and make the majority of young maids fall in love with
him with a tremor of romance.
In the world it is too often self that is served, and the gallant
courtier may be a bear at home. My Lord Gore was a man charmed with his
own charm. It pleased him to shine upon people, to radiate warmth, to be
looked upon as generous and splendid by men of duller manners. Yet he
could act generously, and not always with an eye to personal effect. The
plague came when his own comfort or his self-love were menaced. Then the
great gentleman, the classic courtier, showed the crust of Cain beneath
silks and velvets and coats of arms. Cross him, and Stephen Gore’s
stateliness became a power to crush instead of to propitiate. He could
be brutal with a courtly, sneering facility that was more dangerous than
the blundering anger of a rough and clumsy nature. For though every man
with the normal passions in him may be a potential Cain, it is chiefly
in the two extremes of brutishness and luxurious refinement that one
meets with that savage intolerance of the rights of others. And it must
be confessed that in the matter of sheer selfishness the poet has often
eclipsed the boor.
At the supper-table Anne Purcell spoke of Barbara’s singing. Who was
considered the best master, and did my lord prefer the Italian manner?
“For a man, yes,” he answered, quickly, “if he has a bull’s chest on
him. But give me a Frenchman to teach a woman to sing love-songs. That
is the fashion for Proserpine, eh, when Master Pluto has gone
a-farming?”
He winked at Barbara over his wine, looking very bland and fatherly,
with his lips rounded as though he were saying “Oporto” to his own
comfort.
“You might try the girl’s voice after supper, Stephen.”
My lord was very ready. He had a bass of rich compass, like the voice of
a popish priest chanting in some glorious choir.
“Herrick should be the man for Barbara. Soft, delicate lyrics, with an
amorous droop of the eyelids. Poor Lionel was too fond of the old
Cavalier ditties.”
Barbara looked at him with sombre, widely opened eyes. It was not often
of late that she had heard him speak her father’s name. And that night
it woke a flare of exultant anger in her, because of the touch of
patronage, as though the dead could always be safely pitied.
“Well, then, let us go to the music-room,” said her mother. “I will ring
to have candles lit.”
My lord wiped his mouth daintily and laughed.
“Next month there will be no lights needed, but chaste Diana peeping
through the casements and wishing she was not cursed with so prudish a
reputation.”
They wandered out into the garden, where a great slant of golden light
came over the trees and made the grass vivid, even to violet in the
shadows. Barbara walked a little apart, like one whose thoughts went
silently to meet the night. Now and again she glanced at my lord, when
his eyes were off her, with an earnestness that might have puzzled him
had he noticed it.
It was Mrs. Jael who came out with a tinder-box and lit the candles in
the music-room. Barbara watched her through the window, noticing, almost
unconsciously, the woman’s double chin, and loose, lying, voluble mouth.
She was watching Mrs. Jael when my lord took her by the elbow playfully
and turned her toward the portico.
“Come, Mistress Jet and Ivory, we must see how you fancy Parson
Herrick.”
Anne Purcell went in after them, Mrs. Jael standing back as my lady
entered.
“You can send the people to bed early, Jael.”
“Yes, my lady,” and the confidential creature passed out.
Yet what she did was to fly up to Mistress Barbara’s room so that her
breath came in short wheezes, unlock the coffer, grope therein
tentatively, relock it, and hurry down again with a complacent smirk on
her fat face. For Mrs. Jael had a sense of the dramatic where self was
concerned, and could keep a shut mouth, despite her loquacity, till the
occasion should come when she could most magnify herself by opening it.
She went out again into the garden, where it was already growing dusk,
and, crossing the grass softly, stood at one corner of the music-room
where she could wait to hear whether her prophecies were likely to be
realized.
My lord had established himself on the settle with the scarlet cushion,
and was playing an aria, the rings on his fingers glancing in the
candle-light. The mirror had been taken from the wall above the
harpsichord. In the window-seat Anne Purcell showed a full-lipped,
round-chinned profile ready to be outlined by the rising moon, while on
a high-backed chair beside the door sat Barbara, quiet and devout as any
novice.
“Sing us that song of Mr. Pepys’s, Stephen.”
“‘Beauty Advance,’ eh? A wicked wag, that Admiralty fellow. I have
watched him in church trying to discover which girl in the congregation
would make the prettiest beatitude. A dull song, very, for so lively a
gossip.”
My lord had a habit of turning his head and looking over his shoulder,
as though he never for one moment forgot his audience.
“Well, has Proserpine a word to say?”
Barbara gave him her sombre eyes at noon.
“There are my father’s songs.”
My lord struck a false note on the harpsichord.
“Some old Cavalier ditty, fusty as a buff coat! No, my dear, we have
forgotten how to carry a bandolier.”
“Let the girl try something. Teach her one of the playhouse songs.”
Barbara sat with one hand in her bosom.
“There is an old song I remember,” she said, with the far-away look of
one calling something to mind.
My lord paused and glanced at her.
“What do you call it?”
She met his eyes.
“‘The Chain of Gold.’”
“The name has slipped my memory. How does it run?”
Barbara leaned against the high back of her chair. She looked steadily
at Stephen Gore, every fibre in her tense as the fibres of a yew bow
bent by an English arm.
“‘My love has left me a chain of gold.’ That is the first line.”
My lord furrowed his forehead thoughtfully.
“Hum! go on. I catch nothing of it yet.”
“‘My love has left me a chain of gold,
With a knot of pearls, for a token.
It came from his hand when that hand was cold,
And the heart within him broken.’”
There was a short silence in the music-room, the flames of the candles
swaying this way and that as though some one moving had sent a draught
upon them.
My lord turned with a laugh that had no mirth in it.
“A dreary ditty. Where did you come by the song?”
She answered him with three words.
“In this room.”
My lady’s silks rustled in the window-seat like the sound of trees
shivering in autumn.
“What moods the girl has!”
My lord kept his eyes on Barbara.
“Is there any more of that song?”
“There was only one verse to it till I found another.”
“So!”
“For to match that chain—there were three other chains. And they were
sewn upon a black cloak with a lining of purple silk, the cloak Captain
John wore the night he fought Lord Pembroke.”
My lord pushed back the settle very slowly. His face was in the shadow,
but for all that it was not pleasant to behold.
“Has the child these mad fits often?” he asked, with a jerk of the chin.
“She will be wishing Jack at Newgate next.”
Barbara would not take her eyes from him to glance in the direction of
her mother. Had she looked at Anne Purcell she would have seen a plump,
comely woman grown old suddenly, and trying to make anger shine through
fear.
“The cloak did not belong to John Gore, my lord. Nor did he know that I
have the chain from it that I found in my father’s hand.”
She rose suddenly, and, swinging the chair before her, knelt with one
knee on it and steadied her elbow on the back.
“Father lay over there—near the table. There is a stain on the floor
still—though Mrs. Jael was set to scrub. It was I who found him. You
may remember that.”
They both looked at her askance, cowed and caught at a disadvantage for
the moment by this knowledge that she had and by her hardiness in
accusing.
“My dear young madam, you had better go to bed.”
Her bleak imperturbability turned my lord’s sneer aside like granite.
“Here is the chain from your cloak. I give it back to you now that it
has served its purpose.”
She flung out her hand, and the chain fell close to my Lord Gore’s feet.
He did not even trouble to look at it, as though he had no wish to
appear seriously concerned.
“We appear to be judge, jury, and witness all in one,” he said. “Come
down off that chair, my dear, and don’t be foolish.”
He spoke with an air of amused impatience, but there was something in
his eyes that made her know the truth of what she had said.
“You have always thought me a little mad, my lord.”
“No, assuredly not. Only a little strange in your appreciation of a
joke. Nan, stay quiet.”
Barbara had put her hands into her bosom, given one glance behind her,
and then levelled a pistol at my lord’s breast. The high-backed chair
and the settle were scarcely four paces apart.
“I made a promise to myself that I would find out the man who killed my
father. When I discovered it I bought these pistols.”
My lady had risen from the window-seat and was standing with her arms
spread, her open mouth a black oval, as though she were trying to speak
and could not.
“Mother, do not move. I will beseech my Lord of Gore to tell me the
truth before I pull the trigger.”
The great gentleman looked at her like a man dumfounded, hardly able to
grasp the meaning of that steel barrel and that little circle of shadow
that held death in the compass of a thumb’s nail.
“Assuredly I will tell you the truth,” he said, at last.
“Then let me hear it.”
He grappled himself together, gave a glance at my lady, who had sunk
again into the window-seat, and then met Barbara eye to eye.
“Since you seek the truth at the pistol’s point, my child, I will tell
it you, though no man on earth should have dragged it from me at the
sword’s point. Good God!” And he put his hand to his forehead and looked
from mother to daughter as though unwilling to speak, even under such
compulsion.
Barbara watched him, believing he was gaining leisure to elaborate some
lie.
“You are determined to hear everything?”
She nodded.
“Have it then, girl, to your eternal shame! Why should the unclean,
disloyal dead make the living suffer? Much good may the truth do all of
us, for none are without our sins.”
He spoke out in a few harsh, solemn words—words that were meant to
carry the sorrow and the travail and the anger of a great heart. It was
the same tale that he had told John Gore, yet emphasized more grimly to
suit the moment. And when he had ended it he put his head between his
hands and groaned, and then looked up at Barbara as though trying to
pity her for the shock of his confession.
“Is that everything?”
She was white and implacable. My lord’s lower lip drooped a little.
“Is it not enough?”
“Of lies—yes.”
He looked in her eyes, and then gave a deep, fierce cry, like the cry of
a wild beast taken in the toils. It was done within a flash, before he
could cross the space that parted them. He stumbled against the chain
that she had thrown down toward him. And as the echoes sped, and the
smoke and the draught made the candles flicker, Barbara fell back
against the wall, her hand dropping the pistol and going to her bosom
for the consummation of it all.
“Mercy of me, my dear, mercy of me, what have you done?”
She found Mrs. Jael clinging to her and holding her arms with all her
strength. Barbara tried to shake the woman off, but could not for the
moment. Then, quite suddenly, as the smoke cleared, she ceased her
striving and leaned against the wall, her eyes staring incredulously
over Mrs. Jael’s head as the little woman clung to her and pinioned her
with her arms.
For though my Lord Gore had fallen back against the table with a great
black blur on his blue coat and the lace thereof smouldering, he stood
unhurt, with my lady holding to one arm and looking up with terror into
his face.
“Safe, Nan,” he said, very quietly, being a man of nerve and courage;
“where the bullet went, God only knows!”
A gray fog came up before Barbara’s eyes. She stood like one dazed, yet
feeling the warmth of Mrs. Jael’s bosom as the woman still clung to her.
Then her muscles relaxed and her face fell forward on Mrs. Jael’s
shoulder.
Stephen Gore put the mother aside, and, striding forward, thrust his
hand into Barbara’s bosom. He drew out the second pistol, looked at it
with a grim, inquiring smile, and then laid it upon the table.
“The child must be clean mad,” he said, with admirable self-control and
a glance full of meaning at my lady and Mrs. Jael.
“Oh, the poor dear! oh, the poor dear! To raise her hand against such a
gentleman without cause or quarrel! Her wits must have gone. I’ve feared
it many weeks.”
Stephen Gore pondered a moment, looking at Barbara’s bowed head with a
look that boded nothing good for her.
“Get her to her room, Nan. Keep the servants out of the way. We don’t
want any pother over the child’s madness. Understand me there; for her
sake we can hold our tongues.”
Mrs. Jael looked at him as though he were a saint.
“Poor dear, to think of it!”
My lady and the woman took Barbara by either arm. She lifted her head
and looked for a moment at my lord, and then went with them meekly, as
though dazed and without heart. Whispering together behind her back,
they led her across the garden and up the staircase to her own room.
When they had locked the door on her, Anne Purcell laid a hand on Mrs.
Jael’s arm, and they went together into my lady’s chamber.