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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XXI</h1></div> A blustering, cheerless wind beat up over the hills as John Gore rode the last five miles of a three days’ journey, and saw the vague glimmer of the distant city clinging to the loops of the river Thames. Scudding clouds made the sky cold and full of a gray hurrying unrest, though it was splashed toward the west with stormy gouts of gold. John Gore rode over the heathlands, with the furze-bushes shivering as the wind swished through them; and the sandy road was dry and adrift with dust, although the sky looked so wet and sullen. The servant behind him on the cob kept a sharp eye cocked on the hollows of the heath and the knolls of furze, and nursed his blunderbuss for comfort, though his face looked as red and as round as the sunny side of an apple. Here and there clumps of stunted hollies jostled each other, their whisperings making the evening seem doubly gray and dreary. An unhallowed dusk was creeping over the landscape—an unhallowed dusk that made travellers imagine footpads lurking behind the thorn-bushes or the furze. As they trotted downhill a solitary horseman came creeping up a side track, with his cloak blowing about him and his beaver over his nose. John Gore had a hand ready for a pistol, and the man Tom began to nudge the butt of his blunderbuss against his knee. Yet the stranger appeared more scared of them than they of him, for he went skimming like a swallow into the dusk, itching for his own chimney glow and the warm side of a safely barred door. John Gore had come by an instinctive distrust of the man Tom’s forefinger. He pulled up, and sent him ahead. “I shall be safer at your back, Tom, with that tool of yours ready to roar like a boy at the sight of the birch.” Tom obeyed him with rather a shamefaced grin, for thirty miles south of Shirleys his blunderbuss had exploded at two in the afternoon, the road running through a wood with a stray cow pushing through the hazel-bushes. A scattering of slugs and buckshot had pattered into the grass beside John Gore’s horse; for Tom’s forefinger had a habit of crooking itself for comfort round the trigger when the road wound into shady bottoms. And if an owl screeched at dusk along a hedge-row, Thomas would give such a start in the saddle that it was a mere turn of the coin whether the flint would come sparking on the powder in the pan. It was growing very gray in the west when they came by Edgeware toward Hyde Park, and soon saw the spires of Westminster like faint streaks against a fainter sky. The lights that were looking up in the gathering twilight had a heartening, warming twinkle. Tom slung his blunderbuss by a strap over his shoulder, and began to look buxom and bold enough—as though he already sniffed a hot supper and felt the ale-mug tickling his beard. They came without event toward St. James’s, Charing Village, and Whitehall, and all that sweet savor of courtliness where great gentlemen and roguish “maids of honor” drank wine and let the warmth thereof mount into their eyes. To John Gore the whole purlieu of the palaces had a mystic glow—a glow that the romance of the heart throws out like a June sun over an Old-World garden. His thoughts were very different from those of red-faced Tom, who may have associated the ogle of a pair of merry eyes with the glint of a pewter pot; for John Gore forgot a twenty-mile hunger at a glimpse of the dim trees of St. James’s and the imagined gleam of Rosamond’s Pool. And hunger in a strong man is an earnest pleader. Therefore, romance had the greater glory, and even so the queen thereof—a girl in a black dress, with white bosom and white arms, and eyes so sombre that the sorrow of the world might have sunk therein. The lower windows of my Lord Gore’s house were aglow as John Gore and his man rode up St. James’s Street with a homeward clatter over the stones. The iron gates leading into the court-yard at the side of the house stood open, and in the yard itself several coaches were standing without their horses, and a couple of sedan-chairs in one corner with the poles piled against the wall. Yet though there was as much talking going on as in the parlor of a river-side tavern, there was not such a thing as a servant to be seen. As John Gore rolled out of the saddle, being a little stiff after three days’ riding, a couple of red faces were poked out of the near window of one of the coaches. The postilions and footmen had taken their master’s places, issued invitations to the chairmen and the grooms, and were all much at their ease with the beer-mugs passing round, and one of my lord’s cook-boys playing “powder-monkey,” and running round from coach to coach with a great can and an apron full of bread and cheese. In one of the carriages that was upholstered in orange and blue a fat chairman had stuck a farthing candle on the prong of a dung-fork, and so arranged the primitive candle-stand by leaning it against the door that the company within had a light to drink by, though the upholsterings might suffer from the droppings of the tallow. Even my lord’s grooms were making familiar with plush and scarlet cloth and stamped leather, with their heavy stable-boots planted where a satin slipper or a silver-buckled shoe alone had the right of repose. The impudent roguery of it so tickled John Gore that he gave the two men at the near window a gruff “Goodevening,” coarsening his voice so that they should think him one of themselves. “Hallo! Be that you, Sam Gibbs?” “Samuel it is, old codger. Liquor going?” “A hogshead full. Come inside; there’s room for a porker.” John Gore laughed. It was dark in the yard, and the men could not recognize him. “Whose coach?” he asked. “This ’ere? Old Porteus Panter’s. And pant he would, the liquoring old scoundrel, if he knew what honest fellows were warming his cushions. Come along in, lad. Skin o’ my eyes, where’s that damned boy with the beer?” “I’ll go and clap the horses in, and come and clink mugs.” He walked toward the stables, leading his horse by the bridle. Catching the man Tom while he was still staring at the dim but vociferous vehicles in the yard, he slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Keep mum, Tom, my lad. There is some fun here. Put the horses in, and swing your heels on the manger for half an hour.” John Gore managed to slip into the house by the garden entry, and making his way along a passage, reached the door of the dining-room without meeting any of my lord’s servants. Supper was over, and the gentlemen were at their wine, and talking so hard that a company of carol-singers might have struck up in the court-yard without being noticed. John Gore turned the handle and walked in—top-boots, riding-cloak, and all, dusty, and a little hot. His father sat with his back to him at the head of the long table, with some dozen guests talking and drinking on either side hereof. Seated on Stephen Gore’s right hand was one of the gentlemen who had been at Bushy those few days in the summer. He was the first to recognize the intruder, and welcomed him with a laugh and an upraised glass of wine. “All hail, John Gore! Here are we, all on the right side of the table—as yet!” John Gore’s eyes were fixed upon his father. He saw him turn sharply with the look of a man who sees in a mirror the face of an enemy behind his chair. He was on his feet almost instantly, his buxom face pleasant as a glass goblet full of Spanish wine. “Jack, my lad, this is well timed! We are all friends here, or should be. Gentlemen, my son, Captain John Gore, just out of the saddle from Yorkshire. Never mind your boots, boy. You have a hungry look, and a dry look. Pull the bell-rope, Launce, and I’ll thank you. Supper is the song that a man wants to hear after a hard day’s ride.” A boy in a pink velvet coat, and with the grand airs of a lord chamberlain, rose and offered John Gore his chair. The sea-captain bowed to the youngster in turn, though the child’s attitude of condescension was vastly quaint to a man who had dared more adventures in one year than the young fop would meet in a lifetime. “You seem to have left a great many of your friends outside in the cold, gentlemen,” he said, still standing, and looking down the long table; “my father has enough chairs, and more than enough liquor.” His coming had brought a momentary lull with it, and not a few of the gentry at the table were staring with some curiosity at a man who had seen the inside of a Barbary prison. My lord caught his son’s words. “What’s that you are saying, Jack?” “These gentlemen have left some of their friends outside in their coaches. Sir Porteus, sir,” and he bowed to an apoplectic old fellow with a fringe of white hair and a tonsure like a monk’s, “there are people in your carriage. I trust you have not been too modest.” The baronet stared boozily across the table. “People in my coach, sir?” “Certainly. And drinking small-beer when they should be drinking sherry.” John Gore had such a stern and serious way with him at times that casual acquaintances might have set him down as a Puritan, with none of the sly, jesting spirit behind his swarthy and imperturbable face. “I assure you, sir, there were gentlemen seated inside your coach. My father’s house is not so niggardly—” Stephen Gore caught his son’s eye and twinkled. A servant came in at the same opportune moment, having taken fully three minutes to answer the bell. “Here, Jeremy, sirrah, Sir Porteus has left some gentlemen to wait in his coach. Desire them to join us; my table is big enough.” The man stared, and then appeared in a great hurry to go about his master’s business. But my lord hindered him. “Jeremy, you rascal, come here. Pardon me, Porteus”—and my lord assumed his most impressive manner—“perhaps you had better call these friends of yours in to us.” “I should recommend the other gentlemen to do likewise,” said John Gore, gravely; “Sir Porteus is not the only culprit. The more the merrier.” The curiosity of the whole room appeared piqued. Several of my lord’s guests pushed their chairs back and made toward the door. But what Sir Porteus and the rest of them said when they poked their heads into the windows of their respective coaches no one but a hostler could possibly confess. The tallow dip on the pitchfork was knocked over by a judicious fist, but not before it had gutted all down the cushions of the door. There was a sudden exodus of stable boots and small clothes into the dark, and from the whistling and hissing in the stable any innocent man might have imagined that horses had never been so carefully rubbed down after a two-mile drive. The boy with the beer-can was the only thing captured, and most unjustly cuffed because his ears happened to be at the right level for the easy exercise of a gentleman’s hand. It was well after midnight before Stephen Gore and his son were left alone in the great dining-room, with the air thick with the fumes of tobacco and of wine. John Gore opened the windows that faced the street. His father was standing by the Jacobean fireplace, with one elbow on the ledge of the carved oak over-mantel and the stump of a little brown cigarro between his fingers. He was frowning to himself, and looking at the dying fire upon the irons, for a log fire had been burning, though it was still September. John Gore pulled out a short clay pipe and a tortoise-shell box from a pocket. He filled the pipe leisurely, and lit it with a splinter of burning wood that he picked up with the tongs. “Well, Johnny, how is Yorkshire?” My lord, like a father, showed no discretion or sense of proportion either in the diminutives or in the vernacular renderings of his son’s name. Moreover, the Yorkshire moors were very far away, and a more vivid vista blotted them into the distance. “Shirleys has changed very little. They have a new pump in the village. All the farms are in good fettle. Swindale seems as honest as such men ever are.” My lord appeared distraught and preoccupied. “How are old Peter Hanson and his woman? Does she still wear a farthingale?” “Well—as ever, like the solid north country folk they are. I have no news, save that the new pump’s leaden snout was cut off the first week it was put up, and that a couple of deer were shot at Shirleys three days afterward. How have things passed here—in the world?” My lord put his cigarro to his lips, drew a deep breath, and expelled the smoke slowly, watching it curve under the hood of the chimney. “Oh, somewhat sadly. I have a thing to tell you, Jack.” John Gore’s face darkened perceptibly. “News?” “Yes. After all, it may not concern you much—at least—I trust not. We all have our little impulses, our chance inclinations. Do you remember, Jack, something I said to you in this very room the night you fought Phil Pembroke?” John Gore remembered that something very keenly. His eyes betrayed as much. “Does it concern Barbara Purcell?” My lord gave him one look, and then threw the stump of his cigarro into the fire. “It does, poor child. She has gone stark mad. There’s the blunt truth, Jack. If I have hit you hard, take it in the face like a man—and forget.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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