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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XXV</h1></div> In the salon of the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall there hung a portrait of the Spanish lady whom the Purcell of Queen Bess’s days had won with the romantic daring of an adventurer’s sword. It was the portrait of a young woman in a quaint stiff dress of black and gold, her dark hair curled loosely about her head, and her black eyes looking down out of a proud and rather peevish face. The portrait was touched by a ray of sunlight that October morning when John Gore stood beneath it, finding a strange and wistful familiarity in the Spaniard’s face. He was waiting in the salon for my Lady Purcell, being the bearer of a letter from his father, who had ridden suddenly into the eastern counties, giving no other reason than that of business with a friend. These Purcell pictures had been familiar to John Gore from his boyhood, yet they were full of a deeper significance for him now as he searched face after face, but especially that of the lady in black and gold. There was a stretch of landscape in one corner of the picture, the one sunlit space upon the canvas, a scene of meadows and of woodlands, with a mansion of red brick rising from the narrow waters of a moat. John Gore guessed it to be the Purcells’ house of Thorn, now ruinous in a Sussex waste, but once the home of the fair Spaniard with the peevish mouth. He was looking at this picture with some intentness when Anne Purcell came in to him, with cross lines about her mouth, and the strained air of a woman whose temper is not at its best when inconsiderate persons make morning calls. She was wearing a faded puce-colored gown, and lace and ribbons that were none too clean, and she looked sallow in the morning sunlight, and restless yet heavy about the eyes. “Good-morning, Jack.” She treated him with blunt ceremony, having seen his ears boxed as a boy. John Gore turned and bowed to her, with his head full of other things. “I was looking at Donna Gloria’s picture,” he said, making the most obvious remark, as a man commonly does on such occasions; “there is a strange likeness there.” “Ah, yes, Gloria had a temper.” “Is that Thorn—in the corner of the canvas, where the patch of sunlight lies?” My lady glanced at him as though she had found him infinitely tiresome on previous visits. “Thorn? I suppose it is.” “It lies some miles from the Rye road, does it not—not far from a place called Battle?” Anne Purcell looked at him with sudden suspiciousness, and, turning aside, sat down on a low couch with her back toward the light. John Gore had always angered her of late with the grim and quiet persistency of a forlorn and ridiculous faith. And possibly this impatience of hers came from the inevitable pain she suffered when gleams of the finer spirit in her broke through the shades of self. John Gore, feeling in his pocket for his father’s letter, could not help being struck by the haggard expression of my lady’s face. So ripe and healthy by nature, the change in her was the more obvious and the more marked. The woman looked ill, with an indefinable grayness about the mouth and a heaviness about the eyes. Wrinkles had appeared in the skin that she had not touched that morning with rouge and powder, making her look thin, yellow, and even old. “I have a letter for you from my father.” “For me?” Her face lighted up instantly, yet John Gore was struck by a shallow gleam like fear in her eyes. “He has gone into the country for a few days.” “The country! Where?—what part?” “Suffolk, I believe.” He handed her the letter, and turned to the window as though to give her leisure to break the seal and read it. Yet for nearly half a minute she suffered the letter to lie unopened upon her lap as though she were afraid to dip into its contents. Her eyes had fixed themselves with a look of prophetic dread upon the Spaniard’s picture where the sunlight shone. John Gore, standing at the window, heard the stiff crackle of the paper in her hands as she spread it upon her knee. Stephen Gore and my Lady Purcell had been friends for so many years that the son almost thought of them as brother and sister. His father had been Lionel Purcell’s friend and Barbara’s godfather, and the sympathies of the two families had seemed to flow in one common channel. “John”—her voice startled him, for his thoughts had flown elsewhere, as a lover’s thoughts will; he turned and saw her sitting with the letter on her lap, her face dead white, and the muscles twitching about her mouth—“will you ring for Jael?” He looked at her keenly, with some concern. “Have you had bad news—” “No—” “—about Barbara?” “No, no, I am only faint. I have not been well these last few days.” And she crumpled the letter in her hands. As he crossed the room he heard her give a curious, shivering cry, and when he turned again she was sitting with her face hidden in her hands, swaying slightly from side to side, her whole body shaken by some convulsive storm of tears. John Gore looked at her helplessly. Experience had not taught him to deal with an hysterical woman of forty. Seizing the most discreet impulse, he moved toward the door and nearly pushed against Mrs. Jael as he opened it. He stood aside, and nodded her into the room, feeling that only a woman could deal with a woman in such a case. What the woe was he could only conjecture; perhaps some woman’s affair that made her emotions passionate and uncertain. The spirit of unrest that seemed in the blood of every man that year might well have entered into John Gore’s mood as he wandered without purpose in the park after leaving my Lady Anne to Mrs. Jael’s ministrations. To a man who had led an active and adventurous life the court world seemed a trivial world, unless he were a libertine, a gambler, or a dabbler in ambitious schemes. John Gore felt himself out of touch with all these people, for after a three years’ voyage a man may be more ignorant of the political passions of the moment than a ploughboy who can catch the village gossip in a tavern. There were causes and interests to be served, and numberless back-stair intrigues to enthrall those who loved crooked pleasures and the mystery of some plot. John Gore realized that his father had plunged both hands into some secret undertaking, yet even the glamour of the Mazarin’s private salon did not lure him to mingle an amour with intrigues. The times seemed sinister, and full of violent yet treacherous motives. The life about him appeared vague, elusive, and unsatisfying. Even my Lady Purcell, so plump and buxom of yore, seemed to have fallen under the spell of some secret panic, to judge by her sickly look, and the strange emotion she had betrayed that morning. He found himself wondering what she had read in my lord’s letter, for the suddenness of her distress could hardly be explained by a fit of the vapors. For Anne Purcell had always appeared to him to be a thoughtless and selfishly cheerful woman, affectionate toward those who pleased her, but not one who would suffer greatly for the sake of others. The thought haunted him that the news had concerned Barbara, and that she had concealed the truth from him with a spasm of motherly pity. His mood was of restlessness and discontent that morning—the restlessness of a man who lacks a purpose for the moment, and who longs for something to grapple with and overcome. My Lord Gore had counted on this adventurous spirit in the son, believing that it would lure him into the angry intrigues of the hour, and that he would forget that which my lord wished heartily to be forgotten. The fascinations of Hortense might have won many a man’s sword, and her splendor have dimmed the feeble and romantic glimmer of a distant face. To forego such plunder for a sulky girl whose mouth did not seem to be made for kisses! My lord’s worldliness scoffed at the chance. Hortense would disenchant him for any such sickly whim, and with a pout of her red lips or a touch of the hand, turn him aside from stupid melancholy. Yet Stephen Gore misunderstood the nature of the man, for though the vicissitudes of life make most folk fickle, there are some fanatics who grow more obstinate when threatened by fate. John Gore passed by the Duke of Albemarle’s rooms, and entered the street by Holbein’s Gate. He walked under the windows of the Banqueting Hall, over the place where a king’s head had fallen, and turned in at the Palace Gate. He was strolling across the first court with the air of a man who wishes the whole world with the devil, when at the entry of the passage that ran past the Great Hall and the Chapel to Whitehall Stairs, he cannoned against an equally preoccupied person who came out by a side alley with a couple of books under his arm. “Pardon, sir; but may I remind you that God gave us eyes!” “Tu quoque, my friend; you have some weight behind those books, to judge by the dig in the ribs you gave me.” They stared at each other irritably for the moment, and then fell a-laughing like a couple of boys. “Bless my eyes, Jack Gore, but they are always playing me these scurvy tricks. I shall be kissing all my neighbors’ wives soon in mistake for my own.” “And no doubt the excuse will be useful, unless the husbands are fools.” “Ah, you dog! Remember my dignity, and in the public and august place. Where are you bound?” “Anywhere—and nowhere.” “The most devilish, dangerous course, John Gore, that a man can ever sail; it ends too often with places beginning with T and B. It also betokens a precarious state of mind, sir—a readiness to be made a fool of by a satin slipper or the turn of an ankle. I have had experience. Don’t laugh, you buccaneer. I am minded to take you under cover of my guns, and sail you into the country, where you can run into nothing more dangerous than a milkmaid with scarlet stockings.” Mr. Pepys insinuated a hand round John Gore’s arm, and turned him back in the direction of the Palace Gate. “Lest you find your way to the Stone Gallery, John, or to the bowers of the maids of honor, I will conduct you under escort as one who may prove an incorrigible vagrant. But to be most serious. Are you so incontinently idle and unoccupied?” “I am.” “Then you should be the very man for a fat and purblind friend who is driven to making pilgrimages on other people’s business. It is an error, sir, to be considered honest and good-tempered. How would a week’s saddle-shaking help your hunger. You have the took of a man too full of bile.” John Gore looked into Mr. Pepys’s florid, short-sighted, and shrewdly amiable face. “Are you going into the country?” “Yes, like a Jew to Babylon. For of all the things I abominate, John Gore, commend me to country inns and the sloughs that bumpkins call roads. Being plump, Jack, I am piteously popular with certain officious insects, and when I consider it, I am moved by the reflection that these insects might split their affections out of curtesy to a strapping sailor.” Mr. Pepys turned abruptly in his bustling way, dragging John Gore round by the elbow. “We will go back by boat and dine, and after dinner a friend can refuse nothing. Take count of my inflictions, John Gore: Item one, to visit a female cousin and inquire into some business where she has been robbed and skinned by some rogue of a steward; and the woman is monstrously ugly, Jack, with not so much as a simper to make a man feel gallant. Item two, to go in person and render some private matter to Lord Montague who is resting—resting in one of his accursed country houses; it is no real business of mine, John Gore, but the kind of sottish business that a man allows himself to be saddled with because he is what people call trustworthy. Item three, to ride on to Portsmouth and poke my nose into certain unsavory messes there. This is what it means, sir, to be a man of affairs, and the most popular purse-carrier in an accursedly large family.” John Gore laughed at Mr. Pepys’s declamatic energy, knowing him to be a man who would read a beggar a sharp lecture and then give him sixpence to drink with on the road. “When do you start?” he asked. “To-morrow.” “And by what road?” “The Rye road, John—and a wry road it is, I wagerdown to some miserable town called Lamberhurst, in Kent. They work iron there, and I suppose the beds are full of smuts that bite and smuts that don’t. Thence to the town of Battle to find my Lord Montague, if he chances to be there and not at Cowdray. Thence on to Portsmouth, and so home. The one cup of spiced wine is that we ride by Tunbridge; I shall visit The Wells, buy apples from the country girls, drink ink, and perhaps see some fine women. And if you will take the road with me, I shall be more easy in my mind as to footpads and fleas.” Now there had flashed into John Gore’s mind the vision of Donna Gloria’s picture, with the glimpse of Thorn amid its woods and meadows. And sometimes a man is swayed by the veriest whim toward destinies that are far beyond the moment’s vision. So it proved with John Gore as he followed Mr. Pepys into the boat at Whitehall Stairs, for he promised to share with him the mellow comfort of St. Luke’s summer, and to serve as partner in the matter of rustic beds. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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