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Mad Barbara

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<div><h1>XL</h1></div> With the coming of winter there had been strange happenings at the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall, for my lady had died the night after Stephen Gore’s going, with no one to comfort her but Mrs. Jael. The servants had all fled, and the house stood deserted save for the live woman and the dead one; the very tradesmen shirked the steps; friends had business elsewhere; and Dr. Hemstruther himself, being a keen Protestant when popery was especially perilous, kept his distance, knowing that my Lord Gore’s influence had been paramount there in heart and body. For my Lord Gore was one of the Catholic gentlemen upon whom the Plot-men longed to lay their hands. It happened that when poor Anne Purcell died that there was some store of silver and of plate in the house, also her jewels and trinkets, and sundry precious things that belonged to the Purcell family. Mrs. Jael showed some little care for the corpse by covering it with a clean sheet, but she showed far more care for her own concerns and for the valuables that were at her mercy. She ransacked the whole house, gathering every small thing of value into a heap on the floor of one of the attics, gloating and smiling over it, and promising herself great joys. For Mrs. Jael had picked up a sweetheart, a rough, sturdy fellow from Aldgate way, and she crept out one night to warn him of her good-fortune, and to persuade him to help in spiriting away the plunder. The man was a common thief, and had tricked even the smooth, sly Jael for three months past, pretending that he was in the cloth trade, and that he hankered greatly after a comely widow. He was ready enough to join in the adventure, and cared as little for small-pox as for the reek of an open drain. And thus Mrs. Jael let him into the house by night, and they packed up the plunder between them in a couple of sacks, and so went their way into the darkness. But the man no longer had any desire for the voluptuous embraces of a widow, and in some way Mrs. Jael came to her end that night, and was found weeks later afloat in the Thames, an unrecognizable and nameless body. Now Jael, during the time that she was gathering the treasure together, had left lights burning in my lady’s room to make people think that Anne Purcell was still alive. She had put new candles to burn the very night she had fled out to her death, and so an eerie thing befell, for officers in quest of papists, and my Lord Gore in particular, broke into the house, having heard the rumor of small-pox and considered that it might be a trick. But they found Anne Purcell lying dead in her bed, a sheet covering her, and the candles burning, not a living soul in the whole house, and every chest and cupboard rifled. So the Law stepped in, beat round for witnesses, and buried my lady at night with a bushel of quick-lime and extra pay to the man who buried her. Then there was a learned to-do, much hunting out of documents, and much puzzling over facts. For Mistress Barbara Purcell was her father’s heiress after her mother’s death, and Mistress Barbara had come within the chancellor’s ken by reason of unsound mind, yet no living soul seemed able to tell where this same Barbara Purcell was. The lawyers looked wise over it, and sat down cheerfully to make their pickings, Chancery claiming authority in the case, and not caring greatly how long the dilemma lasted so long as they handled the property. For every man’s mind was full of the Plot those months, and not for many years had the wigs boasted so much business. Titus Oates had come toward full notoriety in October by harrowing the public with the fulminations of a furious imagination. Then had followed Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’s murder, the seizing of Coleman’s correspondence, and a panic in London, with mobs shouting in the streets. The Protestant beacon had been fired, and blazed with terrified fury, while Oates threw fagot after fagot to feed the flames. Catholic peers were cast into the Tower; two thousand or more smaller people were arrested; all papists commanded to leave London. The train-bands marched through the streets; executions were soon to begin; it was nothing but Plot—Plot—Plot—from Parliament to Pulpit. At Thorn, in Sussex, my Lord of Gore hid himself from the knowledge of all these things, a man shrunken strangely from his former buxom self, a man without nerve or energy for the moment, vacillating between plans on a dash across the Channel for France, and the timidity of a hunted thing that fears to leave its hiding-place for the open. Even as Monmouth the Protestant prince at the head of an army differed from Monmouth the panic-obsessed fugitive skulking in a ditch, so the Stephen Gore of Whitehall differed from the Stephen Gore of Thorn. Some blight seemed to have fallen on him, turning his manhood into a white-faced, memory-haunted thing afraid of the very shadow of its own thoughts. That brief, fierce burst of winter may have helped to chill the marrow in the courtier’s bones, with the wailing of the wind and the whirling of the snow. For a man cannot do without food and fire, and Stephen Gore had to turn drudge to his own need. At first he had tried to dispense with a fire for fear the smoke should betray him, but when he had shivered and ached for two days his caution surrendered to the lust for warmth, and he brought in fagots and with great trouble made a blaze. He had found a store of salted meat, ship’s biscuits, and other stuffs still left in the place, and though Thorn had a horror for him, he clung to it like a fox to his “earth,” knowing of no other place wherein to hide himself. For there seemed hardly a better place in the kingdom than Thorn, for Pinniger and his woman had not been molested all those weeks. There would be a score of open ways for a bold and resolute man to take later, but the heart was utterly out of Stephen Gore, and the spirit of yesterday was not the spirit of to-day. Yet what, after all, had he to fear, setting visions of judgment and other worlds aside, but the passing fury of a Protestant mob and the wild tale of a double murder? A month ago these menaces would have stung the self in the man to thrust them aside with audacity and resolution. But a climax had come and gone; something was breaking in him and taking his cool self-trust away, and he felt like Samson shorn of his hair. Perhaps the bile had congealed in him with the cold, for nothing can make a man more tame and listless than a clogged and sluggish liver. Perhaps he had lost faith in his own genius for success. Perhaps he was penitent. This last would have been the pretty, saintly end, confession and absolution, penance, the lighting of tapers and saying of masses, and all the saints in the calendar stretching out succoring hands. Yet there is something incongruous in the idea of a strong, selfish, cynical man huddling himself feverishly into the habit of religiosity when Retribution comes knocking at the door. It often fails to impress the conscience. It is not always convincing, even in romance. Probably the secret of all this crumbling up of courage lay in the nature of the man’s very self. Vanity may be a rare cement in the walls of a man’s fortune so long as there is no corroding acid in the air. And Stephen Gore’s genius had rested upon his vanity, not in his dress alone, but in all those attributes that a man desires to see given to his splendor. His vital force had been fed upon the pleasant things of life; he was a self-inflated, artificial creature, who was strong so long as he could be flattered. But, like an orthodox believer smitten to the heart with doubt, he began to find his convictions dissolving into chaos, and the adulations of self-worship becoming a mockery despite his efforts to believe them real. Voices—sharp, sneering, sardonic voices that he had had the strength to stifle of old—began to cut him with his own cleverness, using the very gibes against him that he had used in the gay salons to his own glory. For when a cynic falls into misfortune he is likely to discover that he has nurtured a devil that will use its claws upon the master who has reared it. Stephen Gore had often said that— “A man who begins to think his virtue shabby is a man who cannot afford to pay his tailor—the priest.” “Never confess to yourself any cause for shame, or you will soon find your feet in the mire.” “Men may regret; only women and fools repent.” “Consciousness is life; therefore a man ought to suffer himself to be conscious only of pleasant things.” And my Lord of Gore was having a wider consciousness forced upon him in the narrow world of that ruined house. And where were the studied pleasantries of consciousness? A fine gentleman feeding on salt beef and onions, scraping his own fire together, and living in devout horror of a prosaic thing called death. So much so that he was possessed by a species of “morsomania” grim enough to prevent him seeing the cynically comic side of his own condition. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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