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action, and of the world that he was, his ways were often quaintly
boyish.
“There may be one pang, perhaps.”
“The thought of steel in one’s body makes one shiver.”
She seemed to persist in her morbid melancholy like one whose
thoughts move in a circle.
“Is that the sword with which you fought Lord Pembroke?”
“That? Yes.”
“Let me look at it. Strange that such bodkin can be so deadly.”
He took it for a whim of hers, and humored her, hiding the pity in
his eyes.
“Why, it is not much heavier than a gentleman’s cane!”
She held it in her two hands, balancing it, and looking at the
silver work upon the sheath. John Gore watched her, grave-eyed and
compassionate.
“It is said that the sword suits itself to the age.”
“Oh!” And she drew back innocently, step by step.
“Broad and trenchant; slim and subtle.”
“Then you would call this a sword for a treacherous hand?”
“No, rather a tool for the man with a brain. Any fool can fight
with a club.”
She drew the blade sharply from the scabbard, still moving
backward step by step till the table was between her and John Gore.
“It was some such sword as this that killed my father.”
“Perhaps.”
He shirked the subject, as though afraid of paining her or
abetting her in her distemper.
“If I could only know the truth! The mystery of it haunts me.”
She laid the sword upon the table, quite close to her hand, so
that she could snatch at it if things came to such a pass.
“Some parts of life are better forgotten.”
“If we can forget.”
A great impulse stirred in him, bidding him go to her and take
her hands.
“The bitter things remain, and with them—for contrast—the
silliest trifles.”
 He looked up at her with a brightening of the eyes.
“Yes; why, Heaven alone knows! I can remember kissing my
mother when she lay dead. And with the same vividness I can
remember a wooden horse I had as a boy, a gray horse with a
brown saddle painted on his back, and his nostrils a gay scarlet.
Whenever I see a horse I think of that wooden horse’s nose.”
Barbara gave a queer, short laugh, her face firing with sudden
animation.
“That is just what life is. And sometimes we see the same thing
again—afterward. I can call to mind looking into the window of a
goldsmith’s shop, and seeing upon a little green board a short gold
chain with a knot of pearls for a button. Why I should have noticed
and remembered that one thing I can’t tell. But I saw its brother
chain one night this summer.”
His eyes met hers, calm, steady, and unperturbed.
“Where?”
“On the cloak you wore that night.”
“A cloak?”
“Yes, at Hortense Mancini’s, when you came in wet with the rain.
And I thought that one of the gold chains seemed missing.”
She watched his face, her hand going instinctively toward her
bosom.
“Strange! That chain probably belonged once to the cloak I
wore.”
“Ah!”
“There was a chain missing and a small scar in the cloth, as
though it had been torn away. The loss might easily be answered
for.”
She steadied herself against the table, feeling every muscle in
her rigid, yet ready to tremble when the end had come.
“You had worn that cloak before?”
“I?”
He glanced up at her curiously, struck by her white, set face and
the harsh straining of her voice.
“Yes.”
“No. The cloak was borrowed, if the truth concerns you.”
 “Borrowed?”
“I came home from sea with one shirt, one coat, and the other
part of me in like proportion. My father’s wardrobe came to the
rescue.”
“Then the cloak was my Lord Gore’s?”
“Yes; and his man probably stole the chain and sold it.”
He laughed; but on looking up at her again a silent, questioning
wonder swept the lighter lines aside. She was standing motionless
behind the table, her hands fixed upon the edge thereof, her eyes
staring at nothing like the eyes of one in a trance. Yet even as he
looked at her a great spasm of emotion seemed to sweep across her
face. She turned without a word to him and fled out of the room.
John Gore found himself looking at the table behind which she
had stood and at the sword that lay unsheathed thereon. The
inexplicable swiftness of her mood went utterly beyond him, save
that the words my lord had spoken flashed up like letters of fire
upon the wall.
He rose and went to the door of the music-room, moving slowly
as one weighted with thoughts that bear heavily upon the heart. The
garden was empty, save for its closely clipped bays. Like some
wayward cloud-shadow she had passed it and was gone.
But Barbara had fled to her room with a tumult of deep feeling
within her heart. It was as though something had broken within her
brain, letting forth infinite tenderness that welled up into poignant
tears.
She went in and fell on her knees beside her bed. And if her
heart found utterance it was in the one short cry: “Thank God!”

XVII

J ohn Gore rode for Yorkshire the next day, mounted on a good gray
nag, with pistols in his holsters, and a servant with a blunderbuss,
and a valise strapped on the saddle of a stout brown cob. Travellers
had to take their chance of meeting rough gentry on the road, and
many a nervous countryman, weighing sixteen stone, made out his
will before he did so desperate a thing as travel forty miles. The sea-
captain was not a man with jumpy nerves, and his thoughts went to
and fro between rentals and harvestings and the ways of women as
though he sat smoking at home in a padded chair. Put a man in the
saddle on a summer morning, when the dawn is coming up, and all
the hedgerows are dashed with dew, and he will be moved to sing,
and to think well of the world, for the fresh kisses of the dawn leave
no stain upon the mouth.
John Gore was thinking of Barbara Purcell; and the mistake a
man so often makes is to accuse a woman of whims when he does
not understand her, it being easier to call a thing by a name than to
investigate its properties. Man is the creature of a superstition in this
respect, and if a cow kicks the milk-pail over he calls her “a cussed
beast,” and as such she is branded. For man, taking himself so
solemnly, cannot stay in his stride to find out why a woman has her
silks or her worsteds in a tangle. If she weeps, his great solatium is
a sweep of the arm and a kiss. If she seems sulky, it is just her
perversity, and it is no more use for him to trouble his wise head
about her vapors than to ask a February morning cloud why it shows
such a sour face. It is nature’s business, and man, unless he
happens to be a psychologist, leaves it as such and thinks about his
dinner.
John Gore, jogging along at a good pace, with the fields and
woods all silver under the rising sun, looked back at the hours of
yesterday with more thoroughness than the majority of lovers. An
ordinary egotist might have drawn some flattering inference from
the strange melting of the girl’s reserve and her eagerness to escape
him. He would have reminded his own conceit that a woman cries,
“Shame, sir!” and thinks what she will wear for the wedding. But
John Gore was not so ordinary a fool. His thoughts went deeper into
the soil than the thoughts of frailer men. And he had more true
manhood in him than to insinuate even to his own heart that
because a woman played the will-o’-the-wisp, she was luring him on
with the lure of mystery.
 It was all so simple, had he but known, as all great secrets seem
when they are once discovered. Your astrologist goes weaving
grotesque obscurities about man’s destiny and the stars, till one
calm brain sets the whole grand and reasonable scheme in order.
Men wrote with prodigious pomposity about a pump. “Nature abhors
a vacuum,” quoth they. And Nature, like a misunderstood woman,
laughed in her sleeve, knowing that the larger a wise man’s words
are, the less he knows.
That Lionel Purcell’s death had left a great void in the girl’s life,
and that she still brooded over the violent mystery of it, of these
things John Gore felt assured. He could put no clear meaning to the
mood of yesterday, save that much grieving had left, as it were, an
open wound upon the brain, and that memory, touching it, would
not suffer it to heal. She had never given him one glimpse of the
real purpose that she cherished. Yet probably John Gore’s nag would
have leaped forward under a sudden slash of his rider’s spurs had
the man been told what Barbara had kept hidden from him in her
bosom. As it was, her past life appeared to him suffused with a
wistful glow of infinite sadness, infinite regret. Her face rose before
him dim with a mist of autumn melancholy. Her crown was a crown
of scarlet berries woven and interwoven amid the dark peril of her
hair.
As for Barbara, she had fallen into a strange mood that day when
John Gore rode northward out of her life. She rose early, and walked
alone in the garden, showing an untroubled face to her mother
when my lady descended after taking breakfast in bed. Barbara, to
appear occupied, had a basket on her arm, and a pair of scissors
with which she was cutting off the dead flowers along the border.
Anne Purcell was a lady who had never bent her back over such
a hobby. “Such things were for maiden ladies with round shoulders
and no bosoms.” And the mother was a little inquisitive that
morning, for John Gore’s face had told her nothing the night before.
Her wishes were all for an understanding between the two, and she
was not squeamish. The grip of a man’s arm would hug the mopes
out of the girl. Barbara needed hot blood to teach her to live and to
enjoy. My lady was wise in all these matters.
 “It is a new thing for you to touch the harpsichord, Barbe,” she
said, with that kindness that comes easily when people seemed
inclined to shape themselves to one’s wishes. “I will send Rogers to
the City and have a man out to tune the wires.”
Barbara reached for a dead flower, showing off her figure finely
as she leaned over the border—but there was no man there to see.
“You can have a singing-master again, if you wish for it, so that
you can sing to some one when he comes riding back from the
North.”
She laughed and looked at her daughter with motherly archness.
It was good, at least, to see the girl busying herself even over such
things as dead flowers.
“My voice is not worth training.”
“What! When some one is ready to sit in the dusk and hear you
sing?”
Barbara looked at her mother innocently enough. She was all
meek guile that morning.
“My Lord Gore is a good judge.”
“Why, to be sure, he shall give you a lesson or two. We must get
you some new songs pricked. The old ones are too chirrupy and out
of date.”
Thus my lady imagined that she had discovered much of the
truth, and perhaps she had discovered some small portion of it
beneath that placid surface. Dead flowers! Anne Purcell had no
prophetic instinct in such matters. And Barbara was glad when she
was gone, and the garden empty of all thought save the thought of
expiation. She was neither happy nor sad, but possessed by a
strange tranquillity, like the first sense of coming sleep to one who
has been in pain. She might have been surprised at her own
calmness had she been in a mood to be surprised at anything. It
was as though bitterness and doubt had been swept out of her path,
leaving the way easy toward the inevitable end.
Barbara went into the music-room, and, lifting the lid of the
harpsichord, let her fingers go idly to and fro over the notes. So few
hours had passed, and yet the passionate voice of yesterday had
died down to a distant whisper. She was glad, quietly glad now, that
he had gone out of her life innocent and unharmed. There was still
the blood-debt between them, and in the consummation of her
purpose she would leave him a memory that could retain but little
tenderness.
It was a strange yet very natural mood, the mood of one going
calmly to the scaffold with all the fears and yearnings of yesterday
drugged into stoical sleep. Her one wonder was that she had been
so blind, and that she should have overlooked the grim simplicity of
the riddle of three years. Now, everything seemed as apparent and
real to her as the reflection of her own face in the mirror upon the
wall. Her whole insight had seized upon the discovery and accepted
it with swift conviction, even as a man in doubt and trouble seizes
on the text that answers his appeal. She could have laughed at her
own blindness, had laughter been possible over such a hazard.
My Lord Gore was to sup with them at six o’clock that evening.
Barbara looked calmly toward the hour, as though her heart had
emptied itself of all emotion. There was no anger in her, no haste,
no clash of horror and regret. “I shall kill him to-night,” she said to
herself, quite quietly, as though there could be no other ending to
that three years’ vigil. Judged by the ordinary sentiment of life, men
would have called her utterly callous, execrably vindictive, a thing
without any heart in her to feel or fear. Yet fireside judgments are
shallow things. No man knows what a hanging is like till he happens
to drive in the tumbrel to Tyburn, and the imagination looks for lurid
lights where everything may be as calm and cold as snow. It is easy
for a man to sit as judge with the stem of a pipe between his teeth
and a good dinner inside him. He has no more knowledge of what
love and desire and vengeance and death may be than a plum-
pudding can know the thoughts inside the head of the woman who
stirred it in the making.
At noon Barbara dined with her mother, and in a Venetian vase
upon the table there were some late roses sent from my Lord Gore’s
garden at Bushy. The subtle scent of the flowers remained with the
memory of that day like the perfume from censers before a sacrifice.
After dinner she dressed herself, and, taking the girl who waited on
her as maid, walked in the park and down past Whitehall toward the
river. The girl with her noticed nothing strange, save that she was
very silent, and seemed not to see the people who went by.
Leaning over the parapet of the river-walk, Barbara saw a barge
moored near in, and a couple of brown children sitting at the top of
the cabin steps and blowing bubbles from broken clay pipes. The
soapy water in the porringer between them would not have been
wasted had it been used upon their faces. But they were so brown
and healthy and happy watching the bubbles sail and burst that
Barbara turned away from the water-side with the first pang of the
heart that she had felt that day.
Coming back past Whitehall a troop of the King’s guard came by
with drums beating and trumpets blowing, and all the pomp of the
Palace in their red coats and burnished steel. The girl with Barbara
stopped to stare; but Barbara walked on under Hans Holbein’s gate,
letting a crowd of boys rush past her to see the redcoats and hear
the trumpets.
She would liked to have wandered into the fields beyond Charing
village, but time was passing, and there were things to be
remembered. She went straight to her room on reaching home, and,
locking the door, opened an oak coffer of which she kept the key.
Lying there on a green silk scarf were two pretty little flintlocks, their
barrels damascened and the stocks set with silver. She took them
out and, sitting on her bed, held them in her lap while she ran the
ramrod down the barrels to see that the charges were safely there.
The scattering of powder in the pan from the ivory powder-flask
should be left till the last moment.
Barbara was putting the pistols back in the coffer when she
heard voices at the far end of the gallery. It was her mother and
Mrs. Jael talking together. Their footsteps came down the gallery,
and a hand knocked at the door.
“Yes. Who is it?”
Mrs. Jael’s voice answered, bland and sweet:
“Mistress Barbara, my dear, my lady wishes to see you in her
room.”
Barbara closed the lid of the coffer, put the keys in her bosom,
and went to the door. Mrs. Jael curtesied, never forgetting her good
manners.
“Will you please go to my lady’s room?”
“What does mother want with me?”
“Go and see, my dear mistress,” quoth the woman, with an air of
motherliness and mystery.
Barbara passed up the gallery without locking the door after her,
since Mrs. Jael made a pretence of going down the stairs. Yet the
woman was back again, with a briskness that did her years credit, so
soon as she had heard the closing of my lady’s door. Mrs. Jael
appeared wise as to what to do in Barbara’s room, probably because
of that peep-hole in the wainscoting of the wall. She went straight to
the table where the oak coffer stood, pulled out a bunch of keys
from her pocket, and, choosing one marked with a tag of red ribbon,
unlocked the coffer and lifted the lid.
Mrs. Jael showed no surprise at seeing the pistols lying therein
half concealed by the green scarf. She ran a knitting-needle, which
she drew from her stocking, down each barrel in turn, holding the
pistol close to her ear and listening as she probed it. Then she
examined the powder-pans, smiled to herself sweetly, and, putting
the pistols back just as she had found them, relocked the coffer and
sidled out of the room.

XVIII

M ywelding
Lord Gore came to the supper-table in the best of tempers,
fatherliness, gallantry, and wit into one and the same
humor. After a glance at his debonair and handsome face the veriest
nighthawk out of Newgate might have declared him a great
gentleman, a pillar of the state, and upholder of all chivalry. No man
could be more gracious when the wine had no sour edge to it. He
could dance a child to the ceiling, laugh like a boy, and make the
majority of young maids fall in love with him with a tremor of
romance.
 In the world it is too often self that is served, and the gallant
courtier may be a bear at home. My Lord Gore was a man charmed
with his own charm. It pleased him to shine upon people, to radiate
warmth, to be looked upon as generous and splendid by men of
duller manners. Yet he could act generously, and not always with an
eye to personal effect. The plague came when his own comfort or
his self-love were menaced. Then the great gentleman, the classic
courtier, showed the crust of Cain beneath silks and velvets and
coats of arms. Cross him, and Stephen Gore’s stateliness became a
power to crush instead of to propitiate. He could be brutal with a
courtly, sneering facility that was more dangerous than the
blundering anger of a rough and clumsy nature. For though every
man with the normal passions in him may be a potential Cain, it is
chiefly in the two extremes of brutishness and luxurious refinement
that one meets with that savage intolerance of the rights of others.
And it must be confessed that in the matter of sheer selfishness the
poet has often eclipsed the boor.
At the supper-table Anne Purcell spoke of Barbara’s singing. Who
was considered the best master, and did my lord prefer the Italian
manner?
“For a man, yes,” he answered, quickly, “if he has a bull’s chest
on him. But give me a Frenchman to teach a woman to sing love-
songs. That is the fashion for Proserpine, eh, when Master Pluto has
gone a-farming?”
He winked at Barbara over his wine, looking very bland and
fatherly, with his lips rounded as though he were saying “Oporto” to
his own comfort.
“You might try the girl’s voice after supper, Stephen.”
My lord was very ready. He had a bass of rich compass, like the
voice of a popish priest chanting in some glorious choir.
“Herrick should be the man for Barbara. Soft, delicate lyrics, with
an amorous droop of the eyelids. Poor Lionel was too fond of the old
Cavalier ditties.”
Barbara looked at him with sombre, widely opened eyes. It was
not often of late that she had heard him speak her father’s name.
And that night it woke a flare of exultant anger in her, because of
the touch of patronage, as though the dead could always be safely
pitied.
“Well, then, let us go to the music-room,” said her mother. “I will
ring to have candles lit.”
My lord wiped his mouth daintily and laughed.
“Next month there will be no lights needed, but chaste Diana
peeping through the casements and wishing she was not cursed
with so prudish a reputation.”
They wandered out into the garden, where a great slant of
golden light came over the trees and made the grass vivid, even to
violet in the shadows. Barbara walked a little apart, like one whose
thoughts went silently to meet the night. Now and again she glanced
at my lord, when his eyes were off her, with an earnestness that
might have puzzled him had he noticed it.
It was Mrs. Jael who came out with a tinder-box and lit the
candles in the music-room. Barbara watched her through the
window, noticing, almost unconsciously, the woman’s double chin,
and loose, lying, voluble mouth. She was watching Mrs. Jael when
my lord took her by the elbow playfully and turned her toward the
portico.
“Come, Mistress Jet and Ivory, we must see how you fancy
Parson Herrick.”
Anne Purcell went in after them, Mrs. Jael standing back as my
lady entered.
“You can send the people to bed early, Jael.”
“Yes, my lady,” and the confidential creature passed out.
Yet what she did was to fly up to Mistress Barbara’s room so that
her breath came in short wheezes, unlock the coffer, grope therein
tentatively, relock it, and hurry down again with a complacent smirk
on her fat face. For Mrs. Jael had a sense of the dramatic where self
was concerned, and could keep a shut mouth, despite her loquacity,
till the occasion should come when she could most magnify herself
by opening it. She went out again into the garden, where it was
already growing dusk, and, crossing the grass softly, stood at one
corner of the music-room where she could wait to hear whether her
prophecies were likely to be realized.
 My lord had established himself on the settle with the scarlet
cushion, and was playing an aria, the rings on his fingers glancing in
the candle-light. The mirror had been taken from the wall above the
harpsichord. In the window-seat Anne Purcell showed a full-lipped,
round-chinned profile ready to be outlined by the rising moon, while
on a high-backed chair beside the door sat Barbara, quiet and
devout as any novice.
“Sing us that song of Mr. Pepys’s, Stephen.”
“‘Beauty Advance,’ eh? A wicked wag, that Admiralty fellow. I
have watched him in church trying to discover which girl in the
congregation would make the prettiest beatitude. A dull song, very,
for so lively a gossip.”
My lord had a habit of turning his head and looking over his
shoulder, as though he never for one moment forgot his audience.
“Well, has Proserpine a word to say?”
Barbara gave him her sombre eyes at noon.
“There are my father’s songs.”
My lord struck a false note on the harpsichord.
“Some old Cavalier ditty, fusty as a buff coat! No, my dear, we
have forgotten how to carry a bandolier.”
“Let the girl try something. Teach her one of the playhouse
songs.”
Barbara sat with one hand in her bosom.
“There is an old song I remember,” she said, with the far-away
look of one calling something to mind.
My lord paused and glanced at her.
“What do you call it?”
She met his eyes.
“‘The Chain of Gold.’”
“The name has slipped my memory. How does it run?”
Barbara leaned against the high back of her chair. She looked
steadily at Stephen Gore, every fibre in her tense as the fibres of a
yew bow bent by an English arm.
“‘My love has left me a chain of gold.’ That is the first line.”
My lord furrowed his forehead thoughtfully.
“Hum! go on. I catch nothing of it yet.”
 “‘My love has left me a chain of gold,
With a knot of pearls, for a token.
It came from his hand when that hand was cold,
And the heart within him broken.’”

There was a short silence in the music-room, the flames of the

candles swaying this way and that as though some one moving had
sent a draught upon them.
My lord turned with a laugh that had no mirth in it.
“A dreary ditty. Where did you come by the song?”
She answered him with three words.
“In this room.”
My lady’s silks rustled in the window-seat like the sound of trees
shivering in autumn.
“What moods the girl has!”
My lord kept his eyes on Barbara.
“Is there any more of that song?”
“There was only one verse to it till I found another.”
“So!”
“For to match that chain—there were three other chains. And
they were sewn upon a black cloak with a lining of purple silk, the
cloak Captain John wore the night he fought Lord Pembroke.”
My lord pushed back the settle very slowly. His face was in the
shadow, but for all that it was not pleasant to behold.
“Has the child these mad fits often?” he asked, with a jerk of the
chin. “She will be wishing Jack at Newgate next.”
Barbara would not take her eyes from him to glance in the
direction of her mother. Had she looked at Anne Purcell she would
have seen a plump, comely woman grown old suddenly, and trying
to make anger shine through fear.
“The cloak did not belong to John Gore, my lord. Nor did he
know that I have the chain from it that I found in my father’s hand.”
She rose suddenly, and, swinging the chair before her, knelt with
one knee on it and steadied her elbow on the back.
“Father lay over there—near the table. There is a stain on the
floor still—though Mrs. Jael was set to scrub. It was I who found
him. You may remember that.”
They both looked at her askance, cowed and caught at a
disadvantage for the moment by this knowledge that she had and by
her hardiness in accusing.
“My dear young madam, you had better go to bed.”
Her bleak imperturbability turned my lord’s sneer aside like
granite.
“Here is the chain from your cloak. I give it back to you now that
it has served its purpose.”
She flung out her hand, and the chain fell close to my Lord
Gore’s feet. He did not even trouble to look at it, as though he had
no wish to appear seriously concerned.
“We appear to be judge, jury, and witness all in one,” he said.
“Come down off that chair, my dear, and don’t be foolish.”
He spoke with an air of amused impatience, but there was
something in his eyes that made her know the truth of what she had
said.
“You have always thought me a little mad, my lord.”
“No, assuredly not. Only a little strange in your appreciation of a
joke. Nan, stay quiet.”
Barbara had put her hands into her bosom, given one glance
behind her, and then levelled a pistol at my lord’s breast. The high-
backed chair and the settle were scarcely four paces apart.
“I made a promise to myself that I would find out the man who
killed my father. When I discovered it I bought these pistols.”
My lady had risen from the window-seat and was standing with
her arms spread, her open mouth a black oval, as though she were
trying to speak and could not.
“Mother, do not move. I will beseech my Lord of Gore to tell me
the truth before I pull the trigger.”
The great gentleman looked at her like a man dumfounded,
hardly able to grasp the meaning of that steel barrel and that little
circle of shadow that held death in the compass of a thumb’s nail.
“Assuredly I will tell you the truth,” he said, at last.
“Then let me hear it.”
 He grappled himself together, gave a glance at my lady, who had
sunk again into the window-seat, and then met Barbara eye to eye.
“Since you seek the truth at the pistol’s point, my child, I will tell
it you, though no man on earth should have dragged it from me at
the sword’s point. Good God!” And he put his hand to his forehead
and looked from mother to daughter as though unwilling to speak,
even under such compulsion.
Barbara watched him, believing he was gaining leisure to
elaborate some lie.
“You are determined to hear everything?”
She nodded.
“Have it then, girl, to your eternal shame! Why should the
unclean, disloyal dead make the living suffer? Much good may the
truth do all of us, for none are without our sins.”
He spoke out in a few harsh, solemn words—words that were
meant to carry the sorrow and the travail and the anger of a great
heart. It was the same tale that he had told John Gore, yet
emphasized more grimly to suit the moment. And when he had
ended it he put his head between his hands and groaned, and then
looked up at Barbara as though trying to pity her for the shock of his
confession.
“Is that everything?”
She was white and implacable. My lord’s lower lip drooped a
little.
“Is it not enough?”
“Of lies—yes.”
He looked in her eyes, and then gave a deep, fierce cry, like the
cry of a wild beast taken in the toils. It was done within a flash,
before he could cross the space that parted them. He stumbled
against the chain that she had thrown down toward him. And as the
echoes sped, and the smoke and the draught made the candles
flicker, Barbara fell back against the wall, her hand dropping the
pistol and going to her bosom for the consummation of it all.
“Mercy of me, my dear, mercy of me, what have you done?”
She found Mrs. Jael clinging to her and holding her arms with all
her strength. Barbara tried to shake the woman off, but could not for
the moment. Then, quite suddenly, as the smoke cleared, she
ceased her striving and leaned against the wall, her eyes staring
incredulously over Mrs. Jael’s head as the little woman clung to her
and pinioned her with her arms.
For though my Lord Gore had fallen back against the table with a
great black blur on his blue coat and the lace thereof smouldering,
he stood unhurt, with my lady holding to one arm and looking up
with terror into his face.
“Safe, Nan,” he said, very quietly, being a man of nerve and
courage; “where the bullet went, God only knows!”
A gray fog came up before Barbara’s eyes. She stood like one
dazed, yet feeling the warmth of Mrs. Jael’s bosom as the woman
still clung to her. Then her muscles relaxed and her face fell forward
on Mrs. Jael’s shoulder.
Stephen Gore put the mother aside, and, striding forward, thrust
his hand into Barbara’s bosom. He drew out the second pistol,
looked at it with a grim, inquiring smile, and then laid it upon the
table.
“The child must be clean mad,” he said, with admirable self-
control and a glance full of meaning at my lady and Mrs. Jael.
“Oh, the poor dear! oh, the poor dear! To raise her hand against
such a gentleman without cause or quarrel! Her wits must have
gone. I’ve feared it many weeks.”
Stephen Gore pondered a moment, looking at Barbara’s bowed
head with a look that boded nothing good for her.
“Get her to her room, Nan. Keep the servants out of the way. We
don’t want any pother over the child’s madness. Understand me
there; for her sake we can hold our tongues.”
Mrs. Jael looked at him as though he were a saint.
“Poor dear, to think of it!”
My lady and the woman took Barbara by either arm. She lifted
her head and looked for a moment at my lord, and then went with
them meekly, as though dazed and without heart. Whispering
together behind her back, they led her across the garden and up the
staircase to her own room. When they had locked the door on her,
Anne Purcell laid a hand on Mrs. Jael’s arm, and they went together
into my lady’s chamber.

XIX

W hen Anne Purcell returned to the music-room she found my lord

waiting for her there, walking to and fro with his hands behind
his back and his handsome face lined and shadowed with thought.
He looked up quickly when she entered, a look full of infinite
meaning, as though he had felt a chill of loneliness and was glad
that this woman shared with him what the future might convey.
He closed the door and casements carefully, after walking round
the garden to see that no one was lurking there. Anne Purcell’s face
still looked white and scared. The horror of a betrayal haunted her
as she went to the window-seat, where the moonlight was already
glimmering upon the glass.
“Speak softly. I had better draw the curtains.”
He did so, leaning over my Lady Anne, and stooping to kiss her
before he drew away. Restlessness seemed in his blood, for he kept
walking to and fro as they talked, pausing sometimes as though to
think.
“Does the woman Jael know anything of this?”
“She knows everything. It was she who saved your life by
tampering with the charges.”
“She knew the girl had pistols?”
“Yes—by watching through the hole in the wainscoting. She saw
where Barbara kept them, and found a key to fit the coffer. Jael
seemed to have foreseen something, for to-night she found that the
pistols were no longer there.”
My lord turned to the table where the steel barrels glistened in
the candle-light. He picked them up and looked at them closely, a
deep pucker of thought upon his forehead.
“Who would have thought that the girl had so much devil in her!
I tell you, Nan, she must have been playing with us all these years,
watching and waiting, and pretending to be asleep. And it was a
narrow thing, by God! But for that woman of yours, I should be lying
there, where—”
He did not complete the sentence, but broke off abruptly, for the
conscious shock seemed to strike him more heavily now the intensity
of the moment had passed. He looked white about the mouth, and
his eyes had a hard, scared wrath in them that made them ugly.
Anne Purcell turned on the window-seat to look at him, and then
covered her face with her hand.
“She said that the stain is still there. And it is—”
“Fiddle-faddle! What of that, Nan?” And the evil spirit in him
flashed out fiercely. “The girl has cornered us. It is no time for
whimpering.”
He recovered his serene and cynical poise almost instantly, and,
putting two fingers in the pocket of his embroidered vest, drew out
the curb of gold with its knot of pearls.
“This little thing came very near ending everything. I shall give it
no second chance. Like the easy fool I am I put that cloak away and
forgot it, never suspecting that it had left such a clew behind. Jack
turned it out of an old chest when he came home shirtless from sea,
and wore it that night at Hortense’s. It was only when we got home
that I noticed the thing, and talked him into surrendering it. She
must have cross-questioned him. And, by the prophets of Israel,
Jack was near having a bullet in his heart! She said she told him
nothing. God grant that’s true. Jack’s a man with a tight mouth and
a kind of grimness that sails straight in the face of a storm.”
He paused, staring hard at the flame of one of the candles, and
tossing the chain up and down in his palm.
“What are you going to do, Stephen?”
“Do?” And his face darkened, although so close to the light.
“Keep the Spanish fury out of danger. What can you desire—”
She stretched out an arm to him, her face rigid with dread.
“No, not again, Stephen. I cannot bear it—I will not—”
“There, there,” and he laughed, “how you women leap at
conclusions! There is no such serious need. But I value my neck too
much, and yours, my dear, to let her run at large.”
 “Then how?”
He looked down at her steadily.
“The girl is mad.”
“Barbara!”
“Yes, mad, poor thing, as a March hare. Mad! Drink the word in,
and live on it. Mad—mad! This wild scarecrow of a suspicion is
nothing but a shadow on the brain, a shadow of distortion and
madness brought on by poor Lionel’s death. There are some of us to
swear to that, and our words carry more weight and volume than
the ravings of a girl. Mrs. Jael must be worth her money. The whole
affair will be very simple. Thank Heaven, son Jack is in the country! I
can bleed him and doctor him when he returns.”
Anne Purcell watched him with a trace of wonder in her eyes.
The man was so many-sided, such an actor, such a cynic.
“Then—”
“She must be treated as one gone mad, yet discreetly and gently,
as though the family niceness were to be considered. No idle talking,
no news about town. Yet being dangerous, even, perhaps, against
herself—mark that, Nan!—she must be put under soft restraint in
some quiet corner where she can do no harm.”
He spoke so shrewdly, and with such a meaning between the
words that Anne Purcell again looked scared.
“No whips, Stephen, and all those things. I have heard—”
“Tush, my love, am I a fool?”
“But—”
He opened his arms to her, with an impulse of tenderness and
strong appeal.
“Now, sweetheart, trust me. We have been too much to each
other, you and I. Look at me, Nan; what I am I am because you are
what you are. We are on the edge of a cliff. Don’t tell me that I must
drag you over.”
He played to the woman in her, yet not without real feeling. She
rose to him, and for a moment he had her in his arms.
“There. You understand, Nan, why I want to live. It is for your
sake as well as mine, though I shall not see fifty again. We cannot
help ourselves. And I tell you the girl is mad. I have said so to others
before it came to this.”
My lord put her gently out of his arms, and led her with some
majesty back to the window-seat.
“You must know, Nan, that this will be de prerogativa regis—that
is to say, it will be the chancellor’s affair, and he is an easy man to
manage. As to a private inquiry, we can probably slip by it—with
Christian discretion. The point is—that the unfortunate subject is
confined in custody under the care of her nearest friends or
kinsfolk.”
Anne Purcell began to understand.
“But there may still be danger in it.”
“No; trust me; very little. It can be done quietly. There is your
place of Thorn.”
“Thorn! Why, it is half in ruins, and no one ever goes there.”
“Nan, my sweet, are you a fool?”
“No, Stephen; but—”
“The country air and food, and contact with some simple couple
—what more could the poor wench wish for? An old house in the
deeps of Sussex, seven miles from a town. Why, it is made for such
a case.”
She looked at him helplessly, for her selfish worldliness had
received a shock that night.
“There is no other way?”
“None, unless you wish to feel a silk rope round your neck, my
dear.”
They said little more that night, my lord putting on a cloak to
hide his powder-blackened coat, and kissing her very kindly before
he went. He gave her a few words of warning, commended Mrs. Jael
to her, and spoke of the money that should be forthcoming. Barbara
was to see no one but Mrs. Jael and her mother. They were to keep
her locked in her room till my lord should bring a physician whom he
could trust to inquire into the state of the girl’s mind.
Yet there was one thought that haunted Stephen Gore as he
walked home alone by the light of the moon without a single torch
to keep him company and scare away footpads: it was possible that
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