John Gore rode for Furze Farm with many turbulent thoughts at work in
him, and the raw mist that thickened from over the sea making the wet
woods no more comforting than the degradation he had found at Thorn. He
had been fierce at first with the man whom he called father, till my
lord’s squalid ignominy had become apparent to him, and he had realized
that he was dealing with a creature and not a man. For there had been no
sense of strength opposed to him, no pride, no will, not even savage
passion, nothing to struggle with, nothing to overcome with shame. My
lord was dead in the better sense. Those weeks in Thorn had starved and
frozen the soul out of him, and he had become half a savage, yet a
timid, fawning savage whose consciousness was bounded by elemental
things. At first there had been nothing but abhorrence and disgust for
John Gore. This cringing thing with the face of an imbecile, embracing
his own son’s knees, lying amid his own offal! What could a man say to
this shadow of a self? Where lay the promise of judgment or of appeal?
Good God! He could remember the time when he had stood in some awe of
this same man because of his fine presence and his habit of command.
Yet as John Gore rode through the white mist the impressions and
instincts of the morning began to sift themselves and to piece up a
broader, saner picture. Incidents, acts, details started forward or
receded into clearer, truer perspective. The offensive flavor of the
thing began to prejudice him less. He tried to see the whole untarnished
truth with the sincerity of a man who is not content with mere
impressions.
Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a
lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where
the mere physical miseries of existence would bring him near to death in
body and mind. Pain, sleeplessness, cold, hunger, are grim inquisitors
fit to break a man on the rack and tear the very senses from him. John
Gore had looked into the hole where his father had kept his food, and
had seen meat going putrid and biscuits covered with mould. He
remembered, too, very vividly an incident in the Indies when he and his
ship’s company had found a man who had been marooned on an island that
was little better than a reef. The man was a Norman, and his sojourn
there had been but a matter of days. Yet he was skull-faced, parched,
abject, and as mad as an idiot child. He had run from them, screaming,
when they landed, though his legs had given under him before he had gone
fifty yards. And he had died on board John Gore’s ship, and they had
buried him at sea, and often afterward at night the sea-captain had
fancied that he still heard the man’s wild cry: “J’ai soif, mon Dieu!
mon Dieu, j’ai soif!”
Now Stephen Gore had been a proud man, and a man of sentiment after his
own ideals. He had had other things to torture and humiliate him besides
anguish in the flesh. Proportionately as a man’s physical strength
wanes, so the menace of spiritual suffering grows the more quick and
poignant. This man had spilled blood and betrayed friends. A well-fed
cynic might have put such things under his feet and trampled them. It
would be otherwise with a half-starved, memory-haunted, isolated being
shivering the nights through, listening and ever listening, while the
solitude hung like an eternal silence, and the slightest movement of the
body set bone grating against bone. Who could shrug his shoulders
through such an ordeal and come forth smiling with an epigram? Would not
the very intellect curse itself and die by its own hand? Innocent blood;
the betrayal of honor and of friends; lies, inevitable self-salvation.
These thoughts would grip such a man, throttle him, spit at his very
soul. They would not be conjured or persuaded. They would be awake with
him through the winter nights; scoff when some spasm of pain made him
curse and set his teeth; watch him with cold eyes when the light of the
dawn came in. The same miserable dragging of the days, the same
miserable passion-play of the crucified soul. Where would a man’s
manhood be at the end of such a chastisement?
The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the
shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was
dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like
phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy
silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing
outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden
shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted
heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer,
who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a
candle.
In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest
glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie
was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge
cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly
forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to
themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning
logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting.
“You have had a long ride, John.”
He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its
new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume
after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and
troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his
love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his.
“They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that
I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little
woman?”
She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide
care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who
loves him.
“Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I
went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.”
He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive
frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler.
“I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.”
“John!”
Her voice had a touch of appeal in it.
“This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned
with more than I foreshadowed.”
“Where have you been, John?”
“To Thorn.”
“Thorn!”
“Yes.”
She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in
his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others
rather than himself.
“You are troubled, John. Tell me.”
He looked down at her reflectively, and his eyes seemed to say: “Shall I
or shall I not?” Womanwise, she appeared to understand.
“You are afraid for my sake, John.”
“A little.”
“Is it because you cannot trust me?”
Her eyes held his, and for once it was as though she had the greater
power of will.
“No. Because I wish worry and care away.”
“John, do you think I shall leave all the burden of life to your
shoulders? Are we so little to each other? Am I so selfish?”
She felt his hands tighten on hers.
“Barbe, I have found my father.”
“At Thorn?”
“Yes.”
She shuddered slightly, despite herself, and he saw her eyes darken.
“John, did you speak to him?”
“Without mercy.”
“Does he know?”
“He thinks you dead.”
“Why is he at Thorn?”
“Hiding from the law because of this Plot; hiding from us, a miserable
wreck of a man, half starved, almost mad.”
She saw his face grow haggard and stern, the lines deepening about the
mouth, his eyes staring fixedly at the fire, as though he were looking
upon a thing that revolted him. The instinct in her was one of a strong,
pure passion to be of use. He had feared for her courage, perhaps for
her magnanimity. Yet it was she who took the torch that evening, and
carried it so that the darkness seemed less dark.
“John, my heart, tell me everything.”
She drew him by the hands into the inner room, and shut the world out,
save that world at Thorn. He looked down at her, as though wondering at
the will in her, and feeling a strength and courage near him that might
have the power of turning destiny into providence. She was calm yet
infinitely vital, and her face had a radiance that drove scorn and
bitterness and malice into the dark. He beheld a transfiguration—love
bending toward love, beautiful with the beauty of sacrifice, pity, and
desire.
“John, do you fear for me?”
He opened his arms, but paused with a sudden awe of her, and, bowing
himself, touched her hands.
“No, not now.”
“Then tell me everything.”
And he told her, sitting in the firelight, with his hands clasped upon
his knees.
Silence held them awhile in thrall. Barbara was leaning against the jamb
of the chimney, one hand laid along her cheek, her eyes full of the
past. It was as though some sharp struggle were passing within her, and
for a moment her eyes had a glitter of anger. But the gleam passed from
them, and her mouth softened.
She looked down at the man with a mystery of a smile—a smile with no
mirth in it, but full of sadness, yearning, and self-reproach.
“John.”
He started, almost as though he had forgotten her.
“Do you love your father?”
The question seemed to stagger him; he frowned at the fire.
“Love that!”
She rested her head upon her arm; his scorn had made the heart leap in
her.
“I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!”
“But you—”
“John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s
own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I
should feel that, even more than you?”
He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had
seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man.
And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and
more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself.
He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some
impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her.
Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and
then turned to him with a look he would never forget.
“John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.”
“Child!”
“It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.”
He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She
went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him,
while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were
vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness.
“Barbe, you can forgive!”
“Yes.”
“But it is for my sake?”
She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears.
“Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.”
He bent, and kissed her lips.
“Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep
you!”