It would almost seem that Stephen Gore was a little mad those first
few days in Thorn, what with the fever of a chill he had taken in the
saddle, the utter ghostliness and melancholy of the place, and the cold,
raw mists that hung about the moat. The cold went to his marrow and the
sinister solitude of the house to his brain, for at night Thorn was a
veritable goblin castle where a man might imagine all manner of dim
horrors. The wind made strange noises and whisperings of dismay; plaster
crumbled and fell; slants of moonlight sprang in as the clouds drifted
over the moon; the ivy rattled on the walls; worm-eaten beams creaked
and cracked; and the wind was everywhere like a haunted spirit. Stephen
Gore had found only one candle left in the place; it had lasted him but
one night, so that when the dusk fell he had no light but the light of
the fire. And he would lie awake on the couch in the kitchen, the hot
blood simmering in his brain, and a sweat of shivering fear on him,
while he fancied that he heard voices in the thickness of the walls and
a sound as of things moving in the darkness.
However dainty and superfine a man may be, his flesh takes command of
his spirit when the smaller necessities of life fall to his own hands.
It would have delighted some of the cynics of Whitehall to have seen
this fine gentleman in his shirt-sleeves splitting firewood with pitiful
clumsiness, and disciplining his stomach in an attempt to boil salt
beef. For Stephen Gore was repeating some of the experiences of a
Selkirk, save that his solitude was of his own seeking, and yet not a
matter of choice.
What with misery of mind and body, the _malaise_ of the fever, and the
utter melancholy of the place, my lord’s manhood and his moral courage
were in ruins within a week. He gave way to a sense of panic and to a
delirious lust for self-preservation that would have seemed ridiculous
but for the very real torment he was in. Whether he was hunted as a
conspirator against the state or as a spiller of innocent blood were
possibilities that pointed only to the one grim issue. A morbid belief
in their having “sinned against the Holy Ghost” has sent superstitious
mortals to Bedlam. A morbid dread of death seized on my lord with equal
grimness, and in a week he had lost that larger consciousness, that cool
sanity and shrewd sense of humor, that give a man power over the chances
of life. His intelligence began to drop to the level of the animal that
seeks to cover its tracks from possible pursuers. Sagacity gave place to
cunning and a blind passion for the annihilation of everything that
might betray him.
He sent his horse adrift, driving him out with savage prickings from his
sword, so that the beast fled panic-stricken into the woods. As for the
dog, he put a pistol bullet through his head, tied a weight to the
carcass, and sunk it in the moat. Saddle and harness he buried in the
garden, keeping the bar up across the court-yard gate, and going out
from the house only at dusk. He even made his fire on the floor in the
middle of the kitchen, enduring the smoke and the smarting of his eyes,
so that the smoke might leak away through doors and windows and crevices
instead of pluming up out of the chimney. He burned all the rough
furniture in the place, save the couch and an old stool, and, taking up
two of the flagstones in the floor, dug a hole under them to hide the
store of food, not realizing, perhaps, that the stuff would be mouldy
and rotten in a month. It was his feverish purpose to blot out every
trace of life from Thorn, so that should it be raided by the Law there
should be no clews. The marvel was that he found such a life worth
living for the sake of the life he hoarded. But Stephen Gore was not
wholly sane those days, what with the fever, and the sweat of fear in
him at night, and the thoughts that haunted him as thirst haunts a
straggler in the desert.
Nor was all this cunning of his wasted upon chimerical possibilities and
feverish fancies, as the event soon proved. It was the day of John
Gore’s ride into Battle Town with Mr. Jennifer, and Stephen Gore had
fallen asleep on the couch in the kitchen, for he could sleep in the day
if not at night. About two o’clock in the afternoon he awoke to find
that the fire had burned itself out, for the erstwhile philosopher had
much to learn in the simple matter of building a wood fire so that it
should not be out in an hour. He scrambled up rather sourly, and was
about to cross the court to the wood-lodge when he heard a faint
“halloo” coming from the misty stillness of the wooded slopes of the
valley.
Stephen Gore turned back into the kitchen like a man who has escaped
walking over a cliff in the dark, and stood listening a moment with his
hand to his ear. Then he pushed the couch away toward the window, and,
kneeling, swept the ashes of the fire on to the hearth-stone with his
hands, thanking Heaven for the providential perverseness of the thing in
burning out while he was asleep. Climbing the lower story of the tower,
he looked cautiously through the narrow window to see nearly twenty
mounted men coming down over the grass-land at a fast trot. My lord’s
knees rubbed together as he recognized the red coats of the two
troopers, and the more sombre and magisterial look of the gentry who
followed.
Days ago Stephen Gore had searched out a hiding-place for himself, and
his choice had lighted on nothing cleaner and more distinguished than
the chimney in the kitchen. He had climbed up by the chain, despite the
soot—he who could hardly wear the same shirt twice in a week—till the
throat of the chimney narrowed so that he could use his hands and feet.
About fifteen feet from the ground he had discovered a little recess in
the brickwork where a man might stand and not be seen by any one looking
upward. He had eased the ascent to this possible niche of refuge by
knocking in an old nail or two that he had found in one of the
out-houses.
A great amount of majestic cant has been written about the stately
courage of the Gentleman. There are very few Sir Richard Grenvilles in
the world, but far more Falstaffs ready to take refuge in the
washing-basket at a pinch. To have played the proper heroic part my lord
should have gone out calmly to the gate of Thorn and courteously dared
these gentry to take him while he lived, or at least to have awaited
them with aristocratic composure and delivered up his arms like a great
captain surrendering a fortress that he has no longer the power to hold.
Such should have been the picturesque setting of the scene, but the
meaner impulses of human nature triumphed, and the gentleman Went up the
chimney like any sweep’s boy, barking his knees and elbows, and coloring
his dignity with most satanic soot.
Squire Oxenham and his party came to the gate of Thorn, and sent one of
the yeoman over it to drop the bar and let the others in. Three men were
left to guard the horses and the gate, and two more to patrol the
borders of the moat, while magistrate, attorney, king’s rider, and the
rest spread themselves abroad to ransack the place, keeping their steel
and powder ready in case they might come to grips with desperate men.
But for all their bravery and bustle they found nothing but silence and
emptiness in Thorn, as though the place had remained lifeless since the
old Scotch folk left it in the autumn.
Squire Oxenham and Lawyer Gibbs found their way into the kitchen and
went no farther in the man hunt, being content with the work done. The
lawyer noticed the discolored stones in the floor and some wood-ash
lying in the crevices. And had he touched those stones, instead of
staring at them in a perfunctory and superior way, he would have
discovered that they were warm, and that a fire had been lit there that
very day.
Squire Oxenham, being an old and plethoric man with threatenings of gout
in the right foot, sat down on the couch and pulled out a flask of
hollands. He and the lawyer began gossiping together, and the Knight of
the Chimney could hear every word that passed.
“We shall have an appetite for supper, Thomas, though we may not set
eyes on Mr. Shaftesbury’s lord. Deuce take me if I can get my blood hot
over the notion of sending some poor devil to the block. What are you
staring at the floor for, Thomas?”
“There has been a fire here, Squire.”
“Months old, man; the place where Sandy Macalister smoked his Sabbath
clothes before sneaking into heaven without crossing Peter’s palm. Have
a drop of spirit, Thomas Gibbs. I wonder what made those Westminster
wolves scent out Thorn as the man’s hiding-hole. The fellow Maudesly
tells me that the Purcell woman—Halloo, Sacker, my man, have you found
anything except owls?”
“Not a thing, your worship.”
“Just as I thought, Mr. Gibbs—just as I thought. Any man of sense with
a warrant out against him would have been in France days ago and eating
French dinners instead of freezing in a damned rubbish-heap like this.
But these Jacks in Office must pretend to know everything. Some noodle
at Westminster would be ready to tell me how much to allow my wife’s
sisters, and how often my cess-pit ought to be emptied. Well, Mr.
Maudesly, have you had enough of Thorn?”
The little man in the big periwig came in looking testy, and not to be
trifled with. The men trooped in after him, while the Squire passed his
flask round to the gentlemen, and condoled with them satirically on
having drawn a “blank.” Stephen Gore in the chimney heard them gossiping
there awhile before they tramped out into the court-yard to take horse
for Battle Town before dusk fell. The thunder of hoofs went over the
timbers of the bridge, and slowly, almost eerily, as the water of a
stagnant pool settles over the stone that has been thrown into it, the
heavy silence closed again over Thorn.
It was probable that my lord felt some elation over his escape, and that
he was not a little eager to be out of so black and draughty a refuge.
He was also very stiff and cold from having stood in that narrow recess
for over an hour. At all events, he began the descent clumsily and
carelessly, and, bearing too much weight on one of the nails that he had
driven into the wall, the thing broke away from the rotten mortar, and,
though he drove out his knees and elbows in an attempt to wedge himself
in the chimney, his weight and bulk carried him heavily to the hearth
below. Coming down on his right flank, his right thigh struck one of the
iron fire-dogs about a hand’s-breadth below the great trochanter of the
hip. And Stephen Gore felt the bone snap as a dead branch snaps across a
man’s knee.
In the agony of it he rolled over and over till his body was stopped by
the couch that Squire Oxenham had drawn forward from the window. He
gripped the lower stretcher of the wood frame with both hands and took
the sleeve of his coat between his teeth, as a seaman will clinch his
teeth upon a rope’s-end to save himself from screaming when the
surgeon’s hot iron sears the stump of a mangled limb. Then he lay on his
back, breathing deeply and slowly, his hands tugging at the collar of
his shirt as though the band were tight about his throat. His right foot
had fallen outward, and when he tried to move the limb there was nothing
but a spasm of the muscles and a sense of bone gritting against bone.