For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out
from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin
and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with
him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on
each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs.
Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were
folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex
folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good
friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar
face.
Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those
first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of
will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague
glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for
John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the
determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and
none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the
past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned
aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a
man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten
enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn
had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even
in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the
finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive,
suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler
feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex
flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving
the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.
John Gore had made a rough splint and bound his father’s leg to it, and
contrived a bed with straw and blankets that should keep him from sores
and from the cold. A spark of my lord’s easy cynicism had flashed out
momentarily in the midst of his degradation.
“Mending a leg to break a neck, John; you are Puritan enough for that.”
But it was a flash in the pan. Even the polite insolence seemed dead in
him. He had caught his son’s arm and clung to it pleadingly.
“Think better of me, John. I came here to save the girl: I swear that,
before God.”
And then he would show great cunning behind the chatterings of dismay,
trying to worm from his son all that he knew, and also how he had come
to know it. But John Gore kept a shut mouth and the face of a flint, the
heart hard and contemptuous within him when he remembered the look in
Barbara’s eyes when she had spoken these words: “I can forgive.” Surely
there was no soul here worth forgiving. Better dead. That was the grim
judgment his heart uttered.
Such was the first week at Thorn, with the dark rides to and fro along
the woodland roads, the mournfulness and dolor of the winter landscape,
love by the fireside, retribution amid ruins. Sometimes Barbara would
walk out a little way toward Thorn in the hope of meeting John Gore upon
the homeward ride. She could not but mark the bitterness in him, a
certain questioning look about the eyes that seemed to gaze toward some
inevitable end. The riddle would have been baffling enough even if his
heart had been in the solving of it. Granted that the past were given to
oblivion, his father was a proscribed man; there was some risk even in
shielding him; any day he might be discovered and taken.
Nor could he tell Barbara all that he saw at Thorn. It was too sordid,
too contemptible; and yet his very reticence led her to understand.
Perhaps she had more sympathy, more vision than John Gore that winter.
She knew what Thorn could be even to one without guilt, without physical
pain, without an eternal dread, and with some one to bring food. This
man had gone down into the deeps of misery and degradation. He had been
starved and broken. That was her thought.
Once she asked John Gore to let her see him, but he shook his head and
would not hear of it.
“He thinks that I am dead, John,” she said.
“Then let him think it. God! Are we to make the thing so easy?”
“John! John!”
His fierceness hurt her a little, seeming to wake a clash of discords in
her, as though the brazen gates of that closed tragedy were jarring wide
again.
“John, don’t speak like that, dear.”
His tenderness shone through the anger in him.
“Barbe, you may forget; I cannot. When I touch your hand, when I see the
life in you, I remember.”
The memory of that night came back, and she shuddered: the dark room,
those throttling hands, the violence and horror in the dark. She looked
at her lover and understood.
“It is hard for you,” she said, very gently.
For to John Gore at that time it was like pampering a man who had sought
to betray the honor of his wife.
The old year had gone; the new was in with white hoar-frost on the grass
and the boughs each dawn, and a silvery smoke of mist melting into clear
blue mornings. January went plodding on—a heavy, toothless, torpid
month, despite the frost and the shimmer of sunlight; for January has
little of the likeness of a child; rather it appears as a gray old man
laboring in the dusk and the mists of the morning at some task that no
man sees. It is a month when gnomes work below the ground, laboring for
the mystery of beauty that is to be, touching the hidden seed with fire,
breathing into brown roots the colors of the flowers that shall come
hereafter.
With January, Stephen Gore’s life seemed to sink to the lowest level of
lethargy. Torpor fell upon him till he was like a frost-nipped plant
with the sap congealed, the leaves shrivelled and gray. He would sleep
for hours, and even when awake lie staring at the beams in the ceiling
above him, his face blank and without intelligence. He hardly ever
spoke. Even the fever of fear left him. He asked for nothing, not even
food. John Gore thought that my lord was dying, and even picked out a
place in the garden where he would bring him when he was dead.
Yet it was not death with Stephen Gore, but a stupor that nature had
brought upon him even as the winter fields lie inert and frost-crumbled
under the sky. Fresh food and the warmth of the bed had a narcotic
effect upon the man. The half-starved body seized greedily upon
everything and bade the mere mind sleep, and so the mind slept on for
many days, as though helping forward the old adage—“_Mens sana in
corpore sano._” For the body is but the stem of the tree of the senses,
and the sick body is often the cause of the sick mind.
Toward the last week in January John Gore saw a slow and subtle change
in his father, a change that came like the first thrusting of growth
through the winter soil. The flabbiness melted out of the man’s face;
his eyes grew brighter and full of the intelligence of inward life. He
was still very silent, but it was the silence of growth, not the silence
of paralysis. John Gore would find his father watching him, not with the
old, furtive, cringing look, but with a kind of sadness, a mute
perplexity that betrayed the mind working behind the eyes. More than
once he had made tentative little attempts to show gratitude, always
watching his son’s face as though conscious of its imperturbable
sternness. His son’s face began to be a dial of destiny to him. He could
read the truth about himself in the younger man’s grave eyes.
It became evident that Stephen Gore’s manhood and his self-respect were
returning to him slowly as he lay in the kitchen of Thorn. What his
thoughts were John Gore could only guess, though he was struck by the
change in his father, the indefinable refining and strengthening of the
outer and inner man, as though my lord had ceased to be the animal, and
had come again to the cognizance of higher things. They seldom spoke to
each other, these two, nor did they venture beyond the trivial needs or
happenings of the day. Both were conscious of the imminent and dark
shadow, and faltered before it, sheltering behind reticence and
procrastination. Yet John Gore would see a certain look come into his
father’s eyes, as though the man were dumb and were striving to speak.
And the first breaking of the superficial surface of reserve was caused
by nothing more dramatic than a beard. My lord’s self-respect seemed
intimately married to bodily cleanliness and perfection in dress. Silks
and brocades and perfumes were beyond him; perhaps he would not have
asked for them even if they had been at hand. But it was with a gleam of
his old wit that he desired most humbly to be barbered, and to be
deprived of the hair that had grown at Thorn.
John Gore accepted the incident without a smile, brought a razor with
him next day, and dutifully shaved my lord’s upper lip and chin. He had
done his barbering in silence, with the air of a man who had no care
beyond the dexterity of his fingers, when my lord laid a hand on his
son’s shoulder.
“You would like to cut my throat, John. Cut it.”
They looked at each other squarely in the eyes. Stephen Gore was the
first to glance away.
“Nor should I blame you, my son.”
And that was all that passed between them over the shaving of my lord’s
chin.
John Gore told Barbara of the change in Stephen Gore, and she listened
with a faint smile hovering about her mouth, as though her intuition
gave her some vision of the future.
“Be gentle with him, John,” she said. “I have heard it said that pottery
is brittle when it first comes from the furnace.”
“Then you think the clay has been recast, child?”
“Why should it not be so!”
And he could only marvel at the change in her.
So the month went, and my lord’s “grand air” began to flutter out feebly
like a faded butterfly on a sunny day in spring. Yet there was a certain
humility about him that made John Gore reflect, for his father was very
patient now, strangely so for one who had sworn at lackeys. Often the
son would catch a troubled shadow darkening the father’s face. He would
drop his eyes when they met John Gore’s, yet he watched his son almost
hungrily when the son’s back was turned.
It was a day early in February, and John Gore sat on Simon Pinniger’s
three-legged stool before the fire, and cleaned his pistols that grew
foul quickly in the damp winter air. His father had been asleep, and the
son believed him still sleeping as he polished the barrels and scoured
the powder-pans.
He heard a slight movement behind him, and, turning sharply, found my
lord awake and watching him with thoughtful eyes. Both men colored
slightly. John Gore turned again, and went on with his work.
Then he heard his father speak.
“John, how long have I been here?”
The son considered.
“Three months—or so,” he answered.
My lord sighed.
“This leg of mine is mending.”
The son said nothing.
“I am wondering whether it is worth the mending. A man must die some
day; though it is better that he should die like a man, not like a dog.”
There was a minute’s silence. John Gore could hear his father’s
breathing, but he went on doggedly with the cleaning of his pistols.
“John.”
My lord spoke softly, almost pleadingly.
“Yes.”
“Will you answer me a few questions?”
“Ask them.”
Again there was a short pause.
“Have you any news from Westminster?”
“What news?”
“The Catholics, my friends—the rest.”
John Gore laid one pistol down and took up the other.
“Coleman is dead,” he said, curtly.
“Coleman! How?”
“The scaffold.”
He heard his father mutter indistinctly, and the words sounded like the
words of a Latin prayer.
“And the rest?”
“Some with Coleman, some in the Tower and the jails, some scattered.
London has been calling for blood.”
My lord lay very still. Then he turned slightly, and his eyes were on
his son.
“And in Pall Mall?”
“My Lady Purcell?”
“Yes.”
“She died three months ago.”
There was another and a longer pause.
“John.” And he spoke with effort.
“Yes.”
“Why did you save me from dying?”
The son frowned at the fire.
“I do not know,” he said, at last.
“John, you were always honest. Yet—God help me—with the irony of the
truth.”
Stephen Gore asked no more questions, but lay staring at the beams above
him, his mouth twitching, his eyes glazed with a film of thought. He
seemed to forget the presence of his son. The great dim world of the
past, and the vast “beyond” that holds the past world in its shadows,
engrossed the life in him, and he made no sound.
As for John Gore, his heart was full of a conflict of strong emotions.
Nor was his mouth so straight and stern when he turned and glanced at
his father over his shoulder. Yet what he beheld moved him more deeply
than any words my lord had spoken. For Stephen Gore’s eyes were wet and
blurred, and there was the glisten of tears upon his face.
John Gore rose suddenly from before the fire, and, taking his pistols
with him, went out without a word. He was half angry and half ashamed,
for though pity had welled up like blood into his mouth, a rough and
scolding bitterness pointed to the meaner motives of mankind, and the
leer of a possible hypocrisy hardened his heart.
He rode home toward Furze Farm, meeting a strong west wind that made the
sky move fast and the ash boughs clash in the thickets. And in the woods
north of the farm Barbara met him, where a number of old hollies threw
up a wall of dense, green gloom.
He dismounted, and kissed her with some of the brusqueness of a man
whose eyes seem too shallow, and whose heart is too near his lips. She
let the strangeness in him pass, and they walked on side by side, the
horse following at their heels. John Gore looked at the grass road
before him, Barbara at the sky. And for nearly half a furlong they
walked on thus in silence.
“John, you two have spoken.”
He glanced at her sharply, as though wondering how she knew.
“Yes.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Questions. He asked questions.”
“About—”
“His friends; about your mother.”
“What did you tell him, John?”
“I told him the truth.”
“Yes; and then—”
“What could I say to the man? Curse him, he wept!”
She paused a moment, taking her lover’s arm, and holding him back a
little as though about to speak. The impulse changed, however, and she
walked on again with a light of infinite wisdom in her eyes. For a man’s
nature is a proud and contrary thing. She felt what was passing in John
Gore’s heart, and she was too tender and too prudent to drag it roughly
into the light of day.