With the coming of winter there had been strange happenings at the
Purcells’ house in Pall Mall, for my lady had died the night after
Stephen Gore’s going, with no one to comfort her but Mrs. Jael. The
servants had all fled, and the house stood deserted save for the live
woman and the dead one; the very tradesmen shirked the steps; friends
had business elsewhere; and Dr. Hemstruther himself, being a keen
Protestant when popery was especially perilous, kept his distance,
knowing that my Lord Gore’s influence had been paramount there in heart
and body. For my Lord Gore was one of the Catholic gentlemen upon whom
the Plot-men longed to lay their hands.
It happened that when poor Anne Purcell died that there was some store
of silver and of plate in the house, also her jewels and trinkets, and
sundry precious things that belonged to the Purcell family. Mrs. Jael
showed some little care for the corpse by covering it with a clean
sheet, but she showed far more care for her own concerns and for the
valuables that were at her mercy. She ransacked the whole house,
gathering every small thing of value into a heap on the floor of one of
the attics, gloating and smiling over it, and promising herself great
joys. For Mrs. Jael had picked up a sweetheart, a rough, sturdy fellow
from Aldgate way, and she crept out one night to warn him of her
good-fortune, and to persuade him to help in spiriting away the plunder.
The man was a common thief, and had tricked even the smooth, sly Jael
for three months past, pretending that he was in the cloth trade, and
that he hankered greatly after a comely widow. He was ready enough to
join in the adventure, and cared as little for small-pox as for the reek
of an open drain. And thus Mrs. Jael let him into the house by night,
and they packed up the plunder between them in a couple of sacks, and so
went their way into the darkness. But the man no longer had any desire
for the voluptuous embraces of a widow, and in some way Mrs. Jael came
to her end that night, and was found weeks later afloat in the Thames,
an unrecognizable and nameless body.
Now Jael, during the time that she was gathering the treasure together,
had left lights burning in my lady’s room to make people think that Anne
Purcell was still alive. She had put new candles to burn the very night
she had fled out to her death, and so an eerie thing befell, for
officers in quest of papists, and my Lord Gore in particular, broke into
the house, having heard the rumor of small-pox and considered that it
might be a trick. But they found Anne Purcell lying dead in her bed, a
sheet covering her, and the candles burning, not a living soul in the
whole house, and every chest and cupboard rifled. So the Law stepped in,
beat round for witnesses, and buried my lady at night with a bushel of
quick-lime and extra pay to the man who buried her. Then there was a
learned to-do, much hunting out of documents, and much puzzling over
facts. For Mistress Barbara Purcell was her father’s heiress after her
mother’s death, and Mistress Barbara had come within the chancellor’s
ken by reason of unsound mind, yet no living soul seemed able to tell
where this same Barbara Purcell was. The lawyers looked wise over it,
and sat down cheerfully to make their pickings, Chancery claiming
authority in the case, and not caring greatly how long the dilemma
lasted so long as they handled the property. For every man’s mind was
full of the Plot those months, and not for many years had the wigs
boasted so much business.
Titus Oates had come toward full notoriety in October by harrowing the
public with the fulminations of a furious imagination. Then had followed
Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’s murder, the seizing of Coleman’s
correspondence, and a panic in London, with mobs shouting in the
streets. The Protestant beacon had been fired, and blazed with terrified
fury, while Oates threw fagot after fagot to feed the flames. Catholic
peers were cast into the Tower; two thousand or more smaller people were
arrested; all papists commanded to leave London. The train-bands marched
through the streets; executions were soon to begin; it was nothing but
Plot—Plot—Plot—from Parliament to Pulpit.
At Thorn, in Sussex, my Lord of Gore hid himself from the knowledge of
all these things, a man shrunken strangely from his former buxom self, a
man without nerve or energy for the moment, vacillating between plans on
a dash across the Channel for France, and the timidity of a hunted thing
that fears to leave its hiding-place for the open. Even as Monmouth the
Protestant prince at the head of an army differed from Monmouth the
panic-obsessed fugitive skulking in a ditch, so the Stephen Gore of
Whitehall differed from the Stephen Gore of Thorn. Some blight seemed to
have fallen on him, turning his manhood into a white-faced,
memory-haunted thing afraid of the very shadow of its own thoughts. That
brief, fierce burst of winter may have helped to chill the marrow in the
courtier’s bones, with the wailing of the wind and the whirling of the
snow. For a man cannot do without food and fire, and Stephen Gore had to
turn drudge to his own need. At first he had tried to dispense with a
fire for fear the smoke should betray him, but when he had shivered and
ached for two days his caution surrendered to the lust for warmth, and
he brought in fagots and with great trouble made a blaze. He had found a
store of salted meat, ship’s biscuits, and other stuffs still left in
the place, and though Thorn had a horror for him, he clung to it like a
fox to his “earth,” knowing of no other place wherein to hide himself.
For there seemed hardly a better place in the kingdom than Thorn, for
Pinniger and his woman had not been molested all those weeks. There
would be a score of open ways for a bold and resolute man to take later,
but the heart was utterly out of Stephen Gore, and the spirit of
yesterday was not the spirit of to-day.
Yet what, after all, had he to fear, setting visions of judgment and
other worlds aside, but the passing fury of a Protestant mob and the
wild tale of a double murder? A month ago these menaces would have stung
the self in the man to thrust them aside with audacity and resolution.
But a climax had come and gone; something was breaking in him and taking
his cool self-trust away, and he felt like Samson shorn of his hair.
Perhaps the bile had congealed in him with the cold, for nothing can
make a man more tame and listless than a clogged and sluggish liver.
Perhaps he had lost faith in his own genius for success. Perhaps he was
penitent. This last would have been the pretty, saintly end, confession
and absolution, penance, the lighting of tapers and saying of masses,
and all the saints in the calendar stretching out succoring hands. Yet
there is something incongruous in the idea of a strong, selfish, cynical
man huddling himself feverishly into the habit of religiosity when
Retribution comes knocking at the door. It often fails to impress the
conscience. It is not always convincing, even in romance.
Probably the secret of all this crumbling up of courage lay in the
nature of the man’s very self. Vanity may be a rare cement in the walls
of a man’s fortune so long as there is no corroding acid in the air. And
Stephen Gore’s genius had rested upon his vanity, not in his dress
alone, but in all those attributes that a man desires to see given to
his splendor. His vital force had been fed upon the pleasant things of
life; he was a self-inflated, artificial creature, who was strong so
long as he could be flattered. But, like an orthodox believer smitten to
the heart with doubt, he began to find his convictions dissolving into
chaos, and the adulations of self-worship becoming a mockery despite his
efforts to believe them real.
Voices—sharp, sneering, sardonic voices that he had had the strength to
stifle of old—began to cut him with his own cleverness, using the very
gibes against him that he had used in the gay salons to his own glory.
For when a cynic falls into misfortune he is likely to discover that he
has nurtured a devil that will use its claws upon the master who has
reared it.