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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XXVIII</h1></div> Nevertheless, Mr. Pepys fell fast asleep on the hay that night, for the Sussex air and the ale at Furze Farm triumphed over his presentiments of violence and murder. The sea-captain, who was of harder fibre than the Secretary, sat in the hay with his pistols beside him and his ears on the alert for any sound that the night might send. The candle in the lantern guttered about midnight, and John Gore was left in the dark to listen to Mr. Pepys’s snoring and the heavy breathing of the tired horses. He could hear rats scrambling and squeaking in the walls, the harsh creaking of a rusty vane over one gable-end of the barn, and the occasional sniffing of the dog’s nose at the door. The barn was warm enough, and full of a musty fragrance, what with the heat of the horses and the hay, and John Gore might have followed Mr. Pepys’s example had he not come by the habit of keeping watch at sea. And worthy man though Mr. Pepys was, John Gore commended him for falling asleep, being desirous of thinking his own thoughts without the distraction of his companion’s tongue. The place and its people puzzled John Gore, and he trusted them even less than did Mr. Pepys. There might be priests in hiding, or some secret to be guarded, for John Gore guessed that only the couple’s greed had persuaded them to give casual strangers shelter in the barn for the night. Their surly aloofness, as though they were risking something for five gold pieces, had set the sea-captain’s curiosity at work. The place had a moat and a gate that suggested a manor-house or a grange of some size. Nor did the folk themselves smell of the country. John Gore determined to reconnoitre the place at dawn if he were able to force the door. Matters shaped otherwise, however, for it was still pitch-dark on an autumn morning when he heard the sound of a door opening and a heavy tread upon the court-yard stones. The man’s voice called to the dog, and by the rattle of a chain John Gore guessed that the beast was being fastened. The footsteps crossed the court and paused outside the barn, with the glow from a lantern sending fingers of light through the chinks in the door. “Halloo, gentlemen—halloo there!” He hammered at the door, the sound making such a thunder in the barn that Mr. Pepys woke up with a gurgle, as though he were being throttled, and sat up, striking out with his fists into the dark. “Soul of me, what is it? John! Where are you?” “Here, watching over you like a father.” “And I have been asleep! My conscience! Call me a fat fool, John, out loud!” “Time to start, gentlemen.” “Start!” said Mr. Pepys, rubbing his eyes, “why, it can’t be much after midnight!” “Five of the clock it is, sirs.” “Call us again at seven, Solomon; the hay is sweeter than I thought.” The man pulled the prop away, dragged the door open a foot or so, and pushed the lantern inside. But he did not show them his face. “I go to work in half an hour,” he said, stubbornly, “and my woman wants you away before I go.” “Dear soul alive, we shall not eat her, nor even salute her tenderly! And there is breakfast to be considered.” “You can get your breakfast on the road. Up with you, or, by Old Noll, I’ll let the mastiff off the chain!” The fellow’s bullying tone roused John Gore’s grimness, but he felt that nothing was to be gained by a squabble. Mr. Pepys dragged himself up from the hay, and helped himself to some of the bread and bacon that had been left over from the night. John Gore was already at work saddling the horses, not sorry to remember the warm parlor of The Half Moon Inn at Battle. The man had moved off, and they heard him opening the court-yard gate. It was still dark when they sallied from the barn, and found the woman waiting for them with a cloak over her head. John Gore loitered and looked about him, but could see nothing but low, dilapidated, thatched roofs, and a vague, shadowy mass looming up against the northern sky. The woman seemed to have no wish to let them linger, and the growling of the dog typified the temper of the humans who owned him. The man had disappeared, but what with the darkness and the raw cold of an autumn morning, Mr. Pepys had no desire to wish him good-bye. He remembered the glint of a gun-barrel as he climbed into the saddle. “You can at least tell us, my good woman, how to find the road to Battle Town?” “I never was at Battle in my life, sir.” “Oh, cheering Aurora, how helpful thou art! Can you give us just one point of the compass, ma’am?” “Ride east, sir; you must come somewhere.” “I agree with that statement, heartily,” quoth Mr. Samuel, with a philosophical grimace. They rode out through the gate and over the bridge of tree-trunks with a vague, black gleam of water on either side. They had hardly crossed when the gate was slammed on them, and they heard the woman laughing, and calling with coarse words to her man. “The pope deliver us, John, but I congratulate my throat on being sound.” “Did you get a glimpse of the man’s face?” “No.” “Nor did I. He seemed shy of showing it.” “The surly scoundrel! As I said before, John, thank Heaven there is a hell.” They pushed on slowly in the dim light, riding over spongy grass-land that sloped upward toward the west. Everywhere the silence of the night still held, save for the fluttering call of an awakened bird. They had gone little more than a furlong when they came to the outstanding thickets of a wood, the trees rising black and strange against the heaviness of the sky. John Gore drew rein suddenly, and swung out of the saddle. “What’s your whim, John?” For he was leading his horse by the bridle toward a clump of beech-trees whose boughs swept close to the ground. “I am going to wait for the dawn.” “There is some wisdom in that,” said Mr. Pepys. “What is more, I want to have a look at the place where we have spent the night. And the folk yonder will not get a glimpse of us in the thick of these trees.” A slow grayness gathered in the east with little crevices of silvering light opening across the sky. The silver turned betimes to gold, with tawny edges to the clouds, and here and there the faintest flush of rose. The grayness rolled back gradually, with a glimmer here and a glimmer there of a hill-top catching the first gleams. In lieu of the ghastly twilight the landscape began to take on color, and to glow, as though touched by fire, with all the wild tints of an autumn dawn. As the day came John Gore saw a great house rise in the valley, with water about it, and grass-land and woods on every side. The walls were smothered with ivy, and through some of the empty windows shone the dawn. Above the roofless rooms a square tower rose, showing a few feet of red brick above its mantling of ivy. There were rotting out-buildings beyond the court-yard, and a green space that looked like a wild garden, while in the meadows about the place grew a number of old thorns. Now there flashed suddenly across John Gore’s mind the picture of Donna Gloria in the Purcells’s house at Westminster. And he knew as he gazed upon it that this place in the valley was their ruined house of Thorn. Mr. Pepys was too short-sighted to distinguish the place distinctly. “Well, John, what do you make of it?” His companion jerked a look at him as though he had forgotten Mr. Pepys’s existence. “Strange chance, Sam! We have spent the night, without knowing it, at the Purcells’s house of Thorn.” “Thorn!” “I have seen a picture of it before the Parliament men made it a ruin. The windows are out, the roof in, and the walls shaggy with ivy. I wonder that they did not batter down the tower.” Mr. Pepys was screwing up his eyes and shading them with his hand, but things run into a blur at a distance, and much straining made the tears come. “We had better be mounting, John.” “Wait! Bide quiet a moment.” John Gore’s face had a keen, hawk-like look as he leaned forward a little, drawing a beech bough down to shade his eyes. He had seen several white pigeons flutter up from the circular brick dove-cote that still stood in one corner of the court, and beat their wings about a narrow window high up in the tower. The dark ivy seemed to give distinctness to the fluttering specks. Two of the birds had perched upon the sill, and it was then that John Gore’s far-sighted eyes had seen something that made him wonder. For two faint, white things had appeared at the window, like hands thrust out, and the pigeons had fluttered to them as though to be fed. “What is it, John?” The sea-captain ignored the question, and Mr. Pepys began to yawn and fidget. The white birds had fluttered away again, and the faint hands and wrists showed in the dark framing of the narrow window. They looked like hands thrust up in supplication, the hands of a prisoner who could only see the white birds and the sky. John Gore turned sharply, and climbed into the saddle with the air of a man gripped and held by some inspired suspicion. He rode off slowly, Mr. Pepys following him, and they began to pick their way through the autumn woods. And fortune was kind to them that morning, for they struck a track that led them to the Battle road. John Gore fell into a deep silence, a slight frown on his forehead and his mouth firmly set. Mr. Pepys’s sallies lighted upon a stubborn and irresponsive surface, for his companion seemed grimly set upon reflection. “It puzzles me to know,” the Secretary had said, “what that man and his woman are doing down at Thorn. Has my Lady Purcell established them there as her retainers, and if so—why? Or have they taken up their lodging there like rats in a ruin?” Mr. Pepys did not suspect how sudden a significance that same question had gathered for John Gore. The sea-captain kept his own counsel on certain matters, nor did he tell his companion of the hands he had seen at the tower window. They might have belonged to the woman, but John Gore did not imagine her to be a creature who would climb a tower in order to feed pigeons. And yet the suspicion that had seized him seemed wild and incredible when he thought of the people who were responsible for such a thing. Even in an age when the mad were treated more like caged beasts, no man with manhood in him could have given a mere girl such a prison and such keepers. John Gore gave his horse the spur suddenly, and took Mr. Pepys into Battle at a canter, the Secretary bumping fiercely in the saddle, much to the delight of certain rude children who watched them come riding into the town. But at Thorn, Barbara, cold and very quiet, sat on the bed under the window, with the red book in her lap and her eyes full of vague musings. For though those four walls let life in only by the window overhead, her thoughts flew out into the wide world—sad and poignant thoughts that bled at the bosom like a bird that has been wounded by a bolt. She had heard strangers come and go, and with them the echo of a voice that made her heart hurry and her white face flush, and her eyes grow full of desire and mystery. It had seemed but an echo to her from far away, no dear reality—yet there had been tears upon the page when she read the book that morning. For many things had changed in Barbara’s heart that autumn, with the cold and the loneliness, the wretched food, and the wind in the tower at night. She had grown gentler, more wistful, less sure of her own soul. It was as though suffering were softening her, even ripening the heart in her, despite the raw nights and the shivering dawns. What the future had in store she could not tell, but she fed the birds at the window, and the mouse that now crept out to her in the daytime and not only when dusk fell. And with these childish things some new impulse seemed to quicken and take fire within her, like the life of a child that is reborn in those who suffer. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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