When Anne Purcell returned to the music-room she found my lord waiting
for her there, walking to and fro with his hands behind his back and his
handsome face lined and shadowed with thought. He looked up quickly when
she entered, a look full of infinite meaning, as though he had felt a
chill of loneliness and was glad that this woman shared with him what
the future might convey.
He closed the door and casements carefully, after walking round the
garden to see that no one was lurking there. Anne Purcell’s face still
looked white and scared. The horror of a betrayal haunted her as she
went to the window-seat, where the moonlight was already glimmering upon
the glass.
“Speak softly. I had better draw the curtains.”
He did so, leaning over my Lady Anne, and stooping to kiss her before he
drew away. Restlessness seemed in his blood, for he kept walking to and
fro as they talked, pausing sometimes as though to think.
“Does the woman Jael know anything of this?”
“She knows everything. It was she who saved your life by tampering with
the charges.”
“She knew the girl had pistols?”
“Yes—by watching through the hole in the wainscoting. She saw where
Barbara kept them, and found a key to fit the coffer. Jael seemed to
have foreseen something, for to-night she found that the pistols were no
longer there.”
My lord turned to the table where the steel barrels glistened in the
candle-light. He picked them up and looked at them closely, a deep
pucker of thought upon his forehead.
“Who would have thought that the girl had so much devil in her! I tell
you, Nan, she must have been playing with us all these years, watching
and waiting, and pretending to be asleep. And it was a narrow thing, by
God! But for that woman of yours, I should be lying there, where—”
He did not complete the sentence, but broke off abruptly, for the
conscious shock seemed to strike him more heavily now the intensity of
the moment had passed. He looked white about the mouth, and his eyes had
a hard, scared wrath in them that made them ugly.
Anne Purcell turned on the window-seat to look at him, and then covered
her face with her hand.
“She said that the stain is still there. And it is—”
“Fiddle-faddle! What of that, Nan?” And the evil spirit in him flashed
out fiercely. “The girl has cornered us. It is no time for whimpering.”
He recovered his serene and cynical poise almost instantly, and, putting
two fingers in the pocket of his embroidered vest, drew out the curb of
gold with its knot of pearls.
“This little thing came very near ending everything. I shall give it no
second chance. Like the easy fool I am I put that cloak away and forgot
it, never suspecting that it had left such a clew behind. Jack turned it
out of an old chest when he came home shirtless from sea, and wore it
that night at Hortense’s. It was only when we got home that I noticed
the thing, and talked him into surrendering it. She must have
cross-questioned him. And, by the prophets of Israel, Jack was near
having a bullet in his heart! She said she told him nothing. God grant
that’s true. Jack’s a man with a tight mouth and a kind of grimness that
sails straight in the face of a storm.”
He paused, staring hard at the flame of one of the candles, and tossing
the chain up and down in his palm.
“What are you going to do, Stephen?”
“Do?” And his face darkened, although so close to the light. “Keep the
Spanish fury out of danger. What can you desire—”
She stretched out an arm to him, her face rigid with dread.
“No, not again, Stephen. I cannot bear it—I will not—”
“There, there,” and he laughed, “how you women leap at conclusions!
There is no such serious need. But I value my neck too much, and yours,
my dear, to let her run at large.”
“Then how?”
He looked down at her steadily.
“The girl is mad.”
“Barbara!”
“Yes, mad, poor thing, as a March hare. Mad! Drink the word in, and live
on it. Mad—mad! This wild scarecrow of a suspicion is nothing but a
shadow on the brain, a shadow of distortion and madness brought on by
poor Lionel’s death. There are some of us to swear to that, and our
words carry more weight and volume than the ravings of a girl. Mrs. Jael
must be worth her money. The whole affair will be very simple. Thank
Heaven, son Jack is in the country! I can bleed him and doctor him when
he returns.”
Anne Purcell watched him with a trace of wonder in her eyes. The man was
so many-sided, such an actor, such a cynic.
“Then—”
“She must be treated as one gone mad, yet discreetly and gently, as
though the family niceness were to be considered. No idle talking, no
news about town. Yet being dangerous, even, perhaps, against
herself—mark that, Nan!—she must be put under soft restraint in some
quiet corner where she can do no harm.”
He spoke so shrewdly, and with such a meaning between the words that
Anne Purcell again looked scared.
“No whips, Stephen, and all those things. I have heard—”
“Tush, my love, am I a fool?”
“But—”
He opened his arms to her, with an impulse of tenderness and strong
appeal.
“Now, sweetheart, trust me. We have been too much to each other, you and
I. Look at me, Nan; what I am I am because you are what you are. We are
on the edge of a cliff. Don’t tell me that I must drag you over.”
He played to the woman in her, yet not without real feeling. She rose to
him, and for a moment he had her in his arms.
“There. You understand, Nan, why I want to live. It is for your sake as
well as mine, though I shall not see fifty again. We cannot help
ourselves. And I tell you the girl is mad. I have said so to others
before it came to this.”
My lord put her gently out of his arms, and led her with some majesty
back to the window-seat.
“You must know, Nan, that this will be de prerogativa regis—that is to
say, it will be the chancellor’s affair, and he is an easy man to
manage. As to a private inquiry, we can probably slip by it—with
Christian discretion. The point is—that the unfortunate subject is
confined in custody under the care of her nearest friends or kinsfolk.”
Anne Purcell began to understand.
“But there may still be danger in it.”
“No; trust me; very little. It can be done quietly. There is your place
of Thorn.”
“Thorn! Why, it is half in ruins, and no one ever goes there.”
“Nan, my sweet, are you a fool?”
“No, Stephen; but—”
“The country air and food, and contact with some simple couple—what
more could the poor wench wish for? An old house in the deeps of Sussex,
seven miles from a town. Why, it is made for such a case.”
She looked at him helplessly, for her selfish worldliness had received a
shock that night.
“There is no other way?”
“None, unless you wish to feel a silk rope round your neck, my dear.”
They said little more that night, my lord putting on a cloak to hide his
powder-blackened coat, and kissing her very kindly before he went. He
gave her a few words of warning, commended Mrs. Jael to her, and spoke
of the money that should be forthcoming. Barbara was to see no one but
Mrs. Jael and her mother. They were to keep her locked in her room till
my lord should bring a physician whom he could trust to inquire into the
state of the girl’s mind.
Yet there was one thought that haunted Stephen Gore as he walked home
alone by the light of the moon without a single torch to keep him
company and scare away footpads: it was possible that the girl might
turn against herself. And though he tried not to hanker after the
chance, he knew how it would simplify the tangle. Barbara’s window stood
some height from the ground, and there were no bars to it. My lord
remembered these details before he went to bed. He was careful to show
the man Rogers his blackened coat, and to tell him that he had been
fired at by some villain, but that the ball had missed him by some mercy
of God.
Mrs. Jael came down from her attic next day soon after dawn, her eyes
red and suffused, her bosom full of sentimental sighings. She went about
the house, blubbering ostentatiously in odd corners, dabbing with her
handkerchief, and setting all the servants spying on her.
Yet all she would say was:
“Poor dear, poor sweet! The brain is turned over in her. And so young,
too! I always was afeard of it, she took it so to heart. Oh, dear Lord,
what a sad world it is, surely! The poor child’s made me ten years
older.”
And then she would shuffle away, jerking her fat shoulders and trying to
smother sobs, so that every servant in the house knew that something
strange had happened, and were ready to hear of anything—and to accept
it as an interesting fact.