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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XLVIII</h1></div> My lord took his first walk in the kitchen of Thorn leaning upon John Gore’s shoulder, the son’s arm about the father’s body. Any one who had seen the pair would have judged them to have been the best of friends, for the son steadied the father’s steps with the grave, patient air of one whose care was almost a devotion. And the father, who had the look of a man who had aged very rapidly, what with the white in his hair and the deep lines upon his face, seemed to lean upon the son with a sense of confidence and trust. He was wearing a new suit of plain black cloth, with a white scarf about his throat. Some of his little gestures and tricks of expression came to him as in the old days, save that they were less emphatic and less characteristic of the aggressive self. At the third turn Stephen Gore looked at the window that was lit by the March sunlight, and a sudden wistfulness swept into his eyes, as though he were touched by pathetic memories. He paused, leaning his weight upon his son, for he was feeble and easily out of breath after those weeks upon his back. “I should like to go into the open air, John, and sit in the sun.” John Gore looked at him doubtfully. “You are safer here,” he said. My lord gave a shake of the head. “Are you cautious for my sake, my son? John—John, you do not understand me yet.” There seemed a new atmosphere of sympathy enveloping them, for John Gore answered his father very gently. “It shall be as you wish.” “Then put your arm under my shoulders, John—so. What a strong fellow you are! I can just toddle like a dot of two.” They went out into the court-yard, Stephen Gore’s right leg dragging stiffly. He would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, since the limb that had been broken had been shortened by three inches in the mending. The son carried Simon Pinniger’s three-legged stool in his left hand. They crossed the court-yard very slowly, and passed through a doorway into the wilderness of the garden. The green of the spring was thrusting through a thousand buds; there was the thrill of growth in the air, and the birds were singing. Close on the sunny side of a ragged box-tree that was half netted in brambles a clump of Lent-lilies stood in bloom, swinging their golden heads over the weeds and grass. There seemed the beauty of symbolism about these flowers. The sunlight appeared to centre upon them, and to burnish their golden heads with the warmth of the March day. My lord’s glance settled on the flowers. He paused before them with a sudden curious smile. “Set the stool here, John.” And he sat down there, with the clump of daffodils at his feet. John Gore left him there awhile, and strolled on along the rank walks where primroses glimmered from lush green glooms, and gilliflowers were beginning to scent the air from the crumbling tops of the old brick walls. The softness and the glamour of spring seemed everywhere. There was no wind, hardly a cloud—nothing but the warm shimmer of the sunlight. Father and son had come closer to each other those last days, not through any sentimental outburst of the emotions, but because the father had become once more a man, and a man whom it was even possible to respect. “Mea culpa,” he had said, and the dignity of a simple acceptance of guilt had given him a new impressiveness. It had been difficult, at first, for John Gore to accept his father’s humility as a thing born of the heart and the spirit. There was ever the sneer of possible “play-acting” penitence, the tawdry sentimental epilogue spoken with a hypocritical leer and a thought of the nearest brothel. John Gore had distrusted his father, and had watched keenly for the old self to betray itself. Yet he had still continued to behold a quiet, patient, and sorrowful old man who seemed grateful for small services, and who looked at him with watchful and troubled eyes. John Gore distrusted any religious display in such a man as my lord. And yet he came to understand by degrees all that was passing in his father’s heart. He returned presently to where the elder man was seated, and found him in an attitude of saddened thought. Stephen Gore looked up as his son joined him, and then turned his head away so that his eyes were on the tower of Thorn. The place itself must of necessity force the full meaning of the past upon him. The stones spoke; the very silence of the place had a message of its own. For my lord still believed Anne Purcell’s child to be dead, and that thought had survived to haunt him above all others. “John.” “Yes.” “I have something to say to you as between man and man.” The son stood back, and leaned against the trunk of an apple-tree. “You have given me the chance, John, to judge myself, and to discover the truth with my own eyes. Let us have no parson’s talk—no snivelling. As a man of the world I fought for myself, and pushed others out of the path. I blundered immortally over my selfishness, John, and they ought to hang me for a fool.” He still looked toward the tower, and John Gore guessed whither his thoughts tended. “That was the damnedest thing the self in me ever rushed on, my son. And yet I tried to alter it at the last—perhaps for my own sake, perhaps for the mother’s. She was dying then—I have told you that; perhaps that was why I repented. The heart of a man is a strange, elusive, treacherous thing, even to its owner, John. Sometimes we can hardly decide why we do the things we do.” He sat in silence awhile, with his head bowed down. “You must have hated me, my son; if you had spat upon me, I should hardly have questioned it. Words are not life: I cannot give you back that which I destroyed. And there is where bitterness grips the heart in a man when he sees what manner of ruin he has made. What are regrets, despair, protestations? Air—mere air in the brain! When once a man has fallen into the slough, John, his struggles seem only to carry him deeper. He may even drag others below the surface or splash foul mud onto innocent faces. But the awe and the bitterness are in the knowledge, John, of our own utter, miserable impotence. Things cannot be wiped out. They last and endure against us till the crack of doom.” He stared at the grass and knitted his hands together. “I had thought of giving myself up, my son, and telling the whole truth. But that—that cannot help the dead. And somehow I have come to shudder at the thought of throwing shame into the grave of the one woman who really loved me. And, John, I shall suffer more by living than by dying. Fools do not always realize that in this world. They tie a man to a rope, and think that they are even with him for his sins. They would often get the greater vengeance on him if they only let him live.” He paused, staring straight before him, his shoulders bent. “Weeks ago, John, I remember, as in a dream, that I lived in a mad horror of death. That has passed, I know not quite how. But I leave the judgment in your hands, my son. Do with me what you please.” He seemed to grow very weary of a sudden, for his strength was but the strength of a sick man, and the grim truths of life seemed heavy on him. His son went to him, and, putting an arm about his father’s body, helped him to his feet, and led him back to the bed in the kitchen. “I am not your judge, father,” he said, very gently; “there is another one who should judge, and from whom forgiveness may have come.” He was thinking of Barbara, but my lord thought that he spoke of God. The meadows about Furze Farm were full of the bleating of lambs those days, and the youngsters skipped and butted one another, galloping to and fro on their ridiculous legs, while the stupid old dames baaed, each to its own child. There had been one sick lamb that Christopher Jennifer had brought home in his arms, and the little beast had been laid upon hay in a basket beside the fire. There were also two cade-lambs in a pen in the orchard, and Barbara, who had many hours to herself now that John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, had asked Mrs. Winnie to let her have the tending of the two motherless ones, also the feeding of the early chicks and the gathering of the eggs. The whole life at the farm was fresh and quaint to her, and brisk life it was those spring days—a cackling, bleating, lowing life, with the thrushes singing in the beech-trees and the blackbirds in the hedgerows. The bloom on the apple and pear trees in the orchard would soon be pink and white, and there were daffodils nodding their heads at Furze Farm as well as in the wilderness of Thorn. The evening after Stephen Gore’s confession at Thorn, John Gore took his love away over the uplands where the furze was all a glitter of gold, with the green slopes of the hills and the brown ploughlands making a foreground to the distant sea. They desired to be alone that evening, to feel the spirit of spring in them, and to watch the sun go down and the twilight creep into the valleys. Their happiness was the greater because others were not forgotten in the romance of their two selves. Moreover, the glamour of the morrow had the delight of a plot in it. Mrs. Winnie alone was suffered to taste the spice in the secret, though the duty fell to her of sending out for clean rushes, taking down the rosemary and bay from the beams in the pantry, and gathering flowers to spread upon the coverlet of the bed. She smiled to herself very pleasantly when John Gore and the “little lady” rode out early next morning as though for nothing more solemn than a morning’s canter. She knew that the gentleman had smoked a pipe in the parson’s parlor more than a month ago, and Mrs. Winnie was quite wise as to what was in the wind. There was to be no stir made, and Chris Jennifer’s wife rather approved of being the solitary holder of such a secret. Her attitude was quite motherly. She spent the morning sweeping Barbara’s room, and strewing rushes and flowers about it, and putting posies of bay and rosemary upon the pillows. The pair were back at Furze Farm by dinner-time, looking mild and innocent, even hungry, as though nothing serious had befallen. They walked into the kitchen just as Mr. Jennifer was settling himself to carve the meat. John Gore glanced at Mrs. Winnie, who had run forward to kiss and embrace her “little lady.” That occurred behind Mr. Jennifer’s back, and son William had too brisk an appetite to trouble about the emotions of his elders. “Shall I give you a dump o’ fat, sir?” And so they sat down to dinner. They were half through with it when Mrs. Winnie accepted a nod from John Gore and pushed back her chair, and picking up a wedding-favor from under a mug on the dresser, she went to her man and held it under his nose. Mr. Jennifer stared at the gilded sprigs and the ribbons very gravely. “I dunno as I be a widower yet,” he said, as his slow brain took in the nature of the thing, “nor be you a widow, Winnie.” “Oh, you thick-head, Chris!” Mr. Jennifer looked at her, and then, with a sudden gleam of the eyes, at John Gore and the lady. “Be that so, my dear?” “Surely,” said Mrs. Winnie, in a whisper. Then Mr. Jennifer laid a hand to his mug, rose slowly and solemnly, and stared hard at the bride and bridegroom. “Ut be a pleasure—” He paused and reconsidered the beginning. “Ut be a pleasure—” John Gore and Barbara looked up at him smilingly, and their eyes seemed to drive the whole art of oratory out of Mr. Jennifer’s head. He took refuge in his mug, brandished it toward them, and set it down empty, with emphasis. Then he looked at his wife with an affectionate grin. “I be powerful pleased, my dear. Seven years ago—” “Eight,” interposed the wife, with a shocked glance at son William. “Eight be ut, then—I dared ut like a man, and I’d dare ut again, please God.” “Lor’, Christopher!” “William, keep t’ gravy off thy breeches. Mr. Gore, sir, you’ll be for pardoning me, but t’ lady’s face be a good bargain. T’ Bible says something of vines and fig leaves and olive branches—I dunno as I quite knows what; but I wish ye all of ut, sir, you—and the lady.” So Barbara lay in her lover’s arms that night, and they heard the birds break out with their songs at dawn. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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