My lord took his first walk in the kitchen of Thorn leaning upon John
Gore’s shoulder, the son’s arm about the father’s body. Any one who had
seen the pair would have judged them to have been the best of friends,
for the son steadied the father’s steps with the grave, patient air of
one whose care was almost a devotion. And the father, who had the look
of a man who had aged very rapidly, what with the white in his hair and
the deep lines upon his face, seemed to lean upon the son with a sense
of confidence and trust. He was wearing a new suit of plain black cloth,
with a white scarf about his throat. Some of his little gestures and
tricks of expression came to him as in the old days, save that they were
less emphatic and less characteristic of the aggressive self.
At the third turn Stephen Gore looked at the window that was lit by the
March sunlight, and a sudden wistfulness swept into his eyes, as though
he were touched by pathetic memories. He paused, leaning his weight upon
his son, for he was feeble and easily out of breath after those weeks
upon his back.
“I should like to go into the open air, John, and sit in the sun.”
John Gore looked at him doubtfully.
“You are safer here,” he said.
My lord gave a shake of the head.
“Are you cautious for my sake, my son? John—John, you do not understand
me yet.”
There seemed a new atmosphere of sympathy enveloping them, for John Gore
answered his father very gently.
“It shall be as you wish.”
“Then put your arm under my shoulders, John—so. What a strong fellow
you are! I can just toddle like a dot of two.”
They went out into the court-yard, Stephen Gore’s right leg dragging
stiffly. He would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, since the
limb that had been broken had been shortened by three inches in the
mending. The son carried Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool in his left
hand. They crossed the court-yard very slowly, and passed through a
doorway into the wilderness of the garden. The green of the spring was
thrusting through a thousand buds; there was the thrill of growth in the
air, and the birds were singing.
Close on the sunny side of a ragged box-tree that was half netted in
brambles a clump of Lent-lilies stood in bloom, swinging their golden
heads over the weeds and grass. There seemed the beauty of symbolism
about these flowers. The sunlight appeared to centre upon them, and to
burnish their golden heads with the warmth of the March day.
My lord’s glance settled on the flowers. He paused before them with a
sudden curious smile.
“Set the stool here, John.”
And he sat down there, with the clump of daffodils at his feet.
John Gore left him there awhile, and strolled on along the rank walks
where primroses glimmered from lush green glooms, and gilliflowers were
beginning to scent the air from the crumbling tops of the old brick
walls. The softness and the glamour of spring seemed everywhere. There
was no wind, hardly a cloud—nothing but the warm shimmer of the
sunlight.
Father and son had come closer to each other those last days, not
through any sentimental outburst of the emotions, but because the father
had become once more a man, and a man whom it was even possible to
respect. “Mea culpa,” he had said, and the dignity of a simple
acceptance of guilt had given him a new impressiveness. It had been
difficult, at first, for John Gore to accept his father’s humility as a
thing born of the heart and the spirit. There was ever the sneer of
possible “play-acting” penitence, the tawdry sentimental epilogue spoken
with a hypocritical leer and a thought of the nearest brothel. John Gore
had distrusted his father, and had watched keenly for the old self to
betray itself. Yet he had still continued to behold a quiet, patient,
and sorrowful old man who seemed grateful for small services, and who
looked at him with watchful and troubled eyes. John Gore distrusted any
religious display in such a man as my lord. And yet he came to
understand by degrees all that was passing in his father’s heart.
He returned presently to where the elder man was seated, and found him
in an attitude of saddened thought. Stephen Gore looked up as his son
joined him, and then turned his head away so that his eyes were on the
tower of Thorn. The place itself must of necessity force the full
meaning of the past upon him. The stones spoke; the very silence of the
place had a message of its own. For my lord still believed Anne
Purcell’s child to be dead, and that thought had survived to haunt him
above all others.
“John.”
“Yes.”
“I have something to say to you as between man and man.”
The son stood back, and leaned against the trunk of an apple-tree.
“You have given me the chance, John, to judge myself, and to discover
the truth with my own eyes. Let us have no parson’s talk—no snivelling.
As a man of the world I fought for myself, and pushed others out of the
path. I blundered immortally over my selfishness, John, and they ought
to hang me for a fool.”
He still looked toward the tower, and John Gore guessed whither his
thoughts tended.
“That was the damnedest thing the self in me ever rushed on, my son. And
yet I tried to alter it at the last—perhaps for my own sake, perhaps
for the mother’s. She was dying then—I have told you that; perhaps that
was why I repented. The heart of a man is a strange, elusive,
treacherous thing, even to its owner, John. Sometimes we can hardly
decide why we do the things we do.”
He sat in silence awhile, with his head bowed down.
“You must have hated me, my son; if you had spat upon me, I should
hardly have questioned it. Words are not life: I cannot give you back
that which I destroyed. And there is where bitterness grips the heart in
a man when he sees what manner of ruin he has made. What are regrets,
despair, protestations? Air—mere air in the brain! When once a man has
fallen into the slough, John, his struggles seem only to carry him
deeper. He may even drag others below the surface or splash foul mud
onto innocent faces. But the awe and the bitterness are in the
knowledge, John, of our own utter, miserable impotence. Things cannot be
wiped out. They last and endure against us till the crack of doom.”
He stared at the grass and knitted his hands together.
“I had thought of giving myself up, my son, and telling the whole truth.
But that—that cannot help the dead. And somehow I have come to shudder
at the thought of throwing shame into the grave of the one woman who
really loved me. And, John, I shall suffer more by living than by dying.
Fools do not always realize that in this world. They tie a man to a
rope, and think that they are even with him for his sins. They would
often get the greater vengeance on him if they only let him live.”
He paused, staring straight before him, his shoulders bent.
“Weeks ago, John, I remember, as in a dream, that I lived in a mad
horror of death. That has passed, I know not quite how. But I leave the
judgment in your hands, my son. Do with me what you please.”
He seemed to grow very weary of a sudden, for his strength was but the
strength of a sick man, and the grim truths of life seemed heavy on him.
His son went to him, and, putting an arm about his father’s body, helped
him to his feet, and led him back to the bed in the kitchen.
“I am not your judge, father,” he said, very gently; “there is another
one who should judge, and from whom forgiveness may have come.”
He was thinking of Barbara, but my lord thought that he spoke of God.
The meadows about Furze Farm were full of the bleating of lambs those
days, and the youngsters skipped and butted one another, galloping to
and fro on their ridiculous legs, while the stupid old dames baaed, each
to its own child. There had been one sick lamb that Christopher Jennifer
had brought home in his arms, and the little beast had been laid upon
hay in a basket beside the fire. There were also two cade-lambs in a pen
in the orchard, and Barbara, who had many hours to herself now that John
Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, had asked Mrs. Winnie to let her have
the tending of the two motherless ones, also the feeding of the early
chicks and the gathering of the eggs. The whole life at the farm was
fresh and quaint to her, and brisk life it was those spring days—a
cackling, bleating, lowing life, with the thrushes singing in the
beech-trees and the blackbirds in the hedgerows. The bloom on the apple
and pear trees in the orchard would soon be pink and white, and there
were daffodils nodding their heads at Furze Farm as well as in the
wilderness of Thorn.
The evening after Stephen Gore’s confession at Thorn, John Gore took his
love away over the uplands where the furze was all a glitter of gold,
with the green slopes of the hills and the brown ploughlands making a
foreground to the distant sea. They desired to be alone that evening, to
feel the spirit of spring in them, and to watch the sun go down and the
twilight creep into the valleys. Their happiness was the greater because
others were not forgotten in the romance of their two selves. Moreover,
the glamour of the morrow had the delight of a plot in it. Mrs. Winnie
alone was suffered to taste the spice in the secret, though the duty
fell to her of sending out for clean rushes, taking down the rosemary
and bay from the beams in the pantry, and gathering flowers to spread
upon the coverlet of the bed.
She smiled to herself very pleasantly when John Gore and the “little
lady” rode out early next morning as though for nothing more solemn than
a morning’s canter. She knew that the gentleman had smoked a pipe in the
parson’s parlor more than a month ago, and Mrs. Winnie was quite wise as
to what was in the wind. There was to be no stir made, and Chris
Jennifer’s wife rather approved of being the solitary holder of such a
secret. Her attitude was quite motherly. She spent the morning sweeping
Barbara’s room, and strewing rushes and flowers about it, and putting
posies of bay and rosemary upon the pillows.
The pair were back at Furze Farm by dinner-time, looking mild and
innocent, even hungry, as though nothing serious had befallen. They
walked into the kitchen just as Mr. Jennifer was settling himself to
carve the meat. John Gore glanced at Mrs. Winnie, who had run forward to
kiss and embrace her “little lady.” That occurred behind Mr. Jennifer’s
back, and son William had too brisk an appetite to trouble about the
emotions of his elders.
“Shall I give you a dump o’ fat, sir?”
And so they sat down to dinner.
They were half through with it when Mrs. Winnie accepted a nod from John
Gore and pushed back her chair, and picking up a wedding-favor from
under a mug on the dresser, she went to her man and held it under his
nose.
Mr. Jennifer stared at the gilded sprigs and the ribbons very gravely.
“I dunno as I be a widower yet,” he said, as his slow brain took in the
nature of the thing, “nor be you a widow, Winnie.”
“Oh, you thick-head, Chris!”
Mr. Jennifer looked at her, and then, with a sudden gleam of the eyes,
at John Gore and the lady.
“Be that so, my dear?”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Winnie, in a whisper.
Then Mr. Jennifer laid a hand to his mug, rose slowly and solemnly, and
stared hard at the bride and bridegroom.
“Ut be a pleasure—”
He paused and reconsidered the beginning.
“Ut be a pleasure—”
John Gore and Barbara looked up at him smilingly, and their eyes seemed
to drive the whole art of oratory out of Mr. Jennifer’s head. He took
refuge in his mug, brandished it toward them, and set it down empty,
with emphasis. Then he looked at his wife with an affectionate grin.
“I be powerful pleased, my dear. Seven years ago—”
“Eight,” interposed the wife, with a shocked glance at son William.
“Eight be ut, then—I dared ut like a man, and I’d dare ut again, please
God.”
“Lor’, Christopher!”
“William, keep t’ gravy off thy breeches. Mr. Gore, sir, you’ll be for
pardoning me, but t’ lady’s face be a good bargain. T’ Bible says
something of vines and fig leaves and olive branches—I dunno as I quite
knows what; but I wish ye all of ut, sir, you—and the lady.”
So Barbara lay in her lover’s arms that night, and they heard the birds
break out with their songs at dawn.