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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XXXIX</h1></div> It was Stephen Gore who had ridden that steaming horse into the court-yard of Thorn—Stephen Gore, with jaded, twitching face, and eyes that looked weary with straining and gazing into the deeps of the night. No man can be constantly and statuesquely selfish through life; the very whims and impulses of human nature are against such a frozen constancy in self-seeking. Nor can a man ever swear to being master either of himself or of his future; the whole gamut of the emotions are arrayed against him; a child may prove his vanquisher or a woman his seducer. Stephen Gore exchanging epigrams with some princely wit or bending over a pretty woman’s chair was a different creature from Stephen Gore shabby, saddle-sore, jaded to death, riding with an imagined price upon his head and a prophetic mist of blood before his eyes. Throw a man out of his natural environment and he may lose all the genius of self, and even the poise of manhood. Milton seated upon a boat’s thwart in the midst of mad, cursing Jamaica buccaneers would have probably seemed contemptible and a coward. March out a fop in vile clothes, and he may prove a sneaking, cringing, self-shamed thing, for all his soul was in his coat. We are so much the creatures of habit that our habits flatter us like well-trained and obsequious servants, and we lose our dignity and even ourselves without their ministrations. So it had proved with my Lord of Gore that November night after a reckless, memory-haunted ride from something he feared toward something that he was being taught to fear by the bleak, wind-swept loneliness of wild roads in night and in winter. Nature is powerful to work upon a man’s mind when all the primal instincts of hunter or hunted come again to the surface. All the damned out of hell might have been rushing on him through those gibbering, moaning woods. The very trees had grotesque and sinuous hands stretched out to catch and strangle. There had been the physical weariness of it all, the chafing of the saddle, the stiffness, the lust for speed, the flounderings of a tired horse, the hundred and one vexations that break the heart in a man when it has no inspiration to keep it whole. And as the poise and the self-grip of the colder will had slackened, so the emotions had taken law of license and had scrambled abroad over the man’s consciousness. The cool, eclectic, cynical, civilized gentleman gave place to the credulous, elemental, emotional savage. Primitive instincts came to the surface: an awe of death and the invisible, a dread of the dark. My Lord Gore’s nerves were as tremulous as the nerves of a coddled boy when he reined in his steaming horse under the shadow of Thorn tower. His face looked flaccid and yet under strain, he had lost that power and precision of movement that is second nature to a man bred among pomps. He nearly fell as he climbed out of the saddle, looking about him with quick, scared glances such as a child might have given in a dark garden at night. The dog seemed alive enough, and sufficiently lusty to scare away ghosts, but my lord cursed him for the infernal pother he made, being out of heart, and therefore out of temper. He led his horse toward the kitchen entry whence the light of the fire came out, and stood there waiting in the throat of the short passageway, as though expecting some one to come out to him and at least be decently servile. But since no living soul appeared to answer the barking of the dog and the clatter of hoofs on the stones, he hitched the bridle over a hook in the wall and marched in slowly, yet with the slight swagger of a man who has no reason to be proud of his courage, and yet is determined not to be put out of countenance by anything he may see or hear. But there was nothing tangibly alive in Thorn that night, save the dog in the yard; nothing but the crusts and embers of life, and a silence amid the rush of the wind that made the place seem cold and ominous. A man’s nerve may come back to him again when he has got a grip upon realities, but surmises and conjectures at midnight are apt to run toward emotionalism and panic. There were the blazing fire, the remnants of a meal upon the table, the whining of the hungry dog to prompt him to a conclusion. But my Lord of Gore began to shiver inwardly, and to become conscious of an empty feeling under the heart and of a vague horror that seemed to penetrate the air. Yet a lust to see the end of it, and a blind impatience that set aside shadows and suspicions, gave him sufficient animal courage to light the lantern his son had left and to go exploring through the ruins. The ways of Thorn seemed known to him, for he went first to the tower; nor did he need to go beyond the first few steps in order to discover the ooze of a tragedy staining the stones. None the less he went on doggedly, as though carried upward by the very ferment of the passions in him, greatly dismayed within himself, yet greatly afraid of missing the whole truth. And so the lantern went jerking upward into the darkness of the tower, its movements seeming to signal some restless, devil-driven quest after unhallowed spoil. When Stephen Gore came back again into the blaze and warmth of the kitchen he looked shrunken and ashy about the mouth, and he walked in a stooping, hollowchested way like a man huddling into himself because of the cold. He closed both doors, and even the doors of the cupboards, after peering into them, as though he were afraid of the dark and of any dim, unlit corner. Then he drew the couch up close to the fire, spreading his hands to it, and staring at the flames with a vacant, colorless face. The horror of some unseen thing seemed in his eyes, and his lips fell apart and loosened like the lips of a very old and feeble man. At midnight there had been a moon, but before dawn snow came, a great, gray, shimmering gloom drifting through the vague world. The dry leaves shivered and crackled in the wind as the myriad flakes came sweeping down, ribbing the boughs and the curved fronds of the bracken, piling itself amid the moss at the roots of great trees, and scudding over the open lands with a fierce, withering haste that left the grass tussocks white like stones catching foam from a rushing stream. The dawn came as a mere grayness, with a flocculent, drifting chaos of snow in the air, and a bite in the northwest wind that sent spikelets of ice bearding the fringes of ponds and ditches. <hr class='tbk100'/> Now Mrs. Winnie had been awake most of the night, and had risen very early full of an instinct that strange things were about to happen, what with such a storm of snow the first week in November. She had lit the fire in the kitchen and was standing at the window watching the snow come down when she heard a horse neigh in the stable, as though the beast had caught the sound of a comrade’s coming. And, sure enough, through the maze of snow she saw something dark draw up toward the gate, and knew in her heart that John Gore had returned. Going to the door, she lifted the bar and saw the snow come whirling in with a hungry wind that went deep into her bosom. There was the click of the gate, and a man came up the path between the drooping stocks and the withered, swaying rose-bushes with something wrapped in a cloak lying in his arms. Mrs. Winnie went out to meet him, her woman’s nature caught by the spell of such a love tale. “Mrs. Winnie!” “Thank God, sir, and you have brought her back.” The breast of his coat was white with snow, for he had wrapped both the cloaks about Barbara to keep her warm. And he looked down anxiously at the face that lay against his shoulder, as though he feared that the cold had gone to her heart. “We lost our way, and only luck helped us back again. A warm fire, Mrs. Winnie; she is half frozen.” Christopher Jennifer’s wife had taken a sly peep at this desired one, but she was as brisk and concerned as John Gore was, and not a woman to talk and dally. “Come in, sir, out of this wind; it bites into the blood of the child. Such a storm, with autumn only half out of the door! Let me have her, sir; I know what the cold be on these Sussex hills.” John Gore carried Barbara into the kitchen, for he had ridden with her in his arms to keep her warm, guiding his nag with a touch of the knee. She had fallen asleep with weariness and the cold—a dazed, numb sleep that was not pleasant to consider. Her lips were white and her hands like ice, so that she looked more like a sleeping snow-maiden than a living girl. Mrs. Winnie had shut the snow and the wind out, drawn her man’s chair forward, and was running and rummaging for pillows, wraps, and blankets. Son William put his head in, and was sent packing with the flick of a flannel across his cheek, much amazed and not a little delighted. Mrs. Winnie wellnigh took Barbara out of John Gore’s arms, as though this was a woman’s affair, and not a matter for a man to meddle with. The wood fire had roared up to a great red mound, and was flinging out such a heat that the very air seemed a-simmer. Mrs. Winnie had Barbara propped up before it, with her head on a pillow and her bosom open to the fire. “You will find a brick, sir, holding the pantry door open. Put it in the fire to heat.” John Gore did as she bade him, while she reached for the chain with an iron crook and slung the kettle on it. “There be the tongs, sir. I’ll wrap the thing in a bit of flannel and put it to the child’s feet. Poor, dear young thing—lady, I mean, sir. Mercy o’ me, her shoes are wet and almost froze!” She knelt down and stripped off the shoes and stockings, and began chafing the little feet, admiring them in her blunt, frank way, and calling them the feet of a lady of quality. She had noticed the marks on Barbara’s neck, and John Gore, seeing her eyes fixed there, nodded grimly and put a hand to his throat. His eyes held Mrs. Winnie’s, and she understood the need for silence. “Where be that brick, sir?” John Gore brought it out with the tongs, and Chris Jennifer’s wife patted it into a piece of flannel and set Barbara’s feet upon it with a smile of satisfaction. “Now for some hot toddy, sir.” And she went away to mix it. John Gore bent over Barbara and touched her cheek, for a faint color was creeping back, and he felt that even Mrs. Winnie might be kissed at such a moment. But being a quiet man, he went out to see to his horse, hardly noticing that his own feet were still like frozen clay and that his arms were stiff from carrying his love. There was a brave breakfast cooking, and the fire was a red, shimmering slope of wood ash when Mr. Jennifer came stumping down the stairs to pause and stare in astonishment at Barbara as he opened the stairway door. She was lying back in the chair with her eyes open, but with no real soul in them as yet, her hands hanging over the chair-rail, her black hair bathing her face. Mr. Jennifer came in softly and discreetly, and stood about three yards from her, fingering the side seam of his breeches. Then he made a bob and waited, and then a second bob, with a stolid, persistent desire to be proper in the matter of politeness. But though Barbara hardly had sight or hearing for anything as yet, Mr. Jennifer stood stolidly to his convictions, and scraped his feet to make the lady look at him. Mrs. Winnie caught him at this bobbing and scraping, with a puzzled stare in his eyes and his thick head full of kindness. He glanced at his wife with extreme cunning, and gave her a whisper behind his hands. “Come ye here, Winnie. What be t’ lady a-staring at? Here be I makin’ a knee to her—” “Get out with you, you great fool!” She gave him a cuff across the ear. But Mr. Jennifer still gazed at Barbara. “She be purty enough. But what be a-terrifying me—be—why she won’t blink them eyes o’ hers.” “Get along with you, Chris Jennifer, you great booby! Can’t you see she be dazed with t’ cold? And will she be thanking you for standing there and staring like a cow? Go and help the gentleman with his horse.” “And did them come all on one horse, my dear?” Mrs. Winnie looked at him, and Mr. Jennifer went. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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