They will tell you in those parts how Waller, the parliamentarian,
battered with his cannon the Purcells’ house of Thorn, leaving it half
ruinous, as a warning to all royalists who felt tempted to trust in the
breadth of their moats or the stoutness of their walls. Be the woodland
legend what it may, the Purcells were poor after the long war, and Thorn
had been for thirty years a haunt of owls and jackdaws—a strange, dim
place set in the midst of stagnant water, far from a high-road, and
hidden by wastes and woods. From broken gable ends and tottering
battlements a red-brick tower and a few twisted chimneys rose against
the blue. Even in those short years ivy had climbed up over the walls,
pouring over the stone sills of the windows, and growing knotty and
stout of stem even up to the leaden water-spouts of the tower. When the
wind blew from the southwest the whole house seemed to shake and glimmer
with the movements of those myriad leaves. And through the windows of
roofless rooms you could see the sky redden or grow gold at dawn or
sunset.
As for the moat, it was a checker of black and green, with moor-hens
swimming on it and water-rats making rippling tracks from wall to wall,
while here and there great rambling roses, that had not felt the knife
for many a year, poured over the brick parapet, and hung in summer-like
banners of green flowered with crimson and gold. The crown of the bridge
had been broken, and several tree-trunks, ranged side to side and banked
with earth and brushwood, filled up the gap. The court-yard gate, a new
one since Waller’s day, seemed the only unruined thing about the place;
but the court-yard itself was knee-deep with grass and weeds at
hay-time. In the garden there were stretches of turf that had once been
lawns, paths that were no longer visible, roses and shrubs growing as
they listed, for a corner of the vegetable-garden alone had been kept in
cultivation. The out-houses and stables in the kitchen court were
crumbling and falling in—a quaint medley of ragged thatch and gaunt
roof timber, falling plaster, and lichened brick.
Yet the old thorns that grew in the grass-land beyond the moat,
thorn-trees that had given the house a name and were outliving it,
stretched out their flat tops like so many pleading and appealing hands.
They were white each spring above the green rushes, the brown
mole-heaps, and the dew-wet grass. And in the winter the birds flocked
to them and fed upon the red berries, welcome, indeed, when the turf was
frost-bound or when the snow lay deep. So the old thorns lived on as
they had lived for generations, while “Thorn” crumbled brick by brick,
and the ivy, as though yearning to hide its nakedness, made it dim with
glimmering green.
Thorn had its ghost, and no Sussex churl would come within half a mile
of it when dusk began to fall. An old Scotch gardener and his wife had
lived there some ten years, warm and snug in the rain-proof kitchen,
daring the devil and all spirits and insects with a handful of good
sulphur. MacAlister and his dame had been given their quittance that
autumn, and had been packed off into some distant county, no man knew
why or where, and no man cared. The owls might fledge their broods, the
jackdaws build in the chimneys, and the place be given up to all manner
of mystery and ghostliness. None had troubled in those parts about
Thorn, save one farmer who had needed a new barn, and had driven a wagon
over to thieve bricks, and come away with such a scaring that every one
believed him when he swore the place was cursed.
There were ghosts at Thorn that autumn—but solid, hungry, and most
gluttonous ghosts, who seemed to have abundance of good beer and food
stowed away in the huge cupboards of the kitchen. The kitchen and the
two rooms over it had been made habitable for the MacAlisters, and were
now used by the new spirits who haunted Thorn—a big, stocky man, with a
back like a flagstone; a comely, broad-hipped woman, with black eyes and
a tight, hard face. They had come there suddenly, when the moon was
full, walking by the woodland track from a great black coach that had
set them down upon the high-road.
One evening in October, as the dusk was falling, the figure of a man, a
burly blotch of darkness in the half light of the yard, came across from
an out-building that was used as a wood-shed with an apron full of oak
blocks for the fire. Farmer Knapp, he who had come to steal bricks, had
told how he had come to the gate of Thorn and had seen through the
grill, not a foot from his own eyes, a great white face as big as the
moon when full. Farmer Knapp had not taken a second look, and, although
it was only three in the afternoon, he had jumped into his wagon and
driven off with his cart-horses lumbering at a canter. Now the man who
crossed the court-yard, carrying his billets of wood, had a piece of
white cloth covering his face, tied under the chin and about the
forehead, with two holes for the eyes and a slit where the mouth should
be.
The huge calves of the man’s legs rubbed together as he walked, and
under the brim of his beaver his pate was as bald as the ivory knob of a
gentleman’s cane. He went down into the kitchen by three steps and a
short passageway, and tumbled his wood into a corner of the open hearth.
At the table the woman was stirring something in a basin. A big black
pot hung on a rack and chain over the fire, and on the bricks before the
hearth lay a dog of the mastiff breed, who lifted his head and blinked
when the man entered.
“Supper ready?”
“Throw some more wood on, Sim, will ye?”
The man tossed two or three blocks into the red heart of the fire,
pulled a rough settle forward with one foot, and sat down and stared at
the pot. The firelight glittered on the eyes behind the white cloth,
showing up the red lids unshaded by the trace of an eyelash.
“Lord, what a dull hole this is, or I’m saved!”
The woman had her sleeves turned up, and her big forearms were brown and
comely.
“Dull,” said the man, “when there’s plenty to eat?”
“And drink, Sim?”
“Better than Tyburn or Newgate, anyway. Only there ain’t nothing to lay
one’s fist to; not so much as a dog for old Blizzard to take by the
throat.”
“Turn smuggler, my dear, if you want to let blood.”
The man sniffed at the pot.
“Smuggler? No, thank ye; we don’t want none of those gentry inside
Thorn. Stodging about the country for a keg of liquor when we can have
it for going to the cupboard! This deuced viz of mine smarts like hot
Hollands to-night.”
He untied the strings and turned the mask up, but the woman did not look
at him, it being near supper-time and food upon the table. They were not
Sussex folk, nor even country people, by their speech, but gentry whose
childhood had been passed within hail of Southwark or the Savoy.
“Who’s going to carry the girl’s food up to-night?”
The man took an oil flask and a piece of linen from the long shelf above
the open fireplace. Over the shelf hung a long gun and a couple of heavy
pistols, also a seaman’s cutlass and a pair of iron wristlets. He
dropped some of the oil on the rag, and began to dab his face with it,
blinking his red lids like an owl.
“Take it up yourself, Nance; I’m tired.”
She looked at him with a shrewish lift of the chin.
“Tired, you great hulk! Dang those rickety stairs, they make my knees
ache; a bat put the candle out last night. Mother of God! I wouldn’t be
here another week but for the doubloons! Think of the smell of the
sausage shops and the snug little taverns Southwark way! I would give a
gold Jacobus to sniff the river mud at low water. They might take us for
papists from St. Omer; as for the girl—Black Babs, she’s no more mad
than I am.”
The woman had a certain air of culture—the culture, perhaps, of a bold
and clever orange girl who had caught some of the courtliness of the
playhouses and the gardens.
“So we are papists,” quoth the man, still dabbing his face, “and to say
whether a wench is mad or not is none of our business.”
“It’s my business, Sim, to see no one drops a noose over my neck.”
“Noose be damned! When a great gentleman opens his purse, you slut, wise
folk ask no questions.”
“P’r’aps not. Lift the pot off. My Lord Pomposity wishes the girl mad, I
gather, and mad she will be in six months, with the winter coming—or,
maybe, stiff as a frozen bird. Then it will be old Drury and Whitefriars
again.”
“As likely as not. Captain Grylls will be black-guarding it this way
with orders before long. They must get us fresh supplies sent in before
December.”
“That’s the real business of life, Sim, to be sure. There’s the girl’s
bread and dripping. Run up with it like a good lad, or I shall spoil the
pudding. You had better take the lantern; the old tower is full of bats
and draughts.”
The man put the oil flask on the shelf, and, dropping the white cloth
over his face, took down a horn lantern from a beam and lit the candle
in it with a burning brand from the fire. He trod on the dog’s paw in
the doing of it, and gave the beast his boot in the ribs because he
presumed to snarl at him.
“Anything to wash it down?”
“I filled the jug this morning.”
Simon Pinniger picked up the pewter plate and marched off swinging the
lantern. From the kitchen a passage led to what had been the hall, now
rafterless, with the stars blinking between ivied walls. A flight of
steps led to a door that opened into the lower story of the tower. Simon
put the lantern down, pulled out a key, and, unlocking the door, picked
up the lantern again and began to climb the interminable stair. Thud,
thud, thud, up into the darkness, with the light from the lantern
swinging this way and that, and the raw cold of the autumn night
breathing in at the open squints, and through the shot-holes that could
be seen here and there in the walls. Simon Pinniger climbed sixty steps
or so, passing two narrow landings before he came to a door with a bar
across it. He put down the lantern, unlocked the door, lifted the bar
that worked upon a pin, and, opening the door about a foot, pushed the
plate in with the toe of his boot.
“Supper,” was all he said.
Then, after the turning of the lock and the creaking of the bar, the
thud, thud died down again into the darkness of the stair.
Only one thing moved for the moment in the tower-room, and that a mouse,
who came out boldly to nibble at the bread on the pewter plate. A single
window, high up in the wall and closed with stanchions, let in the brown
gloom of the dusk and the glitter of a star. There was no fire, no
furniture to speak of, and nothing that could be broken and used as an
edge to cut and wound.
In one corner stood a truckle-bed, and sitting thereon a still, shadowy
figure whose face showed a gray oval in the darkness. The place seemed
far above all sound, though the wind might moan there and shake the ivy
on the wall.
The figure rose from the bed and moved toward the door. It went on its
knees there, and with cold hands began to crumble some of the rough
bread. A tiny shadow crept up toward the white fingers and took crumbs.
It was so little a thing, too small to be caressed, yet it had grown
tame in one short month, and, above all, it was alive.
Barbara, kneeling there, fed the mouse with crumbs, and ate some
mouthfuls of the bread herself. For there was nothing for her to do at
Thorn but to watch for this friend at dusk, or for the white pigeons
that sometimes flew up to her window during the day. She could see
nothing of the world, not even the waving woods, but only the clouds
moving and a few stars at night. One book they had given her, and that
an old Bible bound in faded red leather. She had read it twice from
cover to cover, sometimes with listlessness, sometimes with fierce
hunger, sometimes with tears. And for an hour or more she would sit on
the bed and think, her white face thin and questioning, but with no
madness in her eyes.