“I did, John, my father. And then—What misery! What greater shame!”
“John—John, what must it be to lose everything, even the love of one’s own son? That touches me, even to the heart. Is it not strange that I should feel that, even more than you?”
He looked at her questioningly, mutely. She had not seen what he had seen—cowardice, squalor, bestial fawning that was infamous in a man. And yet her words woke a depth of feeling in him, something finer and more delicate than his man’s nature had fashioned of itself.
He opened his mouth to tell her more of the gross truth, but some impulse rebuked him. He waited instinctively for her.
Barbara had raised her head. For a moment she stared at the fire and then turned to him with a look he would never forget.
“John, it may help you if I tell you what is in my heart.”
“It is this, John: I can forgive—yes, I can forgive.”
He looked at her wonderingly, and then sprang up, opening his arms. She went to him with a low, inarticulate cry, and let him hold her to him, while a great tremor passed through her, as though the old self were vanishing with a last spasm of pain and bitterness.
She raised her head, and her eyes were full of tears.
“Yes—partly; you have changed me; and yet—it is of my own will.”
“Child, you make me ashamed. It is you that shall teach me. God keep you!”
For three weeks John Gore rode almost daily to Thorn, starting out from Furze Farm toward dusk, sometimes spending the night at the ruin and riding back with the breaking of the day. He took over food with him, blankets, clean linen, and a keg of spirits, carrying something on each journey, yet keeping the whole matter as secret as he might. Mrs. Winnie and her man had to be enlightened in some measure, and they were folk who could be trusted when once their love had been won; for Sussex folk are often slow and surly in their likings, but they make good friends when once they have forgiven the strangeness of an unfamiliar face.
Nothing had ever gone more grimly against John Gore’s nature than those first days of ministration to the refugee at Thorn. It was a question of will and effort, an ordeal of self-compulsion, lightened by a vague glimmer of magnanimity that Barbara’s renunciation had inspired; for John Gore had closed heart and hand against his father with the determined passion of a man whose nature was strong and combative, and none too gentle where infamy was concerned. The romantic rush of the past months was still with him. It was not easily hindered or turned aside into a sordid, shallow channel. Even in the flush of fighting, a man may throw down his sword and hold out a generous hand to a beaten enemy whose gallantry had touched his manhood. But the refugee at Thorn had roused no generous impulses as yet. Courage respects courage, even in a rogue; my lord seemed half an imbecile, half a coward. None of the finer manliness seemed left in him: he was servile, unclean, furtive, suspicious as an animal, lacking in all the grace of the nobler feelings. It was as though the perfumes and the colors of that complex flower, “the gentleman of fashion,” had evaporated and decayed, leaving the raw and naked self stripped in its ugliness to the last husk.