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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XI</h1></div> My lord paused abruptly with the wine-decanter in his hand, his eyes fixed in a vacant stare on his son, who was drawing a high-backed chair forward to the table. The rumble of the wheels of the coach that had brought them home from Hortense Mancini’s could be heard dying away along St. James’s. “Wine, Jack? They should have got Pembroke comfortably to bed by now. The man will be about again in a month—ready to quarrel with his best friend. What made you meddle in the game? A little mockery might do Nan Purcell’s girl some good.” John Gore was unfastening the curbs of his black cloak. His father watched him, his brows knitted into a sudden frown of uneasiness—the frown of a man surprised by a spasm of pain at the heart. “You all seemed so ready to make a fool of the child.” “Tut—tut, sir, you ought to have come by more shrewd sense than to make a pother over such a piece of fun. Where the devil, may I ask, did you get that cloak?” John Gore glanced down at the garment as though my lord’s tone of contempt might have made the thing shrivel on his shoulders. “The cloak? You should know it, since it came out of your own wardrobe!” “Mine! I deny the imputation.” He laughed with a cynical twist of the mouth, and regarded his son slyly over the rim of his wineglass. “Well, it came out of your room, sir!” “Come, come, Jack!” “My boy Sparkin fished it out of a chest when he was advising me on frills and fashions. The sobriety of the garment suited my inclinations.” Stephen Gore’s eyes gleamed for the moment with a flash of fierce impatience. “The meddlesome ape! You must pardon me being tickled by the irony of facts. Since Captain Jack Gore listens to a cook-boy’s opinions on costumes, I am mum.” The son seemed amused and piqued in turn by his father’s inquisitive and fanatical prejudices. He swung the cloak from his shoulders and held it up with one hand. “What have you to quarrel with, sir? The refinements of fashion are too deep for me. I shall be landed in Newgate for wearing the wrong kind of buckle on my shoes before the week is out.” My lord appeared in earnest. “Pshaw! Quarrel with? Why, the thing is about ten years out of date. Unpardonable! Give it up, Jack; I’ll not countenance you in such a pudding-cloth.” John Gore broke into a hearty, seafaring laugh. “Sancta Maria! is the offence so flagrant?” “You might as well go to the King’s levee with a dirty face, sir. Don’t guffaw; I’m in earnest. Richards has orders to get rid of all the husks.” The sea-captain fingered the gold tags. “Being a prodigal, I will put up with such husks as these. I suppose I may be preferred before Tom Richards?” My lord took the cloak from him casually, as though he had not noticed the gold chains with their knots of pearls. “Hallo! these are worth saving, after all. I’ll keep them myself, Jack. Give a thing, and take it back again. That is philosophy of a sort, according to Hobbs.” He laughed, pulled out a silver-handled clasp-knife from a pocket, and cut the gold curbs away from the cloth. “For what we have saved, let us be thankful. It is not always wise to lend other people either your opinions or your wardrobe, much less your purse.” John Gore had picked up the cloak again. “Three, are there? There must have been four once. Look at the tear, there—in the cloth. Curious; I should not have noticed it before.” My lord took the cloak from him and examined it with a careless air, making use of one corner to hide a yawn. “The mark of the beast, Jack. Tom Richards’ fingers have been at work here, or I know nothing of human nature. Well, the fellow must have his pickings. If one worries about a small man’s petty pilferings one ought not to have the insolence to be a courtier. We are all sooted by the same chimney. Another glass of wine, Jack? No? Well, let’s to bed.” They parted with a hand-shake and a light word or two upon the stairs, words that hid in either case the deeper impulses beneath. In my lord’s heart there was something of scorn, something of dismay, and the fierce uneasiness of a man who loves to look only upon the more flattering features of his soul. There seemed nothing in the incident to shake his confidence, and yet it had shaken him as a light wind sways a mighty elm that is rotten at the roots. A cloak, so much mere cloth, which he had hidden away and forgotten! Yet the thing had brought back visions of an autumn night, of betrayal and of anger, of passionate reproaches and of swift violence in the dark. What though he solaced himself with the oath that death had judged between the fortunes of two swords? The sin of treachery had been his. The blood-guilt remained, and no sophistry and no well-wishing to himself could wipe the stain away. For the son, the happenings of the night had a richer aftermath. He was no self-conscious, strutting righter of wrongs; no chivalrous adventure-hunter launching his lance at the world’s throat. My Lord Pembroke might have kissed most women with impunity as far as John Gore was concerned; for though they might have protested, he knew, as a man of the world, that not one in twenty would have been worth the interference. Any chivalrous fool who had pushed in to a rescue would have merely flattered a coquette with the offer of blood where the other man had only offered kisses. But that tall girl with the Spanish face had given the scene a different meaning. The uncompromising sincerity of her pride had turned a piece of fantastic fooling into insolence and dishonor. The call of solitary soul to soul is ever something of a riddle, and yet to the man there must be that one woman whose hair has the darkness of night, whose eyes are mysterious, whose face has an alluring sadness near to pain. Out of one thread of pathos or of passion may be woven that scarlet robe that covers the dim white body of Romance. A trick of the voice, a poise of the head, and the sleeper wakes in the world of color and desire. The streaking of the night sky by a falling star is not more swift and strange than that flash of divine wonder across the consciousness of a woman or a man. The memory of her standing by the window, tall, defiant, aloof, with those cynical fools mocking her, burned with great vividness in John Gore’s brain. He remembered the moment when her eyes had wandered round the room to remain fixed on his. He thrilled still, strong man that he was, at that appeal the girl had given him, as though some instinct had warned her that his manhood was a nobler thing than to suffer her pride to be humbled before them all. Fighting against wild seas and the primeval perils of strange lands had given John Gore the cool and unflurried courage that is steady rather than impetuous. And yet that one glance from the girl’s eyes had drawn an instant and impulsive answer from him, as though all that she held sacred had been trusted to his hands. And then—her history, this morose, brooding grief that my lord had hinted at! The very shadow of sadness that haunted her added a mystery, an alluring strangeness that beckoned the soul. She was not like other women. What more subtle deification! For strong natures are untaken save by strong contrasts and by keen impressions. The song of the nightingale may have no meaning for the falcon. Nor could the chattering lutes of “court beauties” call to a man who had stood where Cortez stood, gazing from Darien on the ocean limitless toward the burning west. John Gore stood awhile at the open window of his room, as he had often stood at the rail of his quarter-deck on a southern night. The great silence of the sea seemed once more with him, and the far unutterable splendor of the moon. Then, as by contrast, his thoughts were caught by his father’s furious convictions as to the importance of the proper droop of a feather or the color of a coat. Who remembered such things when the storm-wind was shrieking, like the ghosts of the sea’s dead, through a great ship’s tackle? Yet, after all, it was only the fanaticism of another circle, another world. Your scientific zealot will cut a caper over the discovery of some new bug. It was a mere question of environment, and Father Adam may have strutted vaingloriously in some new-fangled smock of leaves. Not for John Gore alone had it been a night of impressions. They had proved keen, pitiless, and pathetic so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. She was alone in her room, and at her open window, the human counterpart of John Gore. In her lap lay a little strand of gold, while the moonlight touched the bleak pallor of her face, making the night, like her heart, a contrast of mysterious light and shadow. With Barbara her impressions were like elemental fire and ice, vivid, distinct, at war with one another. They stood opposed within her mind, hurting her heart by their very enmity. Gratitude and hatred unable to be reconciled; the harsh notes of revenge and the voices of heaven clashing together in the galleries of the brain. She had seen and she had recognized, yet the gross incongruity of it all made her falter for a meaning. The incidents of the night passed and repassed rhythmically before her. The uprising of his manhood in her service; her mother’s strained dismay; the scene at the stair’s head; the glimpse of the three gold curbs upon the cloak. Where were the beginnings and the endings in this tangled skein for her? Had she not looked for exultation in this moment when at last it should come into her life? And now that the truth seemed close to her very heart, she found the near future blurred by a dimness of doubt, of incredulity, even—of dread. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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