There were two link-boys waiting outside Lord Gore’s house in St.
James’s Street when a short, stumpy woman came hurrying along with the
hood of her cloak down over her head. The street door of the house was
open, and a servant waiting on the step with a fur cloak over one arm
and a sword under the other.
His master came out as the woman paused at the steps—a thin, swarthy,
sallow man, with alert eyes and a brisk manner. He took the cloak from
the servant and swung it over his shoulders, putting his chin up as he
fastened the cloak, and making his lower lip protrude beyond the upper.
Coming down the steps he looked hard at the woman who was leaning
against the railings, a look that was half gallant, half suspicious, and
even paused to stare in her face as though he thought she might have
some message for him. But since she hung back and waited for him to
pass, and was, moreover, woolly and middle-aged, he gave an order to the
link-boys for the Savoy, and went away at a good fast stride with the
servant following at his heels.
The woman ran up the steps and spoke to Tom Rogers, who was holding the
door open and staring curiously after the retreating figure. Her voice
was importunate, and even threatening—so much so that he let her in and
closed the door, and went about her business without demur, as though
knowing that she had some right to hustle.
My lord was in the little library at the back of the house, sorting and
looking through a litter of papers on the table with a feverish,
irritable air. There was a good fire burning, and charred fragments of
paper littered the hearth and fluttered in the draught at the throat of
the chimney. My lord had taken a roll of letters, and was thrusting them
into the heart of the fire with the tongs when Rogers knocked at the
door and entered upon privilege.
His master glanced at him with a gleam of impatient distrust.
“What is it now?”
“My Lady Purcell’s woman, sir.”
“Where?”
“In the hall, my lord. She says that she must speak with you.”
Stephen Gore’s face had the dusky look of a face gorged with blood from
drinking.
“Send her in, Rogers. Take warning, I am at home to no one, not even to
the King.”
The roll of letters was a black mass spangled over with sparks and
corroding lines of fire when Mrs. Jael came in with the hood of her
cloak turned back. She waited till Rogers had closed the door, and even
then looked at it suspiciously, as though afraid that the fellow might
be listening. Stephen Gore understood her meaning. He opened it, found
the passage empty, and, closing the door again, stood with his back to
it and his hand upon the latch.
“Your message?”
Mrs. Jael fidgeted her arms under her cloak, and looked hot and a little
scared.
“My lady has sent me, my lord—”
“Well, well?”
“She must see you to-night; she will take no denial; I am bidden to
bring you back.”
Stephen Gore frowned at her didactic tone and the menace in her manner.
“Indeed!”
“She cannot bear it alone, my lord; she must speak with you; we fear
that she is dying.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, sir; yes—don’t curl your mouth at me. She bade me say that unless
you come to her, she will—”
The expression of my lord’s face so frightened Mrs. Jael that her voice
faltered away into an almost inaudible murmur. He stood staring at her,
his flushed face seamed with the passions of a man whose courage and
patience had already suffered, and on whom all the hazards of life were
falling in one and the same hour.
“I will come.”
He pressed back his shoulders, steadied his dignity, and crossed the
room to where hat, cloak, and sword lay on a carved chair. His hands
fumbled with the tags of the cloak as he fastened them. Mrs. Jael kept
her distance as he walked toward the door, for there was a look in my
lord’s eyes that night that made her afraid of him. He was as a man
driven to bay, and ready to stab at any one who should venture too near
his person.
Stephen Gore walked the short distance to Anne Purcell’s house in grim
silence, heartily cursing all women, and in no mood to humor a sick
sinner. The whole thing was accursedly vexatious and inopportune, and he
hardened himself against all sentiment with the savage impatience of a
man who is harassed and menaced on every quarter. Mrs. Jael was a
snivelling fool, an emotional creature who had helped to froth up her
mistress’s panic. Both of them, no doubt, needed ice to their heads, and
a couple of gags to keep them quiet.
Yet the great house was so solemn and dim and silent, and the woman’s
manner in tragic keeping therewith, that Stephen Gore felt chilled and
uneasy as he followed her flickering candle up the stairs. The place
seemed ghostly and deserted, full of dark corners, draughts, and
mysterious empty rooms. Stephen Gore had come in with his pulses
thrumming lustily, and the hot intent to put all this meddlesome
nonsense out of his path. But the house had much of the eeriness of a
moorland in a fog, with quags ready to suck at a man’s feet, and a
strange, vast silence to unnerve him.
Mrs. Jael led him along a gallery, and opened a door at the end thereof.
She stood back waiting for him to cross the threshold, and then, as
though she had had her orders, she swung the door to and turned the key
in the lock.
Stephen Gore turned with a start, hesitated, biting his lip, and then
let things take their course. The room was lit by a single candle; the
boards and walls were bare, and there was little in it save the
four-post bed. A great fire burned on the hearth, and the air felt hot
and heavy, and full of the indescribable scent of sickness.
“Stephen!”
He forced back his shoulders, gave a tug to his cravat, and turned
toward the bed. The curtains were drawn back, and on the white pillow he
saw a dusky, swollen face—a face that might haunt a man till the day of
his death.
“Stephen, are you there?”
My lord looked shocked despite himself, as though thinking of the face
that he had kissed not many days ago.
“Why, Nan, how is it with you?”
Her breathing was labored, her lips cracked and dry, and the hand that
she stretched out to him swung up and down, like a branch in the wind.
“I cannot see you; my eyes are touched.”
He looked at her helplessly, half loathing the thing he saw, and yet
unnerved by a blind rush of pity that beat and shook the pedestal of
self.
“Stephen, don’t come near me if you are afraid.”
She might have reproached him with the pusillanimous prudence he had
shown in keeping away from her until this night. And, vain woman that
she had been, she felt that it was the threat alone that had brought him
to her. Yet she spoke calmly at first, and feebly, like one who had come
to a sense of awe and of the end.
My lord put the best dignity he could upon it, but he felt the heat and
the wilfulness in him growing cold.
“You have sent for me, Nan—”
“It is not the first time.”
“I should have come before, but I have been pressed and driven by a
hundred things.”
Instinctively she turned her face toward him on the pillow, though she
could not see him because the disease had blinded her.
“Let us make no excuses to-night, Stephen. Do you know that I am dying?”
“No, Nan—not that.”
She gave a long sigh, and her hands moved to and fro over the coverlet.
“Yes. I am dying. You know why—I have sent for you.”
“What is your desire?”
He stood looking at her in some astonishment and with unwilling awe, for
she whom he had always led seemed mistress of herself under the shadow
of death, and not the weeping, pleading, terrified thing that he had
thought to find.
“Stephen, you must go to-night.”
He faced up as though to attention.
“Go? Where?”
“Need I tell you that?”
“My heart, you are ill—and distraught.”
She raised herself on the pillow with a sudden energy of passion; her
poor marred face could not express it, but her voice had a deep, fierce
thrill that came from the heart of the world.
“Man, man, do not play with me to-night, as you have played with me
these many years!”
“Anne, if you will listen to me—”
“Listen! What have I to hear? This thing lies in my throat—and stifles
me. I cannot bear it, I cannot bear to die with it—smothering my
breath.”
He breathed out, and tried to hold himself in hand.
“Nan, it is impossible—”
“No, no.”
“I cannot go to-night. There are matters—affairs that it would be death
to me to leave. I tell you, I tell you—my honor is pledged here.”
She held out a rigid arm toward him, her blurred, sightless eyes at
gaze.
“Stephen, I warn you—”
“I tell you, you do not understand—”
“Your honor! You weigh your honor against this thing! Stephen, I warn
you—”
“For God’s sake, listen: I—”
“No, no. Save the child, I charge you, or before I die I will tell the
truth.”
Her hand dropped and then went to her throat, for a spasm of choking
seized her, and he could see the muscles straining in her throat and her
dry lips praying for air. Stephen Gore thought that death had her that
instant, but the strength of her purpose bore her through.
“Stephen, promise me.”
He held out his hands appealingly, helplessly; but the gesture was lost
upon her blindness.
“Promise.”
“It is impossible.”
“Man, man, have you ever loved any one but yourself? Have you never
stood on the edge of the world—and looked over—over into darkness? I
cannot go to it—with this thing stifling me. Stephen, I ask you, if you
have ever loved me, do me this last mercy.”
He walked to and fro with a quick, rigid step, and paused at the far end
of the room, feeling the air hot and poisonous, and the blood drumming
at his temples.
“I am to sacrifice myself, Nan. You ask that?”
She propped herself upon the pillow, her head swaying slightly from side
to side.
“I ask you not to face your God, Stephen, with more blood upon your
hands.”
He cried out at her with bitterness.
“Woman, woman, what can I do?”
“What I have asked. Ride down to Thorn—to-night. And, Stephen, do not
think that I shall die—so soon—that you can play with me—and shirk
it. You may wish that I were dead now—and silent.”
He leaned against the wall, spreading his arms against it as though to
steady himself.
“Before God, Nan, not that!”
“Stephen, if you have ever loved me, do not stoop to play a coward’s
trick upon me now.”
He leaned there against the wall, almost like a man crucified, his face
haggard, his forehead agleam with sweat. He had come to temporize, to
dissuade, to cheat the truth with a few glib words, and he found the
heart plucked out of him, and his self beaten against its anger and its
will.
“Nan, I will go.”
“There is time—yet.”
“A night—and a day.”
She held out her hands as though with a piteous sense of loneliness and
leave-taking; but though he was humbled, shaken, he could not look into
her face.
“Nan, I will go. Let that help you to live. What will come of it God
alone can tell.”
She felt instinctively through all the tumult of it that he could not
look at her without a shudder, he who had always loved sun and color and
richness about him—a soft skin and pleasant lips. Yet she was too near
the veil, too close upon the eternal mystery, to cry out over a lost
desire.
“Stephen, for God’s sake, go!”
She fell back on the pillow as he turned to the door and shook it,
forgetting in the chaos of his thoughts that the woman Jael had turned
the key. He beat upon the panels with his fist, and when the door opened
for him, pushed past her without a word, and went heavily down the dark
stairway to the hall where he had left his cloak and sword.
My Lord Gore was within twenty yards of his own house when a figure that
had been loitering in the shadow came slantwise across the road to meet
him, and stopped on the footway as he passed. My lord had a glimpse of a
pair of shining eyes and the white oval of a man’s face between the
drooping brim of a beaver and the upturned collar of a cloak.
“Good-night, my lord—fugax, fugax, solvendo non sumus.”
He was pushing on with nothing more than a low, soft whistle when
Stephen Gore caught him by the arm.
“Blake!”
“Softly, for God’s sake, sir; I have loitered here for half an hour to
give you the wink and the text.”
My lord still gripped his arm.
“What is it, man?”
“Boot and saddle for me, sir, before midnight, and the godsend of a boat
across the Channel. Coleman’s correspondence has been seized.”
“The fool—the Jesuit fool!”
“The poor devil will be in the Protestant purgatory soon, sir. If you
are wise, ride—ride. There will be bigger titles than yours, my lord,
bumping in the saddle to-night.”
He looked about him uneasily, and then freed himself quietly from
Stephen Gore’s grip.
“Your pardon, sir, but the hawks will soon be on the wing for some of us
poor popish pigeons. Good-night.”
“Blake, thanks for this.”
“Nonsense, sir; you helped me once, and I am an Irishman. Good-night.”
He went away at a good pace, leaving Stephen Gore standing on the
footway, with the wind blowing his periwig about his face. He stood
there for half a minute watching a faint shadow melt into the night.
Then he seemed to steady himself like a tree between the gusts of a
storm, and, turning, walked on slowly toward his house.
But Stephen Gore did not sleep in Westminster that night, for he went
alone into the stable when the grooms had gone and the servants were in
bed, and saddled and bridled a horse with his own hands. He had thrown
his periwig into a corner, put on the oldest clothes he could find, to
ride out like a sturdy crop-head of a Britisher daring enough to venture
on the roads at such an hour. Pistols, money, and food he took with him,
and leading his horse out into the street, went away at a brisk trot
into the black chasm of the night. He might be knocked out of the saddle
at any corner, but Stephen Gore hazarded the chance, since he might be
given an axe or a halter for his badge.