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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XVII</h1></div> John Gore rode for Yorkshire the next day, mounted on a good gray nag, with pistols in his holsters, and a servant with a blunderbuss, and a valise strapped on the saddle of a stout brown cob. Travellers had to take their chance of meeting rough gentry on the road, and many a nervous countryman, weighing sixteen stone, made out his will before he did so desperate a thing as travel forty miles. The sea-captain was not a man with jumpy nerves, and his thoughts went to and fro between rentals and harvestings and the ways of women as though he sat smoking at home in a padded chair. Put a man in the saddle on a summer morning, when the dawn is coming up, and all the hedgerows are dashed with dew, and he will be moved to sing, and to think well of the world, for the fresh kisses of the dawn leave no stain upon the mouth. John Gore was thinking of Barbara Purcell; and the mistake a man so often makes is to accuse a woman of whims when he does not understand her, it being easier to call a thing by a name than to investigate its properties. Man is the creature of a superstition in this respect, and if a cow kicks the milk-pail over he calls her “a cussed beast,” and as such she is branded. For man, taking himself so solemnly, cannot stay in his stride to find out why a woman has her silks or her worsteds in a tangle. If she weeps, his great solatium is a sweep of the arm and a kiss. If she seems sulky, it is just her perversity, and it is no more use for him to trouble his wise head about her vapors than to ask a February morning cloud why it shows such a sour face. It is nature’s business, and man, unless he happens to be a psychologist, leaves it as such and thinks about his dinner. John Gore, jogging along at a good pace, with the fields and woods all silver under the rising sun, looked back at the hours of yesterday with more thoroughness than the majority of lovers. An ordinary egotist might have drawn some flattering inference from the strange melting of the girl’s reserve and her eagerness to escape him. He would have reminded his own conceit that a woman cries, “Shame, sir!” and thinks what she will wear for the wedding. But John Gore was not so ordinary a fool. His thoughts went deeper into the soil than the thoughts of frailer men. And he had more true manhood in him than to insinuate even to his own heart that because a woman played the will-o’-the-wisp, she was luring him on with the lure of mystery. It was all so simple, had he but known, as all great secrets seem when they are once discovered. Your astrologist goes weaving grotesque obscurities about man’s destiny and the stars, till one calm brain sets the whole grand and reasonable scheme in order. Men wrote with prodigious pomposity about a pump. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” quoth they. And Nature, like a misunderstood woman, laughed in her sleeve, knowing that the larger a wise man’s words are, the less he knows. That Lionel Purcell’s death had left a great void in the girl’s life, and that she still brooded over the violent mystery of it, of these things John Gore felt assured. He could put no clear meaning to the mood of yesterday, save that much grieving had left, as it were, an open wound upon the brain, and that memory, touching it, would not suffer it to heal. She had never given him one glimpse of the real purpose that she cherished. Yet probably John Gore’s nag would have leaped forward under a sudden slash of his rider’s spurs had the man been told what Barbara had kept hidden from him in her bosom. As it was, her past life appeared to him suffused with a wistful glow of infinite sadness, infinite regret. Her face rose before him dim with a mist of autumn melancholy. Her crown was a crown of scarlet berries woven and interwoven amid the dark peril of her hair. As for Barbara, she had fallen into a strange mood that day when John Gore rode northward out of her life. She rose early, and walked alone in the garden, showing an untroubled face to her mother when my lady descended after taking breakfast in bed. Barbara, to appear occupied, had a basket on her arm, and a pair of scissors with which she was cutting off the dead flowers along the border. Anne Purcell was a lady who had never bent her back over such a hobby. “Such things were for maiden ladies with round shoulders and no bosoms.” And the mother was a little inquisitive that morning, for John Gore’s face had told her nothing the night before. Her wishes were all for an understanding between the two, and she was not squeamish. The grip of a man’s arm would hug the mopes out of the girl. Barbara needed hot blood to teach her to live and to enjoy. My lady was wise in all these matters. “It is a new thing for you to touch the harpsichord, Barbe,” she said, with that kindness that comes easily when people seemed inclined to shape themselves to one’s wishes. “I will send Rogers to the City and have a man out to tune the wires.” Barbara reached for a dead flower, showing off her figure finely as she leaned over the border—but there was no man there to see. “You can have a singing-master again, if you wish for it, so that you can sing to some one when he comes riding back from the North.” She laughed and looked at her daughter with motherly archness. It was good, at least, to see the girl busying herself even over such things as dead flowers. “My voice is not worth training.” “What! When some one is ready to sit in the dusk and hear you sing?” Barbara looked at her mother innocently enough. She was all meek guile that morning. “My Lord Gore is a good judge.” “Why, to be sure, he shall give you a lesson or two. We must get you some new songs pricked. The old ones are too chirrupy and out of date.” Thus my lady imagined that she had discovered much of the truth, and perhaps she had discovered some small portion of it beneath that placid surface. Dead flowers! Anne Purcell had no prophetic instinct in such matters. And Barbara was glad when she was gone, and the garden empty of all thought save the thought of expiation. She was neither happy nor sad, but possessed by a strange tranquillity, like the first sense of coming sleep to one who has been in pain. She might have been surprised at her own calmness had she been in a mood to be surprised at anything. It was as though bitterness and doubt had been swept out of her path, leaving the way easy toward the inevitable end. Barbara went into the music-room, and, lifting the lid of the harpsichord, let her fingers go idly to and fro over the notes. So few hours had passed, and yet the passionate voice of yesterday had died down to a distant whisper. She was glad, quietly glad now, that he had gone out of her life innocent and unharmed. There was still the blood-debt between them, and in the consummation of her purpose she would leave him a memory that could retain but little tenderness. It was a strange yet very natural mood, the mood of one going calmly to the scaffold with all the fears and yearnings of yesterday drugged into stoical sleep. Her one wonder was that she had been so blind, and that she should have overlooked the grim simplicity of the riddle of three years. Now, everything seemed as apparent and real to her as the reflection of her own face in the mirror upon the wall. Her whole insight had seized upon the discovery and accepted it with swift conviction, even as a man in doubt and trouble seizes on the text that answers his appeal. She could have laughed at her own blindness, had laughter been possible over such a hazard. My Lord Gore was to sup with them at six o’clock that evening. Barbara looked calmly toward the hour, as though her heart had emptied itself of all emotion. There was no anger in her, no haste, no clash of horror and regret. “I shall kill him to-night,” she said to herself, quite quietly, as though there could be no other ending to that three years’ vigil. Judged by the ordinary sentiment of life, men would have called her utterly callous, execrably vindictive, a thing without any heart in her to feel or fear. Yet fireside judgments are shallow things. No man knows what a hanging is like till he happens to drive in the tumbrel to Tyburn, and the imagination looks for lurid lights where everything may be as calm and cold as snow. It is easy for a man to sit as judge with the stem of a pipe between his teeth and a good dinner inside him. He has no more knowledge of what love and desire and vengeance and death may be than a plum-pudding can know the thoughts inside the head of the woman who stirred it in the making. At noon Barbara dined with her mother, and in a Venetian vase upon the table there were some late roses sent from my Lord Gore’s garden at Bushy. The subtle scent of the flowers remained with the memory of that day like the perfume from censers before a sacrifice. After dinner she dressed herself, and, taking the girl who waited on her as maid, walked in the park and down past Whitehall toward the river. The girl with her noticed nothing strange, save that she was very silent, and seemed not to see the people who went by. Leaning over the parapet of the river-walk, Barbara saw a barge moored near in, and a couple of brown children sitting at the top of the cabin steps and blowing bubbles from broken clay pipes. The soapy water in the porringer between them would not have been wasted had it been used upon their faces. But they were so brown and healthy and happy watching the bubbles sail and burst that Barbara turned away from the water-side with the first pang of the heart that she had felt that day. Coming back past Whitehall a troop of the King’s guard came by with drums beating and trumpets blowing, and all the pomp of the Palace in their red coats and burnished steel. The girl with Barbara stopped to stare; but Barbara walked on under Hans Holbein’s gate, letting a crowd of boys rush past her to see the redcoats and hear the trumpets. She would liked to have wandered into the fields beyond Charing village, but time was passing, and there were things to be remembered. She went straight to her room on reaching home, and, locking the door, opened an oak coffer of which she kept the key. Lying there on a green silk scarf were two pretty little flintlocks, their barrels damascened and the stocks set with silver. She took them out and, sitting on her bed, held them in her lap while she ran the ramrod down the barrels to see that the charges were safely there. The scattering of powder in the pan from the ivory powder-flask should be left till the last moment. Barbara was putting the pistols back in the coffer when she heard voices at the far end of the gallery. It was her mother and Mrs. Jael talking together. Their footsteps came down the gallery, and a hand knocked at the door. “Yes. Who is it?” Mrs. Jael’s voice answered, bland and sweet: “Mistress Barbara, my dear, my lady wishes to see you in her room.” Barbara closed the lid of the coffer, put the keys in her bosom, and went to the door. Mrs. Jael curtesied, never forgetting her good manners. “Will you please go to my lady’s room?” “What does mother want with me?” “Go and see, my dear mistress,” quoth the woman, with an air of motherliness and mystery. Barbara passed up the gallery without locking the door after her, since Mrs. Jael made a pretence of going down the stairs. Yet the woman was back again, with a briskness that did her years credit, so soon as she had heard the closing of my lady’s door. Mrs. Jael appeared wise as to what to do in Barbara’s room, probably because of that peep-hole in the wainscoting of the wall. She went straight to the table where the oak coffer stood, pulled out a bunch of keys from her pocket, and, choosing one marked with a tag of red ribbon, unlocked the coffer and lifted the lid. Mrs. Jael showed no surprise at seeing the pistols lying therein half concealed by the green scarf. She ran a knitting-needle, which she drew from her stocking, down each barrel in turn, holding the pistol close to her ear and listening as she probed it. Then she examined the powder-pans, smiled to herself sweetly, and, putting the pistols back just as she had found them, relocked the coffer and sidled out of the room. <div><h1>XVIII</h1></div> My Lord Gore came to the supper-table in the best of tempers, welding fatherliness, gallantry, and wit into one and the same humor. After a glance at his debonair and handsome face the veriest nighthawk out of Newgate might have declared him a great gentleman, a pillar of the state, and upholder of all chivalry. No man could be more gracious when the wine had no sour edge to it. He could dance a child to the ceiling, laugh like a boy, and make the majority of young maids fall in love with him with a tremor of romance. In the world it is too often self that is served, and the gallant courtier may be a bear at home. My Lord Gore was a man charmed with his own charm. It pleased him to shine upon people, to radiate warmth, to be looked upon as generous and splendid by men of duller manners. Yet he could act generously, and not always with an eye to personal effect. The plague came when his own comfort or his self-love were menaced. Then the great gentleman, the classic courtier, showed the crust of Cain beneath silks and velvets and coats of arms. Cross him, and Stephen Gore’s stateliness became a power to crush instead of to propitiate. He could be brutal with a courtly, sneering facility that was more dangerous than the blundering anger of a rough and clumsy nature. For though every man with the normal passions in him may be a potential Cain, it is chiefly in the two extremes of brutishness and luxurious refinement that one meets with that savage intolerance of the rights of others. And it must be confessed that in the matter of sheer selfishness the poet has often eclipsed the boor. At the supper-table Anne Purcell spoke of Barbara’s singing. Who was considered the best master, and did my lord prefer the Italian manner? “For a man, yes,” he answered, quickly, “if he has a bull’s chest on him. But give me a Frenchman to teach a woman to sing love-songs. That is the fashion for Proserpine, eh, when Master Pluto has gone a-farming?” He winked at Barbara over his wine, looking very bland and fatherly, with his lips rounded as though he were saying “Oporto” to his own comfort. “You might try the girl’s voice after supper, Stephen.” My lord was very ready. He had a bass of rich compass, like the voice of a popish priest chanting in some glorious choir. “Herrick should be the man for Barbara. Soft, delicate lyrics, with an amorous droop of the eyelids. Poor Lionel was too fond of the old Cavalier ditties.” Barbara looked at him with sombre, widely opened eyes. It was not often of late that she had heard him speak her father’s name. And that night it woke a flare of exultant anger in her, because of the touch of patronage, as though the dead could always be safely pitied. “Well, then, let us go to the music-room,” said her mother. “I will ring to have candles lit.” My lord wiped his mouth daintily and laughed. “Next month there will be no lights needed, but chaste Diana peeping through the casements and wishing she was not cursed with so prudish a reputation.” They wandered out into the garden, where a great slant of golden light came over the trees and made the grass vivid, even to violet in the shadows. Barbara walked a little apart, like one whose thoughts went silently to meet the night. Now and again she glanced at my lord, when his eyes were off her, with an earnestness that might have puzzled him had he noticed it. It was Mrs. Jael who came out with a tinder-box and lit the candles in the music-room. Barbara watched her through the window, noticing, almost unconsciously, the woman’s double chin, and loose, lying, voluble mouth. She was watching Mrs. Jael when my lord took her by the elbow playfully and turned her toward the portico. “Come, Mistress Jet and Ivory, we must see how you fancy Parson Herrick.” Anne Purcell went in after them, Mrs. Jael standing back as my lady entered. “You can send the people to bed early, Jael.” “Yes, my lady,” and the confidential creature passed out. Yet what she did was to fly up to Mistress Barbara’s room so that her breath came in short wheezes, unlock the coffer, grope therein tentatively, relock it, and hurry down again with a complacent smirk on her fat face. For Mrs. Jael had a sense of the dramatic where self was concerned, and could keep a shut mouth, despite her loquacity, till the occasion should come when she could most magnify herself by opening it. She went out again into the garden, where it was already growing dusk, and, crossing the grass softly, stood at one corner of the music-room where she could wait to hear whether her prophecies were likely to be realized. My lord had established himself on the settle with the scarlet cushion, and was playing an aria, the rings on his fingers glancing in the candle-light. The mirror had been taken from the wall above the harpsichord. In the window-seat Anne Purcell showed a full-lipped, round-chinned profile ready to be outlined by the rising moon, while on a high-backed chair beside the door sat Barbara, quiet and devout as any novice. “Sing us that song of Mr. Pepys’s, Stephen.” “‘Beauty Advance,’ eh? A wicked wag, that Admiralty fellow. I have watched him in church trying to discover which girl in the congregation would make the prettiest beatitude. A dull song, very, for so lively a gossip.” My lord had a habit of turning his head and looking over his shoulder, as though he never for one moment forgot his audience. “Well, has Proserpine a word to say?” Barbara gave him her sombre eyes at noon. “There are my father’s songs.” My lord struck a false note on the harpsichord. “Some old Cavalier ditty, fusty as a buff coat! No, my dear, we have forgotten how to carry a bandolier.” “Let the girl try something. Teach her one of the playhouse songs.” Barbara sat with one hand in her bosom. “There is an old song I remember,” she said, with the far-away look of one calling something to mind. My lord paused and glanced at her. “What do you call it?” She met his eyes. “‘The Chain of Gold.’” “The name has slipped my memory. How does it run?” Barbara leaned against the high back of her chair. She looked steadily at Stephen Gore, every fibre in her tense as the fibres of a yew bow bent by an English arm. “‘My love has left me a chain of gold.’ That is the first line.” My lord furrowed his forehead thoughtfully. “Hum! go on. I catch nothing of it yet.” <div class='blockquote'> <div class='poetry-container' style=''><div class='lgp'>  “‘My love has left me a chain of gold, &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;With a knot of pearls, for a token. &ensp;It came from his hand when that hand was cold, &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And the heart within him broken.’” </div> </div> </div> There was a short silence in the music-room, the flames of the candles swaying this way and that as though some one moving had sent a draught upon them. My lord turned with a laugh that had no mirth in it. “A dreary ditty. Where did you come by the song?” She answered him with three words. “In this room.” My lady’s silks rustled in the window-seat like the sound of trees shivering in autumn. “What moods the girl has!” My lord kept his eyes on Barbara. “Is there any more of that song?” “There was only one verse to it till I found another.” “So!” “For to match that chain—there were three other chains. And they were sewn upon a black cloak with a lining of purple silk, the cloak Captain John wore the night he fought Lord Pembroke.” My lord pushed back the settle very slowly. His face was in the shadow, but for all that it was not pleasant to behold. “Has the child these mad fits often?” he asked, with a jerk of the chin. “She will be wishing Jack at Newgate next.” Barbara would not take her eyes from him to glance in the direction of her mother. Had she looked at Anne Purcell she would have seen a plump, comely woman grown old suddenly, and trying to make anger shine through fear. “The cloak did not belong to John Gore, my lord. Nor did he know that I have the chain from it that I found in my father’s hand.” She rose suddenly, and, swinging the chair before her, knelt with one knee on it and steadied her elbow on the back. “Father lay over there—near the table. There is a stain on the floor still—though Mrs. Jael was set to scrub. It was I who found him. You may remember that.” They both looked at her askance, cowed and caught at a disadvantage for the moment by this knowledge that she had and by her hardiness in accusing. “My dear young madam, you had better go to bed.” Her bleak imperturbability turned my lord’s sneer aside like granite. “Here is the chain from your cloak. I give it back to you now that it has served its purpose.” She flung out her hand, and the chain fell close to my Lord Gore’s feet. He did not even trouble to look at it, as though he had no wish to appear seriously concerned. “We appear to be judge, jury, and witness all in one,” he said. “Come down off that chair, my dear, and don’t be foolish.” He spoke with an air of amused impatience, but there was something in his eyes that made her know the truth of what she had said. “You have always thought me a little mad, my lord.” “No, assuredly not. Only a little strange in your appreciation of a joke. Nan, stay quiet.” Barbara had put her hands into her bosom, given one glance behind her, and then levelled a pistol at my lord’s breast. The high-backed chair and the settle were scarcely four paces apart. “I made a promise to myself that I would find out the man who killed my father. When I discovered it I bought these pistols.” My lady had risen from the window-seat and was standing with her arms spread, her open mouth a black oval, as though she were trying to speak and could not. “Mother, do not move. I will beseech my Lord of Gore to tell me the truth before I pull the trigger.” The great gentleman looked at her like a man dumfounded, hardly able to grasp the meaning of that steel barrel and that little circle of shadow that held death in the compass of a thumb’s nail. “Assuredly I will tell you the truth,” he said, at last. “Then let me hear it.” He grappled himself together, gave a glance at my lady, who had sunk again into the window-seat, and then met Barbara eye to eye. “Since you seek the truth at the pistol’s point, my child, I will tell it you, though no man on earth should have dragged it from me at the sword’s point. Good God!” And he put his hand to his forehead and looked from mother to daughter as though unwilling to speak, even under such compulsion. Barbara watched him, believing he was gaining leisure to elaborate some lie. “You are determined to hear everything?” She nodded. “Have it then, girl, to your eternal shame! Why should the unclean, disloyal dead make the living suffer? Much good may the truth do all of us, for none are without our sins.” He spoke out in a few harsh, solemn words—words that were meant to carry the sorrow and the travail and the anger of a great heart. It was the same tale that he had told John Gore, yet emphasized more grimly to suit the moment. And when he had ended it he put his head between his hands and groaned, and then looked up at Barbara as though trying to pity her for the shock of his confession. “Is that everything?” She was white and implacable. My lord’s lower lip drooped a little. “Is it not enough?” “Of lies—yes.” He looked in her eyes, and then gave a deep, fierce cry, like the cry of a wild beast taken in the toils. It was done within a flash, before he could cross the space that parted them. He stumbled against the chain that she had thrown down toward him. And as the echoes sped, and the smoke and the draught made the candles flicker, Barbara fell back against the wall, her hand dropping the pistol and going to her bosom for the consummation of it all. “Mercy of me, my dear, mercy of me, what have you done?” She found Mrs. Jael clinging to her and holding her arms with all her strength. Barbara tried to shake the woman off, but could not for the moment. Then, quite suddenly, as the smoke cleared, she ceased her striving and leaned against the wall, her eyes staring incredulously over Mrs. Jael’s head as the little woman clung to her and pinioned her with her arms. For though my Lord Gore had fallen back against the table with a great black blur on his blue coat and the lace thereof smouldering, he stood unhurt, with my lady holding to one arm and looking up with terror into his face. “Safe, Nan,” he said, very quietly, being a man of nerve and courage; “where the bullet went, God only knows!” A gray fog came up before Barbara’s eyes. She stood like one dazed, yet feeling the warmth of Mrs. Jael’s bosom as the woman still clung to her. Then her muscles relaxed and her face fell forward on Mrs. Jael’s shoulder. Stephen Gore put the mother aside, and, striding forward, thrust his hand into Barbara’s bosom. He drew out the second pistol, looked at it with a grim, inquiring smile, and then laid it upon the table. “The child must be clean mad,” he said, with admirable self-control and a glance full of meaning at my lady and Mrs. Jael. “Oh, the poor dear! oh, the poor dear! To raise her hand against such a gentleman without cause or quarrel! Her wits must have gone. I’ve feared it many weeks.” Stephen Gore pondered a moment, looking at Barbara’s bowed head with a look that boded nothing good for her. “Get her to her room, Nan. Keep the servants out of the way. We don’t want any pother over the child’s madness. Understand me there; for her sake we can hold our tongues.” Mrs. Jael looked at him as though he were a saint. “Poor dear, to think of it!” My lady and the woman took Barbara by either arm. She lifted her head and looked for a moment at my lord, and then went with them meekly, as though dazed and without heart. Whispering together behind her back, they led her across the garden and up the staircase to her own room. When they had locked the door on her, Anne Purcell laid a hand on Mrs. Jael’s arm, and they went together into my lady’s chamber. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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